#7 – Janvier / January 2025

Michael Punt

Dusting the Catacombs

Dusting the Catacombs

‘Why did this happen to those five?’ If there were any plan in the universe at all, if there were any patterns in Human life, surely it could be discovered mysteriously latent in these lives so suddenly cut off. Either we live by accident and die by accident, or we live by plan and die by plan.[1]

 

  See footnote [2]

The Book

Things don’t always start in the way that we tell them, and this account is no exception, but the unanswered question that ends this story did owe something to the intoxication of a very hot night in a city that was overcrowded with people seeking distraction. And although it did not seem so at the time, it also owed something to the casual bombing of cafes and pubs which had a lot to do with why he took the country bus to work every day when he could have driven there himself in half the time. As the recurring conflict developed, car bombs became so popular that it was necessary to look under the car with a mirror on a stick and make a routine check that the locks had not been tampered with before going home. Even so turning on the ignition and driving the first few hundred yards was always an excitement he could have done without. So, he took the bus and read a book to avoid talking to people. Paperback novels had become cheap and there was a good second-hand market at peppercorn prices which meant there was no limit to his consumption save what was available in the rather constrained culture of polemical politics. Thirty minutes each way every day and possibly some time over a sandwich allowed him time to read a novel a week – more or less. Sometimes he became sufficiently engrossed to read in the evening too, but mostly he confined his consumption to the bumpy ride as far as the outskirts of the city, after which it was sensible to watch who got on and off the bus, especially after a fresh bombing spree. His habit did not go unnoticed by one of the regular drivers who, quite unexpectedly, asked him if he would give him a book. It was a shocking request from a stranger, but he offered him the one he had by chance finished on the journey. It was clearly too thin to be a serious novel, and the driver declined. The next day, with a certain mischief in mind, he gave him Brideshead Revisited because it was

a fair chunk of a book, and the English minor aristocracy were not popular with either side at the time.

At the rate of a book a week it meant that over the four years that he worked in the hospital he had read around 200 novels in this way. His job kept him close to X-ray machines and, for no good reason he could think of, after a month or so he began making an X-ray of every book he read. Very quickly this private joke became an unavoidable ritual: each book was placed cover up in precisely the same place with its spine touching the left-hand edge of the frame. To keep an archive he printed the negatives on acetate. Mostly they comprised a featureless shadow contained within the dimensions of the book. Occasionally a staple or some metal stitching might relieve the uneventful grey, but mostly the plates were grey grounds with a slightly denser rectangle in the top left corner. Once there was an image of a pin which filled him with anxiety because he thought that his colleagues had discovered his vice. Later he remembered when he had seen it on the seat of the bus and, attracted by its length and colour, thought that it might be a Bridal or Lace pin, so he saved it by slipping it between the leaves of the latest novel. Aside from this scare, the pointless risk of X-raying the books never ceased to delight him especially since the images of the books were so similar in contrast to the efforts of the novelists who, for the most part, tried to make something that was unusual.

After a year he had a pile of around fifty X-Rays neatly concealed in the drawer where he kept pencils, rulers, technical manuals, memos, and sandwiches. After three years the pile was as thick as an airport novel and had begun to take on an identity that was quite independent of the content.[3] The collection had become an abstraction of the idea of the novel, which at a certain moment both fascinated and worried him and, as if to reinvest the collection with a purpose, he put the pile on a light box. What he saw was a sort of three-dimensional tower block seen from above with jagged edges. The translucent core sometimes had a faint feature and occasionally a title, (printed in metallic ink to attract casual readers) which floated vaguely in the liminal space between the first and last plate. It provoked speculation about the mysterious latent text that he had created with his pile of acetates. And even while he worried, he continued to add a new print more or less every week and he began to see himself as a termite building a tower – in fact building a multitude of adjacent towers of invisible printed letters, one upon the other, two hundred or so high for each book.

