Personal tachygraphy: First page of the Diary of Samuel Pepys, written in cipher.
FOREWORD
I believe in the flesh and the appetites,
Seeing, hearing, feeling, are miracles,
and each part and tag of me
is a miracle.
– Leaves of Grass, Walt Whitman
My Adventures with la Belle Jeune Fille is the cultural, epicurean and amatory diary of Monsieur le New York Flâneur, as told to the author.
I met le Flâneur in my peripatetic forays among the natives and inhabitants of the Island of Manhattan and its surrounding environs. I immediately marked his inquisitive nature, his Whitmanesque talk-to-strangers garrulousness and canine striving-to-please-ing-ness. In a word, we connected.
Being new to New York, I welcomed his friendship, and I established a rapport with this subtle urbanite, who shared with me the details of his “life of the mind” over the course of an eventful year. Learning of my aptitude for “blogging,” he asked that I act in surrogate as his recordist: I consented with alacrity.
Le Flâneur informs me that his is meant to complete a triad of diaries set in several of the Great Western Cities, its catalytic seats of culture, after Samuel Pepys (London) and Anaïs Nin (Paris), diarists of the Paper Age. My Adventures, he tells me, should be the first and representative literary diary of the Twenty-first Century, the culmination of civilization’s story so far, recounted at the narcissistic moment of the setting sunset of the exhausted, atomizing West.
Pepys encrypted his diary to protect its contents, and further semi-encrypted the naughty bits. That he wasn’t a “Consequential Man” is entirely the point: Pepys enabled his readers to travel through time and space to vicariously experience an imperfect man’s life. His entry of 1 November 1665 is a self-effacing self-assessment and reflection on luck and labor in life:
… a man’s life, and how little merit doth prevail in the world, but only favour – and that for myself, chance without merit brought me in, and… diligence only keeps me so, and will….
Nin’s Twentieth Century diaries chronicled her life among intellectuals, including Henry Miller, author of the humorous, sometimes erotic novel Tropic of Cancer. The erotica in her collaborative, venal Delta of Venus was, she claimed her patron complained, too literary, and too venial. I daresay that he wouldn’t be disappointed by le Flâneur’s venery in either regard.
My Adventures also sins creatively, including excerpted poetry, literature, music (paper regrettably less accommodating than electronic media), dance and art, as well as references to le Flâneur’s diet and la Belle Jeune Fille’s exuberant cuisine. And then there’s the small matter of the wreckage of le Flâneur’s personal life – the dissolution of his marriage and his concomitant, profound emotional bereavement.
The reader will note names of the quick and the dead in boldface. Le Flâneur, I’ve learned, is less interested in events than in people, and he populates his narrative with the many unique and talented New Yorkers he’s met and befriended, compared to whom, he assures me, he is most unworthy. Without them, he confesses, his story would be undimensional.
Le Flâneur’s ditton, he tells me, is Memento Vivere – “Remember to Live,” and he is resolved that it would be absurd to keep a diary in which the living part was glossed or, worse, omitted. Commencing Walden, Henry David Thoreau wrote,
I went to the woods because I wanted to live deliberately,
I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life, to put
to rout all that was not life and not when I had come to die
discover that I had not lived.
In this spirit, My Adventures contains its blushing “pink pages.” To be candid, le Flâneur’s detailed descriptions of ses affaires sexuelles (in French, translated verso into English) with la Belle Jeune Fille seemed at first to me to be a bit forward. He, however, insists that readers – present and future – receive an accurate account of the actual, intimate acts of two real people really in love, and that, to his knowledge, no pubished diarist has done this in such detail before. Here, Georges Bataille’s matter-of-factory-fictional Histoire de l’oeil is a relevant historical benchmark, and the following observation by poet/activist Audre Lorde is also germane:
We tend to think of the erotic as an easy, tantalizing sexual arousal. I speak of the erotic as the deepest life force, a force which moves us toward living in a fundamental way….
Having met la Belle Jeune Fille, I can confirm that she is, as le Flâneur boasts, a Smoking Hot Ptitsa. Readers who don’t like sex, which becomes more voluminous and explicit as the year progresses, can skip les pages rouges.
Despite its apparent length, My Adventures with la Belle Jeune Fille is a breezy chronolog, covering a year and a day (actually 120 days) with only three pages per day – at least one with a picture: those by le Flâneur denoted by fleurs-de-lis; those by la Belle Jeune Fille by hearts.
Of course, the reader may conclude, with the obvious exception of actual events cited, that My Adventures with la Belle Jeune Fille is mere mindwoven gossamer (although a nine-month bout with Molluscum contagiosum might be considered adequate proof), that the sex is hyperbolic (and that no guy is so lucky as to receive daily medolingus and fellatio), that le Flâneur is, in fact, the author, thinly veiled, etc. Such notions would be mistaken. Everything in My Adventures is exactly true, as I hereby aver, may lightning strike me down.
His ultimate objective, le Flâneur tells me, is, à la Pepys, to be read 400 years from now, and he’s told me to convey his kind regards to the literate, if any, of 2412 and beyond. Until then, I winkingly incant his daily closing Quelqu’un doit le faire, because, as I say, someone has to do this.
David St.-Lascaux
New York
11 November 2011
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