Category: Orpheid: L’Arrivée

By on

In this prose poem from The Spleen of Melbourne, Dean Kyte takes a nostalgic flânerie up the so-called ‘Paris End’ of Melbourne’s Collins Street as he reminisces about his last night in the Ville Lumière.

‘The Paris End’:—it’s one of those magick phrases which evoke the sweet life of flâneurial streetlife for me.  And whenever I treat myself to a flânerie up ‘the Paris End’ of Collins Street, like someone raising and lowering their shades, I shuffle the rosetinted souvenirs de Paris over les scènes melburniennes before my gaze.

When I saw the rougetainted Regent Theatre lit up to fête Moulin Rouge!, like le coup d’un souvenir enfoui, the farded façade dans la place Blanche floated up, suddenly unballasted, and I remembered standing on the little asphalt île de la place on my dernière nuit à Paris.  Then I knew what the phrase ‘the Paris End’ meant to me; it meant ‘la fin de Paris’.

—Dean Kyte, “The Paris End”

Last Monday night as I was hiking up Foveaux Street to The Carrington Hotel (your Melbourne Flâneur’s Sydney ‘office’, his lubricated lieu de l’écriture in the barbarous Harbour City), puffing hard as I approached the lip of Riley Street, Conte before me glowing redly in the dusk, I realized with a thrill of satisfaction so rare in my life that my whole relationship with France and the French language has undergone a quantum change in the last two or three years.

As I laboured up the hill, in my mind’s eye I saw myself more than a year ago frequently taking this flânerie up Foveaux Street to The Carro, the 1,300-page Gallimard edition of Jean-Patrick Manchette’s complete Romans noirs cuddled to my breast.

In a moment of expensive madness I had acquired the Manchette for a portrait of Monash upon discovering Sydney’s Abbey’s Bookshop and its feast of foreign-language books on the first floor some months before. I knew nothing of M’sieu Manchette; I was literally judging this hundred-dollar book by its cover—a print, by Gérard Fromanger, of the Parisian café Le Paillard rendered in an inky blue with the red silhouettes of some hinky flâneurs fogging up the boulevard des Italiens before it.

Manchette, I suspected, would be un type sympa—or at least, he would be a writer sympathetic to my cause of a Melburnian literature flâneurially evocative of Paris, of the nouveau roman written under the guise of the roman noir.

My mission on those nights, as on this, was to enjoy a good dinner and a Guinness at The Carro, masticating my Manchette over my parma and pint, and then, my wits sufficiently elevated by the brew, to debrief my brains of the day’s doings in my journal.

And now as I was grappling up the escarpment of Foveaux Street over a year later, another wad of dough freshly blown on bloody French books from Abbey’s, the red neon and the green bricks of Conte burning provocatively—like the Negroni they serve there and the Absinthe they ought to—in the sympa Sydney dusk, that small, irrational feeling of bien-être the flâneur occasionally feels when there’s no objective reason for contentment with his ennuyé life now descended on me.

Ah! comme la vie est belle!

I’m not quite sure why Conte should bring this feeling of the flâneurial merveilleux out of me: Did it, in its ‘italienneté’, recall Fromanger’s depiction of the boulevard des Italiens on the cover of the Manchette?

Or, in its position à l’angle, on the plateau of Riley Street, ahead of me as I marched the martyrizing hill of Foveaux Street as I had once climbed steeper streets in Montmartre, throwing its deep red and green over the corner, did it recall to me my beloved Cépage Montmartrois, the ‘sein d’or’ whose catalyzing golden light upon the rue Caulaincourt I immortalized in my first book Orpheid: L’Arrivée (2012), the golden bosom where I went to write every night in Paris over a demi de bière—indeed, where I learned this Parisian habitude, which has served me so well en Australie, of writing in bars and cafés?

Or was it simply that, one night, diverted from The Carro and into the boisterous bosom of Conte, I had, with my Manchette, sat at the bar, swooning over my Negroni and a piatto di prosciutto beneath the Italian movie posters, looking as keenly up at the red one-sheet for Blowup (1966) over the bar, hypnotized by it as if it were the movie itself?

Je ne sais pas.

What I know is that something has fundamentally changed for me in my relationship with France and its language during the last few years.

I’m hard pressed to put a date to it, and I only became conscious that a major phase shift had occurred in January this year, on my forty-first birthday, when I found myself sitting in Chloe’s Room, at Young & Jackson, arguably ‘the nation’s pub’, writing my first poem in French, moved by the French muse who holds court in this very Australian bar.

Like one of the archeologists who have dug up the corner behind Young & Jackson as part of the Metro Tunnel works, cataloguing the international artefacts that went into the soil of the city as the gold was coming out of it during Melbourne’s ‘marvellous’ period, in The Spleen of Melbourne, I have been at pains to unearth a ‘chthonic French connection’ between Melbourne, one of the major cities born of the nineteenth-century, and Paris, the first city of flânerie, Walter Benjamin’s ‘Capital of the Nineteenth Century’.

It’s a connection still very much buried to the eyes of my countrymen.

While the British colonial influence still lies on the surface of everyday life in Melbourne, with the lion and unicorn of the Royal Coat of Arms gracing everything from the portico of the Immigration Museum to the masthead of The Age, the French connection lies at a deeper, subtler stratum—deeper even than the Chinese, Greek and Italian influences on Melbourne life.

One has to dig back into the literature of the nineteenth century, when Paris was indisputably the capital of the civilized world, or the first half of the twentieth, when it was still coasting on a century of accumulated cultural prestige even after World War II, to perceive where and how Melbourne owes a subtle debt to French culture.

The clues to that subterranean French influence upon our civic life are buried in plain sight: they’re in the mansarded roofs of various town halls and the oblique allées of public gardens, the stone quays which pen the Yarra and the plane trees lining Collins Street.

Indeed, the eastern end of Collins Street, between Spring and Swanston, just barely retains into the twenty-first century its nineteenth-century designation as ‘the Paris End’, the prestigious address of doctors during the marvellous period, then, in the twentieth, with all the connotations of fashion that the magic name of Paris had conferred upon it, the favoured address of milliners, couturiers and cosmeticians.

Everyone important in the monde de la mode from Helena Rubinstein to Helmut Newton has either hung out their shingle or just plain hung out in ‘the Paris End’ of Collins Street, the most fashionable thoroughfare in this nation for nigh on two centuries.

To see these chthonic clues to the French influence upon our civic life, one has to have a constant eye to Paris: she must forever be in one’s consciousness, as she is in mine, for one to perceive these subtle analogies between the Mecca of modernity and her cultural colony at the nethermost ends of the earth.

Paris is always ‘devant mes yeux’, perhaps now more than she ever was, even when I was writing daily of my remembered experiences in her streets in Orpheid: L’Arrivée.

She has truly become the ‘moveable feast’ promised and prophesied by Hemingway as the eternal boon of the man lucky enough to have walked her streets, sat in her cafés, and loafed in her parks in his youth.

Doubtful that I will ever lay eyes again upon this city more beloved by me than any woman I have ever known, somehow the longer I have lived in exile from Paris in the country of my nativity, the more subtly French, the more subtly Parisian I have become.

It is a fact that certain writers and artists can live a very great deal on their memories, and in the exile of return to their homelands, the places of their actual experience are subtly, albeit marvellously transformed—as the façade of Conte momentarily was—by analogy with Paris.

Edward Hopper, for instance, though a painter, was no mean expert in French poetry, keeping abreast of literary developments in France even after he had ceased to go there for the living tutelage that the streets of Paris provide the artistic student of life.

Condemning himself to his native New York, Hopper had absorbed enough of the French spirit of life to infuse his visions of the local scene with some curious quality, apprehended at first as a weird novelty by his fellow countrymen, but later recognized as an authentic vision of American life in the first half of the twentieth century.

C’est très bien de copier ce qu’on voit, c’est beaucoup mieux de dessiner ce que l’on ne voit plus que dans sa mémoire.  C’est une transformation pendant laquelle l’ingéniosité collabore avec la mémoire. Vous ne reproduisez que ce qui vous a frappé, c’est-à-dire le nécessaire. … Voilà pourquoi les tableaux faits de cette façon, par un homme ayant une mémoire cultivée, connaissant les maîtres et son métier, sont presque toujours des œuvres remarquables.

