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.

A New End

Vana Tallinn, Estonia
September 30th, 2011

The street was winding and it was an uphill walk. The voices of the crowds drowned as I left the town square behind me. The cobblestones interrupted my steps as I trekked to the belvedere. The cool autumn breeze grazed my cheek and against the setting sun, the yellowing leaves of the elm trees lent the pathway a golden hue. I ran my hands over the stones of the old houses that lined the street. I walked on feeling the changing textures of the stones, the moss and the ivy that draped the walls of the houses in this quaint hanseatic town.

Through the crumbling gateways of the ancient fort wall, a new vista exposed itself; a serpentine stairway, precariously ascending towards the mound that would have once echoed with lively chatter. The leaves swayed, dancing to the harmony of the wind and gold fell to the earth. A gentle drizzle had laid a carpet of water on the ground. An old man sat under the eaves of his store with a guitar in his hands and a tune handed to him by his ancestors. I stopped. It dawned on me that I was surrounded by a profoundly haunting presence. It was the past. Death could not prevent the essence of life to prevail. The stones, the trees, the wind, the rain and the music had all been there through the ages as a witness to the ephemeral lives of the great kings and traders and the myriad peasants and paupers.

At a distance, I saw a small arched gate that opened into a large terrace. A couple of travellers were climbing down. They smiled gently at me and I reciprocated. I stepped into a puddle and they laughed. The man pointed towards his muck covered boots. We were all victims of nature’s bounty. It giveth and it taketh away. In this case, my intellectual excitement instantly vapourised as I yanked my sneakers and sock and wringed them out to dry. The chill grew every minute and I had no intentions was falling sick in this hauntingly romantic town. After about a minute of hopping on one leg, I sat myself on a dry stair trying to trace my walk from the distant town square to the hill. What lay before my eyes was a palimpsest. An eight century history which had built upon itself, sometimes crumbling down, sometimes accommodating and at other times reinventing itself.



The uniformly sloping roofs of the town seemed to spring up spires intermittently. There was certain verticality in the dynamics of the form of this settlement. The orange and red tiles on the slopes of the colourfully draped edifices lent a shade of uniformity to the otherwise chaotic yet heart stopping beauty. Like peering into the shelves of a French patisserie, the brightly painted buildings lent taste to the mind’s tongue and indulged the mind’s eye in a moment of profuse flavour. What makes one appreciate such beauty? Rather, a more appropriate question would be, what force lends such immense beauty to an otherwise ordinary settlement.

I walked past the small gate with a lowered head into a bower. A large tree stood at the centre and around it, smaller trees, shrubs and grasses covered the large open terrace. The old fort wall defined one edge of the space and hidden behind an old rotunda were the steep steps to a famed cafe. It had been a long walk. Though I had not walked long enough, I had seen the centuries unfold. I needed a sip of something hot. I climbed on to the rickety wooden cantilever that clung desperately to stone walls. With barely sufficient width to walk past the array of small tables, I entered a warmly lit cafeteria.

With a glass of hot Hoogvien in my hands, I sat on an empty chair by the candlelit table. The sun was setting over this beautiful city and drowning into the Baltic. The sky changed from shades of gold to shades of purple. It was a scene I had seen many times and yet there was something new. I drew a breath and sipped a sip, looking at the trees of gold, the town of the past, its resilient zeitgeist and the old guitarist who was still partly visible through the now faraway gate. Things do come and go but some things remain the same. Tomorrow will be a new beginning. Today is a new end.