It's snowing in Paris - Bill Direen.

The snow is really sensational, and it was 18 degrees two days ago! Everybody thought spring had arrived. But nothing really arrives here, I fear. The café is playing Led Zeppelin, like much in Paris long-dead — the heroes, the music, the art, the mannequins and I’m thinking Calvados, Baileys, or an Absinthe to go with my coffee ... Absinthe reminds me of Baudelaire and the pauper’s funeral he had, like our own Katherine Mansfield, whose bones were chucked in a common grave at first, like Mozart and heaps of others who did the impossible and why? ... for us. No matter how soon it is constructed, a tomb is always too late. The Absinthe is symbolist green and the café is cosy. It is called Purgatory, a joke on the cemetery over the road, and I’m thinking that’s what dear old Paris is like, a half-way world, an imaginary state in suspension, a 5000 year old fantasy imperfectly incarcerated. Which depresses me again.

So I’m thinking about you, the reader, killing time in your favourite café, or, like me, waiting for the weather to clear, for a friend to arrive, for a thrill to the heart, for some unexpected event to lighten our inner rooms with sun ... we are together in a way. I am thinking of you passing an idle moment with a cup of New Guinean Gold, some recent alternative music on a quality stereo, and the quiet murmur of people around about, and wishing I were there.

What can I tell you about Paris? Art snobs. Music snobs. Self-protective racketeering and prefabricated culture addicts. As a place, not much different from any other city. The most interesting aspect is its inveterate gypsy populations. But I’m prejudiced by sympathy for them.

I’m thinking that’s it, abort this mission to write to you, and I go to buy a baguette from the Boulangerie where the woman serving doesn’t understand me. I repeat myself clearly and all is well. Then a black-clad but gentle looking guy enters, and orders, and she asks him to repeat what he said as well. He repeats himself and she still doesn’t get it. So he leaves without any bread. I suggest that the snow makes people speak more quietly and she shouts back at me, ‘YES! IT MAY WELL BE TRUE WHAT YOU SAY, MONSIEUR’. Perhaps she is going deaf.

So I’m heading home with my bread but the Bassin de la Villette looks splendid from the elevated Metro so I get off at Stalingrad, remembering that there is a quiet café with good coffee and firm tables beside those wide calm waters. Firm enough for me to write on, that is, unlike some of the wee wobbly tables on Parisian terraces. I’m passing a scurry of sorry-looking pigeons pecking at half-baguettes while out on the freezing water a fleet of black tailed gulls are bobbing serenely as if it is just another day.

It is 10 past 2 already and the price of the coffee just went up. Literally! I complain and the waiter shows me a sign saying the price goes up at 2pm. I suggest the clock is fast, but he laughs and points to a grey-suited man on the other side of some glass panels where there is a cinema. It’s the manager. The manager is there and he can’t give me a coffee for the pre-2pm price, even though he would like to. I can see he’s not lying, he would really like to, and I am happy to pay more. I take a table by a huge window looking out on the quay, where a woman and two children, a couple, and an unidentifiable being in a fur-bordered Eskimo hood tread carefully over the icy pavements. Many stylish Italian shoes will today be ruined, but the light is wondrous. All the greens and oranges, the reds before me, they are all so clear as I go through her body entirely, the one in my thoughts, skin for skin, cell for cell and all that.

The music is sung in French with Parisian, Moroccan rhythms, Arabian violins, and Tunisian improvisations, which creates a double-triple atmosphere. I imagine a village far from here, beset by dust and the perils of the desert, and another scene, urban, Marseillaise, which speaks for many minds, in many cafés such as this one. A few late-risers tap the snow off their shoes and set up laptops. My own visit to this city has been long, fifteen years on and off. If I were just fifteen years old that would make me 100% French I suppose, but I carry my New Zealand-ness around with me like an extra kidney to process the toxicity of the world.

There are things I cannot tell you, will not. We transfuse each other, the visitor and the visited. Enough said. A couple behind me has just spent ten minutes telling their spoilt puppy to sit down. But I’m thinking the granite floor-tiles must be freezing for a dog to sit on and I’m taking out a book of writings by John Cage. To my surprise, he mentions New Zealand in a Note on page 6. His parents led him to believe they were going to take him there—some parental ruse, perhaps. I don’t think he ever visited later in life, either, but it must have remained a tantalizing destination, exotic, perhaps erotic, for him—like all places we have never visited.

