Sailing through the lush fields, righteous like a minister scampering out the side door at No. 10, looking for somewhere private to spread a small portion of the body’s never-ending secretions, its self-assertion, its battle to distract the wobbly mind obsessed with the endless pronouncements we call thoughts. You must piss! the body rages, continuing to secrete fluids long after we die. We’re all water, a poet said which makes me an enormous marmite sloshing with soup somewhere south of Paris. I wander into the bushes near a centre sportif and water the plants, accompanied by various groans and huzzahs from the other side of the fence. A player scored a goal over there. I cheer them on, a fan in the cheap seats. Where the hell am I ?
Wild, urban mushrooms sprout at my feet. Are they real, are they poisonous, am I hallucinating ? Questions. I totter and decide to leave them for the small creatures. Even if they are tasty, if I go down that far, chances are I’m not coming back.
What am I doing here ? Why did I get off the tram or was it the train. Ah, I live here. Memory blackout : I’m taking care of someone’s bêtes, dog, cat and turtle, while she prances around Lyon with the grandkids. But now, in these early hours, I must find my way back to this place that isn’t mine for the next seven days. Where is it ? No idea. I check my back pocket. Keys still there. That’s what we’re fond of calling progress : I have the keys but no idea where the building is or even, if you or Sean O’Handful walked up and stuck a micro in my face, the name of the town. It has a name and a reputation for being welcoming to artists and temporary types like myself.
The Unbearable Lego-Narcissicism of Contemporary Architecture
My immediate, slightly malevolent impression is that this nameless ville south of Paris is tearing itself apart. I don’t mean in the gleeful afternoon-television American way of emotional déchirement over romance or racial matters, I mean construction booms are everywhere and the old places are falling like clay pigeons. Progress again. Slightly surer on my pontoons after two shots of expresso, I decide to wander around for a closer look. When did I become Dostoevski’s ‘eternally ungrateful biped’? What exactly do I have against the house pictured above ? Surely not its declaration of rude apartness or its comically sinister affectations ? I’ve been practicing those two my whole life. Its latent silliness may be its saving grace. Time to reconsider the amoral precepts sloshing around the old den of sin. I’m gearing up for one of those attacks of analytical panic critics believe invest their words with intellectual panache. Of course it isn’t true but it makes their reputation. Maybe there’s something worth nosing about here, maybe not….
Modern apartments hover everywhere at twisting angles - one of them flashing 99.9 SUD Radio on the roof like some secret resistant code for the banlieu - I’d better sit again, I’m losing it. This concrete bollard on a street with an abandoned garage on one side and a pointless pile of cement going up on the other will do. I scratch myself in all the favored places and perform a few Chinese exercises on the cranium. “Sweating / like rain & came to my chair/ weak and trembling/ wondering if I’m crazy at last.” That’s Kerouac, finally laying off the bodhisattva business in his last poem.
In between the chaos all around me is a subtle labyrinth where old and new face off in amiable opposition : lanes, passages, quirky impasses where new houses sit next to tottering relics that may or may not be abandoned but which possess calamitous beauty, the defiance of fate. A very temporary halt to hostilities has been declared. That struggle to hang on, to perish with dignity and become a kind of humus for whatever comes later, is my grand theory, which is all well and good except for the fact of the universal déplacement overtaking the world, the undeniable tide of disruptive replacement which encourages us to forget everything.
Seek treasures in ruins, said old Rumi, another believer in liquid enlightenment. He, however, never tried to keep a camera steady.
Innovation and Preservation
I plunge into Nameless Town’s side streets, curiously close to the peripherique expressway on one side, backed up against City Hall on the other. No doubt plans are being drawn up as we speak to level the entire area. I have no objection to that, it can all go in one swoop as long as they call in an architect like Marinetti or Soleri to remake the place. They won’t. They’ll put up more apartment dungeons designed by a content, well-paid weasel at the drafting table who tweaks contemporary modalities of social function. Architects should be taken out and thrashed until they repent, no matter how many times it takes.
