The tourist, it seems, is the lowest of the low. No other group has such a uniformly bad press. Tourists are continually subject to sneers and have no antidefamation league. Animal imagery seems their inevitable lot: they are said to move in droves, herds, swarms, or flocks; they are as mindless and docile as sheep but as annoying as a plague of insects when they descend upon a spot they have ‘discovered’.
(Culler 1990)
thanks jessie for sending me this article. it arrived at a nice time, when i'm processing my own 'away' existence that lies somewhere between tourist/resident, and in which i'm guilty of seeking a more authentic experience of awayness.
lenny and i chatted today about our different styles of photographing paris. he says he gets my everyday thing, but asks how the tour eiffel is not also part of the everyday. he argues that for many parisians it is. a few days ago (at the pompidou) he asked me to photograph him with the tour eiffel in the distant background. i didn't want to but eventually did. i felt conflicted. he says he can't understand my hatred of this monument. i explain that my hatred is not of the monument (i've never 'really' seen it), but of its symbolism. i hate that for many, it is paris. and i guess i hate that it interferes with my paris.
neither of us would photograph sydney opera house. i suggest that it's pointless because, like the tour eiffel, you can just google it and there it is, shot from every possible angle. so why bother? i don't need to see the tour eiffel to know its shape. i can't not know it. i can't not imagine it. and i guess my refusal to visit it (let alone photograph it) could be about my struggle for authenticity, as Culler suggests. for in doing so, i raise myself above the 'herd'.
and yes, i love it when i get mistaken for a local, when french people ask for directions. it means i'm passing, that i'm falling into step with the locals. when i walk the streets with a bag of groceries, bread, food to prepare at home, i'm a resident. i have a kitchen, a bed, a door code, a place to not simply stay, but to live (whatever that means). and these walls belong to a subleasing resident; this is not a hotel. i fend for myself, and this makes it more real to me. yet i also understand that it's not real. this experience is very much mediated by my being away from home. tourist or not, i do not belong here. and whilst i might pretend, i know that this is pretense.
this neighbourhood houses no monuments and there's little english spoken here. there are piles of broken furniture on the streets, discarded xmas trees, posses of french-african teens on corners. this is a paris i feel more comfortable with because it's uncomfortable. it's different to my usual existence and i'm forced to contemplate this broken furniture (evictions?), my concerns about 'gangs', my understandings of poverty, violence, immigration, noise, mess, etc. the domestic argument that echoed through the stairwell a few days ago was difficult to stomach. but it's there (with or without me) and i guess i'd rather 'experience' it if this can help to broaden/complicate my understanding of how people live.
i can accept that this neighbourhood might even be hostile to me and my bourgeois pursuit of the everyday. it probably should be. and i should be made to question that. and this tension of wanting to belong but knowing that i cannot is one i quite enjoy. it generates material to contemplate, write, and grapple with.
so yes, partly this is about a pursuit of authenticity, but i think it's something else too. i don't think i fit into either of the camps that Culler discusses - the tourist or the traveler. for there's no touring and very little traveling. i'm just staying, and most of my time is spent in my neighbourhood or in my apartment. so my distaste for tourism is not simply to conjure my authenticity, though obviously it's useful in elevating myself higher towards a more original experience of paris (therefore, it conjures my paris).
my suitcase has been stowed away, hidden, out of sight. my fridge is stocked like at home, but not, because it has food that i don't eat at home, things that aren't readily available there. but there are similar habits, practices, routines that stay with me wherever i go. and so here in my paris, i'm both here and there, home and away, myself and not myself. i think in english and (attempt to) speak in french. schizophrenic, i lose my way on these streets. lost, i happen upon pastries whose flavours take me elsewhere.
this morning i walked along a canal. i walked over bridges, under bridges, and past bridges. it was new territory but not too far from 'home'. i ate an almond croissant which i believed to be the best almond croissant i'd ever tasted. i made a mental note of the patisserie location, for i hope to return. yet i know that i might not because experience tells me that i forget locations, that i lose my way, that in seeking an old patisserie i'm more likely to discover a new one. and maybe it's not really the best almond croissant anyway because my memory isn't perfect and the amount of pastry i consume is quite high. but i like to think it's the best, particularly there, in the moment when i'm walking the cold morning streets and feeling its warmth and sweetness fall inside me.
perhaps nothing of that moment was new or authentic. yet surely a spasm of pleasure that resembles something new is just as good, if not better, than the real thing. and maybe that's the paris that i can carry with me always, wherever i go, like a tour eiffel pendant.
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