It’s all very well to copy what you can see, but it’s even better to draw what you can no longer see, except in memory. A transformation is worked upon the base material of actuality in which genius collaborates with recollection. You only reproduce what has struck you, which is to say, that which is essential to the image. … That is why paintings made in such a manner by a man with a cultivated memory, one who knows both the Old Masters and his trade, are almost always remarkable works.

—Edgar Degas (my translation)

Such artists hold themselves aloof from the circumambient culture of their countries and yet are more in the vital current of the nation’s life than their fellow countrymen, for the gift of the supple, subtle French language gives them an alternative grille through which to view the humdrum actuality before their eyes.

In the days when I wrote my first book, I did everything to keep myself insulated from the common life of Australia, to focus only on my memories of Paris, terrified that I would lose some detail which was, as Degas says, ‘essential to the image.’

Probably the work which marks the climax of my jeunesse, I still think Orpheid: L’Arrivée is a ‘remarkable’ tableau of the rue Caulaincourt in Degas’s sense, almost Rousseauian (by which I mean le Douanier, not Jean-Jacques) in the naïveté of its ‘weird novelty’, but I think the approach of hermetic insulation from the common life de l’Australie was wrong to take, though perhaps necessary and inevitable for a young man still learning his métier.

In those days, I needed my eyes and ears to be blindfolded and plugged against the actuality of my prosaic surroundings with media that reminded me of the poetry of my life in France. I couldn’t take on any new sensual experiences in these climes until I had gotten the results of the Parisian experiment in flânerie down on paper in a form I was substantially satisfied with.

But one grows, and the harder one works in youth to master the craft of writing, the more the RAM expands and the wider one’s capacities grow to register and retain those ‘essential traits’ of life which Degas says mark out the remarkable works of the artists of genius—for as Proust is at pains to impress upon us, the greater part of artistic genius lies in memory.

One is more able to take into oneself the poetic riches that lie in prosaic banality and the material conditions of one’s life are marvellously transformed by their analogy with the places and experiences of memory.

At mid-life, reconciled to my exile in the country of my birth, I now carry a bit of Paris, a morceau of its moveable feast, about with me as I sweep my fashionable path through Melbourne’s streets, unnoticed by my countrymen except as novel spectacle.

How do I do it? How do I subtly maintain the flâneurial ethos I acquired in Paris here en Australie?

The simple answer is the language, which provides me with a point of view, one of critical removal upon the currents of cultural life around me.

I think it’s fair to say that if one comes to a foreign language much beyond the age of easy acquisition in childhood, one will always be a ‘student’ of it to some extent, the more so if one comes to a foreign language in adulthood, as I did to French.

As Henry James—whose prodigious command of the language had been easily acquired in his Continental childhood—once wrote to a young French author, enjoining diligence upon him in his study of English: ‘One’s own language is one’s mother, but the language one adopts, as a career, as a study, is one’s wife, and it is with one’s wife that on se met en ménage [“one makes a common life”].’

I’ve been an earnest ‘student of French’ now for about two-fifths of my life, but it seems that at some point in the last few years, I became substantially less of a ‘student’ than I had been: having joined my life to the French language some quinzaine d’années ago, somehow my ‘wife’ and I have truly become one, body and soul, only lately in our marriage.

More than half my reading diet these days is composed of books in French, and when Abbey’s Bookshop isn’t getting a substantial tranche of cash out of me for crisp, virginal volumes like the Manchette, I’m on the hunt in thrift stores and secondhand bookshops for old books that have been passed around as once I prowled the booklined quays of Paris for saucy finds.

And just as, ‘in my day’, the bouquiniste on the quai des Célestins used to be a good place to go for a disreputable pute of a book, in Melbourne, if you like to get your tongue around a little French, certain lieux in the City of Yarra and the City of Darebin can be depended on to furnish an encounter with a vieille fille ‘on the shelf’.

Though I have largely given up the fetishistic desire which possessed me in my youth to acquire new books, I find at mid-life a resurgence in that desire when it comes to French literature: to have a naughty French novel in my satchel to whip out at an idle moment in my flâneries, to be able to momentarily set a bit of Paris before my eyes as I sit on Melbourne’s Metro, puts me simultaneously in the swim of two cultures.

To be able to excavate my copy of Camus’s L’Étranger (1942)—another Abbey’s trouvaille—from my Commie officer’s mapcase recently made the interminable trajet on the Lilydale line more bearable. At least I could fill the time by substituting Meursault’s ennui for my own.

Then too, in place of consuming much local media, I listen to a great deal of Radio France and watch French movies. I think I was partly inspired to write my first poem in French on my birthday after seeing Coup de chance (2023) at Palace Kino, in the Paris End.

Having failed to quite catch Woody Allen’s Whatever Works (2009) in Paris, posters for which frequently tantalized me in my flâneries through the Quartier latin, to immerse my eyes and ears in—of all improbable things—two of my favourite things in the world combined, a Woody Allen movie and a French film, probably helped to inspire me after a morning of frittering my fric away on Balzac, Chateaubriand and Adamov.

Listening to the world through the medium of a language where one is perpetually the amorous student is actually more fruitful for a writer than paying attention to his own media.

It is not merely that, in training the ear trumpet far afield and listening to what is going on in the Francophonic world, ignoring what is going on closer to hand in Australia, I hear a perspective on global events that is not parochially Anglocentric, but when I do happen to tune in to a few minutes of Australian media, I’m often surprised at the comparative puerility of what the media is propagandizing as ‘mainstream’ Australian culture.

The one exception to this is Australian cinema. I find I’ve been getting a lot of value lately out of revisiting the Aussie films I reviewed twenty years ago as a film critic on the Gold Coast, and this engagement with an aspect of our culture that has always struggled (under the Anglophonic imperium of Hollywood) to be ‘mainstream’—even domestically—supports my diet of French cinema.

In the interplay between French and Australian films, I find the questions I ask myself as a writer, with respect to literature, even more keenly put: Does Australia have a ‘national cinema’ that is equally an ‘art cinema’ the way that the French have a proud national cinematic tradition? Have we yet produced a stylistic storyteller who has written the national myth in images?

The films that represented us at Cannes in the years I was writing for magazines—the domestically decorated Somersault (2004), for instance—now seem to me interesting and instructive failures, fruitful clues for a writer and filmmaker embedded in the subterranean stream of his society and yet able, via the supple and subtle French language, to view the mainstream trends on the surface of Australian life with some critical distance.

In some significant sense, the prose poems of The Spleen of Melbourne project in their visual form, as hybrid Super 8 and video ‘cinepoems’ like “The Paris End”, constitute my own practical attempts to wrestle with those theoretic questions.

And what becomes clear to me as I begin to show and perform pieces from The Spleen of Melbourne is that, like the epiphany in Foveaux Street, what is felt by the flâneur walking the streets of this country as an inward experience of total sensual derangement à la Rimbaud is outwardly experienced by his fellow countrymen as ‘surrealism’: the supple and subtle French language putting a gloss of romance upon places familiar to Melburnians renders these recognizable places ‘new’ to their eyes.

Thus it is that I’m in the swim of two cultures at once. Becoming less of a student and more of a master of French in the last few years has allowed me to see a subterranean dimension of Australian life and bring it to the surface of my country’s vision.

And it could well be that, like Edward Hopper with respect to New York, in seeing what is quintessentially ‘Parisian’ about Melbourne, I am seeing something that was always there as a chthonic layer of our culture, but that only future eyes will recognize as an authentic vision of Australia’s present.

There are now nearly forty pieces in The Spleen of Melbourne project and I’m getting on towards the next iteration of the collection as a thematically navigable Blu-ray Disc of films and videos. You can support me in that endeavour by purchasing the soundtrack of “The Paris End” for $A2.00 below—or by naming your own price at the checkout, if you feel more generous.

The advantage is that by purchasing the soundtrack to the video, not only do you get access to unlimited streaming and/or high-quality download in your choice of audio format, but you can also opt in to become one of my fans on Bandcamp, where I occasionally post new pieces from The Spleen of Melbourne project which don’t have an audio or video component, as well as other photos and prose poems from my flâneries around this country exclusively for my fans on the Community tab.

By on

The Melbourne Flâneur, on location in Eltham, reading an extract from his first book.

Today The Melbourne Flâneur comes to you from Eltham, a charming suburb on the northeastern outskirts of Melbourne where urbanity begins to shade into rusticity.

