Day 06 - Paris: Sacré-Cœur, the Paris Sewers, Les Invilades, Musée Rodin

Tuesday morning found me up early again. I took my own trip by Metro and foot to the Basilique du Sacré-Cœur, situated at the top of the highest hill in Paris, Montmartre. Montmartre is the historic site of the Moulin Rouge and Le Chat Noir as well as a thriving center of Parisian art communities in the 19th and 20th centuries.

Before going into the church to pray, I had a brief encounter on the steps of Sacré-Cœur with a young woman who appeared to have been up all night experiencing the life of the city. Amid the otherwise hush of the place, she was moving to each of the few small groups of meditative people gathered there, looking for any scrap of paper to write poetry on. (Though she seemed to be in no real condition to be writing lucidly, she was certainly under the influence of some enthusiasm.) She offered me a handful of M&Ms, which I took and enjoyed. I wish I had remembered to pray for her.

Making my way back to our apartments, I came across the first of my ‘found souvenirs’ -- a Jewish prayer book that must have been dropped on the street. This is my favorite way of bringing back a remembrance.

When we were all ready to head out for another day, we made our way to another highlight of the trip -- the Paris Sewer Tour. A still working section of the sewers right near the Seine has been turned into a museum and monument to the evolution of the Paris sewer system. In the museum, you criss-cross and walk alongside rivers of actual sewage -- in what state of treatment, I don’t know, but the smell was not so good. Informative plaques and placed all along the route.

The chief draw for our family was the connection to Victor Hugo’s Les Miserables. Before describing Jean Valjean’s heroism in the sewers, Hugo writes an extended passage describing the sewers that was one my favorite parts of the novel. We watched a sewer rat scamper back and forth down one shaft.

After the tour, we decided to head to the Musée Rodin, but on the way we had lunch in the gardens attached to L'Hôtel national des Invalides, the site of Napoleon’s tomb.

I have always had some appreciation for Auguste Rodin, but I don’t think I ever really awakened to the brilliance of his sculpture until this visit. I have both studied and taught the Burghers of Calais, but to see a cast in person and get a chance to circle it, to explore different angles, and even to almost bump into individual figures on the grounds as Rodin intended was quite an experience.

A sculpture of “Ugolino and his Children” sits in the middle of a fountain on the grounds. Any of you who know the story of Count Ugolino or have encountered his figure in Dante would appreciate the sculpture. (Some photos are included here but more will appear in the forthcoming, “Best of Non-Religious Art” album)

The day was a bit wearying all-in-all, and I have no record, either journalistic or photographic, of how we might have dined or spent the evening, but I know it was an early to bed, early to rise event with a trip to Versailles planned for the next morning.

Day 06 Reflections

Reflection One -- Something about stumbling upon a small treasure increases its importance to me. The souvenir is a product of a fortunate encounter rather than a purchased arrangement.

Reflection Two -- Sculpture in the round should be experienced in the round. A single image presentation does a greater injustice to sculpture than to painting or any other media. Really,. any two dimensional image of a three dimensional medium becomes at best a new artistic rendering or even interpretation of the scene. The photographer-recorder-artist selects the position, the angle, the lighting, etc. in an effort to capture what can only be one dimension of the statue.

Reflection Three (continued from Day 05) -- Yes, there is a kind of integrity with its heart close to beauty and joy that I admire in the Parisian culture. I can easily imagine myself living in cafes and gardens. Paris seems to be a better incarnation of the biblical vision of humanity's place in a creation that was abundantly provided for to increase our pleasure.

On the other hand ...

As the Genesis account so poignantly articulates,  we do not find ourselves holding our original place in creation. We are not in a state of perfect existential freedom. Our impulses, even towards the beautiful, are no longer safely ordered in accordance with the true and the good. We can no longer follow them with confident abandon.

Our true birthright - nakedness without shame, liberty without license, good without the knowledge of good and evil - we have sold. We are prone to self-destructive excess, to violating the healthy bounds of delight, to desiring forbidden knowledge. Thereby the the authentic human experience of the beautiful is tainted.

Properly speaking, the valuable role that traditional morality ought to play is to keep us within the bounds of delight and save us from our own self-destruction. Most of us know how badly that can all go wrong when morality becomes an end in itself, when the greatest sin of all, self-righteousness, blinds us from the proper function of the law. Nonetheless, even in the midst of attacking such self-righteousness, the apostle writes that “the law is holy, and the commandment is holy and righteous and good.”