Eventually this meant that each tower was (conceptually) around forty thousand letters from base to top when the whole collection was stacked. For the individual book each tower comprised a sequence of printed letters on its own specified portion of the paper. Rather like the unorganised stack of playing cards at the end of a game, the edges were as ragged as the walls of the bombed tenements that welcomed the bus into the city every morning and disappeared behind him in the evening light


Despite the apparently random irregularity that this thought-experiment produced he felt that there had to be a strangely discernible order since each book was printed according to the designer’s plan which the compositor followed with speed and precision. Different fonts insisted on different spaces between the individual letters so that a strange order would be apparent in each book sized module of the final tower. Choose the first letter on the page and you would have a thin squarish tower made of 80,000 letters, (200 or so letters for each of the 400 books). Choose a letter in the middle of the text and it would be the same height but possibly have much more irregularity since it would not be made of exclusively upper-case letters. Suddenly the image of 30 lines of 60 towers making a total 18,000 towers 80,000 pages high filled his imagination like a nightmare from a gothic painting so that adding each new X-ray to the pile became such an ordeal that he found it difficult to carry on reading on his way to work and so, after four years, he took his chance and began using his car again. [4]

During his time as an inpatient he was helped to forget about the project and the obsessive towers until later the lace pin fell from the safety of the book as he rearranged it on the shelf in his new apartment. Being made of brass, the pin was as bright as when he first saw it on the bus seat. He admired again the elegance of the thin shaft designed to follow the intricacies of the pattern so as to avoid piercing the material. The book, with the pin lying on the cover at an angle in sympathy with the italics of the title, remained on a small cardboard box for several weeks as he systematically (if not exactly alphabetically) ordered things on his new shelves. Now, without access to an X-ray machine and with time on his hands, it was inevitable that at a certain moment he would reflect on the project and, beginning on the first page, the lace pin was passed through the ‘o’  of ‘St Louis’ (the spiritual protector) all the way through the 116 pages to the back cover. Each letter and space that was speared (or convincingly grazed) by the relentless passage of

the point was registered in pencil in his notebook. So, the first of these new towers that he was able to capture in this way read:
Ocesm/anhewhtshn/edognnwiDuhrahrer/dghtrrh/reiwnwo./ osaahootkweWniaamatoedlhmnp/vhh/a/sobe/a./ ndtotHnewtsost

Not unexpectedly the letter frequency that this apparently random action revealed was more or less consistent with his expectations except where the Spanish influence on place and character names skewed the numbers in favour of a few vowels. He thought that the resulting text had a rather offensive appearance and to hide his disappointment he typed the letter sequence onto a stiff piece of paper several times and cut it into single strips of the code. For several weeks he imagined the shape a tower that these letters and spaces would make when placed one on the other. Then he wondered how, by placing typed strips one on top of the other, he might build 123 separate towers of the same letter.

His original intention was to replicate the x-ray project and repeat the process 400 times, but help was at hand, and he spent some more time away again and the strips that he had placed inside the back cover were forgotten. When, much later, the apartment was cleared for him, as much as could command a price went to the sale, so that while the book was saved, the collection of X-rays (which made no sense to the auctioneer) was consigned to the regular refuse collection and on to landfill. That would have been an end to it had the book not found its way back to the second-hand market and the strips of code discovered by its new owner as he sought distraction on a long train ride to a tourist city. The strange arrangement of letters and spaces and the multiplicity of strips that fell onto the compartment floor attracted no curiosity from the new reader who found use for one of them as a more convenient bookmark than the spent match that he was currently using. And so, they remained, like the stonecutter’s secrets etched into the trampled plaster of the cathedral tracing floor: The plan for the great edifice itself as an inseparable continuum of a single idea brought together by both desire and accident for as long as both those terms had meaning became no more than an obscure relic. [5]

The Rolodex

It was hot in the way that only a city popular with tourists can be when dark falls and the pavements become sticky with fatigue. The exciting smell of freshly cooked food mingling with that of the scrapings discarded into unlidded bins filled the air as if to give reason to the general clatter of crockery. Indistinguishable music and speech provided a background to street vendors calling attention to fluttering mechanical pigeons and decorative leather goods. A few cars, and motorcycles fought for attention but, despite their menace, they were no more than irritating interlopers disturbing the flow and turbulence of self-obsessed individuals and couples. It is hard to say if this had any aesthetic virtue or was in any way pleasurable, but it was clear that the atmosphere was  perversely addictive. The heat was unpleasant, but the energetic pointlessness of the crowd, the casual bumping, and the street food provided an exotic buzz: It was the anarchy of a city at its most efficient. As the cafes, restaurants, trinket shops, and tobacconists competed for centre stage streaming light onto the crowd, it was easy to forget that above the flow of bodies there were offices and apartments, ambitions, and failures, hopes and disappointments that would last beyond the early morning.