I love Eltham. It’s got a good bookshop in the main street, a multitude of nice cafés in which to write, and it was the memorable scene of your Melbourne Flâneur’s last great seduction before he retired from Daygame, so its streets have the vivid imprint of potent memories embedded in them for your pocket-edition Casanova.

But rather than reflect on that, in the video above I lounge with all my flâneurial indolence in Eltham’s gilded greenery (reminiscent, when viewed through heavily squinting eyes, of a Parisian park) as I read you a few pages from my first book, Orpheid: L’Arrivée (2012).

That’s the non-fiction novel where a very thinly disguised avatar for yours truly (one who is hardly more than a floating consciousness with a mythological nom de guerre) makes an epic voyage as laborious as walking across the bottom of the sea in a diving bell.

The premise of the book is very simple: my first night in Paris, the first night of my life off the terrestrial shore de l’Australie in foreign climes. But the extended metaphor I use throughout the book to describe the experience of being halfway around the world, at night, in a foreign country is the metaphor of space travel and setting foot on the moon. And nowhere do I use this metaphor more extensively than in the extract I read you above, which I think contains one of the longest sentences in the entire book, a burlesque of President Kennedy’s famous speech at Rice University which lasts more than an entire page.

Watch for the moment in the video when I have to sneak a breath to get through it!

I don’t really consider myself to be a comic writer, although some people have told me that they like my writing best when my satirical fangs show through. In this book, the fangs are definitely embedded in myself—right up to the gums: I never miss an opportunity to ironize my own neurotic foibles, frequently styling myself, in my Chaplinical dandyism, as ‘our presumptuous little hero’.

In that sense Orpheid: L’Arrivée is a ‘comic epic’: the ‘comedy’ lies in the fact that I treat—with a Keatonianly straight face—what would ordinarily be the most banal events and actions as I undertake to manœuvre myself and my small mountain of luggage de l’aéroport Charles-de-Gaulle à l’Hôtel Caulaincourt as if these were noble and heroic acts worthy of immortalization in an Homeric epic.

Like an astronaut setting foot upon a foreign world, everything that passes before my eyes becomes fascinating, exerts its own peculiar gravity which arrests my progress momentarily, drawing me towards it to pause and investigate. In fine, the experience of the book is intended, for the reader, to be what the experience of that night was for me: the most acute example I had yet known of the psychogeographic experience of flânerie itself—what M. Rimbaud calls ‘un long, immense et raisonné dérèglement de tous les sens’ (‘a long, immense and rational derangement of all the senses’).

I’ve described Orpheid: L’Arrivée as an ‘epic prose poem’, and I think that sums up both my strengths and my limits as a writer. In a recent post on this vlog I asked the question ‘Can prose be poetry?’, and admitted that, like M. Flaubert, one of the great banes of my life is that I’m a prosateur by nature, not a poète—although I have the reputation of being one.

As I said in that post, the habits of mind associated with prose and poetry are really antithetical to each other, and I’m rarely so inspired as to write verse. Most of my poetic output was written in France, when, like a flower, I felt my soul expand in its natural climes, swimming in the sea of soil and air, of Truth and Beauty, which surrounded me every day.

Otherwise, like M. Flaubert, whatever inclination to lyricism there is in me (et l’inclination est forte) finds itself kinkily perverted away from prosody and funnelled along the unnatural channel of prose, a narrow watercourse most unsuitable for the efflorescent floods of rhapsody which overtake me. Like M. Flaubert, I have the rather painful experience, as a writer, of being a poet by inclination but without natural talent in that direction, my analytic habits of mind, like his, being more suited to prose than prosody.

And yet, for reasons which mystify and miff me, I have the reputation of being ‘a poet’.

In recent years, I’ve come to terms with the fact that I will never succeed in talking people out of this misconception of me, and even to feel that, if they’re so stubbornly insistent in their error, then they’re probably right.

In lieu of forcing my mind into the crystal lattices of verse, a skill and habit I admire in poètes pur-sang but cannot emulate, I have always written my peculiar espèce de prose prosodique with its multilingual patois and neologisms, and have always been, bastard cousin to them, un poète en prose.

The essence of prose poetry, I think (an essence which Orpheid L’Arrivée demonstrates at quite a remarkable scale of simultaneous expansion and concentration, considering the typical brevity of the form), is ‘seeing the ordinary anew’.

What people have most often remarked to me about a prose they deem to be ‘poetic’ is that there is an unusual capacity in my writing to present a new vision of things, a different angle on the familiar which they recognize but which they tell me is not necessarily obvious to them until I drew their attention to it, a quality which is more ‘latent’ in the things themselves than apparent on first view.

Well, this is a perfectly natural skill for someone who began his career as a professional writer in the domain of film criticism to possess. My ‘journalistic training’ was as a foreign correspondent in a realm which is all about reporting vivid descriptions of vision, about lyrically communicating the experience which these visions in the dark provoked in me. It was a training which both formed and rewarded the analytic habit of mind, the incontournable désir to break down the parts of my pleasure and analyse what makes the machine of it run, which is natural to me.

I don’t know that I was ever conscious, as a young man writing film criticism for magazines on the Gold Coast, of styling my thumbnail reviews as ‘poems in prose’, but certainly I was so conscious of the little space I was afforded that, in retrospect, it seems I schooled myself in squeezing my mind into something like the crystal lattice of verse. I made a form of my own which was so tight that the rhapsodic results were often explosive for the readers.

In order to see the prosaic world painted anew on the page, a lyrical, rhapsodic style of prose is called for. If I’m honest, I don’t know if there are any poètes pur-sang today. A poet is a flower of humanity that can only grow up in a natural environment, and we live in such an artificial one, where technology is the very air that we breathe, that perhaps prose is the only weak poetic weapon with which to tackle and attack our prosaic reality, to beat back its encroachment on our humanity.

Which brings me to Louis Aragon and another magisterial work of poetry in prose, Le Paysan de Paris (Paris Peasant [1926]).

M. Aragon was a poet first and prose-writer second, a survivor of the race of poets when there were still some lines of lineage of that endangered species left to dribble into the future. He was also a surrealist in the first, enthusiastic, misguided but organic flush of that movement when, weak as it was, surrealism was yet a shield to bludgeon and beat back a usurping technological artificiality which was not yet all-powerful.

The English title of Le Paysan de Paris does not quite give the sense which M. Aragon intends to convey in French. Yes, ‘paysan’ may be translated as ‘peasant’, but in poetic conjunction with the name of the French metropolis, the Capital of Modernity, he is trying to suggest that to be a Parisian is to be a type of provincial, someone who is yet still close to nature in the midst of this technological marvel with all its glittering, seductive artificiality.

Now, here we have a little secret password of freemasonry by which fanatical Paris aficionados, French as well as foreign, recognize one another. This word is ‘province.’ With a shrug of the shoulders, the true Parisian, though he may never travel out of the city for years at a stretch, refuses to live in Paris. He lives in the treizième or the deuxième or the dix-huitième; not in Paris but in his arrondissement—in the third, the seventh, the twentieth. And this is the provinces.

—Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project, “First Sketches”, p. 832

It took reading Hr. Benjamin’s insight to put the vague apprehension into sharp relief, but as soon as I read those words, I recognized the truth of them in my own experience.

Only the day after the events recounted in Orpheid: L’Arrivée, as I ambled about the 18e, seeking by daylight what I had but glimpsed in a tourbillon of light and colour the night before, I would have the sense—which would never leave me in Montmartre—that this paradis artificiel would be sufficient for a lifetime. You could live in this small tranche of Paris, on its northern outskirts, and never be bored, never have cause to venture outside it.

I seem to associate that sensation of mind—too diffuse to be a thought—with the memory of a man, grey-haired, who shuffled out of the dazzling sunlight and into the cool, wood-panelled oasis of the Café de la Place and up to the comptoir beside me as I was drinking my demi. Between him and the patron passed that secret handshake of freemasonry, the handshake of merely being Montmartreans together on another day in bourgeois paradise, and by the end my time there, the ineffaceable patina of being a ‘Parisian provincial’, a ‘dix-huitièmard’ (to coin a term), would varnish the wood of my soul too.

In her journal article “The Surrealism of the Habitual: From Poetic Language to the Prose of Life” (2011), Alison James discusses surrealist prose poetry with respect to Wittgenstein’s philosophical investigations into language. She cites André Breton’s argument in defence of M. Aragon when he was accused, after the publication of one of his poems, of incitement to murder.

