The early morning train from Paris to Barcelona begins in grey mist. like Monet’s series Cathedral a Rouen, seen yesterday at Musee D’Orsay, colours slowly developing (Monet anticipating photography’s abstractions) from grey to blue to green. Houses change too, from stone to brick to pale yellow plaster. Everywhere, terra cotta roofs. Occasionally, industry appears, which I carefully frame out of my photographs.
Trains offer the comfort of arrival and departure, between which one exists comfortably within the unknown.
My home is my suitcase. My home is my iPad. The homepage of my blog. Deprived of a Wi-Fi connection on this 6-hour train ride I am cast adrift with nothing but the present moment to anchor me. The train becomes a Buddhist meditation. I watch the hills rearrange themselves like the folds of slowly moving fabric. I watch my thoughts, returning constantly to the breath of the train, its high-pitched, constant breath, its irregular sway. We are inside the train’s body, its rhythms become ours.
On Boulevard de Magenta in the 10th arrondissement we chance upon a small demonstration of migrants. Currently, there are almost 200,000 asylum-seekers in Paris alone, many of them homeless. We discern the words “sans papiers” on their banner, we wave, raise our fists awkwardly in solidarity, slip euros into the cup one of the men passes around. Furtively, I take a photo: later, I see only a dark shadow, a cloud in the foreground of polite Parisian society.
In Crimea, ethnic Ukrainians are being denounced and forced to migrate north or west, leaving behind wives, children, entire families, entire lifetimes. As did my father and my grandmother and grandfather. A constant expansion and contraction of borders, caused by the omnipresent and irresolvable tension between nation and ethnicity.
In Paris, we go to political theatre, see activist art in galleries, classical art in museums. It’s only as I’m leaving the city that I realize that almost all the work I’ve seen, and certainly all of the major gallery shows, are of male artists. A dance based on the writing of Dostoyevsky. An art show juxtaposing the writing and drawing of Artaud with the painting of Van Gogh. Henri Cartier-Bresson. Bill Viola.
A small show in the 7th by Lida Abdul is the exception. I think I discern something different in her nuanced video renderings of children playing with broken military planes in Afghanistan. The children tie strings to the the planes, pretend they are kites. “If you think you can control something, then you can, ” one of the children says.
The mood of the train loosens as we near the Spanish border. A woman sings a line or two of a song to herself; laughter bubbles up in the cafe car. There are cypress trees now, and mountains, and green everywhere. Police enter the train, I check my pocket anxiously for my passport. There is always the fear of being caught out, of not having the right papers, of not being welcomed. Colleagues of mine spent almost three months in a jail, perhaps in part for taking borders for granted. My father, the eternal refugee, was never casual about border crossings, and always broke into a sweat at the most benign of frontiers.
Russian soldiers amass along the borders of eastern Ukraine. They’ve set up land mines in a region neighbouring Crimea. There is a school, there, the children stay home.
The police on the train do not stop us, there is no border guard, no Customs. This is the EU after all! But as EU encroaches on Ukraine, austerity looms. Gas prices will go up, subsidies will go down. This may help eliminate corruption but it’s certain that its impact will be felt across all sectors, including education and the arts.
I don’t forget Berlin, just after the Wall went down. Amongst artists and activists, there was a strange sadness.
These days, no papers are immutable, no border is benign.
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