Here I am stumbling down some nameless Paris side street, half in the bag on a bottle and a half of wine I probably couldn’t afford but bought anyway because what the hell, life’s short and I’m already here aren’t I, and I’m hauling this ancient Kodak with a Polaroid back, juryrigged on because I’m impatient and broken and I need proof that beauty exists RIGHT NOW, not three days from now when the film comes back, when I round a corner and there it is.
A chicken lamp.
I’ve seen things. I’ve been around. I should be past the point where a glowing ceramic rooster in a shop window stops me dead in my tracks. But here’s the thing about being just drunk enough in Paris on a Wednesday afternoon: you’re vulnerable in the best possible way. Your bullshit detector is still working but your cynicism has taken a coffee break, and suddenly this ridiculous, magnificent, absurdly sincere chicken lamp is glowing in the window like some kind of barnyard deity, and I’m standing there thinking… no, KNOWING,that this is perfection.
Forget everything you’re supposed to care about. This chicken lamp, this stupid beautiful fucking chicken lamp radiating warmth through the glass, is the truth. It’s honest in a way nothing else is. It doesn’t apologize for being what it is.
All I’m thinking is I need to capture this before the moment passes, before I sober up and remember I’m supposed to be too cool for chicken lamps.
But I’m not. None of us are.
Looking from outside into an open window one never sees as much as when one looks through a closed window. There is nothing more profound, more mysterious, more pregnant, more insidious, more dazzling than a window lighted by a single candle. What one can see out in the sunlight is always less interesting than what goes on behind a windowpane. In that black or luminous square life lives, life dreams, life suffers.