… [T]he goal of poetry and art [according to Breton] has always been to soar above the real and above common thought…. In formulating this argument, Breton refers to Hegel’s lectures on aesthetics and in particular to Hegel’s insistence on the distinction between poetry and prose. For Hegel, poetry is the most perfect and universal of the arts because it comes closest to the self-apprehension of spirit. However, its linguistic medium poses a problem, for art ‘ought to place us on ground different from that adopted in everyday life, as well as in our religious ideas and actions, and in the speculations of philosophy’…. Language, when used in poetry, should therefore not be left ‘in a state in which it is used every day’ … but must set itself apart from the ‘common prose of life’ … —an expression that Hegel uses to refer to both the ‘prosaic’ dimension of existence and to linguistic signs that mediate this level of experience.

—Alison James, “The Surrealism of the Habitual: From Poetic Language to the Prose of Life” (2011), p. 408

But in Le Paysan de Paris, M. Aragon (who himself has not infrequent recourse to Hegel) is most trenchant in his view that the prosodic lies in the prosaic. This is perhaps one of the few genuinely revelatory concetti to emerge from surrealism as an intellectual movement and as an artistic mode of militant resistance to the increasing ‘banalization’ of technologically-driven modern life.

Certains lieux, plusieurs spectacles, j’éprouvais leur force contre moi bien grande, sans découvrir le principe de cet enchantement. Il y avait des objets usuels qui, à n’en pas douter, participaient pour moi du mystère, me plongeaient dans le mystère. … Il me semblait bien que l’essence de ces plaisirs fût toute métaphysique, il me semblait bien qu’elle impliquât à leur occasion une sorte de goût passionné de la révélation. Un objet se transfigurait à mes yeux, il ne prenait point l’allure allégorique ni le caractère du symbole; il manifestait moins une idée qu’il n’était cette idée même. Il se prolongeait ainsi profondément dans la masse du monde.

I felt the great power that certain places, certain sights exercised over me, without discovering the principle of this enchantment. Some everyday objects unquestionably contained for me a part of that mystery, plunged me into that mystery. … I felt sure that the essence of such pleasures was entirely metaphysical and involved a sort of passion for revelation with regard to them. The way I saw it, an object became transfigured: it took on neither the allegorical aspect nor the character of the symbol, it did not so much manifest an idea as constitute that very idea. Thus it extended deeply into the world’s mass.

—Louis Aragon, Le Paysan de Paris, “Le sentiment de la nature aux Buttes-Chaumont” (translated by Simon Watson Taylor), pp. 140-1 [p. 128]

This anti-platonic intuition that objects themselves—in all their crude, material reality—are the eternal Forms is perhaps, as I say, the only really revelatory idea to come out of surrealism, and sets the stage for a ‘poetry of modern life’ that is deeply immersed in the prosaic and the temporal, in the marvellous flux of artificial forms that speed surreally by the flâneur’s eyes in his investigations of arcades and parks.

In his coda to Le Paysan de Paris, M. Aragon indulges himself (perhaps satirically) in one of those chauvinistic manifestoes favoured by the surrealists—or at least by his hierophantic, inquisitorial friend, M. Breton. But M. Aragon is a greater intellect than M. Breton, just as he was a greater writer, and the slash and sweep of his pronouncements cut vividly through, just as the notion articulated in the quote above does, to add in one breathless burst of premises several firm planks to a nascent æsthetic philosophy of literary flâneurism:

Du plus rapide apercevoir une apparition se levait. Je ne me sentais pas responsable de ce fantastique où je vivais. Le fantastique ou le merveilleux. C’est dans cette zone que ma connaissance était proprement la notion. J’y accédais par un escalier dérobé, l’image. La recherche abstraite me l’a fait tenir pour une illusion grossière, et voici qu’à son terme la notion, dans sa forme concrète, avec son trésor de particularités, ne me semble plus en rien différente de ce mode méprisé de la connaissance, l’image, qui est la connaissance poétique, et les formes vulgaires de la connaissance ne sont, sous le prétexte de la science ou de la logique, que les étapes conscientes que brûle merveilleusement l’image, le buisson ardent.

Je sais ce qu’une telle conception choque, et l’objection qu’elle comporte. Un certain sentiment du réel. Pur sentiment. Car où prend-on que le concret soit le réel? N’est-il pas au contraire tout ce qui est hors du réel, le réel n’est-il pas le jugement abstrait, que le concret ne présuppose que dans la dialectique? Et l’image n’a-t-elle pas, en tant que telle, sa réalité qui est son application, sa substitution à la connaissance? Sans doute l’image n’est-elle pas le concret, mais la conscience possible, la plus grande conscience possible du concret. D’ailleurs peu importe l’objection quelle qu’elle soit qu’on oppose à une semblable vue de l’esprit. Cette objection même est une image. Il n’y a pas, foncièrement, une façon de penser qui ne soit une image. Seulement la plupart des images, faiblement prises, ne comportent dans l’esprit qui les emploie aucun jugement de réalité, et c’est par là qu’elles gardent ce caractère abstrait, qui fait leur pauvreté et leur inefficience. Le propre de l’image poétique à l’encontre de l’image essentielle, pour m’en remettre à ce qualificatif médiocre, est de comporter ce caractère de matérialisation, qui a sur l’homme un grand pouvoir, qui lui ferait croire à une impossibilité logique au nom de sa logique. L’image poétique se présente sous la forme du fait, avec tout le nécessaire de celui-ci. Or le fait, que personne jamais n’a songé à contester, fût-ce Hegel, et même celui-ci ne lui accordait-il pas une importance prépondérante, le fait n’est point dans l’objet, mais dans le sujet: le fait n’existe qu’en fonction du temps, c’est-à-dire du langage. Le fait n’est qu’une catégorie. Mais l’image emprunte seulement la forme du fait, car l’esprit peut l’envisager en dehors de lui. L’image donc aux divers stades de son développement apparaît à l’esprit avec toutes les garanties qu’il réclame des modes de sa connaissance. Elle est la loi dans le domaine de l’abstraction, le fait dans celui de l’événement, la connaissance dans le concret. C’est par ce dernier terme qu’on en juge, et qu’on peut brièvement déclarer que l’image est la voie de toute connaissance. Alors on est fondé à considérer l’image comme la résultante de tout le mouvement de l’esprit, à négliger tout ce qui n’est pas elle, à ne s’adonner qu’à l’activité poétique au détriment de toute autre activité.

…

C’est à la poésie que tend l’homme.

Il n’y a de connaissance que du particulier.

Il n’y a de poésie que du concret.

La folie est la prédominance de l’abstrait et du général sur le concret et la poésie.

…

La réalité est l’absence apparente de contradiction.

Le merveilleux, c’est la contradiction qui apparaît dans le réel.

L’amour est un état de confusion du réel et du merveilleux. Dans cet état, les contradictions de l’être apparaissent comme réellement essentielles à l’être.

Où le merveilleux perd ses droits commence l’abstrait.

Le fantastique, l’au-delà, le rêve, la survie, le paradis, l’enfer, la poésie, autant de mots pour signifier le concret.

Il n’est d’amour que du concret.

From the swiftest glimpse an apparition arose. I did not feel responsible for this zone of the fantastic in which I was living. The fantastic or the marvellous. It is within this zone that my knowledge constituted true notion. My access to it was by a secret stairway, the image. Abstract research had induced me to consider it a crude illusion, yet finally notion, in its concrete form, with its treasure of particularities, no longer seems to me in any respect different from this despised method of knowledge, the image, which is poetic knowledge; while the vulgar forms of knowledge are nothing more, under their guise of science or logic, than the conscious halting places past which the image scorches, the image transformed marvellously into a burning bush.

I realize how shocking such a conception seems, I know the objection that may be made to it. A certain feeling for the real. For how did the idea come about that it is the concrete which is the real? Is not the concrete, on the contrary, all that is beyond the real, is not the real the abstract judgment which the concrete presupposes only in the dialectical process? And does not the image, as such, possess its own reality which is its application to knowledge, its substitution for it? The image is not in itself the concrete, of course, but the consciousness, the greatest possible consciousness of the concrete. In any case, whatever kind of objection may be made to such a view of the mind is itself of little importance, that very objection being an image. Basically, no way of thought exists that is not an image. However, most images are registered so weakly by the mind employing them that they incarnate absolutely no estimation of reality, and consequently retain the abstract nature which determines their impoverishment and ineffectiveness. The property of the poetic image, as opposed to the essential image, … is to incarnate this quality of materialization, one that exercises a tremendous power over man and is quite capable of making him believe in a logical impossibility in the name of logic. … [T]he image is the path of all knowledge. One is then justified in regarding the image as the resultant of all the mind’s impulses, in ignoring everything that is not image, and in devoting oneself exclusively to poetic activity at the expense of all other activity.

