Portholes
By Kathleen Waller
Paris, June 2012
It is for want of self-culture that the superstition of Travelling, whose idols are Italy, England, Egypt, retains its fascination for all educated Americans. They who made England, Italy, or Greece venerable in the imagination did so by sticking fast where they were, like an axis of the earth. In manly hours, we feel that duty is our place. The soul is no traveller; the wise man stays at home, and when his necessities, his duties, on any occasion call him from his house, or into foreign lands, he is at home still, and shall make men sensible by the expression of his countenance, that he goes the missionary of wisdom and virtue, and visits cities and men like a sovereign, and not like an interloper or a valet.
– From “Self Reliance” by Ralph Waldo Emerson
In other words, Ralph Waldo Emerson tells us here: don’t waste your time being a vagabond. If you do travel, make sure you do not get too entrenched in this new land and culture. I believe Emerson was one of the wisest men who ever lived, but this is one point he made that I just cannot agree with.
Travel itself is a kind of porthole. An escape in place can mean more than geography. Topography is a machine, a child of nature and humanity that lives independently, both affecting and responding to both forces.
As Beaudelaire and many after him tell us, one can be a voyeur while going on a promenade or sitting at the terrace of a café or exploring intimate interiors by boldly entering hidden shops and restaurants, both inviting and intimidating simultaneously. There is the moment before one enters such a space when one wonders what the response from the people inside will be. Do I belong? Once I poke my head inside a closed restaurant, I feel I must sum up the situation within five seconds to decide if I should stay for a table or duck out with a smile. One escapes the streets by going in or escapes the cavern’s intimate gazes by exiting. It depends on one’s mood and what one is trying to escape: Modernity, judgment, heat…in a historic, culturally-rich city it might even be an escape of overstimulation.
Beaudelaire was speaking of Paris. And this is where I am now. Traveling, or briefly living here; speaking their language, but as an outsider; walking through known streets that have changed, discovering new ones as well.
Woody Allen quite recently made the Paris porthole the subject of his film Midnight in Paris. In addition to travel as an escape, we now have the film itself as a virtual world, in the Deleuzian sense, and also the porthole of time. As we enter the space of the film, in a theatre or at home, we enter Allen’s imagined Paris. Allen’s protagonist, played by Owen Wilson, is a like a younger version of himself in mannerisms and personality. Wilson’s character (Gil) is a scriptwriter in Paris on holiday with his annoyingly anal fiancée, Rachel McAdams. She does not appreciate anything artistic or bohemian about Paris, in his mind at least.
Gil wants to be a published novelist, and to help him think and escape from his future in-laws, he becomes a voyeur much like Beaudelaire and wanders aimlessly until a porthole, in the form of a vintage Peugot from the 1920’s invites him into a different time. He schmoozes and exchanges artistic and philosophical ideas with Hemingway, the Fitzgeralds, and Picasso, among others, and gives a manuscript of his novel to Gertrude Stein. In fact, Hemingway has many great books that come from his travels, but one that is more conscious of the fact and takes place in Paris and France is A Moveable Feast. The book takes ideas and relationships and places them in the topographic context of the sights and culture, including food, as the title suggests. But rather than merely being placed there, they interact reciprocally with their surroundings. This pot au feu has much to offer its reader, and inspires one to travel in a similar way to find one’s own discoveries.
Gil and his romantic interest inside the porthole, a muse of Picasso, eventually end up in a second porthole during the time of Degas and L’Autrec, whom they happen to be in a bar with. Gil had constantly been discussing the way he wanted to live in that 1920’s time period with all the great writers and artists, the wonderful way of life and the romanticized vision of what everydaylife must have been like. His lover felt the same about the Belle Époque, but this is when he realizes the dream of a porthole’s escape is maybe better left as a dream. He explains to his lover:
Adriana, if you stay here though, and this becomes your present then pretty soon you'll start imagining another time was really your... You know, was really the golden time. Yeah, that's what the present is. It's a little unsatisfying because life's a little unsatisfying.
He wants to go back to the present, but perhaps not his present reality. When he returns, he breaks up with his fiancée and we see the hint of a new romance with a Parisienne who happens to like walking in the rain just like him.