It is on its feet again, the pup, and they are giving it a little ball, for heaven’s sake! as a song in English strikes up, a long, slow, country croon, a toothless, lipless throaty drawl, a slow trawl, dragging a net full of worries.

When I suddenly realise I am writing again, you know, like, putting pen to paper in a good way, for the first time in well over a year. Just scribbling these snowy pages to you and letting the stream flow. Writing at the speed of the hand, in the speech of the mind. Compatriot with you, but not only. I’m carrying with me all the people who have entered my invisible cells and will never leave them. Gulls may weather the cold as we do, pigeons scavenge as humans sometimes have to, but the meetings of humans go way beyond function and way beyond survival. This is it, the equality of a smile, the freedom of laughter, the happiness, dammit, of being together. This is it—every person we meet or carry inside, with whom we have loved or laughed without reason. Because we surpass reason, as we surpass the ways we’ve dreamed up to describe our own feelings: synesthesia or whatever. Yes, we can hear when we touch, we can smell when we see colours and we are touched inside when we read. And yes, it’s the musicians, artists and writers who are spending their lives putting us in touch with those unreasonable unreligious un-Darwinian experiences, as when we go through each other, when we are one life in many, and many lives in one. We are light and colour, cadence/noise, we are coffee and sitting in cafés, we are these unteachable unprogrammable spirits.

Which doesn’t prevent my feet from getting cold.

The dog and humans have departed. Me too. The snow is falling in drifts on Canal St Martin. Not far from here I bought an effects pedal from a keyboardist who was selling all his analogue FX. I was returning to them. As usual I don’t want to go home, like a wee kid at the end of the day, and I’m taking the Metro again to Pigalle where I know a friendly café inhabited by filmmakers and actors, and I’m settling in there now right beside a radiator heater. The guy next to me is indeed an actor. Actually he describes himself as an actor-masseur and screen-writer, then he adds that he is really more of an alchemist. I say we have that in common.

We laugh, but it’s hard for him to find work, to get himself chosen for TV ads, to pay the rent; he goes outside for a smoke. The café is a tasteful mix of wrought iron and burnt, half-restored, wood. The floor is paved with the irregular tiles of a previous age. The chandelier is a giant bottle-dryer with wine bottles upended on prongs in draining position. The massive bottle-dryer has at least nine diminishing circles, like stages towards paradise, or hell.

The snow gives no sign of letting up, it falls on this café, it falls through the skin of Paris, dissolving into the personae of masseurs, writers and alchemists. It falls upon these words. The snow is these words, in negative. As the black ink is a kind of inverse snow...as a page a kind of terrain, it belongs to us who are waiting for the weather to clear up, us who are sitting in cafés in Paris, Auckland or Newtown. Yes sure, the sex shops are all around here too. The sex, I suppose is like the tourist rock ‘n roll of these parts, commercialised, overpriced and cliché-ridden. And just out the door and around the corner is a shop where I bought my ‘76 electric guitar, cream like yellowing snow, which I’ve played in Germany but hardly at all in this city of stars and idols, icons and museum pieces. Left to my own devices I have, it must be said, finished seven novels here, and am on the way to finishing an eighth.

To finish a work is work. To begin one is a snowstorm, a momentary dream that remains in your cells, redolent of one you love, and of all you have known, a living fresco until the last rose is laid on its tomb.

The buses are still not running, so I’m riding home on the train again with thoughts of you and thinking this Café Reader thing will be like rays, for I reckon it will bring you a spray of gleams. I’m riding these Metro lines, these hardened veins beneath a rip-off city, and the Metro lines are falling, the train is falling as I hit station after station, as you, and her, us all, dissolve into the beeps and blasts of discordant horns.

*****

Originally printed in Phantom Billstickers Cafe Reader Vol. 1, Winter 2013

Bill Direen is a New Zealand writer, poet, and musician. He manages the music group Bilders and lives in Otago, New Zealand. He is a legend.