16 Apr 2019

Believe in the Ruins: Reflections of a Gargoyle on the Great Fire of Notre-Dame de Paris

croire aux ruines ...


I.

It's a shame that the fire at Notre-Dame only destroyed the roof and spire, leaving the towers and most of the building still standing. It would have been better for the people of France - better for all of us - if the whole thing had been razed to the ground.

I say this not as some kind of cultural barbarian or iconoclast, nor simply to be provocative; but, rather, as someone in agreement with D. H. Lawrence, who writes in one of his Etruscan sketches:

"We have reached the stage where we are weary of huge stone erections, and we begin to realise that it is  better to keep life fluid and changing, than try to hold it fast down in heavy monuments. Burdens on the face of the earth, are man's ponderous erections."

Like Lawrence, I love to see small wooden temples, that are unimposing and evanescent as flowers. Buildings - particularly religious buildings - should aim to be modest and charming rather than grand and impressive, preserving the natural humour of life: "And that is a task surely more worthy, and even much more difficult in the long run, than conquering the world or sacrificing the self or saving the immortal soul."   

Lawrence continues:

"Why has mankind such a craving to be imposed upon! Why this lust after imposing creeds, imposing deeds, imposing buildings, imposing language, imposing works of art? The thing becomes an imposition and a weariness at last. Give us things that are alive and flexible, which won't last too long and become an obstruction and a weariness."

Even Notre-Dame, if we're honest, standing in Paris for centuries on end, had become a colossal dead weight - stuffed full of priceless treasures and cultural artefacts, but dead treasures and dead artefacts, belonging to another time, another people.

And one suspects that those who claim to revere the past and seek to preserve it - along with those billionaires and politicians who are now pledging obscene sums of cash to rebuild the cathedral (whilst continuing to ignore the deprivation in many parts of the city and its suburbs) - do so simply because they are unable ultimately to face up to the challenge of modernity to make it new.   


II.

Lawrence, of course, was ambiguous (at best) on the question of cathedrals - from Lincoln to Milan - long before his trip to see the Etruscan tombs in 1927.

In The Rainbow, for example, his novel of 1915, Lawrence stages an amusing conflict between Anna Brangwen and her husband Will, in which she destroys his passion for Lincoln Cathedral with her own gargoyle philosophy ...

Will is physically excited by the cathedral and willingly allows himself to be transported by it to another world. But to Anna, it's merely a thing of the past and she rather resented his ecstasy, wishing he might curb his enthusiasm.

Lawrence writes:

"The cathedral roused her too. But she would never consent to the knitting of all the leaping stone in a great roof that closed her in [...] it was the ultimate confine [...] She claimed the right to freedom above her, higher than the roof. [...]
      So that she caught at little things, which saved her from being swept forward headlong in the tide of passion that leaps on into the Infinite [...] the wicked, odd little faces carved in stone, and she stood before them arrested.
      These sly little faces peeped out of the grand tide of the cathedral like something that knew better. They knew quite well, these little imps that retorted on man's own illusion, that the cathedral was not absolute. They winked and leered, giving suggestion of the many things that had been left out of the great concept of the church."

Understandably, Will is unimpressed with such thinking and has little or no time for the carved faces; his wife was "spoiling his passionate intercourse with the cathedral" and this made him bitterly angry:

"Strive as he would, he could not keep the cathedral wonderful to him. He was disillusioned. That which had been his absolute, containing all heaven and earth, was become to him as to her, a shapely heap of dead matter [...]
     His mouth was full of ash, his soul was furious. He hated her for having destroyed another of his vital illusions."

Anna's nihilism, however, inasmuch as it's a counter-idealism, is an active negation of the negative and of nothingness. Thus, despite Will's initial anger and despair, gradually he became more responsive to the call of the gargoyles than to the perfect surge of the cathedral itself, realising that outside the cathedral "were many flying spirits" that could never be contained within the holy gloom.

"He listened to the thrushes in the garden, and heard a note which the cathedrals did not include: something free and careless and joyous. He crossed a field that was all yellow with dandelions [...] and the bath of yellow glowing was something at once so sumptuous and so fresh, that he was glad he was away from his shadowy cathedral.
      There was life outside the church. There was much that the church did not include. [...] He thought of the ruins of the Grecian worship, and it seemed, a temple was never perfectly a temple, till it was ruined and mixed up with the winds and the sky and the herbs."

And so, my advice to the good people of Paris is this: either finish the job and demolish the rest of Notre-Dame, or leave it as a lovely ruin, roofless, and at the mercy of the elements.


See:

D. H. Lawrence, 'Sketches of Etruscan Places', in Sketches of Etruscan Places and Other Italian Essays, ed. Simonetta de Filippis, (Cambridge University Press, 1992), pp. 32-33.