So it was that among the bins of uneaten food and bottles scattered on the pavement he saw a disorganised pile of office paraphernalia. Besides two damaged swivel chairs (in the style of a previous decade) and a single wooden drawer there were some books, a few lever-arch files, a box of pens and lots of loose papers. This could have been part of the shipwreck of the catering culture around him but more likely had its origins in the rooms above him. Whether the heap of abandoned stationary was the last gasp of a bankruptcy, or a consequence of the reckless euphoria of promotion and success was difficult to say on the evidence of the pile. Either way it offered a temptation to the distracted mind, and he yielded to exploring it.


First the arrangement and then the classification of objects said something of the speed with which the things had been left there. The way that the pile had been made showed a mixture of care and complete indifference. Large flat objects provided a foundation for those less easily stacked which were also arranged with some structural stability in mind, but then quite suddenly there was no attempt to give equilibrium to the pile and small objects were just heaped one upon the other so carelessly that some had become

separated from the main collection. One orphan was a Columbia Rolodex rotary file directory a (Répertoire rotatif) lying on its side half a pace away. He had no need for it but, at that moment, it became a trophy from the squalor of the city that he swept up into his rucksack. It was not rightly his but it was not really stolen so it fitted the tourist contract perfectly and there was no guilt.  Some atonement for the ‘crime’ was delivered by the metal edge  that pressed through the rucksack against his back; he shuffled the bag, and it soon found its place and he forgot about it until several days later when it was time to leave, and he wrapped it in a dirty shirt and buried in the rest of his luggage.[6]

Much, much, later, (possibly a year had passed) the Rolodex seemed to demand some attention for no good reason, and, with a bit of research, he discovered that it was the type first marketed in the early 1960s by Columbia as a modernisation of an earlier version which had a rather inelegant side wheel on the right. He looked through it for a while, counted 432 separate cards each covered on both sides with names and numbers written by various hands and at different times. Some were careless and illegible, others hurriedly written in an odd orientation during a telephone call. A few were crossed out and these had a particular fascination for him as acts of deletion. Those with multiple lines especially carried the energetic frustration of the moment; just as an unanswered call can stop a train of thought, so some erasures seemed to refer to a lost opportunity. Others seemed to have been struck through with a slower meandering mark suggesting an air of melancholy. Travel bureaus, government departments, institutions, airlines, individuals – a few noted with just a given name, were undifferentiated. Occasionally a business card was held in the rolodex by a rusty paper clip and sometimes just the clip remained as a reminder of a lost soul. Each Rolodex card was a personal mnemosyne atlas: He wondered how the Theatre du silence (15(46)411775),[7] Tony Vidal (15/414570514) and TUNIS AIR (RiC 4083)[8] (in caps) came to be connected, or if TURDIL Francis (agence) 228/230 Blvd. RASPAIL (DAN 6308)[9], Thomas (227173) and the Tribune Herald, and Irving Harder (BAi 2290) had anything in common beyond the desire of the owner or the compiler(s).[10]



He decided that the Rolodex must have been mostly used by a man since, aside from Thomas, all those listed only by their given names were women, as for example in the unusual amount of ‘Susans’ scattered across the cards. Elsewhere the strict alphabetic classification appeared to have been partially abandoned for the vernacular at some stage and it became a flea market of connections. For example, Guarigue (Anne) was between galeries Lafayette and the Goethe Institut. This idiosyncratic listing was most marked when there seems to have been a shift in the centre of gravity of the addresses on several cards to London. One of these in particular struck him because there were a number of odd things about it. On the same card as Freight 4464111 and “O MARSEILLE (13.91) 91.90.35 there was printed in red ink: Troy Doris 165 Chomley Gardens London NW6 (with no phone number). Around the name there was a spidery line in black enclosing it as if, during a conversation, there was some internal thought process that was developing in the listener. The second thing that struck him was that Chomley was a misspelling of Cholmley. He knew this because the address referred to a select red brick mansion block with its own tennis courts in West Hampstead where his mother had briefly worked as a cleaner. Finally, it intrigued him because the person referred to was almost certainly Doris Elaine Higginsen the American singer known as Doris Troy, a backup artist who was also responsible for the hit, “Just One Look” (1962). Troy lived in London between 1969 and 1974 during which time she sang at Ronnie Scott’s club (among other things). This entry was important because it opened a five-year window allowing him to date the period of active use. The spidery doodle intrigued him and he speculated on the possibilities that the author was constructing in his mind as he slowly circled the name? Three cards further into the T’s there was an ugly entry in felt tip pen for Terry Page at 18 Roderick Road Gospel Oak, a small, terraced house two stops away from Cholmley Gardens.[11] He wondered if Terry and Troy had met since they were so close and then concluded that any connection he made merely had the appearance of order offering  an illusion of design in the anarchy of the address list.[12]

