betwixteurope

Reading Tim Moore at La Tour du Pin

All three of us, Tom, Tim Moore and I come into Lyon after days in the quiet of the Loire. I feel all three expect something here, after the rain and the solitude. We bring our mood, basically. And on the road that is a delicate, nuanced thing. Tim’s Lyon is a city of pimps, hookers, teenage thieves…he can’t appreciate the old part of the city: he calls “Hovis-advert hills in Pirelli-advert weather.” He’s staying on the outskirts in a thirteen Euro hotel, and most of his narrative is about its car park.

[Tom stays at the “Three Kings”]

“which is the fairest Inne in the whole citie, and most frequented of al the Innes in the Towne, and that by great persons. For the Earle of Essex lay there with all his traine before I came thither: he came thither the Saturday and went away the Thursday following, being the day immediately before I came in. At that time that I was there, a great nobleman of France one Monsieur de Breues (who had laien Lidger Ambassadoour many years in Constantinople) lay there with a great troupe of gallant Gentlemen, who was taking his journey to Rome to lie there Lidger [ledger?]. Amongst the rest of his company there were two Turkes that brought with him out of Turkey, whereof one was a blacke Moore, who was his jester; a mad conceited fellow, and very merry. He wore no hat at all eyther in his journey (for he overtooke us upon the way riding without a hat) or when he rested in any towne, because his naturall haire which was exceeding thicke and curled, was so prettily elevated in height that it served him always instead of a hat: the other Turk was a notable companion and a great scholler in his kinde; for he spake six or seven languages besides the Latin, which he spake very well: he was borne in Constantinople. I had a long discourse with him in Latin of many things, and amongst other questions I asked him whether he were ever baptized, he tolde me, no, and said he never would be. After that wee fell into speeches of Christ, whom he acknowledged for a great Prophet, but not for the Sonne of God, affirming that neither he nor any of his countrey men would worship him, but the onely true God, creator of heaven and earth: and called us Christians Idolaters, because we worshipped images…

I understand both men: Tim Moore’s book is of its times, just as much as Tom’s. in 2000 the attention has turned from the very public: Tom’s churches, his nobles who don’t wear hats, and morphed into a more private narrative about the things one person witnesses subjectively:

“I’d just passed a breaker’s yard full of cars people had died in…”

“…the showcase three floor McDonalds on the Place Bellecour was being systematically sacked by bored French teenagers…”

“…There is a bad man in parking,” I told the receptionist as we settled up….Il est concierge she said, very sad that my life had been blighted by such malignant paranoia.”

Tim sees what he sees, feels what he feels, within his context: travel as performance, and a very particular English passion for suffering “abroad.” It is about misery in the end; and Tom’s tale is quite fitting for the mood, as we shall see.

“At mine Inne there lay the Saturday night, being the fourth of June, a worthy young nobleman of France of two and twenty years olde, who was brother to the Duke of Guise and Knight of Malta. He had passing fine musicke at supper, and after supper he and his companions being gallant lustie Gentlemen, danced chorantoes and lavoltoes in the court. He went therehence the Sunday after dinner, being the fifth day of June.

At the south side of the higher court of mine Inne which is hard by the hall (for there are two or three courts in that Inne) there is written this pretty French poesie: on ne loge ceans à credit: car il est mort, les mauvais paieurs l’ont tué. The English is this: Here is no lodging upon credit: for he is dead, ill payers have killed him. Also on the South side of the wal of another court, there was a very pretty and merry story painted, which was this: A certain Pedlar having a budget full of small wares, fell asleep as he was travelling on the way, to whom there came a great multitude of Apes and robbed him of all his wares while he was asleepe: some of those Apes were painted with pouches or budgets at their backs, which they stole out of the pedlars fardle [small pack], climbing up to trees, some with spectacles on their noses, some with beades about their neckes, some with touch-boxes and ink-hornes in their hands, some with crosses and censour boxes, some with cardes in their hands; al which things they stole out of the budget: and amongst the rest one putting down the Pedlers breeches, and kissing his naked, &c. This pretty conceit seemeth to import some merry matter, but truly I know not the morall of it.

I saw a fellow whipped openly in the streets of Lyons that day I departed therehence, being Munday the sixth day of June, who was so stout a fellow, that though he received many a bitter lash, he did not a jot relent at it.

My train is very late now: this could be the chance to write about the inconsistency of French rail, the strikes, par grave…or the pounding rap, but that isn’t the point of this journey – not really. Tom romped through here; so do I. Very soon the mountains will be visible. He managed to complain very infrequently, and that seems right. Let’s give place a chance, eh? Misery seems so selfish given the choice to travel. And for most of us travel is a seemingly limitless choice.

Lyon, which I will write about extensively is the city not just of Rabelais, Interpol, the Lumiere brothers, music, food and fun: it also demands out respect.