D. H. Lawrence, The Rainbow, ed. Mark Kinkead-Weekes, (Cambridge University Press, 1989), pp. 188-89, 190, 191. 


Jamie Reid archive 


7 comments:

  1. I

    'And who by fire, who by water, Who in the sunshine, who in the night time’ - Leonard Cohen, 'Who By Fire'

    Much as we value the piercing pleasures of TTA's sharp angles and coruscating (if sometimes corrosive) intelligence, we usually start to feel uneasy when someone engages an argument by means of such a suspiciously over-inclusive and folksy-looking piece of rhetoric as 'if we're honest' or worse, dubious appeals to what would be 'better for all of us'. (As if such 'honesty' is even necessarily always the best policy, and/or anything is most desirable for everyone. Truth wears many veils for reasons, and in the end, in matters of everything from romance to religion, one wo/man's meat is another's poison.)

    We also can’t help wondering if Lawrence ever stopped to worry about the warrant for his own literary/cultural impositions and/or ostensibly over-heated love of liquidity? Clearly, his hostility to the former did not prevent him foisting his books on the world - hard technologies, rather clearly, designed to outlast their authors and even become monumental in their way! (And, lo and behold, here we are, already a century later, revisiting The Rainbow like scripture as if there were bound to be some kind of irresistible, transhistoric treasure at the end of it!)

    The one-sided modernist cult of novelty patented by Pound and amplified by Lawrence is/was all very well, but like all theoretical cultishness, it ultimately succumbs to faddish one-sidedness. That's why it's important to affirm, for example, the aesthetic of speed of early 20C Italian futurism, while also recognising the compensatory need for contemporary Italy's 'slow food' movement. One can, and perhaps even should, embrace both, unless one wants to be a prisoner of one’s age.

    The humour, delicatezza, and we guess Stephen/Nietzsche might say, 'gaiety' of life, is literally vital to art and culture, we can agree. We are suckers for gossip, the ephemera of forgotten wine-soaked conversations and the first flush of love. But so, rather obviously, is the grandeur of the Greeks, the sublime sadness of the Mona Lisa and the spiritual ambition of Gothic architecture. Countless religiously non-affiliated visitors to Notre Dame and Chartres attest to experiences of spiritual astonishment and rapture inseparable from these marvels’ venerable endurance and structural achievement. The Giza pyramids are awe-inspiring, because, in significant measure, their ancient lineaments are so alien and enigmatic.


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  2. II

    As we're not confined by nihilism, idealism, counter-idealism or a/theism (being agnostic on religion, omnivorous about art and perspectival in ontology - agnosticism, in our view, being the only intellectually credible position in relation to other dimensions), we don't resent or belittle the distress of all of the open-mouthed, shocked crowds gathered outside Notre Dame. Evidentially, pieces of one's heritage are as meaningful and real as parts of one's soul, and buildings can be mourned like people.

    Why is something less valuable (or less 'alive') just because it's 'old', any more than just because someone is notionally alive and ‘with us’ they're automatically vital and interesting? One doesn't have to believe there's nothing really new under the sun (though there probably isn't) to refuse such questionable distinctons between 'past', present' and 'future'. In the end, time is almost certainly one simultaneous event, as (contemporary) subatomic physics tells us.

    All that said, we find more than a soupcon of lovely mischief in the valuation of 'gargoyle philosophy’ – even if their uncanny value, rather obviously, is premissed on the unsmouldering structures on which they sit. (A blackened gargoyle lying on the grass beside a ruin isn't quite the same somehow.) And the idea of a roofless monument, both humanly restored and elementally exposed, also has something compelling about it for us - though why the element of fire should win the day (whether started by negligence or something more sinister) is unclear. At the same time, we presume Stephen would not react to, say, the burning-down of his own house with a Gallic shrug and a grateful embrace of the wind and rain!

    Who by fire? What the burning of Notre Dame means now – and tells us about ourselves -- is probably more important than anything else about it. Paradoxically, it may be an accidental architectural sacrifice of an old monument that renews a new sense of its deliberative and collaborative cultural value. Our Lady, like it or not, is ours.

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  3. Thanks for this S -

    Just a few quick points in reply:

    (1) 'Our Lady, like it or not, is ours' - and you accuse me of suspiciously over-inclusive language! She might be yours, but as I'm neither French nor a Catholic - nor living in the Christian Middle Ages - she isn't mine. Are you speaking here as a good European or as a défenseur de la foi?

    (2) Did Lawrence foist his books on the world? It seems a rather odd synonym for publish. But it's interesting to note that The Rainbow was found to be an obscene publication following a trial at Bow Street Magistrates' Court in November 1915, as a result of which all remaining copies were seized by the police and burnt by the public hangman.

    (3) Whilst I agree with Deleuze that when faced with the blackmail of the either/or, one should effectively choose not to choose and opt for neither/nor, I'm not sure it's always possible to select both options and thereby have your (slow-baked) cake and eat it.

    (4) Re: the pyramids, their ancient lineaments may be alien and enigmatic, but (to quote Lawrence once more) 'they will not last a moment, compared to the daisy'.

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  4. A provocative post and an equally provocative response. But what intrigues me more is the speed with which 1billion has been raised to renovate the damage. Given that the Catholic church is worth 10-15 billion, I'm 'surprised' they didn't step in. The donors also reveal some interesting insights into altruistic behaviour. Francois Henri-Pinault donated 100million, leading his main business rival, Bernard Arnault, to donate 200million a few hours later! What Lawrence would have made of this solipsism I can only imagine...