All that was forty years ago. For thirteen of those the Rolodex was left neglected by an extension telephone in a seldom used room that was lime rendered to comply with heritage building regulations. In this damp and unloved space, it acquired a thin film of alkaline dust on the uppermost exposed surfaces. The Alizarin Bakelite core, once so proudly modern, became a grubby purple madder and unpleasant to touch. On the uppermost part of the roll of cards (from M to A) the elegant Payne’s grey of the metallic tabs clipped to the Apricot

dividing cards had acquired a nondescript gritty film of rust compromising the chic tonal contrast with the black letters. These cards which were most exposed to the air had also suffered in this environment: they became noticeably thinner, and the inks had faded – especially the entries in red and where the cards had been repeatedly touched. This was most marked on the corners (mostly the left-hand side) and about a third of the entries had become unreadable skeletons of better days. Those below, shielded from the moist corrosive air, were as clear as they had been on that hot night in the city, but they had lost some of their meaning and intensity as their network of relationships had, through the passing of time, become mere shadows. His first impulse was to restore it; to recover some of the exotic buzz of the first encounter, to erase the 40-year indifference he had shown to its condition. But how was this chance accretion of organic material any different to the haphazard life of the contact list that was now (naturally) fading? Many of those listed were dead and while some may not have moved, the telephone numbers of most were no longer valid.[13]

To restore it would be like dusting the catacombs. So, it remained; an archive in its own right  and a semi-material object shaped by the coexistence of intention and contingency, accident and design. Steel, Bakelite, card, pigments, and binders slowly rearranging themselves, determined by, but independent of, the desires of the various scribes and the significance of the people, businesses, and institutions that they had listed.

A Matter of Life and Death: Let’s start again.

‘Why did this happen to those five?’ If there were any plan in the universe at all, if there were any patterns in Human life, surely it could be discovered mysteriously latent in these lives so suddenly cut off. Either we live by accident and die by accident, or we live by plan and die by plan.[14]


He was listening to a rather uncanny version of a piece of music he thought he knew well. It was a great, and now famous work that, premiered 13 or possibly 15 years after the osiers parted without warning on that Friday morning at noon. For another 50 years the musical work was an object of revision that was subject to sectarian regulation that forbade its distribution, and this meant that it was all but lost to the world for a very long time. By good fortune (so the story goes) a copy of the ancient score was presented to a thirteen-year-old prodigy by his maternal grandmother and he set to work to reduce it by 60% so that it became a perfect precis of the original thought. This version was performed four years later to much international acclaim but despite this, like the original, it became dormant before it too was ‘discovered’. Through this process the original work was eventually liberated from its provincial confines after a hiatus of 125 years to be offered in its unreduced form and to be progressively recognised as a key master work in the classical repertoire. This story, (true or not) struck him as an example of the aesthetics of chance on a grand scale and Brother Juniper’s more fundamental question (repeated above) once again tormented him: Was it a matter of chance or an inevitability that things would happen the way they did? He wondered what musical form would be if the religious constraints on performance had not been so constricting, or indeed if the manuscript had not been gifted to a privileged child for his birthday, or if his subsequent precocious fiddling was never revived? Would some other reference point arise  in the history of art to bring us to this necessary moment in musical form or was it the imperative of an energetic formal evolution that simply ‘found’ a work that was ‘lost’ to satisfy a convenient narrative of art as a mirror of biological evolution in which progress is a driving tautology? As he thought about this one evening he found that he was fiddling with an old Rolodex  he seemed to have had forever.

He vaguely remembered he had picked it up somewhere from a pile of rubbish a long time ago and somehow it had survived his neglect and inexplicably stayed with him through various moves – albeit a bit the worse for wear. Perhaps it was because the names of people had been inscribed in it by various recognisable hands or because of its unusual shape, it had never found its resting place in land fill or one of those cupboards of ‘lost souls’ that are seldom visited. Instead it had hovered pointlessly on his various desk getting in the way.[15] He rotated the cards and chose five at random; one card for each of those who fell when the bridge, suspended centuries before by the Incas, finally gave out and the osiers parted on that Friday morning in 1714 while Brother Juniper looked on at the demise of  ‘one of those things that seem to last forever.’

