Tagh, l'explorateur

At a special hour of the day in Paris—in the late spring it comes when barefoot people in parks are enjoying sunlight that wasn’t there a month ago and the warm feeling against the arms of city walkers is still a surprise—those who have made it to the Place Contrascarpe for an evening glass of Voignier witness something special. This is the hour that Tagh, the explorer, arrives at the place on his camouflaged scooter to put on a show before them.

As his epithet suggests, Tagh is an urban explorer. Though the dried palm branches adorning his yellow scooter lend the vehicle a disguise more appropriate for a desert safari, Tagh continually returns to Place Contrascarpe to pursue his explorations. The steady flow of patrons in and out of the busy cafes provides Tagh with a constant influx of new species to discover. Tagh slowly approaches the seated guests, holding a pair of binoculars to his eyes with one hand and a notebook in the other—Tagh takes copious notes on his surroundings. Occasionally Tagh returns to his scooter, steps up onto the seat and peering off into the horizon through a telescope, surveys the terrain ahead.

Tagh, the explorer, is more than the average street performer. Unlike the accordion player in the metro performing next to an upturned hat that passively awaits loose change, Tagh holds a fake pistol to the backs of the café customers, demanding his payment. Those who comply toss their coins into a cigar box in Tagh’s outstretched hand.

Still, there is something other than the audacity to hold a crowded café at gunpoint that makes Tagh remarkable. Tagh’s service to the city of Paris extends beyond the careful gathering of foreign specimens; he instructs those who visit its sights in the art of observation.

Observation can be easily dismissed as the default activity following the opening of the eyes. Sitting by the fountain at Luxembourg Gardens, however, I realized that to refine the skills of observation actually takes a great deal of discipline and practice. I watched the children playing with their boats in the water and watched the parents that watched over them. (Or, to revise, I’ll say I looked at them, because for some reason the word “look,” to me, implies that the action begins at me and moves toward the subjects of my gaze, whereas “watch” begins with them and approaches me. I make this distinction because, from my seat in the garden with my journal propped open over my knee, I caught myself trying to project my interpretation of what was going on before me with the aim of pulling together some touchingly meaningful piece of writing like Adam Gopnick does so beautifully in Paris to the Moon.) The nascent journalist in me, concerned with writing the truth, quickly put an end to my temptation to jump to meaningful, yet false, conclusions.

Instead, I set out to describe the scenes as they were actually playing out in front of me. My journal from this read something like “little girl in a yellow dress prods at red and white boat with a stick” or “priest walks with a young girl wearing translucent black plants.” I tried to be as objective as possible, omitting that I thought the girl with the priest was quite attractive—it is a fact that one could see through her pants. As a constant seeker of the significance of things—one who interprets a cold as not just a lapse in the immune system, but also the shifting of fate and a haircut as a metaphor for personal evolution—it is hard for me to extract pure reality from my interpretation of it. After a few rounds of jotting down verbs and nouns accompanied by only the most necessary adjective, observations came more easily. And, at risk of making my experiment sound more important that it really was, other things came more easily as well.

The moment in which you dismiss yourself from the task of evaluating another culture and allow yourself to just look at it—no, watch it—is itself a special hour of the day. It results in a kind of openness that is at first as uncomfortable as having your mouth propped open at the dentist. You fight it at first but then submit, discovering that it requires almost no effort at all to stay open and allow the necessary improvements to transpire.

At no point in his show does Tagh present a hypothesis or draw a conclusion. He is forever operating in the data-gathering phase of the scientific method. And he does this so skillfully as to almost slip under the radar of the audience, who are lost in their own observations of him. “I didn’t realize until later,” my sister, Emily, said during a conversation we were having about our mutual appreciation for Tagh and his performance. “I’m not watching Tagh,” she announced. “Tagh is watching me.”