July 14, 2007
psycho-alpha-disco-geo
[above: ceiling domes of the Passage Colbert and the Bibliothèque Nationale Richelieu]
Speaking about his grand project, Walter Benjamin wrote:
This piece, which is about the Paris arcades, was begun under a clear sky of cloudless blue, which formed a dome above the foliage but was made dusty by the millions of pages with which the fresh breeze of industriousness, the heavy breath of research, the storm of youthful eagerness and the lazy gust of curiosity had been covered. The painted summer sky which looks down from the arcades into the reading room of the Bibliothèque Nationale, in Paris, has cast its dreamy lightless blanket ceiling over the first-born of its sources of understanding.
The language is Benjamin in high form, mobile and punning (the page/leaf device works far better in French — and is that a pastry joke in there?), a shifting self-reference which at once displays and disguises the connection between one figure and the next, real and painted skies, domes over the reading room or the arcades, a final uncertainty about the final subject of the sentence...here the elusive experience of tracking thought in spiraling flight, the presence of Benjamin's thinking which makes of him a poet.
The painted dome of sky in the library is actually nine domes, designed by Henri Labrouste, hovering at an implausible height above the reading room, which therefore has a sense both of massive volume and extraordinary gravity. Stilted and quiet, it's a bit hard to match up with the commodity-bustle of the arcades. For linguistic source, one searches through time, alights upon this from Berlin Childhood Around 1900: "later in the year, a dusty canopy of leaves brushed up against the wall of the house a thousand times a day, the rustling of the branches initiated me into a knowledge to which I was not yet equal" (from the section titled "Loggias"). The dusty canopy returns decades later as the blanket ceiling, dusty from the million de feuilles, associated still with a knowledge and understanding upon which it weighs.
One must in fact know the territory to see that his reference ("The painted summer sky which looks down from the arcades into the reading room") is not a forced metaphor to link one space to another, succeeding on some figural aptness. Rather it's a metonymy, or even literal: the reading room where he did his work, and the arcades where the flanêurs set about their own projects, are no more linked by concept than by geography. The reading room, one discovers on a visit to the old library, opens directly onto the Galerie Colbert across the narrow Rue Vivienne. A true adjacency; they do indeed peer into each other's faces. The Passages Vivienne and Choiseul are a leaf's blow away.
(Note: space's way of remembering what time forgets.)
Posted by jane at July 14, 2007 12:33 AM | TrackBack