Robert Fripp's Diary

Hotel Quite Acceptable Paris Here

Hotel Quite Acceptable, Paris.

Here to accompany & support T on a project she has underway. Backtracking --

Sunday 22nd. February: Our taxi driver from Chiswick to Waterloo was a British Asian & very concerned with the possibility of "cheap labour" coming to the UK from 10 countries entering the EU in May.

In Paris, much walking, as is always the case when I am with my Wife. This is, partly, an instinctive form she has developed to deal with dyslexia: physical activity fires up the neural pathways between the anterior & posterior cerebellum that, with dyslexia, do not properly speak to each other. There is also an instinctive sense that the body needs to be set in motion.

Each street we walked, dog shit everywhere.

One of the few occasions where I have witnessed the effectiveness of legislation, and that within days of the legislation taking effect, was the banning of dog droppings in NYC (1978?). An extreme public nuisance, it disappeared if not overnight, then within a week.

12.10 From Travis Metcalf's GC Diary for Saturday --

awesome beginner's circle this morning. We worked on a number of circulation exercise that I found most illuminating. The crux of it is that I clearly Felt the difference between passing notes and playing notes in sequence. I could feel notes travelling around the circle. more importantly i could feel where they were stopping. Even though the next player played 'in time', I could tell when something was actually being passed and when it wasnt.

Within my own experience, I discovered that I could be in one of two places, I could either focus on the big pattern (while passing two circulations in opposite directions) and play my notes when they were supposed to be played, or I could be in a state where i was actually receiving and passing notes. I discovered I don't have the ability to be in both places simultaneously. Yet. I think this is the key to Circulation --

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An observation regarding the verbal recapitulation of experience in words: As I re-read the above paragraphs, I realize that already my memory of the experience is arranging itself around the verbal re-telling, becoming a linguistic narrative, rather than the memory of the feeling of the experience.

Travis touches on several important issues here. Two very brief comments:

1. Because we rarely sense the reality of an event, ie what is actually going on, doesn't mean it isn't going on. It simply means that we don't know or feel or sense what's going on.
2. And, when we attempt to retrieve the reality of an experience, unless we are in the same place, we won't be able to.

17.45 Paris is a city where people meet to consensually blow smoke over each other.

I have just been to the hotel library + bar, to compute over coffee, and was driven out by an unwillingness to breath in the wafting fumes of addiction. I support the right of people to smoke, noting that smokers have little effective choice in the matter anyway. But inhaling exhaled smoke is non-consensual on my side. I support both smoke-free public zones and public smoking zones. But where there is only one shared public space, I suggest that puffing is best sited outside