Someone who knows I have a rich history of walking and observing and generally swanning about gifted me a book that examines and celebrates my favourite pastime: Flâneuse, by Lauren Elkin. ‘Flâneuse’ is the feminisation of the masculine ‘flâneur,’ a French term coined in the first half of the nineteenth century to describe a man who saunters about observing urban society. He wanders without a goal, seeking nothing, so seeing everything. Elkin expands this concept by focusing on notable flâneuse from the past hundred years (herself included). A woman’s experience of existing in public space is inherently different to her male counterpart. She sees differently.
Flâneuse came along whilst I was pouring over my journals from the past two years. I’ve begun writing what will hopefully be my second novel, and the first thing to do was to transcribe the scribbles where I’d daydreamed about it in my journals – anything could be useful. I’m a big journaller, it’s how I begin most days, so it was a long process, sifting through the detritus of my psyche (and discovering how my mind circles the same preoccupations – essentially three of them – but I’ll save that for another day).
And, yes, there was a lot of flâneuring! At first I thought that I’d wrangle an essay from these entries, but I’ve instead decided to share some excerpts and let them speak for themselves. It’s kind of an experiment, so here goes.
8 July, 2023
A puddle of Burger Rings on the sidewalk, some mashed to powder. The Burger Rings were on the sidewalk and why, what happened for them to get there I didn’t know, and I could never know. Temporal reality is an illusion, the spilt savoury snacks seemed to say.
13 July, 2023
I was walking home. That was my mission, an intention that blinkered me. The opening, then, was my mind expanding to allow for a different perception of the world, not simply as scenery as I made my way from point A to B. The thought was: relax. What followed was that the houses, the front yards, the cracks in the pavement, became an expression of something, as when on holiday and all is novel and worthy of attention. That same holiday sensation of looking around and feeling replete.
5 August, 2023
Sometimes, always in moments of solitude, when I’m completely available to everything, I’m claimed by the inexplicable understanding that I know nothing, and it’s a wondrous feeling, to be transformed into a tuning fork.
7 August, 2023
The film had summoned the world, and it wrapped itself around me. Each detail crackled with quiet significance as I walked through South Yarra. It was the texture of the film. People’s shiny, alien faces; shop windows mimicking desire; a man watching me from his car as I crossed the road, and I nodded, and he nodded back. No-one else had noticed me. I thought: this is all I need, for the world to be my secret.
24 August, 2023
Anyway, pretty much deliriously happy. Happiness without cause is happiness that’s affixed to nothing, so you are transfixed by everything. On the cycle here it felt as though my physical being was disintegrating, becoming holey and latticed. And, yes, holy. Pleasure crested over me and thrust me forward as it crashed across my brain. I thought – what would it be like if I wasn’t here? I looked around and everything was the same. But this was a misconception, because what I see is an outcome of perception – the world is my world and without me it doesn’t exist. I cannot know objective reality. This thought reinforcing my existence, I guess.
2 November, 2023
His desire to be someone else, something else, was so great that sometimes it came true, and a shift would occur. It was most keenly felt when travelling, for example, on a tram along an artery of the city. When the gliding carriage somehow provided the mechanism to glide across and into others, that is to say: into a reality beyond his own.
26 November, 2023
So utterly seduced! By existence – everything pulls me towards it, into it – into it and beyond myself – existence beyond me!
25 June, 2024
In the moments of my greatest lucidity, I don’t belong to anything in the same way that the city doesn’t belong to anything. Though we created the city, it is not ours. It acts upon us just as much as we act upon it.
6 July, 2024
If to look is to see the self, what does the flâneur see? But: “to look is to see the self” is only true if the self is fixed. The flâneur looks not for the reason that most people are looking – in search of themselves. The flâneur sees a world constantly in motion; this is the flâneur’s eye. Existence is transformation.
When the flâneur leaves their home, that shell that cases all that tethers one to the constituents of their existence, and steps out, into the world, they’re enacting their own death. The flâneur’s pleasure is a taste of ecstasy that depends wholly on the evacuation of the self. It’s suicide in miniature.
That’s it from me, my friends. Thank you for reading.
Until next time, enjoy.
Tom
Thought-provoking with a flavour of mysticism.