The Paris Catacombs

1, avenue du Colonel Henri Rol-Tanguy at Place Denfert-Rochereau, 14th

Open daily from 10am to 8pm, except Mondays and some public holidays.Last admission: 7pm.

Published at Hyperallergic as

Connecting with Humanity in the Paris Catacombs

http://hyperallergic.com/284198/connecting-with-humanity-in-the-paris-catacombs/

We rarely experience the oceanic sensation of our structure as continuous

and equal with all other humans. But such a pseudo-sense of anguished

continuum is available to those with a smidgen of imagination at Place

Denfert-Rochereau in the Parisian Catacombs.

Enough people had died in Paris by the 17th century that its cemeteries were

brimming with graves to the point that corpses at times became ghastly

revealed. Hence, in 1785, following the decision to excavate all of the

overflowing cemeteries (stemming back to Gallo-Roman times), the city

began moving skeletal remains to one central location, an abandoned 13th

century limestone quarry from which the stones that built Paris were dug.

Cemeteries began to be emptied in 1786, beginning with Les Innocents, but

it took 12 years to move all the bones, as they just kept coming until 1860

when the city stopped sending bones into the ossuary. At that point

something like six million skeletons had been transferred, disassembled, and

stacked systematically according to body part against the walls.

Open to the public, this (seemingly endlessly) undulating ossuary is a

fascinating, if somewhat squirly, work of walk-in art. When people come to

Paris they often ask me what art they should see first? Leonardo da Vinci’s

“Mona Lisa” (c. 1503–06) at the Louver? The modern art collection at the

Pompidou? Notre Dame? I always tell them the same thing (though few do

it). I tell them first to go to the honey-colored Catacombs – and, after

experiencing its purification ritual, follow it up with a magnificent long

lunch or dinner.

What I find artistically important about the Catacombs is that it is both

visually compelling and conceptually enthralling. Visually, the studied

logical arrangement provides a tone and spirit of unity that blends and (as it

were) fuses sameness with difference into a disincarnate bardoscape of love

(they always love you when you’re dead). There is a loving, musical

cadence and order here that offer a Baroque-like musical metre as you

follow down the teeming harmonious and entangled flow. The countless

sloping skeleton bones have been stacked by type into desolate waves of

terraced order. Row upon row of Lovecraftian wretchedness.

Snaking and surging through the chilly and lopsided footpath, one passes

through wave after wave after wave of monotone ochre panoramas bereft of

motion: a psychic no-go zone just as forbidding as a seething wall of curled

barbwire.

Conceptually it is a contradiction to both racial profiling and to the left's

over-zealous (at times self-damaging) obsession with identity politics. Its

ripping brackish-yellow walls display an intimidating vanitas wit that

dissolve partial diversity into general likenesses.

Sure, a walk down the Catacomb path has a macabre grandeur about it that

occasions reflection on our own boney insignificance. But its general

likenesses may also provide a mental retort to the skullduggery that

dehumanizes us by decreasing us to a demographic profile that shrinks us to

our sex, race, sexual preference or skin tone. Walking with an open mind

through the Catacombs is an immersion into equality incapable of

maintaining racial or sexual difference, and as such animates the crumbling

of human indifference. Its a seething dark walkway where everybody is

treated equally (and with loving dignity) even as it displays subtle diversity

concealed in general sameness. Or flip it, and see a profundity that discovers

an essential unity under all semblances of difference. Here we can walk the

walk on the thin line where immanence and transcendence briefly

commingle. Each bone is delightful in itself and as part of the whole and

thus yields intellectual fruit for meditation on our refined commonality,

according to taste.

Though horridly racked together by type, each bone has a sweet agony and

unknown history to it that extends itself beyond its contours into mental

mist. You are on a gnarly and misty phenomenological walk of liminality

here constructed of undulating ontological walls. The pleasure and

satisfaction obtained is the result of elevating the gritty stacked rows of

bones into a kind of machine elf trance cum visual drone. Reflected in the

horrors of the mind, this trance unquestionably evokes Prince Hamlet’s

moralizing on Yorick’s skull where he thinks about the commonness of

death and the vanity of life. Hamlet not only remembers the jester Yorick,

but also considers what’s become of the body that belonged to Alexander the

Great. Both men, he concludes, are essentially alike in the horrid end.

Though aesthetic pleasure is the goal of the strenuous impersonality

discovered here, the footpath followed can also provide a certain ethical

utility as well, where all of us think of ourselves as equals. Voilà, it has

provided us with a different way of looking at the social world. Others may

see it as a physical metaphor for misanthropic anti-hedonism, where flesh

deprivation is mixed with religion and rigorous logic. In fact, it is not any of

those things but all of those things.

One passes through the Catacombs in very small simpatico groups. But you

can lag behind a bit and experience private pools of sensation where you

might stroke the quivering surface of a row of skulls or smell their earthy

agitated odor, experiencing a pinnacle of somber imagination linked to

literally looking death in the face. Grief or rapture may be roused in you, and

stir you, to the point where you may find a string of tears on your cheeks.

Besides Paris, there are many other examples of ossuaries found within

Europe, including the Santa Maria della Concezione dei Cappuccini in

Rome, in southern Italy at the Martyrs of Otranto; the Fontanelle cemetery

and Purgatorio ad Arco, Naples, at the San Bernardino alle Ossa in Milan;

the Sedlec Ossuary in the Czech Republic; the Skull Chapel in Czermna in

Lower Silesia, Poland; and the Capela dos Ossos (Chapel of Bones) in

Évora, Portugal. Dizzying to peruse, they are grim genius works of

morbidity that pertain to us all.

But nothing is like the Parisian Catacombs’ tottering bone-lined promenade

in how it grinds against the completing, reassuring, representations of

identity ideology. By its massive size and rigorous logic, it ponderously

invites thoughts of our ultimate integration, complete with elongated

excruciating washes of feelings based in the realization of our ultimate

dissolution. There, immersed in its trance-like boney repetitions that

hauntingly flow and resonate, we are part of those from The Cemetery of the

Innocents. This trembling concession to ego-loss provides consciousness an

elaborate experiential shock. We find ourselves in the midst of a quantitative

artistic space of great quality. One that may transform our opinion of the

value of distinctiveness.

Such a rich aesthetic antirealism welcomes identity politics to step onto the

path leading to the edge of the exalted.

Joseph Nechvatal