L2: PAF, PHL of BUS, upshots of travel

I’m writing this bad boy from the couch of the library closest to the shelf containing the “PERFORMING ARTS” books here at the Performing Arts Forum in Saint-Erme-Outre-et-Ramecourt, France, which I learned today (while looking at map with my new buddy Marnie from Portland who is gone already) is kind of near the “Champagne region” of France, or as I think of it, the “‘“Champagne-Region”-of-France’-jokes region of France.” You know? “It’s not really Gatorade unless it comes from the blue Gatorade of France. Otherwise it’s just sparkling sports drink”? “Actually, it's only existentialism if it comes from the existentialism region of France. Otherwise, it's just sparkling anxiety.”

Also in this library are a woman from Paris named Océane and a guy over in the corner I don’t recognize.

The Performing Arts Forum (PAF), if you do not know, is the artist residency I’m living in that people I know have taken to calling the “art castle.” It is not a castle. It’s a former monastery. It’s a three-floor, three-wing residence that can accommodate about 100 people. It has a chapel, a ping pong table, a meditation room, two saunas, half a dozen peacocks, two kitchens, one attic with graffiti by soldiers from WWI. Parisians and people from the Netherlands and Belgium and Berlin seem to be represented in the highest numbers. People basically come here and make art and canoodle and schpoongle each other’s doongles. Right now there’s a group of like 30 people here for some vaguely anarchist conference called “Hacking and Philosophy.” Last year I woke up at 5 a.m. to participate in a seance for Hegel. People lead workshops on BDSM. There are like, seven pianos. It’s fun.

I came here for the first time last summer, with two friends, about a week after I learned I’d received a sizable grant from the Canada Council of the Arts, and I spent five weeks here, and realized that my desire to live anywhere that wasn’t Toronto was achievable, and I quit my job and have since been floating lonely like a speck of ash in the euphoric fallout of that detonation.

To fill in some of the basic facts about my current life, I have been supporting myself first with the CCA grant, which ran out about two months ago, and since then, a combination of my savings and copywriting. My most regular gig is writing profiles of entrepreneurs and CEOs for a B2B publication I don’t fully understand. 

I like this latter job very much. It forces me into a headspace that’s very different from the fiction I do the rest of the day in a way I find immensely helpful and healthy. These people’s concerns are so different from mine. One thing I’ve learned about the business world is that no one’s allowed to be a buzzkill. I thought of this last night as I was walking back to my room and thinking about how one of the most abused English words is “technically,” which as it’s often used adds no information to the sentence except to function as an argument from authority.^1 Anyway, I realized that I have thoughts like this because I studied philosophy and was encouraged to aimlessly interrogate whatever concepts caught my eye and in fact actively corrode usefulness in general; to disassemble the machine and spread all the parts on the shop floor for inspection. Talking to businesspeople, contrarily, I gather that there really do not exist for them concepts divorced from their financial use. In this way, ironically, they are very good Wittgensteinians, and no one kills any buzzes. 

Another reason I like the business interviews job is I just enjoy interviewing people; I always have. And plus it’s also nice to have a stable neutron around which to orbit. 

Because it is a fact that my current lifestyle is, uh, unstable. I know where I’ll be in two weeks, but I don’t currently know where I’ll be in three weeks. It is probably not surprising that I’m looking forward to having a home again, but I know this won’t last forever, and in the meantime, there are good and surprising things about this life. I found myself formulating them last week in the media room upstairs, after watching Whiplash with Cole and T (these two plus Rhiannon and Jahandar had been my stable little crew for the three or so weeks up until a week ago—Rhiannon I knew already from Toronto; T was Rhiannon’s friend/collaborator (they were collabing on a musical comedy about sex workers in Alberta); Jahandar I knew from PAF last year; Cole was Jahandar’s friend from Santa Cruz). After T had gone to bed, Cole asked me, in the post-movie dark, in a discussion of our probable next moves in life, “What do you get from traveling?”

It’s funny, in that time I was in an extended period of clarity, which I had attributed to being in the countryside and being in Europe—two pretty powerful barriers between me and what felt like a Spector-ish wall of noise of like, my life in North America. I could think straight and clearly about how I felt and what I wanted. I remembered the pleasure of ‘aiming lower’, i.e. having the courage to give up potential opportunities or whole paths of pursuit in order to stick with one humble thing, and do it well. I felt a greater control over my own life, and, most importantly, I felt like I had the willpower to effectively control the floodgates of information that exerts pressure on my consciousness, via, e.g., limiting Twitter, Netflix, etc, which seems to me like a really important thing for many reasons, among which productivity and happiness.

However, having spent the intervening week without my posse, I’m now not convinced that that mini-era of placidity wasn’t due to the overall situation of living with a stable crew of non-stressful buddies in the countryside in, uh, France. Which. Seems, unfortunately, somewhat difficult to replicate. Though of course the non-glib conclusion is that friends seem important to mental health.

That may not be a very impressive dead mouse to leave at your doorstep, but Océane, who had long since left to go eat dinner, just came back in and said people are drinking wine in the kitchen, so I’m gonna go. Next week I’ll try to have less philosophizing and more, like, nouns and verbs. Adieu.

FN1: “Technically, there’s no difference between eating two small lunches and one huge lunch.” Do you see what I’m saying? This person has no argument in support of their position. They’re trying to snow job you.