1
In the Thalys express from Amsterdam to Paris I have trouble looking at things. Not that there’s anything wrong with my eyes, but I’m trying to convert everything that I see into a part of a larger whole – everything must have meaning, from the towns and meadows we pass through to my fellow passengers.
I have thought too much about the nature of vision. It feels as if my looking is monopolised by the project I’m taking part in, citybooks: scores of authors and a handful or so of photographers and video artists who are dispatched all over Europe to take up residence for two weeks in a pre-selected town and turn their experience in to a piece of literature. Those texts and images are then put on the Internet by the Flemish-Dutch cultural centre deBuren in three, four or five different languages (and if all goes well) read, looked at and listened to throughout Europe (even the world).
The first network, consisting of about seventy different journeys criss-crossing Europe, is already enough to make my head spin. The second network is a labyrinth I prefer not to think about. All that effort to direct, capture, reproduce and make public the exceptional vision of the artist makes my vision nervous and forces it to fight against its obviously exceptional status. From my meta-perspective, the fact that I am bound for Chartres from Amsterdam is more interesting than the experience itself, and something tells me that in that case I might just have well have stayed at home. If I am to experience anything, I shall have to forget that I am wandering through a maze, and focus my eyes on what is in front of me.
2
When you or I close a curtain, we seldom do so because we are not allowed to look outside. What is outside does not have to be protected from our gaze or our eyes. What is inside, however, has to be sealed off from outside influences: sunlight, the eyes of a passer-by, the excessive rain that makes us depressed.
Stained-glass windows are more like TV screens than real windows. Like television, the stained-glass window changes when the outside conditions change. If there are elections on, the TV shows a different image than when there is a war. The stained-glass windows change their appearance according to the position of the sun and the weather conditions. But both TV and the stained-glass window are first and foremost a filter: one’s gaze may be focused outwards, but sees only as much of the world as the maker of the filter regards as suitable for display. The outside world sees nothing of us while we are goggling at our glass.
We are in a precarious position. We do not dare to look freely and we don’t want anyone to look back.
Or do we, perhaps? One of the greatest stained-glass scenes in Chartres cathedral features a Jeremiah figure whose eyes consist of clear, unstained glass. It is no coincidence that this window was put on the South side: the light falls through Jeremiah’s eyes straight into those of the viewer. But do we want to be seen or do the makers of the stained-glass window want to make us believe we are being studied?
3
Patrick Géroudet meets me at Chartres station. I haven’t been able discover exactly how the hierarchical relationships in French councils work, but he is a kind of alderman for culture and municipal promotion. Patrick is my first window on the town. It is warm for October, and the sun is shining. With my coat unbuttoned and my scarf over my arm I walk – case-on-wheels in one hand, cigarette in the other – after him. The case-on-wheels ricochets off the cobbles of the medieval town centre and my shoulder bag slips off my back onto my hip, and gets caught between my body and the handle of my case.
Patrick describes everything we see. He sees not only what is there, but also what will be there in the future. I find it difficult to picture the raised square in front of the cathedral that he describes to me. The underground exhibition that the raised structure is supposed to accommodate simply defies the imagination. When we have left my things in the apartment where I am to spend the next two weeks, he shows me the town. The river, divided into three, the bridges and the open-air laundries, historic alleyways, an anecdote about a poet, steep lanes or tertres, chapels and churches.
Scarcely a local passes by whom Patrick doesn’t know and he talks to them all. He introduces me as a young Dutch writer. I am in Chartres as part of the ‘promotion de la ville’. He doesn’t say so to me, but those words recur invariably in every conversation.
I can’t light up a cigarette without someone making a comment.
We briefly visit two exhibitions. A collection of mosaics in a chapel, with a mosaic Frank Zappa as the pièce de résistance. The other is in a church with paintings and sculpture on display without any kind of structure. We strike up a conversation with a small balding figure in his fifties wearing pointy-toed shoes and a silk shawl. His work aims to bring peace to the cosmos. He has made much larger sculptures in this series, he tells us. He speaks about the harmony that he wants to impart to his sculptures and the peace they must radiate. When Patrick urges me to say something, I observe that the artist is very fond of big words.
What the sculptures remind me of most are melted smurfs.
When Patrick drops me back at the apartment, it’s two hours later. I have the feeling I’ve seen every church in Chartres inside and out, except for the cathedral.
