TOWERING

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Many years ago, a few times in a row, I visited Corbusier’s chapel on the hill of Ronchamp. It is elegant, yet bulky – a huge mass of stone. The hill on which it is built is steep all around. Climbing it, it becomes clear that with the equipment of those days there was no way of transporting the materials up the mount in a technical manner; all of it had to be brought up by men with carts and horses. The massive bulk is all the more astonishing. Thus, it did not come as a surprise to read that the enormous hat-like roof is in fact an empty shell with only a thin, reinforced cement skin.

This also explains that, once inside, the visitor may be awed by the fact that the whole of the roof is balancing on small stilts, placed on seemingly fat walls, leaving open a slit through which sunlight peeps in – without the mass collapsing. The sublime in architecture…

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When confronting the outside of the chapel, what struck me already the first time was the optical illusion Corbusier had produced. Standing close to it, yet in the precise position from which the first photo has been taken, the edifice was towering above me. Stepping backwards, thus descending the hill and taking distance, something curious happened: instead of the building getting smaller, which one expects when taking distance, it actually seemed to grow in size, getting bigger and taller. As I stepped away from it, it began to tower all the more so. Being a good Popperian, on my next visit I tried to falsify this weird impression; it remained the same.

This illusion seems to be the effect of the immense, empty, cement-shelled eaves. This idea was reinforced, when I began to analyse the impression made by one of my favourite aquarelles, watching it from a certain distance, in an almost meditative way, lying on my siesta couch – Plokker’s group of buildings in Thiers, France.

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Observing an aquarelle, there is of course no way of taking distance from the building painted; I made a visit to Thiers. As the small town is built ‘against’ a steep mountain, each street dropping before one’s eyes, buildings always ‘up there’ like Corbusier’s chapel, the experiment worked – no falsification, indeed. On a sunlit day, similar to the one the painter used to produce his image, descending backwards down the sloping road, the building was progressively towering over me. Again, I am convinced, that it’s the generously large eaves that performed the trick.

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Sierksma, Montmorillon, 28.3/2024

AN EMPEROR PEEING

The lower part of the body is the reason why man does not all too easily mistake himself for a god.

Nietzsche Beyond Good and Evil

 

Every man believes himself to be a kind of prothesis-god.

Freud, On Discomfort vis-à-vis Culture

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On my way to the Great White Mountain, at about one o’clock in the afternoon the higher part of my body told me that the body as a whole would get totally exhausted if I did not immediately begin my search for shelter. Not only does one need some sort of sleep at night, in my case a long siesta in the early afternoon has become imperative. 400 kilometres had been covered already.

 

Having left the Autoroute – even before I had a look at the roadmap, a gorgeously hardcovered atlas, dating from the antediluvian year 1991 – I found myself stranded on a very small road, forced by law to reduce my 130 km/h to a miserable 80 km/h which suddenly feels the same as not driving not at all. And I am surely not a speed-idiot.

 

Never before had I driven the highway on holidays, not even using the map all too often. At a fork, in the middle of nowhere, I just had my intuition decide which one of the small roads I would take. Now, to save my breath and not to impose too much on an ailing body, the Autoroute was indicated; so much less tiring. On the map of my old atlas some of the new Autoroutes were not even indicated…

 

Instead of a spacious aire, I had to park my car on a little P spot on the road-side. Where to go, where to find a room? As this specific region of France was new to me, looking at the map was of not all too much help. So, I walked over to the only other people present, a couple of the same age, and asked them if they had any idea about a nice, smallish town in the vicinity where I might find a place to sleep. ‘Not really – let’s have a look’. Inspecting the same map I had perused, the man looked up and said: ‘I’ve never been there myself, but somehow the town Thiers rings bell; sort of mediaeval and high up’.

 

The die was cast, by a stranger at that. And indeed: Thiers is of a mediaeval cast and it is high up. So much so, that I seemed to require a new type of driver’s licence in order to cope with its incredibly steep and winding narrow roads. ‘Paths’ seems to be a more fitting expression.

