THE PARISIAN DREAM
1
There is a city, cut through by the river that made it, streets twisting like liquid veins from a bird’s-eye view. In this city, losing your bearings means you’re either drunk or high or doing it on purpose. This is the city of the marooned and the exiled, the dreamers and the sanguines, the hungry, the curious—of people who seek constant evidence of human displays of being. They don’t know why—we don’t know why.
The city I’m talking about is the city of those who call you up in the middle of the week to ask if you’re up for a little protest Saturday afternoon, before drinks and the concert. You say yes, always. What’s it about, this time? you ask each time, but you know it’s always something important. The causes to march for are inexhaustible in this city. This is a city that yearns and obsesses.
Paris. You read the word and sensory connotations trail behind your first thought like a string of garden lights at dusk. Paris. You read it again, and there it is—that thing, that feeling. That nostalgia, almost, for a city you might never even have visited. But you know it anyway. You know Paris. You know it’s nothing like you think it is, and everything you think it is.
2
For years, I’ve kept a page solely dedicated to sentences on Paris, as faithful as a passport in its consistent proximity. It rests with me, like a love letter I’ve been sculpting and editing and lugging around. I don’t really know why. Over the years I’ve trimmed it down. Some sentences seemed stupid and outdated, some repetitive, and some were just plain gibberish—most likely written in fevered, drunken lapses.
I made it into a poem. Even though it felt unfinished, I performed it once—an evening I don’t like to remember.
Look at the walking, talking unoriginality, I read on everybody’s faces, in the twitch of their looks. After all, I’d joined the chorus of innumerable writers swayed by the same lady. Paris, cette grande dame. And I, standing there with that crumpled paper—an atom of a droplet in the literary heritage. (Whatever, but also not whatever.)
The audible feedback was the opposite: claps, claps, a lot of clapping. Nods, here and there. Compliments, what nice words—mute, repetitive echoes, really. Let’s have another glass of wine, shall we? So, you lived in Paris, huh? Sure, nothing to it, I’d say, but I’d think: you have no idea, Paris is everything.
During the performance, I think nobody was moved but myself. Now, that is bad poetry. Subjectively? Objectively? There are things we will never know, and everything is a projection.
3
The poem has moved through various wallets, its edges moist and crumpled, and it is slightly yellowed now, with a couple of cigarette burns—one accidental and one for the sake of aesthetics. It almost feels like somebody has given me a love letter.
A lost beloved has given me a love letter so I could always remember them. I didn’t write it to me, Paris wrote it to me. And what if it did?
Before we dismiss this idea as overly romantic, unserious, pathetic even—and I wouldn’t necessarily disagree—let us remember that riddles need a conclusion, that outlandish hypothesis are worth exploring.
No, okay, I wrote it, and I am compelled to carry it around, and to muse on this very fact. What does that say about me? I will never burn it.
4
Suppose it is a lost love—is it lost because the Paris I’ve always been looking for exists only in the intangible realm of hapless imagination? Paris—the city of concealed layers, of transient essence, like an unfinished novel, something I have to reckon with despite the gnawing feeling it won’t let me do so.
Suppose it’s an incantation, a verbal amulet, a romantic’s portrait of a city.
Suppose it serves to be invoked whenever life loses its lustre, a reminder that there is at least one Paris to return to—exactly like the one I held in my dreams.
The time to invoke it, for me, has come.
Paris, it begins, is the love of bread and wine, of café crème at brasserie terraces in the mornings.
Paris is Chardonnay.
Paris is Chardonnay with your best friend and a side of pickles after work at five o’clock.
Paris is the smell of cigarettes, the missing of nicotine.
Paris is the true cliché of the best baguettes.
Paris is clichés.
Paris is giant palaces home to Renaissance Art and refugees scattered around the périphérique, in the tents round the bend of my street.
Paris is the odyssey for walkers.
Paris is beheaded royalty and the ghosts of dead soldiers.
Paris is the never-ending spectacle.
Paris is the chanting revolutionaries and wedged cobblestones.
Paris is a lightning rod for freedom.
Paris is the self and the new self at the turn of a boulevard.
Paris is the memory of a different arrondissement.
Paris is an exile for exiles and the maker of exiles.
Paris is an unstoppable exodus of emotions.
