1.
Come from the holy fire, perne in a gyre, And be the singing-masters of my soul.
What follows is an experiment, not unlike the one that engendered this previous post, but not really like it either; rather a combination of both, two moving charges aligned in a vector field experiencing forces perpendicular to their own velocities and to the field itself, which is magnetic and telluric, linked to specific places on the earth — in this case Paris, and, more specifically, my apartment on the Right Bank and place du Panthéon on the Left, and the complex of affinities that these two places attract and repel, which radiate in and out of them horizontally and haphazardly, and which are also buried under them, vertical strata of excavable history, temporal hatchways of hidden meaning forgotten under the paving stones, leading from the surface to the depths through this city’s sewers and springs, its catacombs and quarries, its vaults, dungeons, grottoes, cellars and metros.
All roads seem to lead to Paris these days, and as Walter Benjamin once argued, the power of the road, whether less or well travelled, is different when one is flying over it than when one is walking along it, and in the same way —
— the power of a text is different when it is read from when it is copied out. The airplane passenger sees only how the road pushes through the landscape, how it unfolds according to the same laws as the terrain surrounding it. Only he who walks the road on foot learns of the power it commands, and of how, from the very scenery that for the flier is only the unfurled plain, it calls forth distances, belvederes, clearings, prospects at each of its turns like a commander deploying soldiers at a front. Only the copied text thus commands the soul of him who is occupied with it, whereas the mere reader never discovers the new aspects of his inner self that are opened by the text, that road cut through the interior jungle forever closing behind it: because the reader follows the movement of his mind in the free flight of daydreaming, whereas the copier submits it to command. — Walter Benjamin, One-Way Street, 1928
This is this experiment, then, mere and dear reader, and how this post is written: not like Benjamin’s copying “rung by rung” but written minute by minute, in other words fast and scrambling, as we have climbed to Sunday again and I have but the narrowest foothold left and the height is making me dizzy, and I won’t take even a moment to look around for fear of becoming dizzier, for the sentences have slipped their moorings and I have a dinner to make, and there are Surrealists nearby, just a few paragraphs below.
3.
All roads seem to lead to Paris these days. We have had wave after wave after wave land with luggage on our teeming shore, an ebbless flow of friends of all categories — ours, our children’s, our friends’, our children’s friends, first-timers, frequent returners, the long lost, the barely remembered, the never met, all welcome, all wonderful, fellow feeling in full spate, seven for dinner tonight, 11 last night, 14 the night before. More tomorrow.
Endless fun. Endlessly exhausting.
Beyond Paris, off these magnetic roads, up a mountain somewhere or on an island, a quiet hamlet near nothing, near nowhere, a life elsewhere, what would it be?
Probably pretty similar.
4.
Almost went into the Pantheon for the first time in decades yesterday. To see the grands hommes buried within. Voltaire etcetera. Women too, six of them. But didn’t. Giant queue. Walked around the place du Panthéon instead, circling the square with the Canadian coast guarding John Prawn, legendary Bamphibian and Looprechaun, rescue specialist, leading seaman, “first in first out”. Proudly walking (“whom were you trying to walk like? Forget: a dispossessed”) along the newly widened sidewalk past the even longer queue of students waiting turns to enter the Bibliothèque Sainte-Geneviève.
In 1902, Stephen Dedalus was among them, doffing his Latin Quarter hat and snotgreen gloves and pretending to study medicine but with, as his brother Stanislaus tells us, “some undefined purpose, vaguely literary”, and fussing aesthetical instead night by night, sheltered from the sin of Paris and the fleshpots of Egypt, with his stuffed-up nose buried in Aristotle amidst full and half-fed brains bent under glowing green desk lamps, moths pinned to their pages, barely breathing, feelers barely beating, and in his mind’s darkness “a sloth of the underworld, reluctant, shy of brightness, shifting her dragon scaly folds.”
All day I hear the noise of waters Making moan, Sad as the sea-bird is when going Forth alone He hears the winds cry to the waters’ Monotone. The grey winds, the cold winds are blowing Where I go; I hear the noise of many waters Far below, All day, all night I hear them flowing To and fro.
There, too, a decade on, Marcel Duchamp, part-time librarian, working in the stacks to earn enough to turn his back on painting and study Poincaré instead, and dream of bottle racks and bicycle wheels, and of stopping time with lengths of string and cricket boxes, and a life in America, and a bride stripped bare by her bachelors, even.