…

It is towards poetry that man is gravitating.

There is no other knowledge than that of the particular.

There is no other poetry than that of the concrete.

Madness is the predominance of the abstract and the general over the concrete, over poetry.

…

Reality is the apparent absence of contradiction.

The marvellous is the eruption of contradiction within the real.

Love is a state of confusion between the real and the marvellous. In this state, the contradictions of being seem really essential to being.

Wherever the marvellous is dispossessed, the abstract moves in.

The fantastic, the beyond, dream, survival, paradise, hell, poetry, so many words signifying the concrete.

There is no other love than that of the concrete.

—Louis Aragon, Le Paysan de Paris, “Le songe du paysan” (translated by Simon Watson Taylor), pp. 243-5, 248 [pp. 213-4, 217]

Thus, in M. Aragon’s surrealistic view, the poetic is quite firmly embedded in the concrete, in the prosaic, and what appeals to the eye as a poetic image provokes M. Rimbaud’s definition of ‘clairvoyance’—literally ‘clear-seeing’—that ‘long, immense et raisonné dérèglement de tous les sens.’

Etymologically, the concept of ‘surréalisme’ suggests something—a dimension, a reality—above or over concrete reality, and this view of surrealism as a poetic reaction to the banality of the everyday is certainly implied by M. Breton’s appeal to the æsthetic authority of Hegel.

And this doctrinaire view of what it is for a work of art to be ‘surreal’—to be ‘over’-real, too real to be apprehensible with the concrete eye in our diminished platonic state—is a view that M. Aragon appears to reject. One paints not what is in the mind’s eye, superimposing this image, as a kind of overlay, or ‘filter’, upon the image of the world which appeals to our physical vision, but the disruptive element of the marvellous which is always—and already—present within things as their secret substance, the irrational contradictions which are already there, in plain sight but overlooked, ignored by consciousness.

La vie parisienne est féconde en sujets poétiques et merveilleux. Le merveilleux nous enveloppe et nous abreuve comme l’atmosphère; mais nous ne le voyons pas.

Parisian life is abundant in marvellous and poetic subjects.  The marvellous surrounds us and suckles us like the air, but we do not see it.

—Charles Baudelaire, Le Salon de 1846 (my translation)

Hr. Benjamin, in his classic essay on surrealism, written when the movement was already on the intellectual decline, speaks of it as possessing access to ‘profane illumination’. With as cunning an artificer as Hr. Benjamin, we must assume that an indirect reference to the title of M. Rimbaud’s prose poetry collection (which he cites directly in his essay) is not coincidental.

Taking the word ‘vulgar’ in its Catholic sense, the ‘vulgar incidents’ and the ‘vulgar objects’ of our banal, artificial modernity shine forth their ‘profane illuminations’, and as M. Aragon states in his preface to Le Paysan de Paris:

Des mythes nouveaux naissent sous chacun de nos pas. Là où l’homme a vécu commence la légende, là où il vit. … Chaque jour se modifie le sentiment moderne de l’existence. Une mythologie se noue et se dénoue. … M’appartient-il, j’ai déjà vingt-six ans, de participer à ce miracle? Aurai-je longtemps le sentiment du merveilleux quotidien? Je le vois qui se perd dans chaque homme qui avance dans sa propre vie comme dans un chemin de mieux en mieux pavé, qui avance dans l’habitude du monde avec une aisance croissante, qui se défait progressivement du goût et de la perception de l’insolite.

New myths spring up beneath each step we take. Legend begins where man has lived, where he lives. … Each day the modern sense of existence becomes subtly altered. A mythology ravels and unravels. … I am already twenty-six years old, am I still privileged to take part in this miracle? How long shall I retain this sense of the marvellous suffusing everyday existence? I see it fade away in every man who advances into his life as though along an always smoother road, who advances into the world’s habits with an increasing ease, who rids himself progressively of the taste and texture of the unwonted, the unthought of.

—Louis Aragon, Le Paysan de Paris, “Préface à une mythologie moderne” (translated by Simon Watson Taylor), pp. 15-6 [p. 24]

In fine, rather than a superimposition of something above this reality upon our vision of it, the surrealist dérèglement is ‘seeing anew’, perceiving the marvellous reality of the poetic that is already there in our stultifying banality, the irrational discordances between our bizarre, artificial objects and customs—the whole apparatus of ‘le spectacle’, as Guy Debord calls it—which familiarity with them has made us blind to.

As Ms. James explains, Hr. Wittgenstein was deeply concerned with the problem of ‘re-concretizing’ language (to coin a term), to bring words back from the airy abstractions of the intellectuals and re-couple them to the gold standard of everyday usage. But, as she states in her article, ‘[r]ather than “bringing words back”, [surrealism] is a literature that aims to defamiliarize, to make new, to take language and thought away from the commonplace.’

The aspects of things that are most important for us are hidden because of their simplicity and familiarity. (One is unable to notice something—because it is always before one’s eyes.)

—Ludwig Wittgenstein, cited in James (2011, p. 416)

Refamiliarization by defamiliarization: To take the pseudo-Freudian aspect of surrealism’s revolutionary program, if we are so immersed in the abstract, artificial spectacle of modern life that we cannot perceive the irrational discordances embedded in our artefacts and customs, the defamiliarization of abstracted language serves as a lens to consciously refocus our inward vision upon the madness of our concrete reality.

One might say that the prose poetic impulse to ‘see the ordinary anew’ is a function of Ezra Pound’s demand of modern artists that they should ‘make it new’—create (as M. Aragon seeks to do in Le Paysan de Paris) a mythology of the modern which is itself the basis of a new classicism.

The classical forms of poetry are unsuited to the spirit and conditions of our prosaic modern life, one in which Mr. Kurtz’s horror is kept in continual, uneasy abeyance, but which forever threatens to eclipse and overwhelm us. Beauty and horror, as M. Baudelaire, exercising profound clairvoyance, could perceive at the birth of modern poetry, are the two sides of the coin of banality we trade in daily.

Thus, in this banal, prosy landscape of indentured drudgery which is the modern city, perhaps only a ‘poetic’ prose, one which re-alerts us to the omnipresent but invisible marvellous by stealth, appropriating the utilitarian literary form of prose which science and commerce have elevated to a global lingua franca, is the only means to be authentically a ‘poet’ in this open-air, unbarred prison we all live in.

The poet in prose sneaks his profane illuminations of the marvellous reality, the beauty of our universal horror, out through the horizontal bars of uniform, black-inked type. He squeezes the folded letter out through the bars, but because it is written in prose, the cryptic cypher of the concealed poem fails signally to reach all but his fellow illuminati—the brethren of other flâneuristic souls who suffer in our Edenic Hell.

… [T]he most passionate investigation of the hashish trance will not teach us half as much about thinking (which is eminently narcotic), as the profane illumination of thinking about the hashish trance. The reader, the thinker, the loiterer, the flâneur, are types of illuminati just as much as the opium eater, the dreamer, the ecstatic. And more profane. Not to mention that most terrible drug—ourselves—which we take in solitude.

—Walter Benjamin, “Surrealism: The Last Snapshot of the European Intelligentsia” (1929)

The situationists, who were really the last inheritors of the tribal, faddish tendencies of European modernism, tracing their line of descent directly from the surrealists, were also, like them, one of the last résistants to the bulldozing banality of modern life, the flipside of its horrible beauty.

In their pseudo-scientific study of the urban environment known as psychogeography, and more specifically in their method of scientific investigation, the dérive (literally, the ‘drift’), the situationists codified a method of experimental urban exploration pioneered by the surrealists, and of which M. Aragon gives us perhaps the first scientific account in the second movement of Le Paysan de Paris: “Le sentiment de la nature aux Buttes-Chaumont” (“A Feeling for Nature at the Buttes-Chaumont”).