Tom made his big lifestyle choice at 32; these days decisions – forced or not – about lifestyle, travel and place, can happen at any time. Travel after finishing high school, parents changing country to find work, bringing their small children to grow up “betwixt” at any time. Later there are the social-cultural decisions: to leave corporate employment, to flee a war. Retirement to somewhere warmer; a new start.

In Lyon I am around people who are mobile; nomads in their way: led to a busy city – the city of “Interpol” and “Euronews” – that is, like those organisations, neither a NATO nor CNN of a city: small enough to be human without atomising, like London or Paris, into villages. Though Lyon has its share of moods and atmospheres. They might live in twenty places in their lives; travel to hundreds of countries: that isn’t the point. The point is finding a balance.

That Tom (who wasn’t quite “in” enough, perhaps not “creative” enough, at Court in London) chose mobility as his passport is, in retrospect, perhaps not such a surprise. He is an entrepreneur of “newness”, one of those “guru” figures that emerge at any “paradigm shift” – as we used to say in the 1990s. In fact when he returned from his trip the response was lukewarm: not that his famous and aristocratic friends and acquaintances had “done” what he had, far from it. It was precisely that they hadn’t; were not well-travelled – though Inigo Jones would later see much of Europe.

Because being well-travelled, having the foreign graffiti-stamp-full passport, isn’t a virtue, it’s a boast and threat. Like many “lifestyle” choices, it says a lot about vanity, or self confidence. And being easy around people, “getting by abroad” isn’t, in itself, a skill that – whatever one feels about salesmen and women – leads to the good, let alone the creatively good.

Because travel says a lot about who we are: and the more we do it, the more complex our “travelling” personalities become, the harder it is to be in one place only. Are we travelling to be somewhere else? To forget bad experience? To create a new sense of self? Do the passport stamps (if they exist these days) signify greater maturity and understanding of humanity? Very often I think, perhaps not.

As I sit at the station of La Tour du Pin, fretting that there are four Lyon pieces to write and post, I wonder did what Tom saw – radical, new things; mountainous Alps almost beyond description at that time, “offical” courtesans at Venice, orchestras and giant beer factories – make him happy; less discontented? Or did the “wiki-ing” of his knowledge – adding to the Classics, his education, stories from London, anecdotes from the famous – bring a frustration, a sense of smallness and head-shaking that he could not turn this knowledge into something? Is that why he wrote, later? Is Claude Magris correct when he says in “Danube”: “perhaps writing is just filling in the blank spaces in existence?”

And the blog a gentle voice in search of companionship, nothing more: a lifestyle choice, waiting to happen? I’m not sure: when I can finish the pieces about Lyon I hope to have a far clearer sense of the local digital community, and how it balances betwixt the visceral and the cerebral. How it can be a force for the good, even if it is part also of our rapid atomisation.

Hmm. So that is Sunday’s Task.

Singular game! Where the goal changes places;
The winning-post is nowhere, yet all around;
Where Man tires not of the mad hope he races
Thinking, some day, that respite will be found

The Voyage, Charles Baudelaire

“Baudelaire was a secret agent – an agent of the secret discontent of his class with its own rule…”

Walter Benjmain’s notes to his first essay on Baudelaire.

“If I was in – say – Peru I wouldn’t miss out on Machu Pichu. Yes, I’d be trying to make connections with the people, of course. But it is a balance.” Because she has travelled all over the world, often alone, she knows the shifting rhythms that the “journey” brings: “the achievement you feel if somebody really understands you, for instance in China, when it takes hours: that’s amazing.”

Her parents came to France from Morocco thirty years ago, separated now; she went to college in Dublin, has been to Mongolia and Bolivia and most places in between. This summer is Laos, Morocco, “Hungaria”.

In a Lyon apartment, or a café, a “political” meeting, the people change but the type of travel being discussed is always the same: backpacker, alternative, resourceful. It has few limitations of horizon, is of a budget, uses technology for routes, a bed, a hitch, a cheaper ticket. But is about the experience more than the “pleasure”.

There is the Swiss-French (with a bit of Irish) puppet maker, the French-African “Elvis” with his “deals”, the Chinese-Canadian, the Irishman, the Vietnamese chef…the sons of daughters of the first back-packer generations whose family backgrounds are as much about global movement to find work, gain citizenship, or simply change “lives” as about fun. These are people with a recognition that Lyon is a very cool “nodal” point for their travels. A balance of size, scope, culture and budget.

“Globalization isn’t the problem,” Connie says, “I’ve worked in big business [for Yahoo in Hong Kong]. The problem is when it loses, or never finds, its social responsibility.”

“People have done what you did,” the French-Moroccan woman says. “A lot of people.”

“I know, that’s part of the issue for me, what’s left? I want to leave a snapshot of a time, and that means making connections as well as visiting museums. It’s not always easy. Because I want to give back as well.”

“Yes,” says Connie, “I agree. You have to make choices. When we were last in Paris it was for music, three concerts in three nights. We saw one big thing: Jean Nouvel’s library, inside. It was fantastic. But you can’t see everything.”

