Monday, February 20, 2006

Nantes 6: Three Short Poems of Varying Relevance

Le Café Porquois Pas?

The woman who, with her husband, owns this café
Sets up the chairs and tables
Out in front;
It is 36 degrees.


For Sebald

Where the hell are you buried?


Le Cathedrale de St. Pierre et St. Paul

Nantes Cathedrale is actually called Le Cathedrale de St. Pierre et St. Paul,
But secularism is the religion of the French
And they are remarkably devoted.
And so Le Cathedrale de St. Pierre et St. Paul is called Nantes Cathedrale,
Which is fine, I suppose,
Unless you are St. Pierre or St. Paul.

Saturday, February 11, 2006

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.

Saturday, February 04, 2006

Paris 5: A Mutable Feast

From in front of Gertrude Stein’s one-time apartment, through the Luxembourg Gardens, down Rue Mouffetard to the Place de Contrascarp, where one easily understands what Hemingway meant when he wrote of how difficult it is to be poor in Paris, one knows, if of a certain disposition, and with a certain history, the steps of he who wrote those words. I have read that book, that book about the thrust of what is not written, what is not spoken; that book about what is left, unpurchased on the seller’s cart, or unformed but in the mind of that man behind the circular griddle. Yes, he said, we became very good students of the avalanche that winter. And so, with a variously professed and steeping fondness for the words in that book, I accepted the offer, nearly first thing, to be guided knowingly, on that deliberate walk. It was then, in the midst of that walk, that I felt compelled to author a few words which demanded dedication to an absent companion. That book accompanied us in the autumn of a year not too long past, in our little truck, four of us, moving in and of some sense of the Gypsy spirit, some of us, but with a very certain trajectory and a very definite schedule, which, I believe, is exactly what my dear friend felt so obligated to rebel against and to, at least in his own universe, destroy, obliterate. That project, of course, in its original form may have been of some concern to those in close proximity to its progress, as will be any such project, however necessary, in real time, at the time, as we say, in the condition of that moment; for the condition of one engaged in such a project can be, will often be unsettling.

I have not forgotten, in the condition of this moment, as it did not escape me then, nor any of us traveling together, that the five o’clock shadow, the grit, if I may be forgiven such a prosaic turn of phrase, was an ativism and a sort of homage to Hemingway, or so another good friend put it, in a way as volatile then as it is amusing now. The recipient of that verdict, just the same, a little tight, undoubtedly firey, agreed and blessed the verdict tersely. Soon after that exchange, it came out that the reason that my dear friend had been wearing his right pant leg cuffed up since San Francisco was that, locked in the women’s bathroom of an Irish pub on Haight Street, he had, in his woozy aim, landed a relatively innocuous amount of vomit on the ankle of his pants. When pressed as to why he had not since then donned his other pair of pants, my dear friend replied, authoritatively, that it was because they were dirty.

I recall that autumn fondly and vividly, although, as with any period worthy of such fondness, I can count myself among good but sparing company. And I, indeed, thought of it vividly and fondly when walking streets immortalized by that book, streets called, each respectively, a part of that fête mobile.
Later that day I completed, in some sense, that deliberate walk, that secular pilgrimage, by visiting the once lending library and now only "antiquated book dealer," Shakespeare and Co. Antiquated Books. The space of that bookstore provides a formidable challenge to the discerning pilgrim, especially one wishing afterwards to communicate a worthy and lucid account of the experience of navigating through it. It must have been quieter in the 20s, or so one may be led to believe. Perhaps, however, and almost certainly, it has always been a space given primarily to the English language, both in speech and inscription. In the 20s, I believe that Shakespeare and Co. provided a haven for English-speaking writers, while today it provides such for tourists, both those who are fans of those writers and those who were visiting Notre Dame and sighted a quaint bookstore just across the Seine. The discerning pilgrim should be ginger, however, in his judgment, for the truth of such a thing in its original form, later mutated, may not be necessarily bastardized in the mutation. That is to say, there were no drunken bastards looking to borrow that day, in Shakespeare and Co., which it seems, left me disappointed, no whiskey-breath sounding and echoing from the charming, musty corners where the sagging shelves meet the rotting ceiling; and yet, I think, it is possible that drunk would still be welcome there, if with a pat on the back that one reserves for only the most novel characters.