The Strange Entry

office du TOURisme Ville de [Pacés] Mr Casteix 104. Rue Ri chelieu. RIC 25.13’[16]

This is how it was written on a card along with others in the section delimited by the grey metallic tab ‘O”. Mr Casteix was obviously not the important contact here, neither it seems was Pacé, but aside from that curiosity there were immediately some other puzzling aspects to this entry. The unnecessary gap between the ‘Ri’ of Richelieu and the remainder of the name suggested that address was taken down during a telephone conversation.[17] This may also have explained the idiosyncratic use of upper-, and lower-case letters in ‘tourism’. This inconsistency at first made him wonder if the author was an English speaker whose nerve waivered at the French suffix since it was finished in rapid cursive. This was something that he already suspected since, that most famous of French names, ‘Casteix’ was prefixed with Mr (no full stop). But the style of the ‘1’ in ‘104’ was undoubtedly a legacy of long hours of practice in a French (speaking) classroom somewhere. And then it struck him that the extravagance of the sinister diagonal of the X in Mr Casteix that extended below the letter baseline may have innocently disrupted the flow of the street name. This perhaps was the best explanation – an accidental emphasis – a slightly extravagant gesture of calligraphic narcissism (perhaps) that had consequences in the following line forcing a gap where there should be continuity. Indeed, such an extravagant discontinuity was echoed in the history of 104 Rue de Richelieu when in 2021 the former office du Tourisme Ville de Pacés (which itself had been replaced by a boxing school) was subject to a complete restoration in which the modernist statement of this emblematic 1960s building on stilts was erased. The architectural datum of matter and memory was transformed by another vison of the ‘now’ into a ‘vertical sea’ of glass as a new home for the immaterial cosmos of bankers, asset managers and lawyers.[18] The spectacular ‘waves’ of the glass façade, it seems,  have since ‘lapped’ onto the opposite side of the road and the former artisan tailor’s shop, squeezed between the Hotel Cusset and Le Passage des Princes, is now something else serving coffee.

Susan

‘SUSAN’

He noticed a noticeable number of entries distributed across the Rolodex cards with the name ‘Susan’. While some were followed by a family name ,more than a few (with different phone numbers) were simply inscribed by the given name. One, a dancer living in the 15th with her full complement of names, was caught by chance in the arbitrary process of his selection.[19] It was a distinctive entry in that it had been written in black ink with a much more deliberate hand than many others. Moreover, the card contained a further three names and addresses, each written in the same careful way. The lefthand margin alignment and the consistency of the spacing of entries on this card, lodged as it was among the more hectic Bs, looked as though it could have been a careful transcription from another source. Either it was the consequence of the good intentions that inaugurated the new Rolodex or a later attempt to bring order to what had become a semi-feral document with its own determination. Perhaps an intern or a child off school in the office had been given ‘something to do’ that looked important. Whatever the circumstances, this ‘Susan’, who moved to Paris from abroad must have taken up residence when the emblematic building on stilts in Rue de Richelieu (now defaced with glass), was, like her, in the flow of the spirit of modernist euphoria fuelled by material progress. Not so the road in which she found herself living: Opened in 1883 it was an accretion of various small scale speculative developments devoid of any architectural coherence in a semi-suburban quarter of Paris devoid of metropolitan colour. By all accounts it was a place for an improving recreational stroll on Sunday at the turn of the century. It appalled him that a dancer, or in fact anyone whose life was concerned with aesthetics and visual sensitivity, should tolerate the casual ad hoc expediency of these buildings which fitted together ‘only where they touched’. The 15th, in any case, seemed an unlikely lure for a cultural explorer from the new world since it was a late inclusion into the Paris metropolitan area and even in the 1960s still had an approximate air. This feeling inspired him to look further into the Rolodex to see if any of the nominally abbreviated ‘Susans’ might be the same one who had made the right personal decision and relocated. The search was rewarded: now listed under ‘S’, and written in a hurried cursive, she had a new address in the much livelier and more metropolitan 17th.

