The universe expands; here the warmth, heat and humidity presses down, but in the distance, peeking over the canopy, part of the LKYSPP, ISAS, to be rear a half-familiar gazebo, children doing endless cartwheels, lurid frisbees, the late afternoon sun beyond discomfort, splattered and thrown across my own self, and the vast expanse of the here and now. A moment ago I was blinking slowly, labouriously marking my day; errands and miniscule projects as a substitute for the passage of time. A clean, vaulted, bold cafe, men, women and families, having escaped, like I, waiting only to be pulled back into the current. R’s marvellous gift; Cartier-Bresson as muse, the half otherworldly life of a defiant dilettante and dreamer, the years marked with an inexorable rhythm, converging on his fate, until I can almost discern that distant, insistent leitmotif, that measure of a life, that arrow of time, universal, yet forever hidden, an infinitude of parallel lives invisible to each other. I whisper to myself, I understand a little of what I want to share with R, later, not this and that machination, not the enabling of possible, causal futures, but the location and presence of, circumstances, the pinpointing of this self and soul, marking the spot, declaring one’s existence, a priori, I, I, I. In Assouline’s biography of Bresson, he methodically peels back the years, while disawoving the dates, years, numbers, but in reality he has called on our very own chronology as the ruler by which Cartier-Bresson’s life has been sketched. In this year, I went here, where I fell in love, inseparable from, in the other, I was ill, oblivious to the events outside my window. In Paris artists came and went, here there are overweight men struggling through the park. In each moment, in each element, the struggle falls away; there is no sense of time, only being. Fears fall away; tomorrow will answer for itself, yesterday is a line in a text, which will change lives, but. And inevitably, as I measure my own, I whisper to strangers, telling them as I glide past, that I am lost, not of this present. In that year, I gave up all pretences of normalcy, and conformity, and never looked back. I went, and took the plunge.
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