A decade after that, Simone de Beauvoir inaugurated her new existence by ascending the stairs to the section reserved for the ladies.
We wanted a cold beer so instead approached the heavy door of the Bombardier, which Aaron of last week first opened for me (and who protested in a text that he is not a flaneur, and asked me to invite him to write an essay about why he is not, which I am now, here, officially, doing), for inside they serve real ale from their brewery in Bedford, matured in the cask from which it is dispensed and served without the use of extraneous gas, but it was shuttered and locked, and it was raining harder by then, and though most parched we were wetter still, so took refuge instead — stepping around the thin young man begging at the door — in Eglise Saint-Étienne-du-Mont, where the bones of a finger of the patron saint of Paris are kept.
I lit a candle for my father, an old habit, but this time thinking of my brother. And while the Looprechaun snapped selfies with tears in his eyes I sat in a tiny cane chair and thought about the nearby corpse of Jean-Paul Marat, and about his skin disease, and his bathtub.
Marat, the martyr of the Revolution, whose likenesses replaced crucifixes in the dechristianized churches of Paris. Who, according to his eulogist the Marquis de Sade, “like Jesus, hated kings, nobles, priests, rogues and, like Jesus, he never stopped fighting against these plagues of the people.” Who, a year later, 1795, was removed from the Panthéon, his busts and statuaries knocked from their pedestals and dumped into the sewers to shouts of “Marat, voilà ton Panthéon !” [Marat, here is your Panthéon]. A year later his coffin, and what remaining bits were undisturbed therein, was moved here, alongside those and that of Blaise Pascal and Jean Racine, and the blessed finger bones of Sainte Geneviève.
On the way out the Looprechaun gave the kneeling man at the door a two-euro coin — “a toonie” — because he’s Canadian. And nice.
5.
Thought is the thought of thought. Tranquil brightness. The soul is in a manner all that is: the soul is the form of forms. Tranquility sudden, vast, candescent: form of forms.
— James Joyce, Ulysses, 1922
Getting hungry by now, and still thirsty, and thinking of Sainte Geneviève, who never touched a drop of alcohol, and until the age of 50 ate only beans and barley bread, and that only on Mondays, Tuesdays, and Wednesdays, but who, for the latter half of her life, added fish and milk, on the orders of her bishop, but still only on Mondays, Tuesdays, and Wednesdays, for she fasted through every Thursday to Sunday.
Outside, past the high school where Foucault, Baudrillard and Deleuze went, and before them Simone Weil and Jean-Paul Sartre and Alfred Jarry and André Gide, and before them Guy de Maupassant — and after, for his last year, sent by worried parents desperate to save him from the drama teacher, Monsieur le President.
6.
We avoided the magnetic pull of the Emily in Paris apartment around the corner and instead walked further down the quietened place, where just before COVID all the parking lots were replaced by granite picnicking slabs, and bicycles can now go in every direction, and cars are dissuaded by one-way streets and a 20 kmph cap — and thereupon I did point my index finger, which, alas, as yet, does not blaze with celestial fire, at this plaque on the Hôtel des Grandes Hommes:
And this is where the idea of the experiment started. For as Paul Virilio once said, “every city has its winged man”, to which I add an unhinged man, and in 1919 those two men were magnetically charged into one “single author with two heads and a double gaze”: André Breton and Philippe Soupault.
Breton: “We came back from the war, of course, but what we didn't come back from was what was then known as brainwashing, which for four years had turned people who wanted nothing more than to live, and — with rare exceptions — to get along with their fellow human beings, into haggard, crazed beings who were not only easy to work with but could also be decimated at will.”
Les champs magnetiques— Magnetic Fields. “Psychic automatism in its pure state.” Breton and Soupault spent eight to ten consecutive hours a day diligently refraining from “correcting and erasing our rants”, and by so doing casting words off their moorings and revealing the subterranean forces beneath their conscious selves.
At the end of the first day, they had written about 50 pages. Breton saw little difference between their output, except “Soupault's were less static than mine [...] Each [of us] continued his soliloquy, without seeking to derive any particular dialectical pleasure from it or to impose the slightest bit on his neighbour.”
After a few days of this hallucinations set in. After eight days Breton quit. Soupault continued for another week, and then he too lost the “desire to write a dangerous book any further.”
7.