 This move, which was also reflected in her relocation in the Rolodex from the ’B’s to the ‘S’s suggested that she became a more familiar acquaintance to the compiler and possibly more relaxed. In the 17th she had taken root in a much larger apartment block with a more joyful outlook over the zinc and lead roofs opposite into the city. There were no obvious further moves to be found in the Rolodex, and it seems from the notes that were later found in her papers that she stayed in Paris for about 20 years before leaving on a spiritual quest and, according to one entry, the light and the view over the rooftops inspired her attachment to the purity of belief that informed both her life and her work as a dancer.[20]

 

The Collector

Zeineb levy Despa 60 Rue de Varienne Paris 7e Si di Door’

‘Zeineb levy Despa’ was written in black ink in the same hand that had captured Susan’s move to the 17th. Here however, was an exclusive address in the 7th, in the same road as Rodin’s now ossified studios. The rest of the card had two scrawled entries starting with ‘Z’; one in the same black ink ‘Yoursef’ almost illegible, and another by a different hand which had been corrected so many times that to the uninitiated it was unreadable. The deliberation and care taken in inscribing ‘Zeineb levy Despa’ had, in contrast, an air of reverence. A lower case ‘z’ had been overwritten several times and corrected to a more emphatic ‘Z’. Below the address, (60 Rue de Varenne ) and evidently written at the same time; ‘Si di Door’ was followed by a six-figure number. There was something frustratingly familiar about it all which he first attributed to the style of writing on the card, but the ‘Si di Door’ transformed in his perception to the doors of Sidi Bou Said and the Tunisian art collector Zeineb Levy Despas who famously married Jean Pierre Marcie-Rivière after her first husband, André Levy-Despas died in 1977. (The missing ‘s’  suggested a phonetic spelling that was taken over the phone or, as he was beginning to suspect, it was written by someone who was not a Parisian). He recalled the coverage of Zeineb when, in 2010, ‘this woman of tireless elegance’ died, as ‘one of the first people to patronize Yves Saint-Laurent’. She lived in Rue de Varenne which runs from Bd. Raspail to the Bd. des Invalides almost parallel to Rue de Grenelle. In this charmed square, 60 Rue de Varenne was an exceptional collection of apartments, (more precisely an hôtel particulier) behind a fairly non-descript green vehicle access door. Beyond this however, there was a very large formal garden – a

metropolitan Eden – which is overlooked by the private aspect of the many mansions and embassies each with their sombre public façade and scruffy doors on either the Rue de Varenne, the Rue de Bellchasse, the Rue de Grenelle or the Rue de Bac. In this Haussmannian frame, Zeineb and André Levy-Despas built a life based on an exquisitely honed aesthetic with a collection of art and antiquities which included the works of the Paul Bonnard and other artists dedicated to recovering the virtues of painting as an agent of colour and light. The scale, domesticity, and the interiority of matter and spirit in Bonnard’s paintings fitted the Levy-Despas’ aesthetic project which Zeineb took even further in collaboration with her second husband who, in 1992, bought the apartment above hers in 60 Rue de Varenne and extended his exquisite collection in it to produce an aesthetic bridge between their two worlds.[21]

A Life

‘3 bis Place de [la] Republique’[22]

Zeineb was a Muslim, and she was finally laid in the ground in a cemetery in Tunis clothed in a simple white shroud: the garb and destiny of everyman. This was a fitting closure for a woman of culture and taste known in Paris for her fashion sense and support for emergent designers. This passing was not unexpected; the Rolodex had been with him for more that forty years, so it should have been  no surprise that many of the companies, offices, agencies and people were no longer as they were. Zeineb had prepared him to find some deaths in the cards but it was a shock nonetheless when he saw that listed at 3 bis Rue de [la] Republic was a person who had died at more or less the same time as he had selected the card at random.[23] It was peculiarly unnerving to read the funeral notice of someone whose only presence was a handwritten entry on a card. Even more disturbing was that, for a moment, he experienced a real grip of grief: that breathless moment when profound unrecoverable loss is no longer an abstraction. Stranger still that the Rolodex should, in the presence of this death, become as alive for him as it once was to those who used it in the offices in Paris half a lifetime ago above the restless crowd.


3 bis Place de la Republic is an apartment above the Passage Vendome in the 3rd. The arcade was opened in 1827 and it originally connected Boulevard du Temple to Carreau du Temple. It was built

on land taken from the Templers which may explain why, despite its grandeur and position it rapidly fell into decline and neglect only a few years after its inauguration. Various attempts were made to restore it but even today with its obvious virtues as an adjunct to stylish shops and busy fashionable cafes it has a gritty feel not helped by a constant supply of fresh graffiti: ugly marks and thoughts left over from unrequited malice. The passage opens out at its western end into Rue Béranger (formerly Vendome) where on either side of the entrance the graffiti extends for exactly one shop front left and right and then abruptly stops with none to be seen anywhere on the street for the rest of its length. Viewed from the Rue Béranger the entrance to passage Vendome looks, for all the world, like a black hole of disembodied anger.

