Paris bulletin 2 2017

Because Paris is such a compact city you can visualize it as a kind of giant spider, although one with more than eight legs. The legs radiate out from the centre, roads and train lines transporting over 2.8 million citizens in and out of the city every day. One of them, the RER line D, carries roughly 550,000 passengers per day from the north-east outer suburbs (furthest point is Creil 28 miles from Paris in the valley of the Oise) right down as far as Malesherbes. To get to Boussy St Antoine, my usual destination on that line, you travel past the gare de Lyon and through the crossing points of Maisons Alfort, Villeneuve Triage and Villeneuve St George, each of those stations surrounded by a vast acreage of train tracks.

On the outward journey the Seine is to the right, sliding sleekly by, a very different looking river from the one that spread itself across the valley a century ago.  

the Seine at Villeneuve St Georges, Théodore Rousseau (1812 - 1867)

It doesn’t take long to get past the high-rise apartments, the distribution centres, the SNCF maintenance hangars and the crazy criss-crossing tracks and then you find yourself travelling alongside les pavillons de banlieue sitting snugly in their minuscule plots of land. There are patches of woodland, occasional glimpses of other smaller waterways, catkins on the hazels along the line and once in a while clumps of snowdrops up the banks.

Boussy St Antoine is just over 16 miles from Paris but as soon as you’re away from the train station you could be in any of France’s semi-rural backwaters. The air is clearer, the birds sing louder, there are horses in the fields and some of the copses are already thick with the green of the little wild daffodils we will see being sold in tight bundles outside metro stations any day now.

The river Yerres at Boussy St Antoine

‘La Chapelle est un sas’, says Hélène, a member of les Quartiers Solidaires association supporting refugees in our neighbourhood. I look up the word in le Robert dictionary, not for what it means – these days it’s most often used of the airlock between two separate spaces, in for example a spacecraft or submarine – as for its etymology. Dictionaries are wondrous objects to use, even if they can be tedious to write.

Sas – nom masculin; latin médiéval setacium; latin classique seta ‘soie de porc, crin’. pièce de tissu (crin, soie, voile) servant à passer diverses matières liquides ou pulvulérantes  From that early meaning  of a sieve or filter it came eventually to denote the calm area, between an inner and  outer harbour, between two locks on a canal, like a buffer zone.

What Hélène says feels right: this less than half a kilometre square area around metro la Chapelle is definitely a space in between, in between exile and acceptance, arrival and departure. I can report for those who expressed an interest after the last bulletin, that our little boat, the supermarket trolley, is still afloat in the sas of our streets and still well-filled, thanks to the generosity of the riverains and local shops. If only the same could be said for the main centre d’accueil just to the north at Porte de la Chapelle. It is ‘saturé’ and the police action there marked by aggression both towards the refugees waiting outside and the local volunteers, some of whom have been given fines for feeding hungry men.

 

queuing outside the centre d'accueil Porte de la Chapelle

Elsewhere in Paris and with a different focus, the Vermeer exhibition at the Louvre is underway (on until 22 May only). If you’re determined to see it, go early. You will be given a time slot with your ticket but you may well have to wait for longer. You could of course decide to forego the closer look at paintings you already know (how close you get will obviously depend on how busy it is). You could spend the time you waste standing in line in the Richelieu wing instead, in half-empty rooms among the hundreds of other Dutch masters the Louvre owns. Less to pay and more leisure to look.

I haven’t yet been to see Abraham Poincheval who is locked away this week inside a rock in the Palais de Tokyo (until 2 March). Will I go? I’m not sure there’s a lot an observer can do with the outside of the stone. The experience seems to me to be a very private one. I do like the idea he’s going to follow being ‘rocked-in’ (my word not his for this 'stunt') by sitting on some hens’ eggs. The time of duration of that next happening is obviously less certain, hens’ eggs taking anywhere between 21 and 26 days to hatch out.

Here is Poincheval in one of his previous vessels, a giant bottle complete with solar panels to supply him with power for his ventilation system. 

Another of his exploits last autumn was to sit for a week like a nesting stork on top of a mast 'to mediate and write on questions of perspective'. 

Abraham Poincheval outside the gare de Lyon, Paris on his mast

I was never so glad as now to live in a city where art in all its manifold expressions, its boundless exuberance, is still breaking taboos, dismantling walls, opening minds.

Walls

                                          Without regard, without pity, without shame,

                                           massive and high all around me they've built walls.

                                           And I sit here now and give up all hope.

                                           I have no other thought: this fate gnaws at my mind;

                                           because I had so many things to do out there.

                                           Ah, when they constructed the walls, how could I have paid no

                                           attention.

                                           But I never once heard a noise or any sound come from the builders.

                                           Imperceptibly they've shut me away from the world out there.

                                           Constantine Cavafy