Here I would speak in praise of traditional American morality. I am talking about good ol’ bread and butter sexual morality, modesty, decency, honesty and simplicity. I am talking about the social virtues of the early American Christians that passed into our culture in so many ways. I am talking about something that, yes, we may be witnessing the passing of.

Some of this heritage has had seriously negative side-effects. Most of us know the dangers inherent in cultural morality. But if traditional American morality can err on the side of being overly restraining, it also has a tremendous preservative power for which I am deeply grateful.

Even seemingly arbitrary or artificial moral restraint serves its purpose in our lives and in our culture. Sex shops are relatively rare and considered seedy where they do exist. If what happens in Vegas shouldn’t happen, at least we still seem to know that. We don’t have open red-light districts. We never had a thoroughgoing culture of kept mistresses. These are good things about the United States.

On the other hand, Paris, seemingly without such a tradition of morally normative cultural restraints, has the real danger of breeding a spirit entirely like Arthur Rimbaud’s:

“Right now, I’m beshitting myself as much as possible. Why? I want to be a poet, and I’m working to turn myself into a seer: you won’t understand at all, and it’s unlikely that I’ll be able to explain it to you.  It has to do with making your way towards the unknown by a derangement of all the senses. The suffering is tremendous, but one must bear up against it, to be born a poet, and I know that’s what I am. It's not at all my fault.”

The sentiment is expressive and his pursuit of a “derangement of all the senses” may really have been inspired at its depths by some genuine mystical yearning for the beautiful, but without moral restraint the life it produced was deeply, deeply sad, a life in which he eventually abandoned poetry, and a life that I think one must eventually turn away from with a kind of horror or despair, at best a very sorrowful sympathy. I will never be able to understand the unqualified celebration of Rimbaud, just as I will never be able to understand the unqualified celebration of Sylvia Plath.

G.K. Chesterton writes of the aesthetic function of moral restraint in “The Ethics of Elfland:”

I could never mix in the common murmur of that rising generation against monogamy, because no restriction on sex seemed so odd and unexpected as sex itself. To be allowed, like Endymion, to make love to the moon and then to complain that Jupiter kept his own moons in a harem seemed to me (bred on fairy tales like Endymion's) a vulgar anti-climax. Keeping to one woman is a small price for so much as seeing one woman. To complain that I could only be married once was like complaining that I had only been born once. It was incommensurate with the terrible excitement of which one was talking. It showed, not an exaggerated sensibility to sex, but a curious insensibility to it. A man is a fool who complains that he cannot enter Eden by five gates at once. Polygamy is a lack of the realization of sex; it is like a man plucking five pears in mere absence of mind. The aesthetes touched the last insane limits of language in their eulogy on lovely things. The thistledown made them weep; a burnished beetle brought them to their knees. Yet their emotion never impressed me for an instant, for this reason, that it never occurred to them to pay for their pleasure in any sort of symbolic sacrifice. Men (I felt) might fast forty days for the sake of hearing a blackbird sing. Men might go through fire to find a cowslip. Yet these lovers of beauty could not even keep sober for the blackbird. They would not go through common Christian marriage by way of recompense to the cowslip. Surely one might pay for extraordinary joy in ordinary morals. Oscar Wilde said that sunsets were not valued because we could not pay for sunsets. But Oscar Wilde was wrong; we can pay for sunsets. We can pay for them by not being Oscar Wilde.

Why this long reflection on morality and beauty? Because if you shifted your view by only a few degrees, it was not hard to see the Arthur Rimbaud-Oscar Wilde spirit lingering just on the edge of all that was beautiful and free about the left bank of Paris -- something sad, lost and still unaware of any way back to Eden, or even that Eden had been lost.

In the end, you can’t dance your way to illumination without first putting on the sackcloth and ashes. In the end, anyone who is honest with themselves after throwing off all moral restraints -- even in pursuit of extraordinary beauty -- will have to confess with Rimbaud:

But, truly, I have wept too much! The Dawns are heartbreaking.Every moon is atrocious and every sun bitter: Sharp love has swollen me up with heady languors. O let my keel split! O let me sink to the bottom!If there is one water in Europe I want, it is the Black cold pool where into the scented twilightA child squatting full of sadness, launchesA boat as fragile as a butterfly in May.

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