It seems that staying in this foreign city will give Gil a sort of cultural dissonance to allow him to experience reality at a hyperreal level. He does not take any day or experience for granted, noting what he likes about coffees, music, and even the weather. Although Allen tells us that living in the past does not make a better reality, perhaps the past as a porthole can open up new possibilities for living in the present. We can visit it in our imagination, sometimes with the aid of films and books. Also dreaming of another time, or of elsewhere, keeps us cognizant of the way we live our daily lives.
I find in my times spent in Paris, I am often looking for something from the two other time periods in Allen’s film. However, during this trip to the museum-city, I found myself in a porthole I did not realize I had already been entering in Hong Kong, but was propelled into at lightening speed here in Paris.
May 1968: the Revolution-that-wasn’t in Paris. Actually, it was time of revolutionary ideas and protests in much of the world, including Hong Kong. There was so much turmoil about Vietnam, the Cold War, women’s rights, civil rights (in America), and methods of education.
Many great French writers and philosophers came from this time period. I found myself during a first trip back to GibertJeune, the wonderful student bookstore on Boulevard St. Michel, looking thoroughly through the shelves of books by Deleuze, Foucault, Derrida, and Baudrillard, to name a few. There were so many books that had not even been translated yet into English. I had to be selective in my purchases, for reasons of both luggage weight and cost.
I spent a few days reading Tourner Les Mots written decades after the protests by Jacques Derrida and SafaaFathy, but still in response to them. The book is about film language, and also about the power of all language as it plays through images and cultures in translations. Derrida encourages us to play with language, as we play with culture, and values improvisation:
Tourner les mots, en revanche, ceseraitaujourd’hui les calcule aussi, après coup, láoú, dans le tournage, ilsfurentlivrés, sans defense, au contraire, á l’improviste. (18)
To turn words, however, that would mean to also calculate them now, after their delivery, where in the turning, they were delivered without holding back. In the contrary, they were given to us in improvisation. (My translation.)
Words are written creatively, rather than in stagnant, denotative fact. We can continue to play with the words even after they have been written, as we read them with continued improvised experience, dependent on culture, mood, and extended knowledge of the words and their contexts. In this way, both writing and reading are escapes into the living world of language.
In one walking excursion home from a café where I was reading this book, I noticed some graffiti on a wall that read: L‘émancipation de l‘homme sera totaleou ne sera pas. This was one of the slogans of the May 1968 protests that means: The liberation of humanity will be total or it will not be. The paint was clearly from a more recent time, and I realized there were probably many students and others in Paris who were continuing the mindset of 1968 today.
Later in the week, I went to a discount bookstore in the Marais where the texts are on old shelves under a plastic roof. The vintage prints, French classics, and used booksfill up wine cartons and line the staircases in unsorted piles. There, I found more great literature from this time period, including Jean Baudrillard’sLe Systeme des Objets from 1968 and quite a few texts by Gilles Deleuze that respond directly to that time period. At the cash register, the friendly gentleman working told me there was a pile of books like that on the staircase. I thanked him, but said I had more than enough for today. But as I was about to exit, a huge rainstorm began. So in order to protect my new purchases, I went to the pile. Actually there were four piles, all about to fall over. I carefully looked through each of them and came across an old literary journal from 1968 with an article from Michel Foucault in it. I did not bother to buy it since I have his essays in a big, fat book, and it was true that my suitcase was really filling up at this point.
But just holding the journal in my hand made me think differently about the reading I was doing and this time period. I looked more closely at the cover. It was a vintage edition of Les Temps Modernes, started after World War II by Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir. In that journal was contemporary discourse about ideas of what the world was to become: more free, more just. Think what you like about today’s injustices, and there are many, but the reality is that the world continues to share ideas toward fairness and freedom for all in a sort of fight for humanity.
I immediately thought back to when my brother graduated from Colby College, hiddenin the thick forests of Maine (USA), and the commencement address I heard there. Weaving through Maine’s rivers and dense pine trees, Henry David Thoreau philosophized his own existence and the relationship he held with nature and the Native Americans who understand this relationship in an existential way in The Maine Woods. For the speech on this day, an intelligent man from the 1968 generation brought philosophical response to modern conflict into this sacred space. Thomas Schelling repeated much of his Nobel Prize speech from 2005, stating: “The most spectacular event of the past half-century is one that did not occur. We have enjoyed sixty years without nuclear weapons exploded in anger” (Nabers). His argument was about the goodness of humanity and the biggest success of the 20th century: that after the deadly nuclear attacks on Japan at the end of World War II, no country had dropped another atomic bomb. All that violent power contained. Surely, it must show society is progressing rather than regressing.