 

Again, counter the soul’s core, I did something never done before: I went to the Office du Tourisme to ask an office-person if they could give me an address. Not only did my condition prescribe this procedure; with all those winding paths in Thiers I was also very glad to have arrived anywhere at all. Half an hour later I was received by a very nice woman who let two rooms – a small one, in this case reserved for Rashid, a French Moroccan who was working on the upkeep of the Autoroute; and the large one for me, a spacious chamber of six by six meters with a very good bed and large, French windows. ‘The Jackpot’, as our Yank would put it, or perhaps ‘Bull’s Eye!’

 

Opening the windows – and French they were indeed – the view was astounding and, as it is said, breath-taking. The house, high-up in town, was overlooking a vast valley, its slope being as it should be, precisely as the Jardinier, in this case the maker of a great English Garden thriving for his perspectives, would have had it. Both eyes sucked into a depth more beautiful than sublime. However, out there, some thirty kilometres in the distance, those very same eyes were met by a mountain range, raised up to confront the Puy de Dôme on the right and the Puy de Sancy somewhere in its middle. After The Beautiful, The Sublime was awaiting.

 

 

Freud may have had his ideas about man’s hubris, making himself feel all too easily a stand-in for some little godhead; I just was that god! And if Nietzsche claimed that what for Freud was all-important – our ‘lower parts’, with their everlasting urge to commit carnal sin – would reduce that hubris, making man feel more like the man he is, not so in my case. That is: not here in Thiers, anno domino 2018. Un Dieu!

 

Nietzsche of course would have us believe that God is simply dead. And so right he was and so right he still is, even though quite a few people still cannot believe it. Yet, such wisdom learned from that wise man – also a fine poet by the way – did not prevent me from feeling god-like while overlooking that valley and those mountains, the sun slowly sinking away behind them, as if the bay of Sorento were lying on its side. More so, I felt like The Emperor of whom it has always been said that he himself was actually God.

 

It is here, Precious Reader, that the peeing bit comes in, as well as the Emperor mentioned in the title. As indicated before, health has become a problem; one of the defects being a bladder which has developed a will of its own and, in its vicious guerrilla warfare, is being subversively supported by arms given by the doctors who make me take peeing pills against high blood pressure. Et cetera, et cetera. Now, in one’s own home all is well, more or less so; there are more toilets in the house, one begins to sleep alone, in short fine. In the house of a stranger, with two other people sleeping not too far away, floor boards creaking, doors making a hell of a noise, the non-sleep of an insomniac becomes even more non-sleep, worrying as he is about waking up the others each time he is at it again.

 

In Antonioni’s movie The Last Emperor we observe that, even though His People considered The Emperor to be a God, the Chinese Revolution decided otherwise. They must have read their Nietzsche as well as their Freud, perhaps even a little Marx! The man who had actually been The Emperor is now reduced to a sick, older man, forced to live in meagre conditions amongst people who were once his subjects and who considered him god, however now having lost the faith. The Emperor is still alive, yet no longer as a god; nor is he an Emperor anymore.

 

At night, the lower part of the body of the has-been Prince is giving him problems. Indeed: his bladder. Time and again he must go, waking up his minions, now turned into his comrades. One morning, not all too friendly, the poor man is confronted with this anti-revolutionary peeing. He is asked never again to piss straight into the pool of water, but to always aim against the inside of the bowl. “The days of loudly peeing like an Emperor are over.”

 

Beyond Good and Evil. Power has always decided what is to be considered good and bad. Our by now would-be Emperor has lost his ethical empire. I myself have not even been an Emperor. So, from the very first pee, out there in the night of Thiers, I did my best not to make my little spout hit the pool of water inside the bowl. I reserved my imperial pretensions for that moment when, early morning and all alone in my room, I opened those French windows once again, struck speechless by the mountain range which the eastern sun in my back now hit full-blow in the face.

 

Sierksma, La Roche 16.9/2018