Interactions

http://polaroid41.com/interactions/

Monday, June 7th, 2021 - 12:09pm.

My son Elliot listens to a science podcast called Olma and this week’s episode was about the origin of life. French biologist Marie-Christine Maurel was the special guest and at one point the robot Olma asked her: what makes something alive ? My ears perked up. As adults, we have an intuitive understanding of what’s alive and what isn’t, but despite this fact, it’s surprisingly hard to define ‘life.’ I was curious what she would reply and anticipated something like, ‘a living being can reproduce and is made of at least one cell.’ Instead, she said, ‘a living being is in constant interaction with its environment.’

Of course, there are other criteria that make something alive, but I love that she put this first and foremost. Interaction with the world around us is a fundamental part of life: the way we breathe in and out, the way we pull our hand away from a flame, the way plants turn toward the sun, the way unicellular organisms migrate toward nutrients.

The notion that interaction is one of the most essential parts of life followed me this weekend as I went to visit friends in Paris. Lockdown is slowly lifting around France, and though we still have a 9pm curfew and the interiors of restaurants are still closed, terraces are open and outdoor seating is available. Oh the joy of sitting at a sidewalk table in a Parisian café with friends I haven’t seen in a year and a half! It feels like the city is slowly coming back to life, and we are too, right along with it.

Friday night we had dinner in a little Italian restaurant. We were thrilled to simply be together out in the world and to have someone else doing the cooking and the dishes. The waiter seemed as delighted as we were, humoring us as we all attempted to impress each other with our three words of Italian. Saturday we had lunch in the 18th where they were content to let us linger at our table till almost 4pm, well past the end of the lunch service. My friend Hélène was raving about the chocolate cake, so the waiter brought the chef to our table and he happily wrote down the recipe for her. In Paris. The chef came out to give us his recipe. Talk about a collective hunger for interaction! I could feel it everywhere we went.

On Sunday, my friend Ellen and I went to a little festival in Montreuil, an eastern suburb just outside the Paris city limits. ‘Festival’ is a big word for the modest affair that it was: an outdoor event taking place in and in support of 75 acres of urban grass and gardens, one beer stand, one food stand, one spot for frozen mango and coconut, and little concerts and performances taking place amongst the trees and flowers. Sitting in the shady grass with thirty people and listening to live music, drinking a beer in the sunshine and people watching with my friend...it was a balm for my soul. Judging from the smiles and the happy, relaxed energy all around me, it was a balm for each soul who was there that afternoon.

Walking back full of sunshine, Ellen said, “There’s a poet’s house up here on the right.” I wondered: how does she know it’s a poet’s house? Is there a sign? Or some dramatic turret or something? It turns out it was nothing as official as a plaque or as elaborate as an architectural statement: the poet simply hangs her poems and art up along her fence. That day there were three paintings, three poems and two paperback books with notes and an invitation to borrow them.

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Complete 'polaroid' - text, minicast and polaroid photo - available at: http://polaroid41.com/interactions/