Revisiting History
I’ve been clearing out my Bastille apartment because and I are moving up the proverbial hill (it’s also a literal hill) to a new apartment next to the Père-Lachaise cemetery.
We have views of a blooming canopy of green and the final corporeal resting places of Gertrude Stein and Jim Morrison and Edith Piaf, and for now I shan’t say more, but as I packed up the last of my books and documents into an overladen bag, I came across a handwritten message from mid-April 2019, which I wrote a few hours after the infamous Notre Dame Fire.
Below is the two-page document typed up in full, unedited, a primary source document of sorts—not only concerning my personal reaction to a historic event, but also why, for some reason, the historic fire conjured thoughts about re-writing a novel I’d begun years earlier and that I would ultimately end up rewriting in 2020 and publishing in 2024, that ole chestnut of historical metafiction called The Requisitions.
Notre Dame is BurningI am sitting on the terrace of La Cantine de Belleville with an old friend who has returned to Paris because, among other things, she misses the city.
My phone keeps vibrating in my pocket. I do not respond. Few things in life are more important than sharing wine with an old friend.
After the fourth missed call, I answer my phone. It’s my brother, who is in my sixth-floor maid’s chamber apartment just down the hill.
“Are you seeing this?” he asks.
“Am I seeing what?”
At the very same moment, my friend, E—, responds to her vibrating phone, a slew of texts from family members who know she’s here in the City of Light. I don’t remember what she says, or what I say to my brother. Notre Dame is burning, my phone tells. Acquaintances send their condolences, send their prayers, are keeping me and Paris in their thoughts.
It’s a peculiar thing, history; and even a more peculiar thing, historical monuments.
“Sorry about your loss,” one friend tells me in a private Instagram message. I wonder what it is he thinks I’ve lost?
After watching the proverbial spire of French civilization crumble down in a fiery blaze (Michael Bay would kill for this kind of shot), E— and I put away phones and return to our meal—she to her fish filet, me to my rum steak with bearnaise, always bearnaise—and to more pressing matters like San Francisco rent prices and polyamory and the complexities and deceptions of modern love.
I recently listened to an episode of “Philosophize This” on simulation and simulacrum, The Matrix, and Jean Baudrillard, and I am thinking about the myriad places Parisians and smartphone users throughout the globe are experiencing this “horrific” event (according to the Guardian) and the “equivalent of nine-eleven” (according to a faculty member at the Sorbonne), everyone implicated by virtue of the robot in their pocket in a historical (and ahistorical) event that fell at a particularly calm moment in the global news cycle.
How else to explain the ahistorical notions of a “national tragedy” that shall (according to a pundit) “test the French resolve?”—ahistorical, as in lacking historical perspective, because watching a 1080p video of a burning Notre Dame on a smartphone doesn’t allow for some important context: mainly, nobody died; secondly, the building is still very much intact despite being 850 years old; thirdly, because the spire that has just crumble was the one that was rebuilt in the 19th century; the roof can be rebuilt; and did I mention that not a single human being died? The renovation of the 12th century roof and 19th century spire was the most likely cause of the fire, which is reassuring, in a sense, because they were planning to rebuild much of the cathedral anyway. But the symbolic meaning—ah yes, that is something different. We shan’t discount humanity and its symbols.
Many people mourning “the loss” of an old roof are the same people who choose to view it through a telephoto lens attached to a selfie-stick. The 2019 Notre Dame Fire, which will soon be translated into a Wikipedia page with a section devoted to conspiracy theories, is in reality nothing more than an anecdote in the building’s 856-year history. An important anecdote, no doubt, but I haven’t drinking my glass of wine, and me and E— are back on our phones, and we haven’t shared a meal together in six years, and so my Parisian history of mid-April, 2019 has less to do with a burnt cultural icon society that only tends to be reminded of collective solidarity when witnessing a monumental tragedy, and more to do with sharing a good meal with a dear friend.
When it comes to my own personal history, I wonder, which is more important? Responding to text messages and watching a compilation of amateur videos showing the partial burning of Notre Dame, or, despite the historical moment, putting away my phone to reconnect with an old friend over a glass of red wine?
if not, Paris is a community-supported publication
… a glass of wine. Yes. How important it can be to an individual’s history. I see it now: a glass of red on white linen. The man in a brown hat is there. I’ve seen him before. Who is he? I remember how I once tried to start this book: “When the sirens began, the professor was sitting at the Astoria Café.”
Why the Astoria? Because I know it really did exist. I don’t know this in the way I know Notre Dame is no longer burning, but I have read about the Astoria before, and I can imagine it stuck in time—or at least stuck in history—and I do not know why they’ve come to me again, Viktor, Martin, and Elsa, but now they’re here and there’s no use pretending they haven’t entered my mind for some reason.
Where did they come from? Who are their parents? Do I care? Why or why not? All I know is that Viktor has met Elsa on a Polish terrace. The year is 1939, and whether fact or fiction, their meeting holds the key to my understanding of that particular history.
