In Search of Some Head Space
[ bgin preface ]
this is an ongoing thing.
i've heard that there was a kind of tradition in paris during the 1920s. people, presumably bored with their lives, would take a map of the city, draw a line on it, and try to follow that line as they walked the street. this meant up the sides of buildings and down the other side, and through courtyards and backyards, and across canals, so on. the commanding of geometric over organic. in the states, in the Great Grid of places like Tucson or Denver that relationships already been nailed sickly into place.
[ dun preface ]
my first year in paris was a courtship of casual vicissitudes. sometimes paris is a beautiful gothic church catacombed with hidden promises. sometimes its a piss-stink series of inconvenient misunderstandings and sandy confusions. the city has never seemed to me open and willing but, after about 6 months of teasing her streets with long, gentle walks, paris began not to open up but to close in on me. the city seemed small but no less oppressive, old and no less conservative, dank and dark and most of all, closed barred and gated.
travel, drugs and computers; three of my afore-mentioned favorites. these three things each put you in the same position :: lose your resources, face the mysteries, gain your confidence, and build a place to stand in the void. (and waste all your money, but that's besides the point... ) it has been the same living in paris, but after that cycle had passed, the void became a series of alleys and the alleys were oppressive. beautiful, but oppressive. paris, at first retinal hit, is beautiful and mysterious in its grey and gold spirals and spiraling towers of medieval strangeness. but then, after about 9 months, that mysterious appearance evaporated. i had learned its patterns and so i started to take it for granted and, like a lover, look for deeper mysteries. the mystery of appearance is always replaced by the mystery of structure.
but the structure is closed to deep visitation. sure, you can walk down the street, sure, you can look in the windows, but most of the streets look distressingly alike. if you keep an eye out you see glimpses of courtyards, ramps, tunnels, and passages. glimpsed, but never visited.
the look-dont-touch trick.
even when outside, walking in the street, i felt indoors. the city has a psychological ceiling. the only time there isnt a ceiling is when it rains, and the parisians run like hell when it does; if you lived your entire life indoors you'd run if it rained, too. i imagine the parisians all behave as if they are seeing rain for the first time. we all have our problems.
take mine: this psychological ceiling i mentioned got extreme for me. one morning i was walking along the canal st.martin - a rather open stretch of street - and each of the buildings seemed to me to be people, standing shoulder to shoulder, leering forward in their silent way, and each of them had a face that was watching me as i walked among them. i was a small mouse, creeping between their concrete and stonied spectator rows. i knew that they wouldnt move, but the windows of their eyes might have been watching. i couldnt be sure.
like any old woman, paris has gates everywhere. but they are spiked gates with, in some cases, spikes as long as your forearm and much, much thinner. these spikes are generally set on a kind of semi-decorative semi-circle that billows out the bottom. the visual message is clear: "Fuck You. Go Away." after a while i started to think of them as "fuck Us" when i saw them in pairs.
here were enough middle fingers to satisfy even marilyn... but one day, i looked again and the fingers werent telling me go back. they seemed to be pointing up. i had misread the symbol.
i decided it was hedspace i needed. thinking space, a little mental liberty, a tad o wind in the hair (or scalp, in my case) and some fresh respiratories for the morning physicals.
yes, morning time is a good time to be doing this. parisians sleep until 9 or 10. they're as bad as the spanish. and the good news is that if someone does see you they're usually too slow moving, snakelike in the cool morning, to do anything about it. so one is free to climb around (if one happens to be a hyperactive, poorly domesticated, semi-agile american with a schizophrenic bent and the perfectly sane opinion that one is being repressed by staring architectures). sure, and the morning is the time to do it.
i started in montmartre, in march or so.
montmartre is on a hill and its packed with lots of clever little gardens. so over the fences and into the courtyards, these private 'green spaces' that had been tucked away, potentially for hundreds of years, reserved only for one family, or one building, and so i would delicately pick my way over the Fuck-Us and drop down into someones back yard. or courtyard. or balcony. or garage. or wherever i would find myself always being very careful to keep track of how it was i got there in case there wasnt another road out or some vicious dog or - worse - a vicious frenchman.
the first time i made it to the rooftop of a building i was stunned. it was like being born. wind, light, space, vigor. my hands shook and stung from the climb and sweat made my skin into a cold, autonomic cooling system. seeing the city from the rooftop of a building is completely unhinging and its generally a good view because paris has such strict building policies. but the sight... the city seems, when you climb to that height, to lay on its stomach with its face down, like a calm ocean, and not some multi-faced demon or guarded old woman.
months went by and i didnt think on taking a picture or writing about it until i got an email from a reader of my site, and i quote,
"When you have new on http://www.boar.com?Damn It? Damnyou."
at least i interpreted it as a reader of my site. it might have been a perl script, but either way it was nice enough to ask.
so i started taking my camera along in the mornings.
after some 5 months now, like drugs or computers or travel, climbing rooftops has become something between a hobby and an addiction. i started finding larger buildings and higher ones and the challenge began to be listed as:
- the ascension must be under my own power
- the view must be 360-degree
- the time has to be during sunrise
- if possible, the ascension must be made on the exterior of the building.
these are the rules of Hedspace.
(that last one's not a real rule, but more of a guideline i guess. if it is a rule, its one i've broken a few times.)
its been three months and has kept some part of me from rotting.
if you've got some photos you've taken of the same absurd activity, send em over and i'll post them here.
thanks to my courteous reader for the incentive.