Saturday, June 1, 2013

Timeless Totems

Place de la Concorde, Paris, France
Sometime in September, 2011

I remember the can of fizzy drink that my father had brought back for us from his first trip abroad. I am not sure what sparked an instant and lifelong dream to travel abroad. Perhaps it was the promise of seeing new and hitherto unseen things like that orange can of fizz! I was seven and in my mind’s eye, I began travelling the world. Temporality was suspended and within my head imaginary worlds, peoples and places came to life. It would be another seventeen years before I would step out of the country to see a new world for the very first time. The excitement was palpable and as I sat on the center most seat in the flight, I couldn't help but jump restlessly, counting down the hours to touch down. Chance brought me to the historic city of Paris. To my now mature mind, it was as if the temporal suspension of my dream world would only be released by soaking in the culture of this beautiful city, which has itself been suspended in time.

I was in Paris for a couple of months. I would get onto the suburban rail after work every day and on arrival in the city, shift to any one of the many available local metro routes. I would then get off at a stop out of sheer randomness and walk over the area trying to see something new every time. I was awestruck by many things I saw. As a child, I had seen the symbols of Paris; the Eiffel Tower, the Louvre and the Arc de Triumph. Now that they were in front of my eyes in reality, I couldn't escape the incredible pull of these magnificent monuments and gravitated uncontrollably towards them. The people were friendlier than those I had grown up around in India. They would smile when eyes met and some would even wish me a good day! The neo-classical facades of the Haussmanian medieval city were imposing and lined the grand avenues and boulevards of the city almost continuously to create a spatial narrative that instantly transported the pedestrian to a bygone era of dreams. In particular, it was on one of my walks along the famed Avenue des Champs-Elysees that I remained captivated by a totem. This totem had become synonymous with the image of the city. Though not as famous as the Eiffel Tower, this, more than any other structure, embodied and signified for me the timeless character of the city that I had always imagined.




At Place de la Concorde on the central axis of Paris, is the Obelisk of Luxor. Gifted by the government of Egypt to France in 1829, this monument stands in the very place where the guillotine was located during the French revolution. It is a strange co-incidence that a single Parisian plaza must so eclectically recount the history of a nation through poignant symbolism. All around me on the plaza tourists, school children and families had established their holiday territories. Lovers romanced by the fountains and women had their photographs captured by the statues. The Arc de Triumph birthed the Avenue Champs-Elysees which now split into two just at Concorde. Beyond the plaza was a large elevated mound which marked the entrance to the royal garden. The plaza itself was buzzing with life as countless people permitted themselves a moment’s awe at the Obelisk and then they were off. I am not sure whether anyone stopped to consider the many connotations that this one place offered as a spatial and temporal history.

As a child, I had always allowed myself to be engrossed in books about history and philosophy. I had to read to fuel my imagination with enough instances of wonder. The many things I had read and seen about the French revolution, the Egyptian Civilisation and the sub-textual metaphors of semiotic architecture now refilled my thoughts and led me to ponder on the nature of timeless that the space seemed to have inherited. That breezy September evening, as the drizzle intermittently wet my jacket, I stood at Concorde staring into the unintelligible Egyptian hieroglyphs on the Obelisk as if trying to decipher a cryptic message of understanding.





The irony and subliminal urban message was strikingly visible to me. Place de la Concorde during the French revolution had become the site for an unmatched blood bath and was the location of the infamous guillotine. The King’s head had once rolled over the same ground where the plush tourist plaza now supported hundreds of joyous visitors. At the time of the revolution, everything about this place spelled death. How ironic then that the Egyptian totem, the guardian pilaster to the Great Temple of Luxor, this Obelisk should stand there now. The Egyptian belief in after life pervaded every aspect of their culture, art and architecture. This totem pole was not simply a tower; it was a metaphor for afterlife.

The Obelisk marks the transition of the French from one form of governance to the other. The death of monarchy was followed by the establishment of the republic. It was in all ways, an improvement. It marked the birth of a more peaceful nation and this birth was caused by the cathartic barbarism of the French revolution. French history boasts such great works of art as those of Jacques Louis David, but none are greater than his masterpiece, ‘The Death of Marat’. In it is a hint of the same metaphorical and temporal progression that adds value and significance to the obelisk. The painting is highly complex in terms of the ideas it conveys and the ideologies it promotes. In the end Marat is the face of the revolution and the creation of this painting is but an effect of the vicissitudes of history. It is a work of art and profound genius which was inspired by and grounded in the spirit of its time and place; and yet transcended into timelessness.

Death essentially complements birth. Change is inevitable and this is a binding organic truth. Over the years, I was to discover that they are complementary and that one cannot exist without the other. In just the same way as the private death of Marat gave a public life to the revolution; the way the death of monarchy gave life to the republic and as death of the Pharaoh led him onto the afterlife, so also the city of Paris had at once become bound by time and yet timeless.




It had become a city bound within the confines of the neo-classical facades of its ageing edifices. Within the aged framework, a modern zeal for life was brewing and it expressed its enthusiasm rebelliously. The Obelisk of the ancient Egyptians had been given new meaning by the revolutionaries in the nineteenth century. Now the same obelisk has been understood as nothing more than a fantastic addition to the captive urban museum which Paris has become. A bustling cosmopolitan global city which has fastidiously held on to an imagined past; just the way I held on to an imagined picture of foreign lands as a child. Every memory, every edifice, every narrative and every instance carefully blanketed and shielded from the elements of nature and forgetfulness. I bought a can of fizz and stared at the setting Sun past the timeless totem, for what is everything but an ephemeral image in the purgatory between life and death, being and non-being, past and future? For me, a dream had come true and the memories I gleaned remain timeless.