The entrance to ‘3 bis’ is inside the Passage Verdome and involves running the gauntlet challenging both the past and the present. In contrast to the hostility immediately below, the pretty balcony on the first floor faces the morning sun and offers a view over the trees and the metropolitan bustle of the square to what is now the four star Crowne Plaza Hotel. In the 1970s ‘3 bis’ was something of a dive; a basic apartment possibly used by the occupant while he was a student. He seems to have stayed there for a few years, or he was not very important since he is not erased and there is no updated address listed for him. After university, where he studied law, he worked as a clerical functionary and later moved south and west to a small town near the coast just north of Bordeaux. Facing towards the Bay of Biscay he ran his business and lived and died in an inoffensive white bungalow set against a sky as blue as a Tunisian door.


The Wire Walker

‘Phillipe Petit 10 Rue Laplace 76949135728 Paris’

Just a short walk from the Bibliothèque Sainte-Geneviève in the 5th is Rue Laplace. It is one of the older streets in Paris dating from about the 14th century and so it is not surprising that it is both very narrow and shows signs of 19th century attempts to widen it by setting restorations a meter back from the adjacent building. Despite the extensive recent refurbishments, the irregular castellated building line means that it still retains something of the air of an imaginary fin de siècle Paris as a place of solidarity, joy and

 danger.[24] Its earliest name suggests that there were possibly almond trees to be seen there seven centuries ago and, in the right light, that is not hard to believe. In the 16th century this was changed, and it was named after the patron saint of Paris and then later in 1864 it was given the name of the mathematician, astronomer, and the author of Traité de mécanique céleste. After renovations in 2013 and 2023, apart from the ragged edges, there is little left to suggest how it must have looked when Phillipe Petit lived there around 1970. Although at the less gentrified end, where it meets Rue Vallete, there is something of a sort of shabby chic which gives it an imaginary sense of the creative atmosphere that Petit would have experienced. It was while he was living in Rue Laplace that the prospect of a new celestial mechanics – (one that conjuring, juggling and wire walking could visualize if not actualize) – drew Petit to Notre Dame and the void between the towers. He became possessed with a growing obsession to walk in the space between them as a performance of transcendence. An obsession that became so demanding that on June 26, 1971 at 10.00 am he performed on a wire that he and his accomplices had previously fixed between the towers.[25] When he was spotted crowds gathered and for their benefit he juggled, moved backwards and forwards and eventually prostrated himself on the rope, (which by all accounts was dangerously slack) after which he stood up and walked off the wire to safety.
Suspended between the towers the idealized curve of the rope under its own weight must have resembled the slim ladder of woven osiers that Brother Jupiter saw as he turned the brunt of the hill that morning in 1710. But, unlike the crowd assembled below Phillipe Petite, what the Brother saw was a bridge protected by King Louis of France and a small mud chapel. It was one of those things that lasts forever that was suddenly lost. In 1971 it was a different story as skill and accident were pitted against each other in a high stakes game in which chance had a hand. Few below, if any, wanted to see the rope part or the performer find that his extensive preparation had been inadequate, or that some ridiculous twist of fate would play an uninvited part in the performance, but the possibility that this could happen amplified the narcissistic display of virtuosity. Nonetheless, subordinate to the effort of balancing on a wire, was his claim to be alive between the two towers of Paris’ spiritual guardian and testify to the superiority of life as a plan over life as an accident. It was no less an existential experiment than the various attempts to make sense of the towers of letters tediously constructed in the X-ray machine so long ago, or the passing of a lace pin through 116 pages of a book that a bus driver thought was too thin to read.

 

The Rolodex

The Rolodex is still around on a desk. The last time he saw another (without a side wheel) was as a prop in a recent recreation of a period drama set in the immediate post war period in the same city where, by coincidence, on a hot night he swept his trophy into his rucksack. Despite the unwitting anachronism, with thoughtful design the set decorator had successfully turned a collection of objects into things to become an image; an associative collage that created a convincing television version of the past ossified in a fugitive electronic medium that was hardly imaginable when the building on stilts in 104 Rue de Richelieu was thought to herald the future.

