I’m grateful to be leaving patterned Paris. It’s gorgeous but in a structured way, and it’s busy with exhausting sensory choices. The charm entices you in, puts you in a beautiful structure, satiates you and then you’re off to the next exquisite experience.
It was just a few days ago that I was grateful to be leaving Turkey. Maybe I should just be grateful for leaving and forget the object. Or maybe I should just be grateful and leave the object of that. Or maybe I should just be. But that’s what I do at home, where I get so out-of-body that I marvel at the guy who can do all those photos and write and spend all my money.
Got into Strasbourg late last night. It’s a free day, no events, just spiritual balances by the MSIA staff, and people are gradually arriving at the Les Haras Hotel. Strasbourg is a quiet, gentler, more Germanic (it’s right on the border) French city, probably as kinetic as Paris was 150 years ago.
Something about France lends itself to black and white photography. Maybe it’s all the historical photos that are in our memory banks. But I think it’s more than that. Black and white is more mental and unconscious, which is appropriate for the French viewpoint, which is highly mental with a direct tunnel into the unconscious, which infuses the mental level with creativity. Using black and white is like gaining access to that tunnel and the ways in which it transforms “reality.” Color relates more to the feeling/emotional level.
And black and white captures a stillness that I sense in these European barbarian-Christians. To me, they still feel like the little hobbits in physical and mental burrows and tunnels that the Romans found when they conquered these areas. Kind of earthbound in a cute, peasanty sort of way. They’ve been civilized but not totally, which is why they can’t seem to stop fighting each other, poring over their little handicrafts, stuffing themselves with all kinds of strange foods, and rioting occasionally as they are doing now.
Jsu Garcia and I took a walk around town and ran into Matt Van Fossen and Rita. Matt was in Turkiye with us, and is still hanging on to the Mystical Traveler train as it speeds through Europe, as a few of us are. The Girlfriend is back in Santa Monica, woozy and sleeping a lot, but those of us who are still here are still plugged in to the energy, and blazing.
