Posing in Paris

Back to Paris, though it’s been a few months since I’ve actually been there. Because (I’m not alone here) we want to capture it, really grab it with palms and fingers, need to have something of it to bring home and keep with us always because it’s mine mine mine. From Hermes or the Monoprix.

Okay, that’s silly, but how to get a bite of it, a little taste? Maybe here, maybe with a cell phone picture. Maybe if I “capture” the girls staging photos of the Tour Eiffel, one thrusting her hand out and the other bending and moving so that in the photo the hand will appear to hold the spindly symbol of France, symbol of culture the world round. The hand is empty, natch. And there’s another gal watching, just taking the pose in. All of it working around a useless structure built in 1887 that shouldn’t really be the symbol it is and (maybe for that reason) absolutely carries the weight of meaning (culture, art, sexy Frenchness) for the world. If I haven’t taken my own posed pic in thirty years (now remembering the pix before the Tour as well as the boyfriend and I who posed in front of the leaning tower of Pisa as if we’d knocked it over—it was funny!) and if I snap these three tourist-girls now that I’m over 50—I am funny doubly removed, as I am capturing something no one else has captured.

Hmm. When I think of the Eiffel Tower, it’s impossible not to recall Roland Barthes’ smart essay, called “The Eiffel Tower,” which he begins by telling about Maupassant who frequently ate in the restaurant there despite not liking the food, saying it was the only place in Paris he could go where he didn’t have to see it. As if it were a relief. And it is a relief, surely. Even a tourist like me can see that.

“Then why do we visit the Eiffel Tower?” Barthes asks. “No doubt in order to participate in a dream of which it is (and this is its originality) much more the crystallizer than the true object.”

Aha. The dream of Paris, the world’s object-ness of it, and the endless crystal prism (a hall of mirrors, I suspect) is in itself a sort of achievement. (On another day I’ll write about my mother’s Francophilia.)

Which is pretty much where Barthes ends up in his essay, too. ‘Just as there is no Parisian glance which is not compelled to encounter it, there is no fantasy which fails, sooner or later, to acknowledge its form and to be nourished by it.’ – Roland Barthes

I shouldn’t have taken the picture, of course. It’s invasive, it’s rude, voyeuristic, hubristic. I took the picture. Of course.