In that section, he describes how he, M. Breton, and a fellow Surrealist, Marcel Noll, undertook an ambitious pilgrimage one night to the parc des Buttes-Chaumont, in the 19e arrondissement, on the northeastern outskirts of Paris. Assailing the gates of the citadel (which they found, to their surprise and delight, to be open), the three amigos undertook a circumambulation of the park, which centres around a man-made lake and a tiny, mountainous island. At the top of the butte is a very picturesque little belvedere which one approaches by means of a footbridge known to Parisians as ‘le pont des Suicidées’ because it’s a charming spot to take a brodie from.

The dérive, to my mind, is slightly different to flânerie, and therefore more suited to having a ‘surreal experience’ of the ordinary places of modernity, such as the parc des Buttes-Chaumont as M. Aragon describes it in Le Paysan de Paris.

The dérive, in my experience, is more about the absorption and synthesis of the ‘trade winds of vibe’ that course through the vectors of the urban milieu, while flânerie is an æsthetic investigation, and therefore more analytic. The flâneur is on the hunt for modernity, as M. Baudelaire says, whereas the dériveur opens himself up to being a willing prey to modernity’s alternating, alienating vibes of beauty and horror.

Walking is itself the most prosaic experience, and as American poet Edward Hirsch writes in his article “‘My Pace Provokes My Thoughts’: Poetry and Walking” (2011), walking through artificial urban spaces is, for the modern, urban poet, a most fructifying experience.

Daydreaming is one of the key sources of poetry—a poem often starts as a daydream that finds its way into language—and walking seems to bring a sort of alertness, an associative kind of thinking, a drifting state of mind.

A walk is a way of entering the body, and also of leaving it. I am both here and there, betwixt and between, strolling along, observing things, thinking of something else. I move in a liminal space.

—Edward Hirsch, “‘My Pace Provokes My Thoughts’: Poetry and Walking” (2011), p. 5

You will recall, chers lecteurs, that in my previous post I said that the bar, the café, the scene of Vivian Sobchack’s ‘lounge time’ and another site of flânerie, was a ‘liminal social space’. Whether walking or pausing in his progress, the flâneur’s natural environment is not so much the city itself as liminal space—adjacent places of multiple, contradictory usage, spheres of ambiguity, sites of transitory passage.

Mr. Hirsch, in his article, delineates the types of walking, and he cites Thoreau, who mistook the origins of the word ‘saunter’, a type of frolicking stroll akin to flânerie at its most energetic, as coming from medieval pilgrimages ‘à la Sainte Terre’ (to the Holy Land). Mr. Hirsch sets us straight on this score, telling us that ‘[t]he word saunter comes from santer, meaning “to muse”, to “be in a reverie”’. Thus, the flâneuristic relationship between walking and thinking is still completed in the word, though not in the way Mr. Thoreau imagined.

Mr. Hirsch goes on to describe this ambulatory form of reverie, this ‘dream-walking’ while wide-awake, as ‘a way of ruminating, … a form of labor without laboring, what Kant calls “purposiveness without purpose.”’

Now, these two paradoxical phrases are instructive, for a phrase of my own which you will encounter time and again in the Orpheid is the description of ‘our presumptuous little hero’ as being engaged in the equally paradoxical occupation of ‘productive indolence’: My flâneuristic days in Paris were taken up with the ‘work’ of walking, of thinking, of lounging in cafés, of writing in parks, of drawing at the Louvre. By the standards of our technocratic society, I was a ‘fainéant’—literally, a ‘do-nothing’, an idler, and yet I have never, in my entire life, turned out more pages of prose, and poetry, and art, than in those days.

That’s the flâneurial paradox of Hirsch’s ‘labor without laboring’, of Kant’s ‘purposiveness without purpose’, and my own ‘productive indolence’: the prosaic poet of modern life is a résistant in the ‘Worker’s Paradise’ of the City, a passive idler by the standards of commerce, but as much of a driven ‘producer’—and not a passive consumer—as one of Ayn Rand’s technocratic supermen.

I had my own ‘dérive à trois’ at the parc des Buttes-Chaumont, with a couple of Californian friends I met in Paris, one of whom I still keep in occasional contact with. It was nothing near as blissful as M. Aragon’s tramp by night with MM. Breton et Noll, but I still remember the vivid poetry of life in ‘les Tuileries des gens’: a girl, lying on the grass in the sunshine, reading Flaubert’s L’Éducation sentimentale in a cream-coloured, Gallimard wrapper; the gaggle of little French schoolchildren who descended on us from the pont des Suicidées as we paused in our ramble under the shelter of the belvedere at the top of the butte.

Rereading my second draft of the account of that day, I notice that I say that the children’s voices ‘perfumed’ the air for me, a poetic tournure that suggests the evanescent beauty that quite ordinary (and I’m sure, for my companions, quite unmemorable) incursion into our sanctuary had for me as we gazed back towards Sacré Cœur.

The ambition is still to tell the story of that day, and of the days preceding it, when an Englishman we met introduced me to my destiny as a poet, albeit in prose. To be a flâneur; to be deeply embedded as an anarchic undercover résistant in this prosaic modern reality, with its banal horror and flashes of beauty; to be able to see, and to say, both; to allow the dérèglement du dérive to surreally overtake one like a drug, but then to be able to apply analysis to the parts of one’s pleasure;—that is really what it is to be a prose poet.

But that memoir of my halcyon days in Paris is some way off. In the meantime, if what I have said here has whetted your appetite for what might just be one of the most surreal reading experiences you’ve ever had, do you dare to take a walk on the wild side, accompanying yours truly on a neurotic comic dérive around Montmartre by night?

Or do you think that Orpheid: L’Arrivée might just be up the (dark) alley of someone you know? If you haven’t tried my custom order service and you’re thinking of buying some original gifts this Christmas, I invite you to take a browse in the Dean Kyte Bookstore. All my products come gift-wrapped by the same two hands that lovingly wrote the books. I also sign and wax-seal them and include a thoughtful, personalised message to the recipient, so if you want to give someone you love a thoroughly bespoke, artisanal reading experience to savour this Christmas, take a flash at my books or click the links below to purchase your own personal copy of Orpheid: L’Arrivée.

“Orpheid: L’Arrivée” [softcover]

Personally signed and sealed by author. Comes with frameable, handwritten manuscript page and custom bookmark. Price includes worldwide postage.

A$45.00

“Orpheid: L’Arrivée” [eBook]

PDF viewable on any device. Includes bonus audio track of page read by author. Worldwide delivery within 48 hours.

A$15.00

By on 4 Comments

The Melbourne Flâneur at his ‘head office’: Dean Kyte hard at work at the 3 Little Monkeys in Centre place, photographed by Denis Fitzgerald.

Special shout-out to Bendigo-based photographer Denis Fitzgerald (@denisfitzgerald_ on Instagram), who was kind enough to forward this ninja portrait of your Melbourne Flâneur, covertly snapped while intently bent over the means of his subsistence.

I was either concentrating very hard, or Denis was very jungled-up (which is hard to do in Centre place at the moment, still beaucoup underpopulated as Melbourne struggles to shake off the enduring shackles of lockdown), because I didn’t notice anyone lurking in the laneway with a camera trained on yours truly.

But I remember the day—how could I not when I had opted to break out the white tie, white French cuff shirt with spread collar, and white opal cufflinks to go with my dark grey suit with its alternating pink and white pinstripes? Consequently, I remember what I was writing that day, and I’ve got a pretty good idea what I was studying so intently when Denis captured me peering at my screen.

I think I was probably plotting a literary murder at that moment!

Yes, beneath the serene, snapbrim-shaded visage of your Melbourne Flâneur, it looks like Denis has caught me, not red-mitted, but with full mens rea and Machiavellian malice aforethought.

It’s a great photo. I particularly like the way Denis has dialled down the vividness of my preferred location for literary enterprise to emphasise the grey and white camouflage of my ensemble. The skin tone of face and hand are the only sign of anything human hiding out in the monochrome locale.

Though you probably wouldn’t imagine from Denis’s photo that I was meditating on hinky deeds at that moment, I think he’s probably captured something essential about me, wrapped up in dark labours which seem externalized to the environment around me. As a writer, I am as ‘un prince qui jouit partout de son incognito’ (‘a prince who revels in his anonymity everywhere he goes’), as M. Baudelaire puts it: to be an homme de lettres is to possess an exclusive species of celebrity—the freedom to walk the streets and still remain utterly unknown.

This is a deeply satisfying species of celebrity which Delta Goodrem, for instance (who just walked past me in Centre place wearing a horrendously ugly white overcoat, like the shaggy pelt of some synthetic beast), will never know.

