For a long time, I’ve known that the stairs from Woody’s Allen’s Midnight in Paris would probably rest in the latin quarter like much of the film.

On monday night i went to Shakespeare and co, then wandered towards rue Mouffetard to get a drink with a friend. we walked past the church of St Genevieve, and i pointed to rue de St Montaigne de Genevieve and told him that this was where George Orwell sold his clothes to a pawn store in Down and Out in Paris and London. He told me that he was pretty sure the stairs from Midnight in Paris where near here. 

I’ve walked that path so many times before I was surprised I hadn’t seen them.

Then today I took a break in the sun from studying in the library of St Genevieve, and walked to the stairs to eat my lunch. I realised that the road in from of me was the right curved shape as the one in the film. I stood up from my spot and realised I was sitting on those very stairs from the film. How many times I’d past them; looking for l’Ecurie Resteraunt, the Cardinal Lemoine metro stop, or a coffee. Today I ate lunch on those stairs. 

i just realised imogen may have been referring to the fact she arrives at the end of my trip? #selfishinspiration ?

If you listen, you can hear it.
The city, it sings.
If you stand quietly, at the foot of a garden, in the middle of a street, on the roof of a house.
It’s clearest at night, when the sound cuts more sharply across the surface of things, when the song reaches out to a place inside you.
It’s a wordless song, for the most, but it’s a song all the same, and nobody hearing it could doubt what it sings. And the song sings the loudest when you pick out each note.

The low soothing hum of air-conditioners, fanning out the heat and the smells of shops and cafes and offices across the city, winding up and winding down, long breaths layered upon each other, a lullaby hum for tired streets.
The rush of traffic still cutting across flyovers, even in the dark hours a constant crush of sound, tyres rolling across tarmac and engines rumbling, loose drains and manhole covers clack-clacking like cast-iron castanets.
Road-menders mending, choosing the hours of least interruption, rupturing the cold night air with drills and jack-hammers and pneumatic pumps, hard- sweating beneath the fizzing hiss of floodlights, shouting to each other like drummers in rock bands calling out rhythms, pasting new skin on the veins of the city.
Restless machines in workshops and factories with endless shifts, turning and pumping and steaming and sparking, pressing and rolling and weaving and printing, the hard crash and ring and clatter lifting out of echo-high buildings and sifting into the night, an unaudited product beside the paper and cloth and steel and bread, the packed and the bound and the made.
Lorries reversing, right round the arc of industrial parks, it seems every lorry in town is reversing, backing through gateways, easing up ramps, shrill- calling their presence while forklift trucks gas and prang around them, heaping and stacking and loading.
And all the alarms, calling for help, each district and quarter, each street and estate, each every way you turn has alarms going off, coming on, going off, coming on, a hammered ring like a lightning drum-roll, like a mesmeric bell- toll, the false and the real as loud as each other, crying their needs to the night like an understaffed orphanage, babies waawaa-ing in darkened wards.
Sung sirens, sliding through the streets, streaking blue light from distress to distress, the slow wail weaving urgency through the darkest of the dark hours, a lament lifted high, held above the rooftops and fading away, lifted high, flashing past, fading away.

And all these things sing constant, the machines and the sirens, the cars blurting hey and rumbling all headlong, the hoots and the shouts and the hums and the crackles, all come together and rouse like a choir, sinking and rising with the turn of the wind, the counter and solo, the harmony humming expecting more voices.

So listen.
Listen, and there is more to hear.
The rattle of a dustbin lid knocked to the floor.
The scrawl and scratch of two hackle-raised cats.
The sudden thundercrash of bottles emptied into crates. The slam-slam of car doors, the changing of gears, the hobbled clip-clop of a slow walk home.
The rippled roll of shutters pulled down on late-night cafes, a crackled voice crying street names for taxis, a loud scream that lingers and cracks into laughter, a bang that might just be an old car backfiring, a callbox calling out for an answer, a treeful of birds tricked into morning, a whistle and a shout and a broken glass, a blare of soft music and a blam of hard beats, a barking and yelling and singing and crying and it all swells up all the rumbles and crashes and bangings and slams, all the noise and the rush and the non-stop wonder of the song of the city you can hear if you listen the song

and it stops

in some rare and sacred dead time, sandwiched between the late sleepers and the early risers, there is a miracle of silence.