4
The next day I visit the cathedral for the first time. Restoration work is in progress. There is scaffolding around the main west entrance, and around the choir stalls opposite. I hear the sound of a vacuum cleaner and the clumping of the restorers’ heavy work boots on the scaffolding. On the east side the vaulted ceiling is creamy white, but apart from that the stones are grey. Coloured light enters through the stained-glass windows. From a distance, the geometrical patterns into which the illustrations are grouped are more striking than the illustrations themselves. From close up it is difficult to keep a sense of the whole and my eyes jump from picture to picture.
Rows of chairs neatly set out. In the nave a small part of the labyrinth is visible that has been laid in dark-coloured stones in the floor. After half an hour I leave again. Somehow I don’t feel able to cope with this thing.
5
Gilles Fresson talks with enthusiasm and at length about his work and about the cathedral. Since his job is the coordination of all activities taking place in the cathedral there is quite an overlap between the two subjects. At the start of our conversation I invite him to deluge me with information. It is precisely in the uses made of it that the meaning of the cathedral is revealed, I think. My idea is that the cathedral is a huge collection of different signs all waiting to be interpreted. The various functions that the building assumes for various people say at least as much about the users as about the cathedral.
Virtually without exception, visitors with unusual requests find their way to Gilles. Like the man in the orange dress who wanted to follow the course of the labyrinth with his followers. He had worked out the time and day on which this must be done very precisely using the position of the stars and the moon, Gilles said. When asked the reason why he wanted to walk the maze with his group, the man replied, ‘Three reasons. Inner peace. World peace. And harmony in the universe.’ During the conversation the man had had a huge glass pyramid on his lap.
Later Gilles shoves the guest book for last July under my nose. French of course, Spanish, Italian, English, German, Dutch. Japanese? Arab? Americans give their full name, their hometown and the state it is situated in. They express their thanks for the cathedral, which is ’fabulous’ and ‘a wonderful experience’. Someone complains that his religious experience was ruined by the noisy tourists and the many flashing cameras. Under it there is a similar complaint, in the same handwriting but signed with another name. It is striking how often the dead are remembered. Sometimes ‘my husband’, ‘my mother’ or ‘my son’, often with first name and surname.
When the cathedral is open to the public, there is always a priest on hand to whom visitors can turn. Gilles: ‘If an ordinary priest in an ordinary church is a GP, our priest can be best compared to an A&E unit. Sometimes people speak to him to say they have killed someone. Some have just been released from jail, others have never been sentenced.’
The priest is sworn to silence, he adds later.
6
Because of the restoration work only a small portion of the choir stalls can be visited. On the north side the wall is decorated with statues of saints. I stop at a group of three, whose heads are missing. Judging from the worn edges, they must have been struck off long ago.
I try to see more of the labyrinth, but the chairs placed on top of it make it impossible to gain a view of the pattern as a whole. The nave leaves only a small portion free. I can see the entrance, the spot where the path bends to the left. Finally, it returns to the centre obliquely opposite that curve and for the last few metres runs straight to the centre. Once, a brass plate about a metre and a half in diameter lay in the centre. That plate has long since disappeared; what remains is a crumbling surface with several holes in it, through which ran the bolts by which the plate was anchored.
When I was about ten I had a regularly recurring nightmare. I descended into a cellar, which was the entrance to an underground labyrinth, in which I constantly got lost. The upshot of the journey was always the same: I opened a door and found myself in a room. In the room was a man. He had no head. It had not been chopped or cut off; it had never been there. The man wore a faded and dirty shirt, which had no hole through which a head would normally have stuck.
7
Gilles told me that the labyrinth was used in the Middle Ages for an Easter dance, in which a priest made his way to the middle and meanwhile threw a ball back and forth to the members of the congregation who were standing outside the circle. Now the chairs are pushed aside every Friday, so that the faithful, the spiritual and tourists can walk the labyrinth. Before walking the maze was rediscovered, it remained unused for centuries, a meaningless sign in the cathedral floor.
The Easter game was a re-enactment of the myth of Theseus, who kills the Minotaur in the labyrinth of Daedalus. The scholastic interpretation of the myth is that it was a prefiguration of the death and resurrection of Christ: in the three days between Good Friday and Easter Monday Christ descended into hell and then, having triumphed over death, came back to life. That triumph over death made eternal life possible. The ball symbolised God’s mercy received by mankind.
A Medieval text has been found that describes the rules of the game. But the text deals with a custom that was observed in Auxerre, not in Chartres. Since the labyrinth in Auxerre is supposed to have been very similar to that in Chartres, it is assumed that the custom must have been the same.
Via Google Scholar I find a text that interprets the labyrinth as a structure depicting a pilgrimage to Jerusalem. The labyrinth has the same structure as contemporary maps of the world: a circle overlaid with a cross, the arms of which run north-south and east-west. In the centre is Jerusalem, the final goal of life on earth.