“Every street is precipitous. It leads downward — if not to the mythical Mothers, then into a past that can be all the more spellbinding because it is not his own, not private.” — Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project, 1927-1940
My experiment, then. I’m not crazy about the results. If I had more time I could structure it more, flesh it out, give it a sturdier scaffolding, in order to draw, like Benjamin, the most vital aspects of the past into my net. But the guests want to see the sights and I have to hunt down provisions for tonight’s dinner: roasted garlic and butternut soup; roasted sweet onion and beetroot salad with fiore di latte and chili crisp oil; magret de canard with potatoes done somehow and accompanied with something else; cheese and salad; not sure what for dessert. Wine. Maybe a sniff ot two of cognac.
According to Breton, his first attempt at automatic writing with Soupault apparently sucked too, except for one line:
Fleur de laque jésuite dans la tempête blonde....
Jesuit lacquer flower in the blonde storm....
“That Jesuit in the blonde storm haunted me, making me think I hadn't entirely wasted my time.”
I hope I haven’t wasted yours.
I’ll leave you with two last things, neither of them mine, both copied, but not in the Benjaminian sense. Copy and pasted. First, something from Les champs magnetiques: “Glace sans tain” (“One-Way Mirror”):
The window dug into our flesh opens onto our heart. You see an immense lake where, at midday, golden dragonflies come to rest, fragrant as peonies. You see this great tree where animals go to look at each other: we've been pouring drinks into it for centuries. Its gullet is drier than straw, and the ash deposits there are immense. We laugh too, but we mustn't look for long without long-sightedness. Anyone can pass through this bloody corridor where our sins hang, delicious pictures, where grey dominates, however.
All we have to do is open our hands and our chests to be as naked as this sunny day. ‘You know that tonight there's a green crime to be committed. How little you know, my poor friend. Open that door wide, and tell yourself that it's completely dark, that the day has died for the last time.’
And this, the parable of the faithful servant in Luke, which set the young Geneviève on her course towards sainthood:
"Let your waist be dressed and your lamps burning. Be like men watching for their lord, when he returns from the marriage feast; that, when he comes and knocks, they may immediately open to him. Blessed are those servants, whom the lord will find watching when he comes. Most certainly I tell you, that he will dress himself, and make them recline, and will come and serve them. They will be blessed if he comes in the second or third watch and finds them so. But know this, that if the master of the house had known in what hour the thief was coming, he would have watched, and not allowed his house to be broken into. Therefore be ready also, for the Son of Man is coming in an hour that you don't expect him."
Peter said to him, ‘Lord, are you telling this parable to us, or to everybody?’
The Lord said, ‘Who then is the faithful and wise steward, whom his lord will set over his household, to give them their portion of food at the right times? Blessed is that servant whom his lord will find doing so when he comes. Truly I tell you, that he will set him over all that he has. But if that servant says in his heart, 'My lord delays his coming,’ and begins to beat the menservants and the maidservants, and to eat and drink, and to be drunken, then the lord of that servant will come in a day when he isn't expecting him, and in an hour that he doesn't know, and will cut him in two, and place his portion with the unfaithful. That servant, who knew his lord's will, and didn't prepare, nor do what he wanted, will be beaten with many stripes, but he who didn't know, and did things worthy of stripes, will be beaten with few stripes. To whomever much is given, of him will much be required; and to whom much was entrusted, of him more will be asked.’
So dress your waist, light your lamps, and don’t do stripe-worthy things. For your guests are at the door. And it is dinner time.
PS. Jesus probably won’t be making it. Nothing personal.
Don’t forget to tell me something in the comments, or pop a like in my like box, or, what the hell, a few sous in my boite de souscription, which is here:
Agairn you have nailed the baby to the headboard, while we, still lounging in our flannels, hence the description flanneleur, a made up word for one who wanders about the house in his flannel pyjamas, scrape enquiringly around our mouth for the missing spoonfuls of breakfast, breakfast that refused to go down, breakfast that no matter how hard he tried, could not be swallowed, thereby raising the alarm agairn for a third cup of coffee, which is entirely understandable as he drinks decaf, which any fool can tell you contains a small percentage of caffeine, necessitating consuming quantities of decaf to get to any semblance of a caffeine reprieve from reality.
In other words, I love as much as I understood, me uneducated in the romance languages. The gist is the universal story of the last good man, a story that I know, all too well.