The chef and computer musician who wants to talk about his rock and roll “Manhattan”, Connie on “Hong Kong,” John about Ireland…”Elvis” who has those familiar, competitive, stories about Asia. He is a type:
“Where? Hampi?”
“Yes, even Hampi?”
“Really? Sure Goa, and Kerala, Mumbai. But Hampi?”
“Yes.”
“What did you see at Malibaripurim?…
…How did you get to Nepal, did you drive, or fly….
…Kashmir? Easy. I have friends there, they get me in and I have a house and a boat up on the lake. You have to know people…
…Burma? I get great stones there, nice pieces.”

Elvis is the other side of alternative travel: if the French-Moroccan seeks out the solitary and remote, he is about the new silk roads that lead to raves, to endless beach-summers, and nice profits for somebody. Elvis is the wheeler-dealer who always has a new angle. He can’t be impressed, it’s not in the job-description: he’s the man who “knows” travel.

It is a travel about cheap food, drink, drugs, pleasure; taking something home that says: exotic travel. Except that Elvis’s Asia destinations are the new Spain, commonplace, part of growing up. If part of good travel is connection then isn’t Modern Northern Europe more of a challenge than remote packed beaches in India or Lombok?

“Look, I know these boys, they just want fun, you’re too serious.” Elvis says. Connie and John first met at “Burning Man” in Nevada; there are no easy right and wrongs in all this.

Tom Coryat is always fêted is the first “Grand Tourist”, but he was also a kind of “alternative” traveller. Balancing high and low, sights and people; going to places that were remote from normal life, a little dangerous, Thomas is the archetype of the “old” alternative.

In the end Tommy “walked” to India, of course: I wonder what the seventeenth century “Elvis” would have sold him in Jaipur? A bootleg CD of Shakespeare Songs, remixed by Ben Jonson, perhaps?

Some of Tom’s Lyon

“I went on Friday morning being the third day of June about sixe of the clocke from Tarare in my bootes, by reason of a certaine accident, to a place about six miles therehence, where I took post horse, and came to Lyons about one of the clocke in the afternoone.”

“It rained most extremely without any ceasing, that I was drooping wet to my very skinne when I came to my Inne. I passed three gates before I entered the city. The second was a very faire gate, at one side thereof there is a very stately picture of a Lyon. When I came to the third gate I could not be suffered to passé into the city, before the porter having first examined me wherehence I came, and the occasion of my businesse, there gave me a little ticket under his hand as a kind of warrant for mine entertainment in mine Inne. For without that ticket I should not have beene admitted to lodge within the walles of the City.”

“…this city of Lyon, which is situate under very high rocks and hils on one side, and hath a very ample and spacious plaine on the other side. It is fortified with a strong wall, and hath seven gates, many faire streets, and goodly buildings, both publique and private. Very populous, and is esteemed the principall emporium or mart town of all France next to Paris. It is the seat of an Archbishop, who is the Primate and Metropolitan of France…Most of the buildings are of an exceeding height, sixe or seven stories high together with the vault under the ground.”

“Many of the Kings Mules which are laden with merchandise come to Lyons, where they lay down their burdens, who have little things made of Osier like Baskets hanging under their mouths, wherein there is put hay for them to eate as they travel: over their forehead and eyes they have three peeces of plate, made eyther of brasse or latten, wherein the Kings arms are made: also they have pretty peeces of pretty coloured cloth, commonly redde hanging down from the middle of their forehead downe to their noses, fringed with long faire fringe, and many tassels bobbing about it.”

In the seventh district of Lyon, close to Mon Plasir, is the Lumière Museum. Here we celebrate a technology that really changed the way we see the world. The Museum is a marvellous building, a castle-villa, filled with cameras and projectors, 360 degree panoramic photographs; and upstairs a research library. The real inspiration, however, is seeing how the Lumière brothers utterly reworked how we see cities – thanks to the “cinematograph”.

Their work is about “real life”; they sit in symbiotic relationship to George Méliès fantasy: palying Stendhal to Méliès’ Jules Verne. “Sortie des Usines Lumière à Lyon” (Workers Leaving the Lumière Factory) is the first ever 46 seconds of “documentary”.

Connie and John don’t watch television: they download what they want, and watch on their computer. The last two “documentaries” they’ve seen are “The Corporation”, and the PBS programme, “The New Heroes: Social Entrepreneurship”.

The Lumière brothers led on to the “realism” of film makers such as Robert Bresson, Jean Renoir, Maurice Pialat and – in a way – Bernard Tavernier, a fellow Lyonaise.

The museum is on the site of the Lumière’s factories. Next door in what was once the warehouse is the Lumière Institute cinema: it is showing a season of Woody Allen films.

I guess he changed the way we see quirky relationships and self-centred angst-ridden issues of self-identity, so he gets his slot.

On the Gilles Peterson show he reminds listeners to send in their “Video Diaries” of the concert he played last week. Everyone is a Lumière now. I wondered what Tom would have caught on his digital camera?

Of course the Lumière Brothers are on You Tube.