Day 1: Spirits High, Genitals Crushed

I could have picked a better tree.

This is, after all, the inaugural post. The flagship, the pioneer, the overture with which I set the tone for this entire series. In accordance with the occasion I should have picked a towering maple, a massive dendro-skyscraper with branches spanning several neighborhoods and leaves like manhole covers. I could at least have picked a tree with real branches, something that I could have sat on without straddling. As it is climbing this tree hasn't really achieved much for me. I've managed to get myself about five feet off the ground, and I've managed to sandwich about 90% of my weight against 100% of one testicle. In spite of everything, though, I'm happy I've made it up here. Because although this tree does have its drawbacks, and although those drawbacks are many, it does have one thing going for it. This tree, you see, is in Paris.

Up in my tree, you can hear tourists walking by, birds, construction

The Seine, as seen from my tree

Some kind of robot intestinal parasite, also as seen from my tree

Indeed

I am, apparently, in some kind of sculpture garden, but my surroundings suggest that I may be a bit confused by the definition of some of those words, specifically "sculpture" and "garden".  By way of illustration allow me to present the following diptych:

So a very valid question at this point might be what the fuck? Why Paris? Why now? Why, of all things, tree climbing? I think the answer to all of these is that I simply don't see any alternative. It would be one thing if I woke up with a deep, pulsing need to get out and see the world, like some kind of modern day Death in Venice, but if I'm being totally honest that's not the case at all. Instead I'm simply trying to see the world for what it is: incomprehensibly huge. I say incomprehensibly here because many things are huge while still being completely tenable. Costco, for example, is very very big, but the world itself is no mere Costco. This is of course because Costco is only big at one resolution, in terms of overall scale. At the level of the individual things held therein, Costco is actually quite small. The difference between a single tube of toothpaste and a warehouse full is simply one of replication. On Sunday I went to a flea market out in the 20th arrondissment I would say was incomprehensible in its hugeness. It was staggeringly, disarmingly, frighteningly huge, huge and sprawling at every scale and in every sense. In terms of area it must have covered at least four miles square. Within those four miles every single square inch was either inside a shop, at a food cart between two shops, or  clogged with pedestrians milling between shops and food carts.  

At a vintage nautical shop. A steal at 4000 euros.

What made this market so brain-achingly big was that there was no way to interact with it that made it in any way tenable. You couldn't walk around the whole thing in one day without spending enough time in any given shop. And if you really tried to sift through all the stuff on display at any one store you could lose weeks. If you went to the bookstore you could spend the rest of the day poring over Baudelaire first editions side by side with French children's comics from the 50's. If you went to the print shop you'd start browsing through vintage military prints and look up four hours later from a collection of hand-drawn anatomical figures. And if you went to the recovered nautical hardware store (which of course exists) then you could spend the whole day looking at just one diving helmet.

The point is this: I was reading about CERN recently in the context of the Higgs boson when it struck me just how incredible it was that such a monumental discovery had come about as the result of group collaboration rather than individual genius. In fact, one could argue that the discovery made at the Large Hadron Collider was so massive in scale that it was beyond the ability of any single person, no matter how clever. Thinking about how hard I work and how much new knowledge I (try to) create every single day, and then multiplying by seven billion people actually gives me vertigo. The hugeness of seven billion minds all thinking, synthesizing and creating makes that little market in the banlieue look like a grocery store. So, how can one spend his lifetime wandering the corridors of his own mind? There is nothing to do but to explore, to see as much as possible and to try to draw a map, however crude, if not of the interior then at least of the coastline.

So that, if nothing else, is what I'm doing in Paris. As for why I'm climbing trees, I guess it's because climbing trees is fun. To close, here's a conversation I had with some guy who was playing guitar by the tree. He played a little song for me, then talked for a while about the island of Comoros, where he was from.