Allow me to phrase all of this in another way. The store is gorgeous and gorgeously dense. The shelves are sagging to the point of breaking beneath the weight of so many volumes, and the cots and bunks are laid out, sincerely, it appears. And I was taken enough to photograph myself on the second floor, among the books not for sale, holding a copy of A Moveable Feast. But soon after doing so, the jarring, pious voices began to sound in my ear, and I began to feel as though I was using and being used, until that moment unwittingly, to some end not my own, but one more false, if ends can be more or less false, and more false for its apparent remoteness from some admittedly antiquated and equally constructed idea that I had myself knowingly carried into that space. "Deliver us from our unfounded accusations of inauthenticity," I would like to pray, and would have liked to have prayed, had it not been a secular pilgrimage, and yet, I felt used and using, the kind of feeling I could easily have imagined would inspire in my friend a kind of violence, if not physical, at least, and certainly, psychic or literary. That, it seems to me, is exactly why (and how) the original form is, if mutable, inarguable. The mutation of the original form, the most original form, the originary form, will not come of contestation, or argument. That mutation (which may or may not be my concern here) comes from the judgment of the source, from the source’s own judgment of itself. And that is not, by any means, to say that, in the world, the authenticity of that inarguable original form is ultimate or unquestioned, that such authenticity is not open to debate or to the tides of history. But there is something of the original form, and I mean, perhaps, and should say Original Form, that does not, in fact, in practice, even dream of subjecting itself to the judgments of authenticity found there in the world. That is what can be so bellicose about the original form / Original Form, about the project in the condition of the moment, and what can be so unsettling about the architect of such, to those in close proximity, for, of course, those in close proximity naturally tend towards subjecting the architect of such a project to just such contestation, to such judgments of authenticity. The tendency of the architect to violent response has as much to do with subjectivity, to singularity of vision as it does with a bad attitude, or in some cases, intoxication. If Shakespeare and Co., in the 20s, became known as a space from which one was not likely to be turned out, a space where the putrid breath of the drunken bastard was allowed to be exhaled, on the premise that, along with such breath, there may be released words of a singular vision, it today displays hand-lettered, poster-sized testimonials to the sentimental feelings that such a reputation has more recently inspired in its visitors. The author makes these observations, careful to avoid authoritative judgments of authenticity, on which the author has no real authority. It is merely to say that the objectified original form, subjective and singular as it originally was, is given to becoming a sort of metaphor wherein it is made analogous to its mutated form, or vice versa. It is the tendency of gnosis to become prognosis, the tendency of revelation to become orthodoxy, and of orthodoxy to resent and reject claims of revelation. The point is, the present day Shakespeare and Co. is one giant invitation to polish off a bottle and bust in, ferociously spewing definitely putrid breath and potentially singular vision, just as the present day Notre Dame is such an invitation to enter and actually try for some ecstatic religious state.

Paris 4: For Proust #2

I was preceded to your grave
By three men obviously looking for your grave.
They grumbled and looked, briefly, over their mustaches
At the glossy, grey stone,
At your name,
Before shuffling off, looking crestfallen,
Perhaps to search out another dead man.
They were disappointed, one might imagine,
To find you as you were, as you were not
Making deft and languid sense of our senses,
Of your senses,
Having no senses, presently.
Perhaps they were disappointed
By how glossy the grey stone,
Polished, reflecting chestnuts bound to branches
Stretched above their heads,
Certain that decaying slate
In a tangle of fragrant branches
Would have been more suited to their needs.
This is, after all, not about you,
All of this business of burial and
Tending to burial plots, visiting
Burial plots.
Even these words are not really about you.
Mostly, I wanted to say that
I was preceded to your grave
By three men obviously looking for your grave,
And I wanted to mention their mustaches,
And to confess that I was disappointed
By how glossy the grey stone. I would have preferred
The "tangle of fragrant branches," etc.