A word about the lord and master of the town in the early days as Paris expanded to the south : no one knows much except that he lived in the house below. He was a Crimean vet who returned to Paris one leg lighter in 1856 and built his modest mansion on the property that forms the nexus of the town. Rumors circulate about him detaching his wooden leg to weild it on the servants, but natives are content to let history rot like an old log and couldn’t give a hang.
Many prominent artists, scientists and anarchists lived and are living in the town. There must be plaques for them somewhere but I haven’t found any yet. Our only concern is the theory that the past could exist in uneasy harmony with the present - it does - and indeed with a projective future. What would that look like ? Remakes of old Westerns are never as good as the originals.
Here are more of the old structures and mysterious fronts in the town with no name. As you can see it’s collapsing slowly, without labor, fighting gravity by attaining a sort of absentminded beauty. It can’t last of course, I’m not blind. In any case, reality intervenes, in the form of a shuttered restaurant. I should take the hint it offers, I suppose, but there are greater, more brutal surprises in store.
The modern world proposes we forget all old craftsmanship in our rush to erect slabs that house defined minimums of displaced people. (Who displaced them ? We all know the answer to that, even if we only admit it late at night, when lights are low.) Some of the French, to their immense credit, actually struggle with this issue, the triple whammy of terrorist attacks, the fire at Notre Dame followed by a return of the plague in the shape of COVID, provoking an upsurge in traditional building crafts among the young. (See the Compagnons du Devoir.) Ruined churchs are being rebuilt using ancient techniques, which must be a fantastic thing to watch even if we admit it can only be a sort of test, an echo that we hope provokes new ambitions in our increasingly dark time.
In short, we need new wooden balconies, subtle and scary, made to new designs and specifications, even if they provoke a sharp jolt of uneasiness in the man or woman about to take their first step onto them. One should risk one’s life every day, it keeps you in shape. The Age of Concrete is over.
The wrecking ball : symbol of modernity itself. A pendulous metal demon, an angry god, ignorant but powerful, who jerks into action when tortured by electrical current. Sound familiar ? This one is in revolt, threatening to bury the men below in the pit. They’re finished digging up the past. Now it’s the future they’re tearing to shreads.
Modernism, Pre-Millennial or After
Here below a fleshy panorama of Paris suburbs, with modernism from the heyday of the GoGo 80s and 90s in the form of an obscene glass eyeball that surveils the town at all hours, glaring at the Old Hotel across the way, while a little further, one of the new class has constructed his all-too-modest red house out of suddenly fashionable wood. It may be a sacred and perverse belief of our epoch that man is incapable of saving himself and so the trees will have to do it for us but a house so repellently boring as this one will save no one. Count on it that the man who built it runs a start-up in one of the smart districts.
Rescued from Himself
The brocante or fleamarket, comes to my rescue after I give up hope of ever finding the apartment door that fits my key. Brocantes are proof that the French are essentially communal. Not only do they gather incessantly, even in bad weather with no media coverage like early Gilets Jaunes at the rond points but they have created a vast network of exchange whose goal is circulation and preservation. Nothing shall ever be lost : weekend enthusiasts offer objects for sale so that others may keep them at home until they too tire of looking and sell them somewhere else. Thus, possessions - the name we give to dying passions - endlessly circulate and even when a small amount of le fric changes hands, nobody owns anything for so very long. There were gems everywhere, one of them a painting I wish I’d bought but as I don’t live anywhere, I don’t know where I’d hang it.
I found the place. The police were just leaving.
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All photographs mine. No one else would claim them.
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Now, after that brief, irregular traversée of an unknown place, what reaction does a building like the one below provoke in you ? El Dragon de la Calderona was built by hand by Rhea Marmentini on the outskirts of Valencia, Spain.
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Essay edited and expanded, 6/7/22.
I've aided and abetted this piece's comprehensability and lexical discipline during my early sober hours. Yes, yes, I'll get back to politics shortly. I 'thought' you deserved a break from All That. So saith the man with a bottle in his hand.