In this theatrical reconstruction (a precis of the original thought), the chronological inconsistency of the Rolodex, rendered in pixels, in the pursuit of an aesthetic and affective experience, exemplified the mutability of semi-material objects to fuse matter and memory into a single life: to bridge the land of the living and the land of the dead and forge it into a seamless unity.[26]

 

Michael Punt   January 2025

Notes :

[1] Wilder, T . (1969) The Bridge of San Luis Rey, Penguin: London. p.9 Monotype Bembo has been selected as the typeface for the print version of this short essay since it was developed in 1928 by the Monotype Corporation shortly after The Bridge of San Luis Rey was first published. However, for consistency of format across platforms, Times New Roman has been used and something of an aesthetic bridge between text and matter has been lost in the digital format.

[2] The images in this short essay are random screen shots from a film of the Rolodex entitled Catacomb made by the author in 1985. It can be found at: https://vimeo.com/1030500716?share=copy

[3] The activity had long ceased to give him any pleasure and although he knew he was in the grip of a trivial compulsion he continued with the process.

[4] It became clear to a number of his friends that he was developing a morbid obsession with counting (arithmomania), and they were eventually successful in distracting him. It seems that despite the distance from his earlier trauma traces of the arithmomania were becoming acute and needed treatment.

[5] There is evidence in several cathedrals that in the 12th and 13th centuries master masons inscribed large drawings in plaster floors as a design practice. They would have used non hydraulic plasters which set slowly and, from the evidence of foot imprints, it also seems that the plaster on these floors was renewed from time to time and children were used to trample the new surface. Quite possibly children were used to preserve the secrets of the mason’s geometry.

[6] To ease the discomfort, he rearranged his bag and used the book (which had long since lost its pin) to cushion the corner. This ultimately indented the paper cover.
The slim novel, once rejected by the bus driver, and the object of his flirtation with chance, was finally left in a hotel waste basket and it is not known what happened to it.

[7] The Theatre du Silence was founded in 1972 and moved from Paris in 1974 so it fixes a date for the entry which includes a Paris number.

[8] Tunisair is listed on several cards and always as TUNIS AIR. He wondered if this had anything to do with a personal familiarity with Tunis and the hijacking of a Tunisair Boeing 747-2H3 that was diverted from Tunis – Carthage to Libya on 12th January 1979. However, it seems that TUNIS AIR is the operator’s name and sometimes replaces the trading name.

[9] This address belonged to a five-story office block in the 14th Arrondissement above the catacombs.

[10] Throughout I have transcribed the original entries as far as the keyboard and digital format will allow. This is clearest in conveying chosen spellings, punctuation and the use of upper and lower case.

[11] They certainly could have met since she lived for another 30 years.

[12] Perhaps more fascinating for those interested in coincidence is that Doris Troy lived in London at precisely the same time as the x-ray project was being executed on another island in the UK.

[13] To test this, he tried dialling a few at random including several of the London numbers even though he knew it was pointless.

[14] Wilder, T . (1969) The Bridge of San Luis Rey, Penguin: London. p.9

[15] These are fashionably called ‘Doom Boxes’ which really invests them with too much intentionality.

[16] There was some difficulty deciphering Pacés. I am grateful to Dr Doove for help in resolving this to a reasonable some degree, but we are still not certain.

[17] When it opened this road received the name of rue Royale and, shortly after, that of Richelieu; in 1793, it was called rue de la Loi; in 1806, it took the name Richelieu again in 1806.

[18] “Vertical Sea” is the architect’s marketing term for this building façade.

[19] Is anything ever really random? The difference between accident and chance are not always clear as Jean Arp and indeed Bergson explored. As D.W. Theobald points out ‘…’accident and chance are terms of interpretation not description.’

[20] This building was also built as part of a development of the area between 1900 in 1910 and renovated sometime after she left.

[21] An extensive photographic feature in Vanity Fair (6 June 2016) documented their collections in their apartments.

[22] The omission of ‘la’ from the entry seems to be another misspelling in the index suggesting a live document.

[23] See footnote vi.

[24] There is a helpful pen and ink drawing of the street by Abeillé made in 1895. It is described as, ‘On the sidewalk, in front of shops, seated woman holding a child on her knees, barrel, furniture and utensils. Laundry hangs from the windows. A man walks in the middle of the street.’

[25] He later claimed that the project took a year to prepare.

[26] For a further discussion of this paradox, see: Punt, M. (2013) Image, Light and the Passage to the Semi-Material Object. In: Blassnigg, M. (ed.) Light Image and Imagination. AUP: Amsterdam. pp. 193-214.