I’ve learned from the throwaway newspaper – as well as from personal observation – that the Seine has once again risen high.
But the grumpy lady with the big rough-plastic sack between her knees, sleep-deprived brats dossed either side, knows as well as we all do that the rise is not because it’s been just pissing rain these long, hopelessly wintry, days.
– You! Close those curtains! I’ve already said it once: The relentlessly grey sky has nothing to do with it!
Those dull, dull, dull heavens are, in fact, a prime example of the pathetic fallacy. Anywhere else you’d have to pay for such a perfect illustration of a literary trope, but not here, not in Paris, not now, not me. It's emotions, not the rain, makes the Seine rise.
Let’s prove it.
Whenever anybody was upset by one of his actions, Marc, my former brother-in-law and a pocket Everyguy if ever there were one, used to cry, pathetically, fallaciously and quite sincerely, Pourquoi tant d'emotions? – “Why so many emotions?”.
As if we were permitted, for example, fear, but not surprise or fury.
With the Seine now bulking large up and down stream every year and with more than 30 years of hindsight, I can answer Marc without the help of a baseball bat.
So many emotions, Everyguy, because most of us now realize that, without any shadow of doubt, this world here-below is more of feeling and emotion than of fact and reason.
It is no accident, then, that the famous fleuve is now poised, has always in fact been poised, to engulf then sweep away the Academie française, the Assemblée nationale & the Musée du Louvre – Reason, Law, Science – along with the three pillars of capitalism, Punishment, Charity & Hard Cash: the Conciergerie, Hôtel Dieu and les Touristes.
Though sturdily built on deep foundations, can reason, law and science hold steadfast against such repeated assaults?
Dark thoughts aside, that we’ve finally noticed and that feeling and emotion are finally getting due recognition is not a bad thing.
It’s just that feeling and emotion are not what anybody wants to deal with. And what nobody wants to deal with is always portentous, laden with doom, an excuse for one drink too many.
Maybe the Seine’s pathetic fallasizing is partly a result of #metoo (or as they say here, using imagery that suggests a splash, #balancetonporc, “#givethebrutetheheaveho”).
After all, haven’t women always been mocked and spurned for entertaining useless feeling and senseless emotion? Ha! No-account hysterical females!
It turns out that the girls, anyhow, those of them such as have been mocked and spurned for feeling and emoting, have been telling the truth all along.
All this truth, wanted or unwanted, and all this literary figuring, pathetic or fallacious or not, can be tough, especially under grey skies.
– Jérémie! Bordel! Where is that bloody pastis!
In the same throwaway newspaper, just as the lady and her brats stumbled off, I learned that, in what may be a first, a con – a self-serving imbecile with nuisance power – is on trial and may actually be sent to prison rather than rewarded with stock options.
Or so some are hoping.
Jawad Bendaoud, the erstwhile Saint-Denis landlord who rented his prosperous shooting gallery to some of the 13-November-2015 murder gang, argues – I swear this is true – that he should be let free precisely because he’s con. That is, since Bendaoud doesn’t now and never has cared a straw for anybody or anything but himself, his lawyers argue he can’t reasonably be blamed for acting selfishly. In fact, Bendaoud's blind egoism is especially blameless since the rental was an unusually lucrative one!
As has the Seine, apparently, society here has reached a saturation point, un seuil de tolérance.
In other news, the same throwaway newspaper has reported that scientists have finally acknowledged that birds talk.
In our hearts we all of us already knew this, did we not?
Birds not only talk, they converse, plan, share information and opinions and make and carry out strategies. But it seems that until theses researchers needed to justify their research grants, we humans paid bird talk not much heed. Understandably, birds themselves, as is true for all other sensible organic life, have always been reluctant to call human attention to themselves on this or any other point.
So, until I walked out unusually early yesterday morning, the world stayed in blissful equilibrium.
With a real job to occupy him, Pierre rises and leaves early; I don’t usually meet him. But there he was, silently holding the door, smiling.
Then I ran into Kekel, a tailor, who cackled his cheerful jargon at me on the sidewalk in front of the house.
Then I met Cathy with her boy - Bonjour, left cheek, bisou, right cheek, bisou.
Done quickly is done well.
Not quite.
I then had to pause and present my rough mug for a shy but somehow ardent little kiss, tiny and wet as a champagne bubble… Somebody at least is not taking all this howyadoin’ stuff for granted.
It was still dark, even if the street lighting had already cut out; City Hall has long been unable to provide useful services usefully.
In the obscurity, there was a barrel-chested bear of a Sofiane with his friend and colleague Mohammed, “Mo,” trudging along to some job moving house or lifting or pushing or pulling heavy objects. Built like a thoughtful bull flamingo, Mo’ has little visual presence for such a job and, on the surface at least, even less spiritual affinity for it.
Mo’? No, no, I never can really believe it, Mo' 's no Mo'. Mo’, indeed. “Mo’” has the sort of natural sensitivity that makes it likely you could pass a pleasant evening listening to him recite and intelligently comment medieval Persian love poetry in the original all the while dandling his four doe-eyed, remarkably calm, little daughters on his knee. Because it's true, I'll call him Al Nour, "light".
There was light, then.
An new world was this unusually early morning!
And with quite a concert going, too.
Even before getting up from behind the old church, I could hear the clicketty and clacketty and teehee and hee hee and hushpering of a large clump of non-grown humans.
Many, I saw, were wearing yellow safety vests, many just raring to test them out in the blind intersection, but most nudging and teasing their happy way to school.
What was clear was: humans, even grown ones, are full of feeling and express it freely.
Like poets.
Like birds.
It hit me, then. It isn’t birds that are like us.
It is we who are like birds.
And, as if to prove that this is indeed the only world and therefore the best possible among them, just then, as this thought bearing on the origin of speech and poetry, Jeanpie hailed me from across the street. “Jeanpie” means “John Magpie;” he is out and about, the fount of all news worth hearing.
I went over to Jeanpie. In a rush, I told him about the birds, about humans, about poetry, about rising waters, about pathetic fallacies, about justice for cons.
Jeanpie opened his big brown eyes very wide and said, “You must be right.”
So, now, all the genies, are out of the bottle.
