In the jungle of the internet, there are some extraordinarily intimate weblogs, places one stumbles across with fascination -- or not! -- via acquaintances who frequent places like that Live Journal community I touched on a couple of weeks back. Places where one wonders where people draw their own boundaries between "reality", fiction and fantasy...
What a week it has been: truly Paris in the spring time, some days as bleak and miserable as the leaden grey skies of an adolescence so many of us seem never entirely to escape, others riding the wings of a storm, catching the changes in the wind and maybe, even, learning a few more lessons of the heart...
Marianne, being a "normal adolescent" herself, tends to weather adventures with greater aplomb than most of her elders, but when her time comes -- and the past week and more in her company have furnished ample proof that such a time is far, far closer than many parents care to imagine of their offspring -- I shall only hope that she might have managed the well-nigh impossible and learned something from the experience of others; or, at least, remember to come "home" for help when it's needed! But she, too, is bound to feel the heartache waiting on the phone that doesn't ring -- even if nowadays it's a mobile -- and the surge of joy when the feet heard on the stairs are at last the ones you've been longing to hear. Indeed, it has already begun.
 Now there's nothing like a visitor or two to rouse the mind anew to some of the wonders of the place you live in and take for granted. This is especially true when that place is Paris in April: a favoured month, like high summer when the traffic can mercifully thin for a few weeks almost to nothing. Some find August stifling, but I'm not among them. My legs still ached tonight; they lie to me that they've trekked every "village" between Montparnasse and Montmartre several times, but that's one of the things Paris is for.. Along with decades of warnings from women, including the one I've heard echoed by many an undone friend in one shape or another: "I'm dangerous - don't get involved!" These are usually ignored. That's also one of things Paris is for...
 When I was young(er) and already fascinated by wolves, one of the sillier things I did was to buy an air ticket for London which I really couldn't afford, in the hope that I'd catch up with her plane in time to persuade her that flying on to California -- in pursuit of somebody else -- was not a wise thing to do. Oh, I caught her all right; and I even proved to be right in the end about the decision she made. But that doesn't stop a friend, then doing duty as a tour guide, preferring to remind me how he of all people came upon me prowling around Heathrow airport until I was almost too drunk to stand up, much to the astonishment of the Japanese tourists he was accompanying.
And the following day saw me on the night train straight back to hell.
Very much later, I learned that hell, like heaven, is in the heart. And rather than fares I still really don't regret for an instant, too much of today's spare cash goes on the software I'll snatch up, rather like some people might buy superb clothes or first-edition books. Myself, I'll settle for the pair of pyjamas Marianne gave me, as one of the few items where I don't mind the designer label showing! I love the message...
For all that I know of kinship with wolves, I'm very fond of cats, the more independent-minded the better. Unless, of course, they're my pet Jaguar.
  But Paris as "hell"? I didn't feel it that way for long. Not with marvels like the Place des Vosges at its heart. Now there's a place for the heart, as frequented by lovers in spring as the bridges spanning the Seine. It's a place where so many decisions must have been made, for worse or for better, which is scarcely surprising since you can walk right out of one world there into another.
A place that Parisians simply haven't allowed to change, not for centuries, though it must and it will, like everything else.
I've known three Parisian cats, recently renewed friendship with a fourth, and even gave a home to two of them, though Tom and Cherry have both passed on. Marianne's Kytie, who stays here sometimes, went "home" a couple of days ago, but my body remained trapped in the reflex tonight, carefully opening the door just in case she was in one of those moods to want to be chased halfway down the stairs. Not that it really matters: she's quick enough to come back. Good company when you're learning to play properly.
 Play is what it comes down to in the end, which is one reason why even for somebody passionate about things African -- the cultures, musics and some of the lifestyles and people -- the 'Book of Changes' would still have to be my desert island read. If I had to choose between the five copies I've got of this particular masterpiece, then Richard Wilhelm's complete version would be it, in a French translation that's the best I've found when it comes to sheer poetry. It just feels right. Ah, decisions, decisions...
There are easier places to start, though, for cats who want an introduction in English. So here are a few I like: one account of basics; a thought or two on medicine; an encyclopaedic resource page; and a digression into Lao Tzu's Tao Te Ching...
Why, even the Franco-Chinese family doctor I'm lucky enough to have is named Yang. And if that isn't serendipity for you, I don't know what is. There's plenty more on synchronicity and one of Wilhelm's friends beginning at the C.G. Jung page.
I really miss the cat already. But you can't have everything...
1:23:06 AM link 
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