Paris is a theatre of passerby with no curtains and no backstage.
Paris is an anthology where walking and reading mean the same thing.
Paris, this shapeshifting entity that can never love you back...
The problem is that it’s all about her.
5
Snaps me to the past in an instant. It always brings me someplace different, where the colours are different each time. What strikes me now that I read it again is how grand the image is, how impersonal. Where are my people? Where are the eyes through which these impressions were conjured? Had they not gone places, witnessed the cracks within a face or two?
I’d neglected to mention my Paris—except, perhaps, the pickles with the chardonnay. No mention of all the small closet-rooms I’d walked into or lived in, the upside-down smiles, the two-night affairs, that philosophical conversation in the catacombs, the myriad sofas I’d spent the night, high-ceiling ateliers fuming of turpentine, empty classrooms at midnight, rusted showerheads, the lovers and their mothers I didn’t really want to meet, the dealers who sometimes laughed at my requests. Rue Désirée, rue Paul Lelong, rue Lagrange, rue Cler, rue de Grenelle, boulevard de Clichy, Porte Maillot, rue Fénélon. The rooftops.
6
There was never any Parisian Dream when we were all there. When we were very young, and insouciants, and anticipating the arrival of palpable time. There is only one now because I’m far away, and I’m just old enough to start mourning idylls, and I’m not even very old.
People never stopped bleeding in Paris. You can also find crushed skulls above the catacombs. Ordinary people pay taxes to people playing kings and with blood on their hands, though I suppose that is most places. Far away, I bleed for Paris too. But the blood isn’t red, and that’s what I’m here to talk about.
7
You can enliven Paris with endless verbs and subject complements but it will remain as it is, at all times: perpetually intangible. Its quintessential volatility, that which compels me to pin it down, at my own expense. I transpose this affliction in regards to people, too. Though I’ve only recently realised that there is something flawed in this approach, however instinctive, like trying to catch smoke.
8
To liberate myself from Paris, I have to cut through the parallax; slice through the looking glass of broken ideals.
See, there we are, dismantling dreams on the rooftop at rue Lagrange. You, me, and the bunch. Grinding weed, melting hash, rolling cigarettes, swearing to stop, living for yesterday. There we are, still in Paris, still inside the Parisian dream with all the drugs we use as fuel.
9
The scene is this:
We meet again, years later now, one evening in June, in an expensive café near the Invalides. We laugh: we can afford this now. The cost leaves us bitter, yet we gorge on aesthetics. We grow serious: we have to acknowledge that we are privileged; once we were not. We go deeper: things change, people change, the weather changes, empires are falling, but our love is anchored. We wonder why we aren’t just sitting on the floor, by the water, on this midsummer night, getting ready to count the few hours until daybreak. We don’t say: it’s because sleep is our sweetest muse. We talk of how we used to imagine our unknowable future, stretching out before us like a stack of endless blank pages. We could choose whichever page to write on or flick through them all. We could bundle them up into a book of our making and tear off the bad chapters. We talk of how Paris made us, while all this time, we had been making her.
We summon a shared memory: that time we were on that rooftop and Mo almost slid off. He swore he’d die happy, if it happened. But it did not, and we did not move for hours. We just laid down, got higher, dreamed aloud. We performed our raps on ukulele beats and hailed it as our poetry. It was moonless, and a wild night, and full of Space conversations. If you shake this snowglobe, you would notice the ash among the glitter, and the hazy shapes of our silhouettes against a polluted sky.
10
So this is a return to Paris.
Now I will unbox the container I had hoped would remain sealed and unravel its spills. My hand must exercise its search in the dark. It feels warm there, while my frozen fingers try to thaw, as they keep poking.
This is why I come here, to the page. I knew this is what I would find: remnants of my past projections, without a clue as to what to do with them. And so, I will mince them into a tale.
Sarah Foulc, 28, Antwerp - Belgium ✯ IG: @sarahfoulc ✯ sarahfoulc.substack.com
"Sarah Foulc is a French-Filipino third-culture kid, who mostly reads and writes and raises little humans. Bibliophile, occasional copywriter, secret poet, avid journaler, and out-of-practice-actress, she is never without coffee and always where there's music. She currently lives in Antwerp with her partner and two children."