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  5. Stephen,

    You have a plausible riposte re inclusive language and our gloss on 'Notre Dame/Our Lady', but we as Europeans – and France in particular – are of course possessed by her regardless, however much or little particular individuals may feel possessive of her.

    In this context, and for one of the better rebuttals of Stephen's supposedly unprovocative provocation, readers may care to peruse Ben Macintyre's piece for The Irish Times ('This miracle of survival must be restored', 17/4/19), which highlights Notre Dame’s extraordinary historical and cultural transcendence of her merely religious significance throughout her near 900 year old history. As Macintyre writes,

    'The church was "Our Lady Of Paris", but who "we" were changed and evolved down the centuries, dependent on the choppy tides of French history. It was used, variously, as a grain barn, atheistic cult-shrine, fictional setting, and a site for secular coronation and national mourning.'

    As the literal centre of Parisian life ('The Parvis', the square in front, is the point from which all distances from Paris are measured to this day), the original construction dating from 1163 was built on the former site of a Roman temple to Jupiter (whose stone was in turn used in the initial building). In one of the cathedral’s many intersections with English political history (which makes the lack of even a token donation by the UK government particularly shameful), Thomas Becket visited it before returning to meet his his maker in another cathedral, Canterbury Cathedral, in 1170. Continuing the Anglo-French narrative, England's Henry VI was crowned King of France there in 1431, which also hosted the marriages of James V of Scotland in 1537 and Mary Queen of Scots in 1558.

    Though the French revolutionaries wanted, like Stephen, for it to be razed to the ground (though in their case as the enactment of a symbolic fantasy of renewal that would sweep away the architectural traces of the Ancien Regime), Notre Dame’s spiritual power resisted such destructive fervour and, in a remarkable demonstration of the building's political adaptability, was instead rededicated to Robespierre's lunatic Cult of Reason (subsequently the even more preposterous Cult of the Supreme Being). Napoleon was crowned Emperor there in 1804, before, as lovers of French literature well know, Victor Hugo's The Hunchback of Notre Dame branded the unfortunate hunchback, Quasimodo – himself possibly based on a mysterious stonemason, Monsieur Trajan – onto the European literary mind. Pivotally, Hugo’s novel also contained an attack on a contemporaneous cathedral restoration project Hugo disliked, using words so enjoyably antithetical to Stephen's modernist preferences we quote them for mischief value alone – though they also depict Hugo's precious poetic valuation of how architecture, like anything else in culture, mediates how we the world without and, no doubt, the one within are envisioned. 'Who put the cold, white panes in the place of those windows?', Hugo demanded to know. 'Who substituted for the ancient gothic altar, splendidly encumbered with shrines and reliquaries, that heavy marble sarcophagus, with angels' heads and clouds?'.

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  6. With the uprising of the Paris Commune of 1871, the demolition of Notre Dame was again called for, but a group of artists and nurses defended and saved her on aesthetic grounds – the claims of beauty triumphing, as beauty always arguably should, over the stupidities of politics. When the Nazis were forced to retreat from Paris in 1944, General Dietrich von Choltitz, in defiance of the philistine insanity of his deranged leader, disobeyed the Führer's order to reduce the cathedral to rubble, out of his thankfully un-Nazi love of Paris. (Choltitz's surrender to the Free French forces would subsequently earn him the title of 'Saviour of Paris'.) Save for a few bullet marks, Notre Dame had a defiantly good war.

    The seminal cultural philosopher Andre Malraux ordered the sooty facade to be cleaned in 1963, but man-made air pollutants continued to attack the masonry, and there is no doubt that years of neglect have since taken their toll. Nevertheless, since then, the cathedral has housed or staged a millennial exorcist, a French tightrope walker and survived an attempted Islamic bomb attack. Whether on religious, aesthetic or cultural grounds, or all three, we can only be enriched by its complexity, delighted by its dramas and awed by its endurance.

    We have also been moved by the words of an Irish curator friend this week, who has written of the primal power of French citizens gathered to sing to the smouldering cathedral - not merely out of Christian sentiment, as she explains, but through primal compassion directed to a 'reverence for the materiality of the building itself as an archive' - and, perhaps, in mourning for the loss of such archive fever or historical depth. She also told of a story of a woman who married the Berlin Wall (and who apparently isn't alone - another bride with a preference for an iconic building over a flesh and blood groom reportedly got hitched to the Eiffel Tower). Readers interested in architectutal forms of this form of 'objectum sexuality' may care to consult "Walls have Feelings: Architecture Film and the City" by Katherine Schonfeld.

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    1. Note: readers interested in objectum sexuality needn't go off-blog, there are several posts that discuss this topic (often within the wider context of object-oriented philosophy) and make reference to the case of Erika Eiffel.

      See for example:

      https://torpedotheark.blogspot.com/2012/12/sexy-eiffel-towers-part-two.html

      https://torpedotheark.blogspot.com/2013/04/behind-red-fence.html

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