continuum...

there is a tree in Paris that is a testament to the tarrying nexus of time, to the soffit spectrum of survival spiralling through hundreds of millions of years...
the end of another year has me thinking of this singular tree, as I had once watched its leaves radiate a glowing yellow before spinning wordlessly down to the ground...
I picked up a few of these gilded leaves so perfectly bifurcated and so strangely primordial, their cell structure interlaced with mysterious knowledge from so long ago when the world had no human eyes, no human touch...
China has since claimed it as her national tree, but I claim it as poetic justice that it may just keep going on long after countries and people have dissolved away like so many new year's resolutions!

"Dieses Baums Blatt, der von Osten
Meinem Garten anvertraut,
Gibt geheimen Sinn zu kosten,
Wie's den Wissenden erbaut."*

[*first verse of "Gingo Biloba" by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, 1815]
[this particular gingko biloba specimen flourishes in the park beside the Petit Palais]

Je vous souhaite de joyeuses fêtes ainsi qu'une belle et sage année 2010!

paris-noel

meilleurs voeux!
...l'amour...la paix...la merveille...

peace on earth...

goodwill to all men...
"J'étends les bras. Mes mains caressent l'horizon doux et souple..."

"La terre je la vois, la terre je l'entends, la terre est sous mes yeux et vit dans mon oreille.
Rythmique et musicale, elle est encor plus belle!
Ses bleus étages descendent, remontent, prennent un temps.

"Laisse penser tes sens, homme, et tu es ton Dieux."

[french lines excerpted from "La Vision Harmonieuse de la Terre" by Paul FORT, (crowned Prince of Poets by Verlaine), 1872-1960...his famous poem "La Ronde" is about world friendship]

paris-mutuel

it is always hard to say goodbye to a space, an era, an entity that has been so physically encompassing, so emotionally enriching, so gloriously uplifting...but as one volume empties, another fills up, so one must make the leap, the graceful entrechat from the one to the other, to a newly shimmering pas de deux, and to a sparkling fresh territorial gambit...

[in an empty room with muted christmas colours in the Petit Palais, 8e Arr]

au premier

it is easy to imagine delicate things gliding up these wooden stairs to more private tables where the food is neglected and hands are surreptitiously preoccupied with caressing other warmer parts... and no, be they not be palm pilots, sourberries nor vibrating mobiles, but soft and scented, smooth and responsive, and taking a long time to come down those narrow stairs again...

[meandering down the rue du Pont Louis-Philippe towards the silently flowing Seine...]

au deuxième

lurid carminite stairs swirl up a cherry-popsicle space...inflated beach balls float in cartoon suspension...
Dr. Z slides down the tangerine banister into a pristine Miesian world of prize-winning models of architectural wonders while I am sucked like Alice in W-land into this glowering vertical tunnel of erubescent saturation...

[Cité de l'Architecture et du Patrimoine, 16e Arr.]

au troisième

drifting through compliant rooms hung with arrested moments in time and place, compelling illusions of captured light and shadows, the ephemeral wisps of hazy played-out lives, I could not climb up the red sphinx steps any further to the smoky trompe-l'oeil, to a ghostly dimension merging what can be seen with what is not really there...as mysterious as the aurora borealis of interior complicity...

[Maison Europeenne de la Photographie, 5/7 rue de Fourcy, 4e Arr.]