Those Christians unable to make the pilgrimage to the Holy City could walk the labyrinth in order to complete the journey symbolically. This is a piling of symbol on symbol, since the pilgrimage itself of course already stands for something else: the life of the upright Christian, ending in heaven.
On the brass plate, according to one interpretation, there was a depiction of a Minotaur, according to another an image of Jerusalem. The plate itself disappeared during the French Revolution; probably melted down.
Jerusalem, Minotaur: what they both boil down to is death.
8
There is always someone begging outside the cathedral. The person I see most often is a skinny man in his fifties. He wears a flat cap and trainers. In his hand he has a bunch of withered twigs with the rains of flowers and leaves hanging from them. Sometimes he sings and does a dance. There is also a fat woman with grey curls and a man with a beard. They are always alone – could there be a kind of begging rota? – and all three hold a stone scallop shell with change in it.
On Wednesday I visit the cathedral while a mass is being celebrated. A congregation of between thirty and thirty-five sits in the pews at the front. I come in in the middle of the sermon. The tourists walk quietly about the cathedral, take photos of the interior and do their best not to disrupt the mass. Still, the sounds of their footsteps, their cameras and their voices conflict with the priest’s words. No one sound is big enough to fill the space, all the words criss-cross from one wall to the other.
9
In the Centre Pompidou there are three paintings by Roman Opalka, or rather they are just details of a single work: 1965/1 – ∞. Opalka began in 1965 by painting a white ‘1’ on a black background, in the top left-hand corner of the canvas. He painted all the following numbers until he reached bottom right. Then he began with the following number on a new canvas.
The details in the Centre Pompidou are from a later period, in which Opalka added a new dimension to his work: now painting on grey instead of black. Every new canvas is one shade lighter. Opalka claimed that around the time he painted number 7,777,777 he would be working with white paint on a white background. Details 3,307,544 – 3,324,387, 3,324,388 – 3,339,185, and 3,339,186 – 3,353,469 can be seen here. The numbers are so small that, partly because of the colour shading, they are only apparent on closer inspection. Roughly a hundred and nineteen thousand figures on canvases of 1.96 by 1.35 metres. They appear to be cautious, dim lines that scarcely stand out from the surrounding grey.
Opalka died on 6 August 2011, or according to his own calendar, at number 5,607,249.
10
Marieke is in Chartres. On Friday morning we’re going to the cathedral together to watch the people walking the labyrinth.
It’s the first time I have seen the labyrinth as a whole. The chairs have been pushed together at the edges, as if they were curious spectators. But, apart from Marieke and me, there are scarcely any. There are the tourists; I’ve been seeing them for a whole week already. They take photos, look up at the windows, read an information sign and light a candle. Now and then their gaze lingers over the strange spectacle in the nave, but they quickly look away.
Those walking scarcely notice the others. They sit at the edge and prepare themselves. Some take their shoes off, others say a prayer or stare blindly ahead. Decisions are taken. Should one leave one’s bag behind or carry it on one’s shoulder? Go now or later? Together or alone? With socks or without?
Even those who do not cross themselves take a moment before setting foot in the labyrinth. There is a borderline between inside and outside the labyrinth that manifests itself in the body language of those entering. A hesitation. A gesture. A glance ahead and then downward. Hands folded or placed flat together in front of the chest.
The labyrinth is approximately twelve metres in diameter, too large and complicated to follow the path with your eyes alone. The only way to follow it is to walk it. However, because the path is so narrow and winding, it’s impossible to maintain an overview of the whole.
It’s a game of trust that everyone plays differently. One of the most striking walkers is a tawny-coloured man of about forty. He wears khaki trousers with pockets at the sides and is barefoot. Not only on entering the maze, but every time he turns a corner, he stops, places his hands in front of his chest, fingers and palms flat against each other, closes his eyes, stands erect and still for a moment and then turns back from a pillar of salt into a person walking.
He takes each step deliberately: same distance, same slow speed, same concentration and caution. Marieke and I speculate about what he does for a living. I suggest that he’s a spiritual advisor, but Marieke finds that too banal. She thinks: a reiki master.
Just after the reiki man, two women enter the labyrinth. Mother and daughter? The younger must be approaching sixty, the older woman is at least eighty. She is fat, in the way that old women who have borne many children are. She wears a black dress, a black coat and a white scarf and walks with a stick.
