Paris 1: Montparnasse Cemetery

In mid-winter hours approaching dawn, Gare Montparnasse is capable of offering little defense against the shocking truth of temperature. Whatever wind is deterred by the outer structures and sparing sliding doors is equally matched by the way in which the overall design seems to focus, to direct the remaining winds through the spaces of the station. It was that shocking truth that I realized when, for fear of that early morning cold, I briefly balked at the exit, wondering if it might not be better to wait inside until the dawn fully broke over the six-story buildings of Montparnasse. That is, it was already too late for bodies like mine, sliding into the frigid morning, to hault. It seems a strange design, at the time as much as in retrospect, to visit, in such a state, a cemetery, for as the day would mature, in time, bodies in motion, active and detemined, citizens and visitors, by incidental friction and purposeful navigation, would come to create a sort of heat, a distinctly urban phenomenon of some collective thermal byproduct; but in Montparnasse Cemetery, as in any cemetery, there is of course a profound absence of such a phenomenon. Still, minor salvation became of timing, as the sun began to crest Paris’ low buildings in time to color the monuments with a sort of early-morning mercy orange, not quite firey, but at least of a color associated with heat. But not the heat of bodies.

There are buried in Montparnasse what one might call “people of note,” people of fame. The plots of these people are visited with with varying frequency and their memories are given devotion with varying degrees of interest and physicality: potted plants, stuffed animals, and framed, sketched portraits for Serge Gainsborg, a note for either John-Paul Sartre or Simone de Beauvoir that reads: “Merci pour toi livre.” Which livre was left unspecified, but the unseeing eyes of those two in repose paused to make no distinction. I used the opportunity of standing in front of the latter monument to a make a confession to the unhearing ears of Sartre, though I am certain he could care less. As cold as I was, I rather empathized, and moved on.

I already cannot remember if I made this observation of Montparnasse Cemetery, or of Miséricorde Cemetery in Nantes, but one of the two, and perhaps both, distinguishes itself immediately from American cemeteries with which I am familiar, though not yet too familiar, by the fact that the main route into it and through it is actually a route through it. As it opens, as an entrance / exit, on one side, so it does the same on the other side. In this arrangement, while the Cemetery still stands to represent certain definite ends, the certain, definite, respective ends of all whose mutable and muted forms are laid therein, the cemetery space, when arrange as such, is no end for those who can, or must, move along the ground. Each monument, by the turns they are allowed to take, in this arrangement, is then even more a monument. Each shrine, built for ruin the more complex, once bold and then delicate beneath time’s heavy hands, visited incidentally, in unprostrated, uninvested, daily convenience-devotion, rises and rises again on respective horizons, however, elegant, always brutely physical in all of its stone and cement and geometry, standing in the stead of the once body beneath it now gone to vapors and fragment. The casual passerby, passing through, carries with her some notable element of the living world, some element wholly absent from the single entrance / exit cemetery. For in this arrangement, there are, walking among the dead, those with no concern for the dead, those not originally, or presently, concerned with the dead, all intermingling, if not interacting, with those present in mourning, and those present to leave sketched portraits or to make confessions to the unhearing, in partial jest, or those present merely in order to say that they were once present. Here, in this arrangement, there is: “I was once present in Montparnasse Cemetery, among so many shrines to the dead,” and also: “I walk to work thorough Montparnasse Cemetery, among so many shrines to the dead.” Therefore, it is perhaps rash to say that there is a profound lack of the phenomenon of the incidental heat of bodies in motion, in passing, in Montparnasse Cemetery, but the morning, still, was cold, and the ears, still, unhearing.