Weka Went Walking
Photo 18: Paris
Paris is a great place for weka.
I know this because of a children’s book on our shelves1…
One Weka Went Walking…
out to explorePage by page, as children’s books do, we learn what weka—out walking—saw, heard, ate, touched, spied (etc).
We wandered Paris like weka. Usually, with a particular destination in mind, but always with the expectation that the walk itself would deliver discoveries, experiences, views, tastes (etc). Like the weka in the storybook, it’s what you encounter along the way…
Such as, for example, the gents in the photo above…spied as we made our way down to the river; recreating for us a painting by Cézanne:
And bringing to mind another Frenchman, poet Charles Baudelaire, who wrote:
What strange phenomena we find in a great city, all we need do is stroll about with our eyes open.
It was Charles Baudelaire who gave us the concept of a flâneur (f: flâneuse)…
A person who strolls the city in order to experience it.
In the Hague (if ever you wander that way) there’s a sculpture of a flâneur:
True flânerie, of course, has no destination: you’re not off to work, you’re not shopping. In fact you are—apparently—‘escaping capitalist control’2.
The words on the sculpture, however, are not political. They simply say I see around, and smile…
We were just a couple of weka, out walking, in Paris.
Seeing around, and smiling.
Next week: Every Picture Tells a Story
More that may interest you from Charles Baudelaire…
One should always be drunk. That's all that matters; that's our one imperative need. So as not to feel Time's horrible burden that breaks your shoulders and bows you down, you must get drunk without ceasing.
But what with? With wine, with poetry, or with virtue, as you choose. But get drunk.3
One Weka Went Walking, written by Kate Preece, with beautiful illustrations by Pippa Ensor. A gift—an objet d’art—for Jude from children’s literature authority (and sister) Rosemary Tisdall.
According to German intellectual Walter Benjamin
https://poets.org/poem/be-drunk
Fabulous referencing to the book!! Bit behind in my reading... for some reason :)
Loved this, I can picture you doing those various meanderings.
What a delicious photograph! I think they were smiling inside.