Rue Notre Dame des Champs

Today I feel like Hemingway wrote me into existence. Some travelers arrived yesterday to stay with us. They are great people, as always; having some new perspectives in the house is refreshing.

One of them is on a soul quest. He left his country at the advice of some friends. He was becoming dull, they told him, too academic. His world was shrinking. He's a philosopher, so I can understand this: the study of philosophy shrinks the world in an interesting but unnerving way. It is a sort of shrinking through expansion that makes me dizzy.

So he left on an experimental attempt to expand his world. He took a biography of Rimbaud with him; Rimbaud who would stab his friends (literally) for the sake of the experience. We discussed all this yesterday. Today I woke up and looked out the window; my friend was teaching him how to split coconuts with a machete for the juice.

And in this scenario, strangely, I felt like an image. Last night my housemate got drunk and took a civil debate to an argument. People who work '9 to 5' are soulless, he said. They only care about money. When we challenged that he was being offensive and narrow-minded, he said that clearly people who wanted to could find a way out, since he did. When I argued that he was living in a loophole and was blaming other people for not having his luck, he said that I was a North American capitalist and that was the reason for my anger. He stormed off and went to sleep before 9.

The debate was silly and commonplace; I wouldn't have thought much about it except for the new perspective brought by our visitors. Suddenly I felt like the debauched expatriots of the Montparnesse. Here we were, waving drinks around, arguing about the 'pathetic' concerns of the little people at home in their countries. Housemate expanding on their small-mindedness. I and others jumping in like self-aggrandized martyrs to defend people whose lives we were still somehow belittling just by assuming that we needed to defend them. It was a living parody. Earlier that day we'd discussed the definition of irony; I suppose that I wanted to show and not tell.

Earlier it had poured rain; the house was flooding from a thousand different directions. I stood outside and got soaked until my clothing looked like I'd gone for a swim; the others skinny-dipped in the pool. Our Rimbaud-reading visitor joined them and it was the first time he'd swum naked. An odd thing to meet someone who can say that. The rain poured down and it was, really, joyous. We enjoyed the little-kid kind of joy that things like acts of nature can bring: total abandon. Throwing my arms around to feel the way the rain hit them, I was not in myself. When the lightning blinded us every few minutes, I jumped impulsively on the plastic furniture as if somehow that would protect me. Even screaming, we couldn't hear each other over the drum roll of the water.

Weighing these two things, I wonder today what impression we made. I feel it's important. What will be dominant: the joy of the freedom? Or the disassociation from reality? How are we representing our lives? And when someone comes down on them in some silly Friday night debate, who will defend us?