~This essay was originally
published under “Adrienne Ross” in
you are
here: the journal of creative geography (2008).
1
Place Denfert-Rochereau’s doors are black. Printed there in block letters are the words: “Entrée
Des Catacombes” (Entrance to the Catacombs.) It is mid-day. I am hungry.
I buy a chocolate croissant from the boulangerie across the street and
nibble it as I enter the ossuary’s doors, pay 5 Euros, and take my place in the
line of tourists walking past warning signs (“Le chiens ne sont pas admis” /
Dogs are not allowed), past historical photographs of the centuries-old
quarries being transformed into catacombs, past video cameras, and down the
spiral staircase to the bone yard beneath the streets of Paris’ Latin Quarter. I am far from home, alone in a city of stones
and strange words.
#
In
the world above, years ago, I was searching for merlins, peregrines, eagles
along western Washington’s Bow Edison Road when I found a dead deer in the
knee-high, roadside grass. Her nose was
ebony, her tawny fur was coarse with dirt and gravel, her legs were arced for
flight as she must have been before being hit by a car. She was gutted open. Rain pooled pink with blood. Her ribs were intact: bone sentinels standing
guard over heart, lungs, intestines long after the battle was lost.
#
We
walk down a tight, curling staircase, down, down, down, its steps worn grey
stone. For a time, we can hear the whistles and sirens from the street. We are 20 or so meters underground. Where are we? Where am I? Where is my lover
or my friends, all half a world away? We
come to a dark and narrow, stone walled passageway. Stones crunch under footsteps. The electric hum of sparse light bulbs, the
chitchat of tourists, a girl’s high-pitched “Daddy?” echo as we walk. In the underground air is a smell too clean
for death. We walk. The passageway turns
through darkness. We walk past cells barred by metal grates, past a half-eaten
apple, past a fire extinguisher. We walk
into a gallery where there are shadows, stone columns, and a stone floor, a
white plastic lawn chair with an open novel on its seat, and a guard wearing
sneakers, a blue rain parka, and a red baseball cap. Signs on columns read: “Arrete! C’est ici l’empire de la morte. Vous etes invite a ne rien toucher, et a ne
pas fumer dans l’ossuarie.” (Stop! This is the empire of the dead. You are asked to not touch and to not smoke
in the ossuary.)
#
In
the world above, years ago, on a dirt road near Landruk, Nepal, I was
bargaining with a Tibetan refugee for silver bracelets when I saw on his
roadside stand what I thought was a grey shell cut in half, tin-plate on the
inside, Buddhist prayers carved on the outside. It was a human skull fragile
and near weightless in my hand. Tibetan
Buddhists regard death as liberation from the delusions, fears, desires
stalking us like hungry ghosts. Perhaps
a Buddhist could have meditated over the skull on the impermanence of life, but
I believed then, and still do, that I have only one life to live as best I can.
I confused the occipital and parietal bones with the hopes and loves of the
person they once sheltered. I put the skull down. I bought finger cymbals and a
garnet ring instead.
#
We
lose our loose community of strangers at the bone vault’s entrance. We each have to cross that threshold
alone. I hesitate. A gut-instinct of fear: don’t come too close
to death. As if being alive I wasn’t
already close to death. As if I could no
longer keep my trust that, of course, I had days, weeks, months, years, decades
yet to come. I cross the barrier. I step
into darkness, into the faint gleam of isolated electric lights, into a room of
disembodied skeletons and scattered heaps of lives torn asunder into tibia,
fibula, clavicles, carpal, ribs, pelvis, vertebrae stacked five feet high and
extending into darkness. The bones were
the color of cinnamon, hard as stone, the skulls showing the zig-zag crevices
of fused plates, the empty sockets staring at the dark, stony ground, the dark
ceiling where water dripped. Skulls, scapulas,
sacrums, patellas, metatarsals were all stripped
clean from bacteria, mold, spiders, time.
Only bones. Nothing to fear.
Death is ancient here, and the dangers of life and the love of chocolate
and violets, the kiss never given, the sunrise prayer are far away. An American tourist, middle-aged and
gut-bellied in Dockers, and draped with Pentax, Olympus, Minolta, Nikon and
video cameras strides into the cavern. His wife stops him with a gentle touch
of her hand and points to a sign.
“What!” he yells shocked into a halted
mid-step. “No photos!”
#
In
the world above, I keep a deer’s leg bone in a spider plant’s terra cotta pot.
I keep a fish’s fanged jaw on a bookcase and a deer’s vertebrae in a dieffenbachia’s
ceramic pot. In a red Tibetan bowl, I
keep rabbit mandibles left after coyotes found a warren, and the jumbled skulls
and small bones of mice and voles spewed out in an owl’s pellet. It’s not that
I set out to find bones. It’s simply that death is everywhere in a world so
filled with life, and the bones are everywhere, too, if you know where to look.
Now dirt and dust gather in bone crevices. Tissue, muscle, the gristle of life,
the flesh of scars, birthmarks and memories, the heart’s softness all decay
back into the world. What’s left are
bones that are brittle, brown, sometimes broken, memorials to a life anonymous
in death.