I don’t think she walks any slower, more thoughtfully, or solemnly than when she goes to the bakery in the morning. At about the halfway point she overtakes reiki man. To do so she has to deviate from the path, but she doesn’t seem to mind.
Reiki man is very strict in the course he takes. He does not let himself be pushed off track by anyone.
When the woman has reached the centre, she pauses briefly, crosses herself and walks straight outside. Or was she already outside the labyrinth when she when she made the sign of the cross?
Much later reiki man reaches the centre. At each rose that had been laid on the floor around the vanished plate, he repeats his ritual of stopping, placing his hand together in front of his chest and looking ahead. In the centre he does it four more times, in all directions. The he retraces the whole path at the same outrageously slow pace at which he walked to the centre.
It goes on like that for hours. The women in bare feet with thick candles, all three expressing different signs of religious ecstasy. Eyes closed or otherwise focused on high. When they sit at the side, I see that the candles they held so anxiously upright are made of plastic. The flames are LED bulbs.
Two men who first go round the whole perimeter sideways and stop after each step.
Two men who pray at each turn. They look like Sicilian gangsters and if anything go even slower than reiki man. By the end of the path they have caused a tailback of some twenty walkers; a comic effect because everyone wants to pass them, but is too polite to push past. Each time the line comes to a halt, heads bend sideways to look along the backs and see what is causing the hold-up.
A mother with her teenage daughter. Both are walking barefoot, with their arms slightly spread to the side. The mother holds her hands obliquely upwards, as if she is waiting for something to descend on her from heaven. The daughter’s hands are turned downwards, like those of a tightrope dancer.
A man in motorcycle leathers, helmet in hand.
An English couple whom only notice there is a labyrinth when they are in the middle of it. They look in surprise at the pattern on the floor. The man walks out of it, the woman follows the path until after two turns she realises she has no idea which way she is going, shrugs her shoulders and hurries out straight through a group.
A Japanese girl who walks part of the path, until her boyfriend has taken enough photos. Then it’s his turn, while she takes photos.
11
In English, ‘labyrinth’ means something different from ‘maze’. The first word implies that there is a single path that may be long, complicated and windy, but eventually ends in the middle. A ‘maze’ is a riddle: there are many possibilities but only one correct path. Dutch does not make a clear distinction, using the word ‘labyrint’ for both, although it does have the term ‘doolhof’ for a labyrinth in which one can lose one’s way.
It looks as if a labyrinth is more benign: trust in the path and you will be rewarded. However, every labyrinth is ultimately a dead-end street, while in a maze, while there are many paths leading nowhere, there is one path that takes you to the exit.
As a spatial metaphor for life, the labyrinth puts its faith in the skill of the designer to take the path to a successful conclusion. The premise of the maze is that the designer is not to be trusted and it is the correct choices of the individual that guarantee a happy ending.
12
On Saturday evening the cathedral is full for a Bach organ recital by Christophe Mantoux. Marieke and I are late, arrive in the pause been two pieces and shuffle as quietly as possible between the chairs towards two free seats.
It is cold and we sit close together. When Mantoux plays the brutal, almost atonal opening notes of the Prelude in E minor, we start. What follows is a piece that almost tears one in two: while the fast-flowing high notes reach further and further upwards, the bass notes threaten to drag us with them as they cascade downwards.
Gradually the melodies become more and more intricate, beauty seems increasingly shrill and what is base seems increasingly appealing, until it is no longer clear what the battle is about or who the adversaries are. All that is left are desires fighting for precedence that are sometimes suddenly in harmony, and subsequently disintegrate again into apparent confusion. At the end there is no judgement, although the final notes show clearly who has been controlling things all through the piece.
During the applause we see reiki man standing obliquely in front of us. While everyone claps, he presses his hands together in front of his chest and makes a small bow, as if he is the only one to have walked this labyrinth, as if he has organised the performance and the music was just his soundtrack.
Silly prick.
13
Chartres is the town with the highest average number of days’ sunshine in France. So there is no place in this country where Jeremiah can look at you for longer. Yet even here he closes his eyes when it’s dark.
Then even in Chartres cathedral you are alone. No one sees you as you do battle with the Minotaur. The result is certain. It will win.
Translated from Dutch by Paul Vincent
Paul Vincent studied at Cambridge and Amsterdam, and after teaching Dutch at the University of London for over twenty years became a full-time translator in 1989. Since then he has published a wide variety of translated poetry, non-fiction and fiction, including work by Achterberg, Claus, Couperus, Elsschot, Jellema, Mulisch, De Moor and Van den Brink. He is a member of the Society of Dutch Literature in Leiden.
