Brussels 1: The Palais de Justice

I learned a few years ago that the Palais de Justice in Brussels is the site of the largest collection of stone blocks anywhere in Europe, that it is in fact larger than the Parthenon. This is not difficult to believe for any who have seen it, for any who have attempted to consume it, by sight or by step. It is a strange phenomenon indeed, and unique to human beings, the desire to erect structures that are so far beyond our needs and even, seemingly, beyond our means. There is a certain and certainly fascinating lack of logic in this desire, in this tendency. It has been said that such structures, so immense, somehow contain within them their very ruin, that it is, in effect, impossible to defend such enormous constructions against assailants of any type, that however monumental, however seemingly sturdy and permanent, with each meter, with each additional stone, there is introduced one more degree of vulnerability. Indeed, although this is perhaps beside the stated point, such tremendously sized structures as Brussel’s Palais de Justice are, in fact, difficult to consume, by sight or by step, and so are difficult to police, to monitor, to differentiate within. There is, of course, the space and the spaces, the incredible height and the innumerable hallways. But there is, even more striking, the effect that such space and such spaces have on those negotiating the space, occupying the spaces, those who consider themselves somewhat familiar with certain hallways and certain rooms, for reasons of employment, of incident or habit. It seems to me, and I admit here if not a total anthropocentrism, at least the leaning on empirical crutches, that within confined spaces, within buildings public or private, there are certain expectations of interaction which are not, I will note, necessarily involved in matters of etiquette and so are not expectations as of learned, appropriate behaviors; rather, I mean to say that there are common traits to be easily noted among most interactions, even those simple interactions “in passing” that occur within the walls of a building of really any kind. And even more, there are certain expected patterns of interaction within the walls of a building that can extend to and affect even those not directly involved in said interaction. It seems that the very size of a structure like the Palais de Justice alters the make-up, the arrangement of whatever elements compose these structures of interaction, whether anthropo- or meta-, whether logical or physical.

Eerily, one can note a nearly constant occurrence of sound, of human murmuring or shuffling, when in the relatively more open spaces of the Palais de Justice, and yet, more eerily, I never witnessed anyone making these sounds. Those people whom I passed, or saw from a distance, in fact seemed silent and indeed, whether at a great distance or in passing, there seems an abnormal and inexplicably imposed distance between the occupants. One would have little difficulty convincing oneself that the distant, anonymous figures appearing erratically are but specters of the more commonly witnessed physical human form, moving about like the white-collar workers of some afterlife, maintaining files on the souls in purgatory, silently handling the mute claims of lost souls, unblinking in the vast, dim corridors where filing cabinets and desks sit unused but apparently conceived and designed for just such neglect, as though each piece of seemingly misplaced furniture was manufactured with a fine film of dust already on it, its sole purpose to silently mark the distance between itself and nothing in particular, each one’s own ruin figured overtly into its very design. I passed a courtroom door, its circular, almost nautical window betraying three figures within: a sexless judge seated just above and facing an anonymous defendant and his advocate. I passed again, apprehensively. They seemed to admit no sound themselves, but merely and so subtly, they mimed to the murmuring soundtrack softly echoing in the space behind me. I passed two young people sharing and amorous moment on a crooked but sturdy bench, as though the Palais de Justice was their perfect and habitual place of romantic rendezvous, and yet, they seemed, like the rest, for their conspicuous silence, not to be there at all. And in fact, on my second pass, not long thereafter, they were not they are all. Their claim, perhaps, was ready to be heard in some silent, ethereal court, their passion expressionlessly interrupted, I imagined, although I of course witnessed no change in location or activity, for I had been following the faint echoing of doors closing to unoccupied offices set in fading evening light, seen through open doors, Brussels alive in the distance through filmy windows, alive and in motion, seemingly so very far below; certainly so very far below. I could not help but to wonder, standing in and walking through the queerly equanimitous spaces of the Palais de Justice, the Palace of Equanimity itself, if there might be some explanation which could be offered in terms of physics, for the seemingly inhuman pacing, for the strange aural phenomena. We know that time itself is, after all, relative, that at greater distances from the Earth, the very pacing of time itself, that element that we so often accept as absolute, in fact slows down. It is no longer enough, once one keeps this fact in mind, to assume that those moments which seem to us “out of step,” those hours which seem to stretch on beyond their standard quantity, seems as such solely because of one’s mood or one’s expectations. That is to say, it is well within the realms of possibility that certain physical locales do, in objective truth, and by their physicality, act upon the very rate of moments passing. Would it not then be the case that at a certain, discrete, physical point, within certain spaces where this phenomenon might be noted, there is the potential for some type of cumulative effect? I believe it is likely, but likely unquantifiable. And still, how many agents act profoundly upon us daily by their cumulative tendencies which, in a single moment, “in passing,” are left all but undetectable, and most definitely unquantifiable? Memory itself falls into this category, if I may be forgiven the very contradiction that is the use of such a term. That is, at any given moment, can one say how many memories one is accumulating, or how many memories are affecting the moment in which one is living? Yet one could deny neither this accumulation, nor this effect.

The construction of the Palace lasted for over twenty years, so that the completed monument was never seen by the architect Joseph Poelaert, who died four years shy of its completion. I had read of numerous architectural anomalies that are said to exist within the Palace, stairwells leading to dead ends, hallways opening on hallways leading only to dead ends, doorless rooms, and tales of people who have over the years used these forgotten spaces to run covert businesses, and even a legend of the Freemasons making use of some remote, otherwise unused corridor. It is significant, or so it seems to me, that of all the accounts, the legends I have come across, none touch on the metaphysical, the supernatural; there are no Palais de Justice ghost stories. I say that this is significant because while the strange spaces of the Palais de Justice certainly leave room for this sort of imaginative mythmaking, it seems that all of its realities are deep and spectral enough, that the people who occupy its spaces are always already under some spell of its arrangement so much so that mere observations are hazy and surreal enough to convey the sort of sense of a haunted place. It has been haunted by ephemeral business operations, it is haunted by discarded furniture and distant, vague juridical hearings. It is haunted by the real passing of real things, by the twilight of its own design and the magnitude of its own construction. It is, in effect, too large to act and be acted upon, dwelt within, in an everyday fashion, but too constructed, too enclosed to retain the qualities of a mundane or urban public space and will remain as such until the time external to it or circumstances of the world reclaim it in the name of constant, regular time; that is, until it falls into the ruin that it always already contains. When walking along the exterior of the Palace, at the front or the sides, one can note the uncanny way that its uppermost structures move or refuse to move along in the sky. It seems, even from this angle, to resist the normal rates of physicality. Imagine the way in which tall buildings of any average breadth seem to perpetually lean, as in the action of leaning, due either to the motion of clouds beyond it, or to the play of the viewer’s pace of step. The Palais de Justice does not act in this way, but instead has more the effect of a mountain, seeming all at once much closer for its enormity and impossibly distant for the hazy blue quality that the atmosphere affects upon such forms. Just as this quality can be so beautiful in the sight of a mountain, it seems uncanny in the case of the Palais de Justice, for the very disparity between its presence, and the fact that the Palace has come to be by human hands. It behaves, in these ways, like the very ghost of itself, like the very real forebearing of what will of itself remain.