Dear Reader,
Hello again. So this is another five things—really a “six things”—cobbled together from back in the day, when I still had fewer than 20 or 30 readers on Substack, I think, but it’s been reconfigured from a few different pieces. Again, this isn’t quite an essay, but it could be.
When walking through a city, I tend to become a creature of habit. I am like one of those prehistoric crustaceans, the organisms of the Ediacaran biota, tracing fossilized pathways into beach rock up in Newfoundland, before the Cambrian explosion. I am always taking the same turns, the same side streets. My desire lines are repetitive. In a warrenous city like Paris, so full of discoveries and hidden treasures, this is madness, of course, so I try to make a point of correcting myself.
When I was living in New York City, I tended to take the same routes, and would feel disoriented if I took a different one. Maybe it was the sheer size of the place, the overwhelming scale of the buildings, the impersonal nature of the grid system. Maybe it was also a desire to avoid certain treeless wind corridors, where icy blasts would funnel up from the seaport and blow garbage into little tornadoes that circled around me.
Even in Paris, I suppose, I do still like to see the same things again and again: the same stalls in the flower market, selling the same flowering orange trees, the same fragrant trellis roses. I like to see the change of the same trees over the course of a few weeks, a season, a year. I like to see the linden trees coming into honeyed bloom on the eastern edges of the Tuileries, how they drop their golden pollen in the pale dust.
All of the parks and gardens were closed during the first months of the pandemic, and many left untended. The usually manicured flower beds ran riot with spent tulip stalks and scattered peonies and undisciplined iris, all coming up on their own but then going to pieces, with no one there to clean them up or put in something new.
When they finally opened up the gardens again, the gardeners of the Jardin du Luxembourg didn’t bother to do the usual plantings. Instead, they scattered a mix of wildflower seeds over all the flower beds and then let them alone to do what they wanted. All that summer, this supremely manicured park was suddenly a wilder space once again, the flowers overtaking one another, as the weeks passed, dying and coming into bloom, sometimes just green stalks, sometimes colors erupting and then fading, overlapping, a chaos of different heights. In my opinion, it was the most beautiful I had ever seen it.
Why don’t roses that we buy in most florist shops smell of anything but the green stems? When I spent six months in Pakistan, many years ago, I went out one day and bought one of the garlands of vivid pink roses I always saw offered for sale at the roadside flower stands. It was a gift for a friend on his birthday. After the small party at his house, the food and the cake, when we pulled the garland out of the water-misted plastic bag it had been stored in, the roses filled the room with a scent so powerful it was like an emotion, or a heat surge; a flood of pink light. You could feel the molecules in your body change in response to it.
Apparently, this was not an entirely appropriate gift. It was more like the kind of thing one buys for a wedding. But, I didn’t know. I wanted to buy the garland of roses that were like a magic spell. I wanted the wet plastic bag of roses that threw their light around so wantonly. And that man is now happily married, with a beautiful family, so perhaps the spell worked after all.
I want the world to come down from its precipice, to step back from the ledge. There’s that quote, or maybe it’s just a saying now, that if you’re not angry, then you’re not paying attention. But now, in this age of social media and the 24-hour news cycle, that phrase has come to be taken extremely, horribly literally. Even a moment of inattention can be seen by some as a kind of moral negligence. Nerve-bursting anger and despair can be seen as a righteous imperative. But there are people who seem to feel galvanized by anger, who don’t seem to feel this sickening buzz in the same way that I do; people for whom anger is like coffee, a jump start, not poison. I’m just not one of them.
I remember Lady Gaga, singing at Biden’s inauguration, her voice reaching up towards the Capitol dome, leaping an octave, climbing, note by note, into the bright January clouds, as she sang that our flag, was, still, there!
Is our flag still there?
I don’t even really like the American national anthem. All those bombs falling, flag or no flag. But it made me think of a night I spent in a Brooklyn synagogue, just days after the 2016 election, when the rabbi passed out sheets with lyrics to America the Beautiful on them, and then asked us, all our hands trembling, to sing it.
Watching Gaga in 2020, with her earnest theatrics, the golden bird on her chest, proclaiming our temporary reprieve, I did feel it, or I wanted to —like a knife, or like a fragrance—that power of a beautiful, fragile idea.
In Paris, in the fall, when I see men selling little garlands of deeply fragrant jasmine flowers, usually older men from Pakistan or Bangladesh, I always buy them. They are threaded on pieces of cotton string like pearls, too long to be worn as bracelets, unless doubled. They’re not that common, these jasmine sellers, walking the Parisian streets in their starched white shalwar kameezes, but somehow, every year, they always manage to find me.
Adapted and updated from notes written in December and January of 2020-2021.
As a photographer, I attach great value to walking the same route again and again. Repetition is never mere repetition. The light changes, the wind shifts, small details reveal themselves that you missed a hundred times before. You think you know a place, but each return unsettles that certainty.
For my long-term series There Is Always Time for Another Wave, I have walked the same stretch of Belgian beach for nearly ten years. I still haven’t seen it all. Each return feels both familiar and new, as if the landscape were quietly re-composing itself in my absence. Perhaps true seeing begins only after familiarity has stripped away novelty, when what remains is attention itself.
We've kayaked on the same pond near our house for the last 10 years, often everyday. It’s not a large pond so we can circumnavigate it all in 20 minutes. Still, it affords daily surprises - blooming turtle head flowers, a new herons nest, a balancing turtle, the beavers at work on a new tree. The magic of the light, the seasons, the silence is extreme if you give it time to penetrate deep.
Your missives do that to me. Thank you. Your writing is delicious.