I then thought of Midnight in Paris and why Allen had left out this time period from his porthole, only to realize it was because he had been alive at that time. In fact, he had not only been alive but an active artist at the time, making a porthole into the artist/writer world then a doorway to his own past life. It’s understandable why he wouldn’t want to take us there. This is a memory rather than a dream. Although the two may interact, there is a clear distinction in the endless quality of a dream that can reach its traveller further, as far as one wants to go.
One day, people may think of this time – 2012 - as a porthole to enter. They may think of the Occupy movements or the first decade of the twenty-first century’s responses to traumatic events like September Eleventh in New York and the 1997 Handover in Hong Kong and yearn to be in the environment of artistic and philosophical response to such a time. In Paris, they may think of what a transition to the European Union has meant in terms of culture, economics, and population. In Paris, they may also think of the riots in thebanlieues(suburbs, normally referring to the poor neighborhoods) and the continued debate about the decision to make the wearing of the Burqa illegal in public (and the separation of religion and state in general). The response to these conflicts have created films, novels, essays, paintings, and simple café discussions and debates. Paris is a city that seems set up to keep the discussion no matter what difficulties it is faced with. It offers space for debate and mediums for expression. The government helps to fund the arts through film projects and artistic restorations. The café terraces offer space for people to intermingle with ideas. The nineteen national political parties ensure much more argument than the American two-party model.
Well, these are just part of my reflections as the effect of my travel to and inhabitance in another place, another culture. Much of what I think about is in the everyday. I escape in the ripe smell of a fromagerie, in the back alley of the Marais where I spot a brilliant blue door, and in the sound of familiar words shaped into a fresh idiom at the next table to a café. I write all these down in my journal as I sip espresso at the café, marking them in my psyche to use later from home, wherever that may be. The stimulation of the city is so constant that it also fatigues me, and I welcome the restful escape to write at a café, retreat to my tiny, rented apartment, and finally to return home.
Emerson was right that we must seek ideas to use at home, but they come from travels that allow us to truly enter the porthole of our hosts. Only here can we see what the rest of the world has to offer and understand why it’s all so worth saving.
We learn more about the world by understanding different cultures and languages, and although we can study these from home, we will never fully grasp them until we throw ourselves out onto the world. I would not be reading untranslated books in French if I had not lived in Paris, not even after my ten years of learning the language in school. It’s not even just about Paris or the French language. As soon as we acquire a second set of cultural and linguistic knowledge, we have created an elliptical space of play between this new set and our native one. In the juxtaposition, the small differences, we can find deeper truths about our daily lives and humanity at large to create the story of our own lives. As Derrida says in Tourner Les Mots:
- Maintenant, chacun joue pour soi…Chacun reprend sa parole.
-A chacun sa mémoire… (25)
-Now, each one of us plays (with language) for oneself…each of us takes back possession of one’s word.
-To each of us, a memoir… (My translation.)
Bibliography
Woody Allen, dir. Midnight in Paris. Gravier Productions, 2011. Film.
Charles Baudelaire. The Painter of Modern Life. New York: Da Capo Press, 1964. Orig. published in Le Figaro, in 1863.
Deleuze, Gilles. Cinéma 1: L'image-Mouvement. Paris: Les Éditions de Minuit, 1983. Print.
Deleuze, Gilles. Cinéma 2: L'image-Temps. Paris: Les Éditions de Minuit, 1985. Print.
Derrida, Jacques, and Jürgen Habermas. Le "Concept" Du 11 Septembre. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003. Print.
Derrida, Jacques , and SafaaFathy. Tourner Les Mots: Au Bord D'un Film [to Turn Words: At the Edges of a Film]. Paris: ÉditionsGalilée/Arte Éditions, 2000. Print.
Emerson, Ralph Waldo. "Self Reliance." Essays: First Series. 1841. 12 Feb. 1997 <ftp.books.com/ebooks/NonFiction/Philosophy/Emerson/history.txt>.
Nabers, Deak. “Hiroshima and the Nuclear Event,” in Post45 (09.12.11). Web. 25 June 2012. <
Thoreau, Henry D. The Maine Woods. Princeton, N.J: Princeton University Press, 2004. Print.