#
We
walk through tunnels and across galleries past the bones of lives laid to rest
centuries ago, unearthed from crowded church cemeteries that had been spewing
pestilence and miasma onto the streets of the living, until in 1786 a reburial
began as the bones of some 6 million dead
were moved to Paris’ vast network of underground quarries and tunnels. The catacombs at Denfert-Rochereau are one
brief mile in the
dead’s empire. We walk past stone
benches in a grotto of humerus, femurs, phalanges, ulna. Ten minutes. Thirty minutes. An hour. That old joke: it’s not that life is so
short, it’s that death is so long. Two
American boys in shorts and tee shirts pull bones from the heaps, femurs, I
think, and start a swordfight to break the boredom. We walk past inspirational signs printed in French
and Latin, the graffiti too worn to read.
“Ainsi tout passé sur la terre / espirt, beaute, graces/ t’elle est une
fluer ephemere.” (In this way, all that
has passed on the earth / spirit, beauty, graces / all is one brief flower.)
We walk past gated tunnels. We walk, and I shorten the distance to my death,
and my bones shelter the marrow growing the blood that keeps me walking. “Òu est elle la Morte? Toujours future ou
passé.” (Where is Death? / Always
future or past.) We walk past the squeals and laughter of children
holding up pelvis bones as masks. We walk.
#
In
the world above, years ago, I was searching for chanterelle mushrooms in the
green and rain world alongside the Olympic Peninsula’s Elwha River, when I
stepped off the trail and found an ungulate’s spine. Perhaps an elk. Perhaps a deer. All that was left on the wet
ground was a row of vertebrae where the animal fell, or perhaps where it lay
down, slept, dreamed, died. Tendrils of
tufted emerald moss and the black hieroglyphics of pencil script lichens spread
across the white bones. I remember
silence, even awe, at old bones sheltering new life.
#
We
walk, we walk past rooms of bones, we walk past caverns of bones, we walk past
another drop of water cold on the face as it falls from stone ceiling to stone
walkway. Skulls line stone pillars. Another turn. Skulls form decorative
diagonal rows in femur walls. As if a
pretty design could hide the unruliness of each of these long forgotten
people’s lost lives. The bones of
peasant and master are here; the bones of the revolution’s assassins are
rubbing shoulders with their victims.
The flesh is gone from too many lives to imagine. The bones remain. And the lives of these people’s descendants,
perhaps scattered to distant shores, perhaps rubbing shoulders with me on the
Metro, perhaps walking past me along the Winged Victory’s staircase at the
Louve, perhaps eating cheese and a baguette as we sit in the Cluny’s medieval
garden. There is no lasting loneliness
within so much life. Centuries ago, the
walking, breathing bone house of one of these strangers stopped to smell a
clutch of cilantro, or walked into a new church, or perhaps the same one,
considered a friend’s face, paused by a manuscript, or took up some other
forgotten, mundane action that released ripples of consequences surrounding me
as I walk past another turn, past another chamber of bones, past another world
of bones.
And so we walk into the world above,
we walk past bones and darkness, we walk up stairs, up stairs, up stairs to
diffuse sunlight streaming through the windows and open door of a room where
uniformed guards search rucksacks, pocketbooks, camera bags for a purloined
pelvis, a stolen skull, a trinket of a tibia.
For hadn’t we emerged from the underworld (or as close to it as we will
get in this life) like the Sumerian goddess Inanna who,
in spite of happiness, set her ear to the Great Below, journeyed into the
underworld, was murdered by her sister Ereshkigel, and then reborn into an even
more passionate life? But this was no
true initiation. The passageway was
never blocked. No demons were there. We deserve no tokens. We’re just tourists
visiting death the same way we’re visiting life. And besides, here in the
world above, the guards are bored. Coffee is going cold in paper cups.
Croissants are turning to crumbs as the afternoon wears on. And beyond the open
door is a frazzle of rain, sunlight, sparrows darting between the wheels of
parked Citroens, smells of fresh baked brioche and loaves of rye from a
boulangerie’s open window. And yet the
city is new to me. Even with a map, I am soon too lost to find the Metro.
- Paris, 2002
Author's notes: I visited in 2002 when this address was in use (verified by travel guides.) The catacombs web site uses a new address: 1, avenue of Colonel Henri Rol-Tanguy. The catacombs were renovated recently, and it’s possible a new address was opened or the street was renamed or other logistical details have shifted. Inanna is the Summerian goddess of love, fertility and war, also known as Ishtar.
*****
THE
STORY BEHIND THE STORY
“The Paris Catacombs”
arose from a tour I’d taken during my first trip to Paris. Upon returning to
the U.S., I realized my notes were episodic and well suited to my favorite
essay form, the collage. As I wrote of the “bones below,” I thought more and
more of the many bones I’d encountered in “the world above,” and incorporating
those instances allowed me to weave the juxtaposition of the living walking
through a world filled with life and death, breath and bone. Some early readers
were put off by the topic, but I think having occasional (gentle) reminders of
your inevitable death is a good way of remembering to live life to the fullest
while you’re still here.
*****
ABOUT
ADRIENNE ROSS SCANLAN
Adrienne Ross Scanlan’s
nature writing and other creative nonfiction has appeared in the City
Creatures blog, the Prentice Hall Reader, Sugar Mule, Pilgrimage,
Tiny Lights and many other print or online journals. She is the nonfiction editor of the Blue Lyra Review, a literary journal of
diverse voices, and in 2016, Mountaineers Books will publish her narrative
nonfiction book, Turning Homeward: Restoring Hope and
Nature in the Urban Wild (tentative title). Her
website is adrienne-ross-scanlan.com.
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