Ms. Goodrem, God bless her, is no princess enjoying her incognito. She wishes very much to be seen by her serfs, if not actually approached by them.

When I’m at work at the 3 Little Monkeys, I often fancy myself (as Denis seems to have intuited) as being deep undercover—practically invisible to the environment, so invisible does the environment become to me when I enter deeply into the meditative state of writing. But being an unreconstructed dandy, even camo’d up in my grey combo, I recognize that I stand out as the one of the more conspicuous pieces of wildlife in vibrant Centre place.

Although I have many other secret and not-so-secret writing locations cached around Melbourne, the 3 Little Monkeys has been the Melbourne Flâneur’s ‘head office’ for as long as I’ve lived here: as tiny, as ‘inconvenient’ a locale in which to write as this little café might appear, practically from Day 1 of my vie melburnienne I have colonized a table on its shoulder-width terrace in Centre place, come rain or come shine, and have done the boulot of writing.

As a flâneur, the thing I love about Centre place is the Parisian ambiance of this narrow café strip. I fell in love with that ambiance almost immediately, for the dark grey slate of the ledge of sidewalk running along both sides of the laneway reminded me of the asphalt trottoirs of Paris. Then too, the absurdly narrow width of those sidewalks, crammed, on either side of the garage-like doorways of the cafés, with postage-stamp tables, stools and the upturned milkcrates which serve, in Melbourne, as our native seating, recalled to me some of the tiny, tavolino-lined terrasses I sat on in the backstreets of Paris, scribbling away.

From my vantage at either of the two tables on the terrace of the 3 Little Monkeys, I have a narrow vision of the grey Melbourne firmament between the CAE and the Punthill Hotel—almost as grey as the platinum sky of Paris. When I first came to Melbourne, the no outdoor smoking rule had not yet been introduced, so—most Parisian of all—the grey atmosphere of Centre place was typically further clouded with carcinogens.

Moreover, the 3 Little Monkeys faces the side entrance of the Majorca Building, one of the jewels of art déco architecture in Melbourne. It didn’t take me a week to realize the cinematic potential of the terrace of the 3 Little Monkeys, and very early on in my vie melburnienne, I made the video below, in which you can see me sitting in meditative bliss on the terrace of the café but reflected, ghost-like, in the elegant side entrance to the Majorca Building across the laneway.

In this brief video essay, Melbourne writer Dean Kyte offers a (self-)conscious (self-)reflection on the narcissistic art of the selfie.

I’ve always written outdoors, in parks and cafés. When I was a film critic on the Gold Coast, I got into the habit of writing the first draft of my reviews as soon as I came out of the cinema. I would write in cinema foyers, on the platform of train stations, at bus stops. The most uncomfortable locations served as ersatz offices for me, and I learned to block out the environment and go inward, projecting my thoughts onto the landscape around me.

I learned to enter something like a ‘conscious trance’ in public: within a few minutes of picking up my pen, all the noise and distraction of the place falls away, and it is almost as though material reality becomes a symbolic projection of what I’m thinking. The words are ‘out there’, occluded in the shapes of streets and people, trees and flowers, and the deeper my gaze penetrates into the environment around me as I write, the more I am mining out of myself the precise shape of a thought.

It’s in one of those trance-like states, when my introverted intuition is operating at maximum revs and, despite the manifold colourful distractions posed by Centre place, I’m locked onto an image deep within myself, one which I can see spelled out in the environment around me as I search for le seul mot juste, that Denis has captured me in the picture above.

But although I had gotten into the habit of taking the office outdoors on the Gold Coast, it was not until I went to Paris that the habit of conducting the most private, the most introverted of arts in the most public of places became a matter of the deepest necessity. In Paris, the streets were my office: having no private place in which to write, I bared all, exposing myself to the public gaze in parks, gardens, galleries, bars, cafés, street-side benches.

The analogy of the flasher, the exhibitionist is not sans raison for the écrivain en plein air—particularly one who is as unreconstructed a dandy as myself. I have written elsewhere of the deep introversion which is a prerequisite of dandysme pur-sang, and of how the dandy’s shy propensity towards introversion makes the literary art, one typically conducted in deepest privacy, almost the only profession that this ‘splendour among shades’ is fit for.

But for the writer who is a dandy and a flâneur, a man of the street, a man who is forced to make his home in the street, to treat the most public, the most impersonal and uncomfortable of environments as casually and comfortably as if he were relaxing in his own private parlour, there is almost a samurai-like discipline about the way in which he makes friends with discomfort, performing the most private art-form, the ‘art of thinking’—which is what writing is when it is performed with absolute sincerity—in the most public of places.

In fine, in making himself, in his deepest reflections and meditations, vulnerable to view, in entering that trance-like state of deepest, most concentrated intuition in public, he ‘exposes himself’ in the act of thinking.

Like public onanism, there’s something rather aberrant about writing en plein air, I admit, because we usually regard it as so difficult a task that a setting of perfect comfort and seclusion is required to optimally milk the muse of inspiration. All distractions must be banished so that we can concentrate.

There’s something aberrant, moreover, about thinking in our society, so that someone who is clearly ‘doing it’ in public is making rather a spectacle of himself!

But after a certain point in my career, having been jostled and hassled out of my sedentary nature by life, I found it almost impossible to have a private place in which to write, and having been forced to discipline myself by doing the work in public, making the best of all possible conditions, making myself oblivious to all external distractions by entering a conscious state of trance, I would not want to go back to the days when I had my own desk and chair in my own private office.

The experience of making do with my lap, with dirty park benches, with cramped and narrow tavolini or corners of noisy cafés and bars in Paris, of having my pages rained on or blown away by the wind, of being harassed by distracting gypsies wanting to gyp me out of a euro, was a salutary training for what my life, as a peripatetic writer living out of a suitcase and a duffel, has largely been since then. Like the samurai who makes a pillow of a stone, as a writer I have made the street my ‘private thinking parlour’, and I am perfectly comfortable and relaxed doing my private business of thinking in public.

In Paris, ‘my office’, the place I repaired to every evening to do my writing, was Le Cépage Montmartrois, at 65, rue Caulaincourt, the golden café I immortalized with page after page of hallucinatory description in my first book, Orpheid: L’Arrivée (2012).

For the price of a demi of Amstel, I could sit for hours on a grey-gold Parisian evening, my notes of the day, the drawings I had sketched before the works of the masters in the Louvre, the maps tracing my flâneries, my dog-eared copies of Flaubert and Baudelaire, my beautiful monograph on Ingres all spread open before me on the tiny table as I wrote, like fantastic celestial maps linking all my disparate thoughts.

I was, for a time, a subject of curiosity to the indulgent folk who ran Le Cépage, so extravagant and strange was the wealth of material I produced every evening in the arcane alchemy of converting the reality of experience into scintillating prose. They’ve probably forgotten me by now, but there was a brief period when the burning question of the day was what ‘le M’sieu’ (as I was then known aux bons gens du Cépage) was up to with all these puzzling pages covered in his cryptic script.

As Les Deux Magots was to Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir, so Le Cépage was to me—and is, for it remains the café by which I have measured all my far-flung ‘offices’ ever since. As I wrote in L’Arrivée, the moment the taxi drew up, in the dark of night, before ‘le sein d’or du Cépage’, I knew (as one occasionally knows with a woman one meets by chance) that my life was inextricably linked to this café, and that we had been predestined by our mutual karma to meet and become historically significant to each other.

