thomas m wilson

My baggage hasn’t made it here yet, but I at least am in Sweden.

After flying over Germany and seeing an endless patchwork of fields (as well as plenty of wind turbines by the way), I was glad to look down on Sweden and see forest cover being a more dominant element of the landscape. Clearly I had left the more hyper civilized parts of Western Europe behind me.

Upon arrival in Stockholm on Tuesday I ambled around downtown by myself, without a map and with the eyes of a stranger recording the scene. There are immigrants from Iraq and Iran and other places, but most people have the traditional Swedish features: thin faces with slightly pointy noses and blond or light coloured hair. I’d heard the Swedish were very fashionable, but I can’t agree: the guys are very often to be seen in a pair of jeans which hang off their arse and then become really tight around their legs. To top this off they often sport a tight, light coloured t-shirt and a cap sitting on their head at a wild angle. Sorry guys, but I’m not digging it.

The architecture seems to be full of straight edges after the curved embellishments of Parisian apartment buildings. Like German towns, and unlike English or French ones, the buildings are painted bright colours. I prefer the unpainted stone and the more intricate facades of further south in Europe.

The streets of Stockholm’s downtown are strangely either shopping streets, full of commerce and people, or not shopping streets, and if you make a turn all of a sudden there is nobody around and no shops to be seen. There are many waterways running through Stockholm, and the presence of the Baltic sea never far away is nice. The sound of Swedish in my ears is a kind of honest, charming sing-song which proceeds ‘da-da-da‘ with an emphasis on the last syllable.

From the moment I arrived, looked at the airport and talked to a polite, intelligent, friendly and articulately Anglophone Swedish woman at Scandanavian Airlines, I knew I was in an organised country. This place is full of clean public places and fast and easy to use public transport. Maybe one of the reasons I have encountered happy and smart people in the service industry here is that these guys actually have a robustly supported Society. Think tax funded child care, parental leave (for both the mother and the father), a ceiling on health care costs, free education up to and including university, extra taxes for the very rich, and proportional representation. With all that no wonder you don’t encounter too many bitter underdogs, or outright criminals, as you walk around the place. If you look after the whole society, and not just the abstract Me of right wing politics, then a trip down to buy some milk from the shop will be a better experience.

In my final bit of praise for the Swedish nation state, I am pleased to see that the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences agrees that global oil supplies are peaking and that Sweden should get itself off the oil addiction. It isn’t impossible that Sweden will be oil free by 2020 as the government has promised. They already get most of their electricity from hydro and nuclear and biomass. It is so heartening to see a national government well on the road to doing the only sane thing when it comes to dealing with the environment: preferential taxation to encourage environmentally benign patterns of consumption (for example, the more polluting your car is, the more you pay to own it). The feeling that the people upstairs are actually moving forward on sustainability is refreshing.

My next photo from Stockholm was inspired by Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra, author of Don Quixote.  My little poem below isn’t just about traveling.

Dub Me a Knight

 

I’d rather be tilting at windmills, than pronouncing life a known factor.

 

I’d rather be questing over the horizon, than ticking boxes at the desk.

 

I’d rather have an imagination, than a BMW.

 

To the giants!

At this time of year many Parisians go away on holiday, and sometimes it seems like every second person in the street is an American with a guide book. Or one of their kids.

That is Pont des Arts in the above photo.

The number of tourists that must stream over the paving stones of this city per year must be astronomical, but who can blame them? Paris is beautiful.

I wanted to represent the ‘flow’ of tourists through Paris visually, so I stood beside one of the most amazing doors in the world, the front doors of Notre Dame, and took a photo. Great old Age welcomes transient and restless Modernity across its threshold…

Ok, I’m not the first person to have taken the next photo, but it is an image I like nonetheless. From the top of Notre Dame I look westwards. The devilish gargoyle plots and broods over the denizens of the city far below.

If we are to look for a devilish plot with a greater basis in reality, the newly elected president of France, Nicolas Sarkozy, might have something up his economic-growth-festishizing sleeve. That at least is what this bit of stencil art on the pavement of the Latin Quarter intimates.

OBEY

WORK

CONSUME

AND SHUT UP!

In the space of those last two images I moved from the Paris of the tourist to the Paris of the resident. What of the residents? They are more likely to be hanging out in places like rue Jeane-Pierre Timbaud, where I was in the 11th arondisement. They talk more quickly than your average Australian, being in general a bit more stressed. I can’t vouch for the men, but the women are very stylish, often with muted colours, interestingly cut skirts and comfortable, dark, flat-soled shoes.

These are my friends Solene and Julie in the 11th, a scene not found in the guidebooks.

I’ve been in Paris for a few days. Yesterday I arrived in Stockholm, but before I write about Sweden I want to reflect on my recent time in France.

Paris, as everybody has probably told you, is a beautiful city. I spent a few months there six years ago, I’ve had a few Parisian friends, and I can speak a bit of French, so I know the place more than some tourists. One of my first impressions of Paris this time around was that the city doesn’t have enough trees. Compared to the streets of where I was in Montreal, it feels all stone, and it is very densely populated. So being in the centre, where the traditional conception of ‘belle Paris’ emerges from, made me feel like I was far from the natural world I love so much. It is interesting to find myself critical in this respect of this city. So many, including myself, have so much praise for Paris. But despite the beautiful old architecture, I wouldn’t want to live there permanently, deep in the middle of the work of humanity. I would crave more space. I would miss untamed ecosystems.

Now after my brief bit of complaining, I will say that I do like walking around certain areas, like St. Germain des Pres. For those who don’t know, central Paris is about two million people living inside a ring road amongst five or six story eighteenth and nineteenth century apartment buildings. St. Germain is close to Notre Dame and the Seine. I like to be close to the Seine, as being by a river reminds me of the natural world a bit. I know that the days of Hemingway and Sartre and Camus are gone when it comes to this quarter, but I still like its art galleries and narrow streets and stylish cafes.

I looked into the shop window in St. Germain and saw reflected the classic Parisian activity: sitting in a cafe.

There is a bookshop on the other bank of the Seine from Notre Dame that I often visit: Shakespeare and Co. They have a piano amongst the books for any passing musicians to sit down at. On Monday morning I was browsing in the back of the shop when I heard some clear and bluesy notes coming from the piano. I looked over and there was a guy with a white beard playing. I kept looking at books, but my attention was completely taken by what he was playing. He was improvising. What he played was perfectly conceived jazz improvisation, with fades to contemplative, well spaced thoughtfulness, and then rises to soulful, twisting movement and force. I stood there behind the piano and amongst the books and felt my heart become lighter. My spirit relaxed as I felt the play and delicate emotions of his phrases. The space of the book shop took on a new quality, much more than a place for old parcels of paper.

That is his son I think, waiting for his dad to finish playing. After he had finished playing I congratulated him on his music and asked if he played in a group, expecting to hear some famous jazz trio as the response. No, he said, in a North American accent, he just noodled around on his piano at home. I couldn’t believe it. Some of the most beautiful music I’d ever heard, stuff that I’d happily put beside Keith Garrett’s work, had just been played by some North American guy who liked to play at home. The music hadn’t been recorded. It had just happened in a bookshop in Paris. I will never here that bit of music again. I left with a new appreciation for music as an event, an event that need have no connection with concerts or studios or CDs, or even with a written score. Just the right set of fingers on an old set of keys. A moment I will not forget for a long time.