DEATH AND THE CITY
It’s almost three months since I made my first appearance on Substack, descending gingerly from the novelist’s ivory tower I’d been content to look down from for years and vowing to walk the streets like Baudelaire’s flâneur, sauntering for the sheer joy of it, absorbing the spectacle of urban multitudinousness. That was not an entirely true account of what has always drawn me to the city’s streets and was beckoning to me again. Catastrophe is what brings the morbidly curious to the city - the excitement of life when it is most imperilled - and while I have never been a stranger to morbidity, age has made me more in thrall to it than ever. Drinking deep of the very thing I dread, I pause at every memorial - a park bench fondly recalling a lost friend or lover, a makeshift shrine of faded flowers or soft toys placed on the spot where someone dear was run over, stabbed or shot down, a grand or puny commemoration of calamity ages old or dating only from yesterday. The more vibrant a city’s life, the more it pulses with the imminence of death. So for every hour I spend like Baudelaire, sitting cross-legged at a corner cafe, sipping absinthe and vaping a Gauloise, lost in the multifariousness of the streets, I spend two more in ghoulish pursuit of transience, tracking my own ghost. . .
But stop…. Such gloominess does not come gratis. To keep me macabre company on this and other journeys - and in the hope not least, that with you as a companion and encourager I will grow to be more verdant and even mirthful - I must ask you to become a paid subscriber….