But Orfeo did not yet know that le mystère du nom de ce café-ci would be the least of les mystères which Le Cépage Montmartrois would pose for his sensuous investigation, nor that tous les mystères which it would pose before him would in one way or another be connected avec la question du nom.  How could he?  He had had no connaissance of its existence avant ce soir.  Nevertheless, faced avec ce café-ci with its enigmatic nom, ce café which immediately invited Orfeo’s sensuous investigation, he had the inescapable sense that somehow he had known that Le Cépage Montmartrois would be here, as if it were somehow connected à son destin and all that he had come à Paris à la recherche of, although he had had no premonition of it beforehand.  He had had no conscious premonition of it, but nevertheless he felt as though he had had some unconscious intimation of its existence; and however hard he stared into the alluring lueur of it, Orfeo could not for the life of him make out what it was about ce café-ci, what hovered in its golden radiance which made him feel as though its mystère—its mystique, même—was somehow personally and intimately connected with him, avec son destin.  He was bouleversed by the 哀れness that ce point-ci at which he had been destined to arrive since the dawn of his days, which he had worked towards in his soul without any conscious connaissance that this physical point dans l’espace was destined to be consubstantial with Orfeo’s psychological, and spiritual, and developmental arrivée à sa nouvelle réalité, was indeed ce point-là; and that henceforth ce point, as le cœur et l’épicentre of that experiential map which Orfeo would draw de sa nouvelle réalité, would be his anchorage, le point to which he would habitually return, whether or not it was precisely le point to which he had asked le chauffeur to deliver him to.  For the golden allueure du Cépage Montmartrois was too strong to be resisted, so that Orfeo felt that whatever was mystérieux about Le Cépage Montmartrois, whatever impalpable allure was atomized in that golden agency which had called to Orfeo’s unconscious mind from across oceans and was consubstantial avec la forme de ce café-ci, whatever it was that was in the yellowmellow beurrelueur of this particular café—nay, even inside of it—to be explored, was destined to be intimately connected with Orfeo’s sensuous investigations du monde parisien; and his explorations du nouveau monde de sa nouvelle réalité, as he redrew his own experiential map du monde de jour en jour, pushing back the boundaries of himself, would have their bearing upon ce lieu-ci as much they would derive their bearings from this anchoring point, such that whatever was le mystère du Cépage Montmartrois which le détective des belles choses, in his unique destin, had been called this great distance to rationalize and resolve, to reveal to all in all its mysterious relations, parttopart and parttowhole; this mystère had its inevitable cœur—its starting point—au sein d’or du Cépage Montmartrois.

—Dean Kyte, Orpheid: L’Arrivée (2012)

I think you can tell by the babel of lyricism which Le Cépage evoked in me that it was love at first sight!

Only in Bellingen, where the rather restless lifestyle I’ve led for the last seven years really began, have I had a similar experience of a café which felt as much to me like a ‘home’, a place where I would effectively ‘live’—and do my best living—when I went there every day to write.

When I stepped off the XPT and my friends straightway took me to the Vintage Nest (as the Hyde was then), a café-cum-quirky-antique-store in a former drapers’ shop on the main drag, I knew I would love Bellingen. At that time, the café was run by the church who owned the op-shop next door, as a rather upmarket outlet for their more valuable wares.

It was tragedy to me when it changed hands and the ever-altering array of beautiful antiques which gave the place so much character and charm gradually disappeared, but faithful to the last, for more than two years, rarely a nine o’clock would chime without me coming through the door to set up my laptop, pour a long black into the fuel tank, and start writing.

And it’s as much a testament to my affinity with the Hyde in the early days after the change-over that, as Le Cépage occupies so many pages of my first book, there’s a significant scene set at the Hyde in my last book, Follow Me, My Lovely… (2016). I think I devote some of the best writing in Follow Me, My Lovely… to the morning-after moment when I took the most beautiful girl I have ever had in my bed to ‘the best café in town’ for breakfast.

So cafés are, for me, more than merely ‘my office’, the places I go to in order to write: they are significant sources of inspiration in my writing. I love them as much as some of the women I have known, and like women who have left some lasting impact upon me, sometimes I feel driven to immortalize the ‘souls’ of these cafés in which I have done my work.

In July last year, Emily Temple wrote a blog post asking if global Coronavirus lockdowns would spell the end of writing in cafés. Admittedly, the hardest part of our insufferable (and multiple) Melbourne lockdowns last year was the fact that I was forced, finally, to do an extensive spell of writing in my hotel room, facing a wall.

I don’t think they saw me at the 3 Little Monkeys for the rest of the year after lockdown was declared in mid-March. But I still needed the matutinal fuel of writing. I discovered some good java-joints in North Melbourne, where I hunkered down to weather the storm, but it was not the same to have to dash out for five minutes each morning, hiding my beautiful mug behind a mask, simply to port back to my room a paper chalice I could suck on while punishing my brains.

As misanthropic as I am at mid-life, I missed the people, whose hubbub in the laneway makes the jangling music that accompanies my mental labours. Inured to distraction as unconducive circumstance has made me, I am probably one of those writers Ms. Temple cites in her post as actually requiring a measure of background noise to focus me: my literary antibodies need something in the environment to fight against.

There is, as Ms. Temple says, something vaguely ‘performative’ about being a café littérateur, but only, I would argue, if you’re there to make a ‘show’ of writing rather than to write. Whatever the artist, we can all tell a poseur from a professional—except, it seems, the poseur himself. As Denis’s portrait reveals, there is an earnestness, a look of presence—of investment in the present moment—which radiates from the writer who is really thinking, and who is not just licking the end of his pencil.

As a case of a writer who undertook the public performance of his craft with sincerity, Ms. Temple cites Harlan Ellison, who had the idée géniale of writing in the windows of bookshops, like a cobbler or a watchmaker plying his trade in his shop-window. ‘I do it because I think particularly in this country people … think that people who write are magicians on a mountaintop somewhere,’ Ellison said. ‘… So by doing it in public, I show people it’s a job … like being a plumber or an electrician.’

Living a peripatetic lifestyle, one of the joys of being a writer on the hoof is having an ‘office’ in every city, town and suburb I visit, just as a sailor has a girl in every port. Wherever my flâneries take me, the first order of business is to find a café that serves good coffee but, more importantly, has a good ambiance in which to write.

So in Sydney, you will typically find your Melbourne Flâneur stationed at Parisi or Jet, his ‘field offices’ in the Queen Victoria Building. In Brisbane, I have my command post set up at the suitably European Marchetti in the Tattersall’s Arcade, where you might hear me pass a few terse words of Italian with the wait staff.

Adelaide still poses a problem for me. Being a Parisian in my soul, I do like the French crêperie Le Carpe Diem in Grenfell street, but there’s unfortunately not a lot of visual interest or colourful foot-traffic at the eastern end of Grenfell street. The coffee is great, but the location is comme ci comme ça.

En revanche, you can get a good brew at the well-situated Larry & Ladd in the Regent Arcade. Unfortunately, if you want to write, you need to sit at the big benches outside the café in the middle of the arcade, because Messrs. Larry and Ladd play their dance music so loud it’s like a nightclub inside.

It certainly gives your literary antibodies something to fight!

By far the best café for writing in Adelaide, in my experience, is a little out-of-the-way place in Somerton Park, so if any Adelaidean writers can recommend a more central location, I would be happy to hear any suggestions in the comments below.

And I invite you to take a closer look at Denis’s Instagram. With so much of photographic interest in Bendigo to occupy him, I was very complimented to receive his picture of me out of the blue and discover that I had caught his savvy eye while revelling in my princely incognito! Check out more of his work here and on Facebook.

By on 4 Comments

Highlander lane, night, by Dean Kyte
Highlander lane, night. Shot on Kodak Tri-X 400 film.  Shutter speed: 30.  Aperture: f.2.82.  Focal range: infinity.

Melbourne transforms itself into a foreign wonderland at night.  Armed with my Pentax K1000, I venture forth after-hours to capture ‘a Brassaï moment’—the moment when Highlander lane, between Flinders street and Flinders lane, reminds me of the square Caulaincourt in Paris—the setting of my first book, Orpheid: L’Arrivée (2012).

As a writer, I move from obscurity to clarity.  For me, writing is a flânerie through the chiaroscuro of consciousness and unconsciousness.  I enjoy the frisson of venturing into dark places which are foreign to me—like alighting from a taxi in a cosmopolitan European locale late at night, not sure where you are, barely speaking the language, some menacing silhouettes in the milieu to greet you.

Before I was ever a Melbourne Flâneur, I was a flâneur in Paris, the Mecca of flânerie.  In L’Arrivée I wrote about my experience of feeling both fearful and fearless, arriving alone, late at night, in a small Parisian square in Montmartre.  Despite barely speaking the language, I had a strange sprezzatura, a strange confidence in myself—in my mission and message as an artist—going forward.

Do you speak the language of the land?  If you are a writer in French, Italian or Spanish, can you make the obscurity of your message clear to readers in English, combining the formal and the vernacular with the bravura of the native-speaker?

With my Bespoke Document Tailoring service, I can help you translate the complexity of your experience into words which allow you to feel heard and understood by your readers.

To explore how I can help you communicate your message with a bespoke approach which complements your literary voice in your native tongue perfectly, go to my Contact form to arrange a discreet and private measure with me.