An education (wanderlust)

The vagaries of the internet world mean that you can put up a song today and it will be gone tomorrow. Oh well, such is life: what is lost was never yours in the first place...finders, keepers we used to tell each other as children. And now?

"Not to find one's way in a city may be uninteresting...but to lose oneself in a city-as one loses oneself in a forest-that calls for quite a different schooling."

What you look for is what you never find. But then, all of a sudden...there..stolen glances, borrowed time, how strange the heart of a city is:now a landscape, now a room...Paris taught me this art of straying. Her lawless, deviant soul. And you, a slacker, a silent poet?

He saw her, fish, in a crowded stream of people and remembered home: there is no fish in the Tigris; there is no Tigris in the fish.

A net snared a net.
Embracing we sever.

"Some writers and walkers had cherished this idea of the city as a kind of wilderness, mysterious, dark, dangerous and endlessly interesting." What is this fascination for dark light?

I stood motionless, preoccupied with linking the present moment to the preceding year's, to make them one.

What is united in memory is untied in life...

He sometimes followed women with small feet and high heels...she said: "I can't convey how much my boots delighted me" (and him, too!). "I came home at all hours..so that even when I was away from home I felt at home everywhere". Paris as a bedroom, a labyrinth whose centre is a brothel, a virgin forest.

"I was like a boat on ice," she said...and "I always forgot to lift my dress." Him: "like those wandering souls who go looking for a body...he enters as he likes each personality."

The damp, intimate, claustrophobic, secretive, narrow, curving streets...

Startling juxtapositions, chance and coincidence. A one-way street. With a door. And a room. And the world.Thanks to her. Thanks to her, who was no more than one of the hundred thousands, the Parisian night became a mysterious domain. And he saw innocence in the face of experience.

But language limits what can be said, just as walking, with its turns and detours, limits what you can know.

(all quotations from Wanderlust and one from Celan)