Having successfully brought The Twisted Yarn out,
I’ve been toying with the idea of doing
something with the bulletins of previous years - they go back to January 2008. That has meant re-reading them and what I’ve found is that whatever else they deal with, the
weather and the seasons are constants. There’s scarcely a bulletin that doesn’t
make reference to either or both, to spring especially.
Well, here we are again. Spring. It has come in a rush, sap spiralling
up the veins of trees and along the leaf paths, buds rushing into blossom and
falling as fast. Grassy spaces in public parks, which are supposed to be ‘au
repos’ until mid-April, have been looking like scenes for a modern-day déjeuner
sur l’herbe, so crowded have they been with picnickers and slumbering forms.
In the middle of this meteorological largesse we have had LA POLLUTION.
So much pollution that for several days a week or so ago, la Mairie de Paris
decreed that all public transport, all vélibres and autos libres too, should be
free. And then because the traffic density was still too high, they briefly
instituted des jours alternés for private cars: even number plates one day,
odds the next, at which point one of the big motoring organisations reported a
30% drop in traffic on the périphérique (the motorway which encircles Paris).
There are those who see in this sudden concern for the quality of air
breathed by Parisians nothing more than political gesturing and it is true that
a couple of days of such restrictions on car usage does nothing for the
long-term problem which is already bad and liable to get worse.
I am not going to take space here to say how this plays out in the
current round of élections municipales, which had their first stage this
weekend and which show the Front National making some sizeable gains in various
large towns but the Ecologistes also performing better than expected. France is
no different from most other countries in trying to square the environmental
circle – have increased growth, continue to drive, travel, eat, buy the same as
usual or maybe just slightly more ‘responsibly’ while hoping that the world
won’t get too much hotter, wetter and wilder than it has so far.
If you take a look at the report published recently by a team
headed by Safa Motesharri at the University of Maryland, and well-covered in
all the major UK broadsheets, you might be forgiven for thinking that western
civilisation is already doomed to collapse, as a consequence of which we might
just as well go right on and party till the bitter end. Because, judging from
what we are told, the end will indeed be bitter.
But we are not going to do that are we? We won’t because humans are
resourceful, inventive and ultimately more concerned for each other than the
dominant rhetoric of today suggests. We have children and grandchildren and we
do not want them to inherit a wasteland of our making.
So I like to think, but with some difficulty when for example, I’m in a
bus stuck in traffic outside the Gare du Nord and I have more time than I might
like to observe the antics and tensions in that heaving crowd, or when I’m on a
pavement full of litter, cigarette butts, empty bottles and cans. The Mairie
regularly runs poster campaigns about litter, reminding people that the
cleaning squads cannot do the impossible and that there is a rubbish bin within
30 feet of you anywhere in Paris. Hard to believe by the end of a warm weekend
if you’re in one of the many tourist hot-spots where there’s been lots of
outdoor eating and drinking going on.
On Saturday evening I went to the Henri Cartier-Bresson exhibition at
the Pompidou. It was marked as ‘affluence moyenne’, rising to ‘forte’ on their
website. In the event there was no queue at all.
It is a huge exhibition – over 500 works – and I felt my senses a bit
dulled by the end. I found the early photographs when he was closely involved
with the Surréalistes the most interesting – and fresh. Cartier-Bresson died
aged 96 in 2004, but he more or less stopped taking pictures in the 1970s. He
began to draw again and particularly to draw himself, so there are several pen
and pencil self-portraits in the very last part of the exhibition, as though as
he aged he was less concerned with the world around him and more interested
finally in turning the lens of his own eye back on himself.
There has been a flurry of comment this morning about the emergence of a
new kind of ‘selfie’, taken by mostly young people in the voting booth: ‘le
selfisoloir’. At the risk of boring you with a lengthy piece of secondary
reporting, here is what Xavier de la Porte had to say about this phenomenon:
L’isoloir est conçu par la
logique républicaine comme le lieu où le citoyen, dans la solitude du vote, est
censé rejoindre l’universel de l’intérêt général. C’est donc, théoriquement, un
lieu de l’oubli de soi, un moment où le moi particulier laisse place au citoyen
de la République. Et là tout à coup, avec ces photos, ce sont des individus qui
apparaissent avec leur tête en gros plan, leurs nez grossi par l’angle…. Ces
photos incarnent la citoyenneté dans ce lieu où la citoyenneté est censée ne
plus avoir de corps… « Exhibitionnisme » disent certains. Oui, c’est
vrai, j’ajouterai même qu’il y a un côté coquin dans tout ça…
Certains ont vu là un signe ultime de dépolitisation, un effet de
désacralisation de l’acte de voter …Eh bien moi, ce sacrilège, je le trouve
intéressant. Parce qu’il dit une vérité de ce qu’est le vote. Le vote n’est pas
l’acte politique par excellence. Réfléchir, lire, donner son avis (sur un blog,
dans un réseau social), discuter avec ses parents, ses voisins, essayer de les
convaincre, militer, manifester, passer du temps dans une association, et
parfois même ne pas voter, sont des actes politiques aussi forts, voire plus
engageants, qu’aller glisser un bulletin dans une urne. Et, d’une certaine
manière, toutes ces photos d’isoloir ramènent le vote à ce qu’il est : un
acte minimal et profane. « Eh oui, disent ces photos, voter ça n’est que
ça... La politique c’est aussi tout ce qui se passe avant et après. La
politique, c’est plus grand que ça. » Et j’avoue que ça m’a ragaillardi.
In
summary what de la Porte says, is that
rather than throwing our hands up in horror at the impiety - the bare-faced
cheek - of taking a picture of yourself in the booth, le selfisoloir strips the
vote of its unjustified symbolic importance. Voting turns out to be just
one small act among many other possible
- necessary even – political acts (informing oneself, debating, joining a
voluntary organisation, getting out on a demo etc etc). Politics, he says, is
about what you do before you go into that booth and after you
come out.
Which brings us neatly enough back to the litter, the traffic and even
to Cartier-Bresson’s self-portraits.
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