Everything has stopped

- Jon Macgregor

left paris to go to the lake house  you are welcome to read azelea’s whinging. 

journeytonoend:

These thoughts are walled by my brain

it’s soft, and they are hard to contain

so i’ll wait, stubbornly in this smokey room

smelling the spruce of these old wooden beams

and i’ll continue to rack my head for new ideas

A flower box, it’s lining the windows in busy city streets

with an…

We’ve talked about this before. We’ve talked about sitting in the smoky rooms with wooden rafters sipping glass with light stronger than cigarettes sparks. It was in that place in the small cities of our minds that the idea was birthed. And it was as if the idea was heard and echoed all across the city. The intricate walls of our brains fenced in our thoughts like boxes; like the flower boxes on the windows of the city apartment buildings.
And the dream transpired as it surpassed the cities in our minds. Although we whispered it, it was strong and it reverberated til the whole population conspired with us to make this idea a reality. And that is always how it happens in these cities. The buildings are always listening.

The walls listened- the bookshelf-lined walls that enclosed men of literature while their ideas grew until the rooms were impregnated with words and they came out, screaming onto the streets like the manifestations of May ‘68. The floors listened- the pine wooden floors that were subject to the sound of Debussy’s failures and repetitions and the sound of his breath as he tired from playing and drawing from artists and poems and the visions he’d seen. The roofs listened- the slanted roofs that kept the surrealists’ heads on, so that headstrong they did not head-on out of their minds. And while they slept, the roofs shook with sand so that the miniature cities in their minds had something to build with and the surrealists woke up with sleep in their eyes. The windows listened- the windows that cast illusions from displays on the streets to the young playwrights of old. The windows framed the new wave of filmmakers talking of interpreting the language and discourse from the foreign man’s world across the street.

And as we tiptoe, through cities of silver or grey, I wonder whether what we whisper will be heard by the city- so much so as to grow, as to run through the canals like a gospel of running water. And I wonder whether the news will be carried through the gutters by little messengers like Camus’ rats with answers to Proust’s search for lost time. And did I tell you that I’ve seen the place where we birthed the idea? Though it was in our minds when we thought of it, I’ve seen it in reality. The walls are covered with pieces of wood, crossing over, hemming in the fire and the wine. And I’ll take you there and we will talk. Though we might not speak of anything. Because it is likely it has all been said before; or will be said later, because now I’m not sure whether it is the miniature city of our minds or the big cities of the world that we are talking about, or that we are talking to.

And I haven’t even told you about the weird growths that come out of those rooms in the city, they crawl out of the buildings like Eliot’s yellow smoke that rubs its neck, but I didn’t tell you- the growth is not yellow but green. It’s no smelly substance that fills up pavements, but it is greenery as bright as spring and I’ve seen it lately jumping across the trees and from the window boxes and I haven’t quite figured it out yet but I think it’s the way the buildings talk. I think they share what they’ve heard and they transport it in the green and just as green comes from dirt, so does life comes from the shadows of those smoky rooms where we sat and talked and dreamed of ideas that grew.

Now I am running around

Hold up, Hold up,

I’m still running around.

And I will join you soon

I’m losing myself in the echoes of this strange new tune.

Something is happening in the rafters

Hoisted up, tied, we’re now together

My head fills with the smoke surrounding, I’m about to choke

I’m still running around

But for now I’m running around

This place has strange echoes

But I will leave here soon

- by journeytonoend

The art of writing is the art of discovering what you believe.

- Gustave Flaubert