From The Monstrous and the Marvelous
“MAPPING PARIS”
One late afternoon of early winter in the hour when the skies and streets of Paris take on the color of turtledoves, I stumbled into a dead end that angled curiously backward like a broken finger, and found myself gazing into the window of a shop unlike any other I had ever seen, for it contained a dazzling assortment of anamorphoses, some several hundred years old. The anamorphosis, like Nabokov’s nonnons, needs to be reflected on the curved surface of a conic or tubular mirror in order to be seen. The painted image, often wildly erotic, scatologic or anticlerical, is purposely distorted and, without its mirror, incomprehensible. The shop window in Paris offered both the anamorphoses and their looking-glasses – a bewitching sight, a species of witchcraft by a picture. At the time, I was too poor to buy one although I would have gladly sold my soul for one, and body too, but the proprietor, decrepit and cranky was nonplussed and I, having glutted my eyes on scatological and satirical scenes, peeled off into the street with the promise I would return the following spring. But this was Paris, and by then the shop had vanished beneath the sand of minutes and hours. The broken finger had twisted itself into a goose neck, the impasse had vanished from both maps and the minds of men, and no one I questioned in the quarter had ever heard the word “anamorphosis.”They treated me like an escapee from Le College Pataphysique. I wandered about sadly, following my nose past the red horses’ heads of Butchers’, a shop full of glass eyes, glass marbles, mother-of-pearl brooches and buttons and, strangely, hard candy. I passed a window animated by artificial and articulated limbs, and a minuscule establishment offering bricks of chocolate so black the sidewalk was suddenly submerged in shadow. The anamorphoses were gone forever, but later that day on Rue de Seine I found a book devoted to Mandrakes and so returned to my hotel soothed, if nevertheless needled by thoughts of mutability and thwarted desire.
In another year and another season, leaving the gare d’Austerlitz behind me and crossing over to the Natural History Museum, I heard laughter and, stepping into a pocket-sized garden, saw a puppeteer lift her skirts to reveal a face painted on her belly; her navel made for a very droll mouth and her pubis a very merry beard, indeed. A vendor of ices pedaled past on a triporteur painted purple; the ices he sold were flavored with violets, a flavor which that day matched the color of the sky, exactly, and the eyes of the Siamese twins, Helen and Philomene who are forever suspended in a jar in the museum’s chamber of comparative anatomy.
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Paris cannot be contained. A mammoth nonnon or anamorphosis – erotic, political, anticlerical and surreal – it is as mutable as Isis, the city’s own anima, and as eternal. If Paris could be pinned down, she would gather herself up on all her one hundred legs in an instant and scramble off in new shoes, leaving a smell of Turkish tobacco behind her. If Paris could be bottled she would taste something like Pernod, a salt tear, a smoked mackerel, a drop of blood, the crushed petals of azaleas, the skin of a new lover, the marrow of roast duckling, champagne sorbet, the damp of moonless nights, couscous, a heap of freshly laundered old lace, a fur muff, autumn leaves, axle grease, fine old bottle of ink, Norman butter, and eels cooked with prunes.
Paris is all those people who look at you while you are licking her windows and drinking her in. Those people you look at too, who like Touaregs inhabit the air and navigate shafts of light. The unknown stranger who in a dream inspires untold longing is, sans doute, someone you saw in Paris bent over an express, or a book, or gazing into the heart of a flower at Le Jardin Botanique. The acute melancholy you feel when a piece of cheese nibbled in Manhattan turns out to be sublime is only Paris uncoiling and resurging in your breast. And when in San Francisco you buy a pair of shoes so green they can never be worn, it is because they brought to mind a pair you saw on Rue de Grenelle exhibited among orchids in an artificial rain.
All this to say: Paris cannot be mapped. (Only Joseph Cornell came close with his star charts and boxes of shifting sand.) To navigate Paris successfully, one needs to be something of a Touareg, something of a daredevil, and something of a deep sea diver. In other words, one needs to be something of a chimera or enigma oneself, a mythical creature ready for and worthy of Wonderland. Such a one has revealed herself in the mutable shape of Karen Elizabeth Gordon, who has in between fits of mad laughter come up with lyrical itineraries based on those hazards that track and impel travelers worth their salt in the city of dreams. For example, in Paris Out of Hand, a guide unlike any other, and one we have never quite managed to do without, she directs us to the Hotel des Horloges where time is the handmaiden of disposition, the Hotel Carrington where you will be registered by a debutante disguised as a hyena (although, watch out! It could be the other way ’round); the Hotel Quadrille, a favorite haunt of perambulating lobsters, and the petit Hotel du Moyen-Age, where a pair of ermine slippers awaits you. You won’t want to miss Brasserie Loplop, Le Cadavre Exquis and Cafe Nada-malgre les piegees surrealistes; and should you be a dog, Patte a la Main proposes barking biscuits. Cafe Conjugal is a must for couples atomizing as well as on the mend, but the place I long for is Cafe Frangipane: I want to order the Lalique despite the price, and also the Tounique, which delivers a wallop of well-being. Other offerings include Le Metro Marquis de Sade, le Grand Malasin Moliere, the Counterfeit Museum and Arse Poetica where you can buy fur pants and butt art; le Grenier de Tante Amelie where anything and everything you have ever lost – tonsils, lovers, teeth – may be found; la Toucberie where, if you are charming enough, you get to see the plum’s secret underside before you have to pay for it.
With the great Renaissance voyages to the New World came the popularity of Wunderkammern, or cabinets of wonders, in which newly discovered monsters and marvels could be displayed. Like such a cabinet, this collection of essays surveys The Monstrous and The Marvelous – as transmuted in the alembic of Rikki Ducornet’s open-hearted vision – in literature, art, and film. For her, excess anomaly, and heterodoxy entice the imagining mind to embrace “otherness,” enlarge the world, and regenerate Eden.
Ducornet playfully investigates works of literature, art, and film that create ruptures in our sense of normality. …[She] shows how the road of excess indeed leads to the palace of wisdom. Most important, however, her ability to transfix and communicate her sense of wonder becomes wondrous in itself, making these essays read with the same quirky delight as her fiction.”-Rain Taxi
