The Ways of Paradise, page 1
‘In The Ways of Paradise, notes on a vanished text become clues into a mystery: if the world has a centre, what is located there? Traversing holy cities, land art and myths of eternal return, Peter Cornell leads us into a maze of profound depth, unlocked at last in Saskia Vogel’s exquisite translation.’
— Anna Della Subin, author of Accidental Gods
‘Like a collision between the fantastical libraries of Borges, David Markson’s art obsessed micronarratives and Iain Sinclair’s occult strain of psychogeography. The Ways of Paradise is a labyrinth I never wanted to escape.’
— Chris Power, author of A Lonely Man
‘Open, allusive, constantly expanding its appreciation of the covert relations between culture and history, place and belief, The Ways of Paradise embodies its own utopian premise. No longer are fragments deployed only formally; rather they serve as waymarkers on a quest to the interior, the final labyrinth of human imagination, and the mind’s own mysterious corridors. Each traveller will find their own entrance, and each will surely be entranced.’
— Gareth Evans
‘The Ways of Paradise is a work of art, an end in itself, a rich and enigmatic book.’
— Kristoffer Leandoer, Aftonbladet
‘A stimulating and incredibly elegant anti-essay.’
— Jan Söderqvist, Svenska Dagbladet
‘The subjects are woven together in a way that is as intelligent as it is imaginative. Cornell’s book is proof of the author’s erudition ripened into wisdom. Cornell’s labyrinth lives and will live as long as there are readers.’
— Crispin Ahström, Göteborgs-Posten
THE WAYS OF PARADISE
NOTES FROM A
LOST MANUSCRIPT
PETER CORNELL
Translated by
SASKIA VOGEL
National Library of Sweden (Kungliga Biblioteket), Humlegården Stockholm
Contents
Title Page
Preface
I.
II.
III.
Image credits
Works Cited
About the Authors
Copyright
Preface
The author of this text was a familiar figure at the National Library of Sweden in Stockholm’s Humlegården. Almost every day for more than three decades he could be spotted in the serene reading room, absorbed in his studies, in reverie. It was said that he was occupied with an uncommonly comprehensive project, a work that – as he once disclosed in confidence – would reveal a chain of connections until then overlooked.
However, even after the thorough investigations following his death, the work in question has yet to be located. Among his effects is a sheaf of papers on which is written ‘The Ways of Paradise: Notes’, which is to say, all that seems to remain of his great work is its critical apparatus.
The found manuscript is typewritten on white A4 paper. It consists of 122 loose sheets, collected in said sheaf. Neither the pages nor the notes are numbered. In this edition I have, however, numbered the notes following their order in the manuscript. The extent to which this order was finalized we cannot be sure; other combinations cannot be ruled out. Nor can we be sure that this manuscript contains the complete critical apparatus to The Ways of Paradise, or if this represents but a small part. Certain graphic figures were included in the manuscript; other illustrations, notably reproductions of various artworks named in the text, I have appended myself.
As the author’s sole remaining friend and student, all that is left for me to do is to publish these notes, in the hope that they will provide a glimpse of the lost work’s contours.
Peter Cornell, Stockholm, June 1987
I.
1. Various types of fantastical tales, ‘contes fantastiques autour des contes originaires’. Jurgis Baltrušaitis, La quête d’Isis: Essai sur la légende d’un mythe, 1985.
2. Ibid.
3. ‘The centre of the world’, ‘the heart of the world’. This concept recurs in all cultures even as their geographic and topographical situations may vary: country, cave, mountain, tower, temple or city. These imagined places arise from fantasies of a holy land, described as follows by René Guénon: ‘This “holy land”, above all others, it is the finest of lands per the meaning of the Sanskrit word Paradesha, which among the Chaldeans took the form of Pardes and Paradise in the Western world; in other words it refers to the “earthly paradise” that constitutes the point of departure in each religious tradition.’ Here was the origin, here was spoken the first, creative Word. See ‘Les gardiens de la Terre sainte’ (1929), in Symboles fondamentaux de la Science sacrée, 1962.
4. Possibly in André Breton’s object Souvenir du paradis terrestre from 1953, a rugged rock, 11.5 x 9.5 x 5 cm, its title inscribed into the rock.
5. ‘Paradise’, from Old Persian pairidaeza, meaning ‘enclosed garden, park’.
6. On parks as places ‘where the city dwellers’ wild dreams stir’, see Louis Aragon, Le paysan de Paris, 1926.
7. Observe that he ‘imagines himself [sic!] to know’.
8. Cf. here Prof. Gianfranco Ravasi, for whom the term centre – ‘paradise’, ‘cosmic navel’ – is fundamental to descriptions of Jerusalem. The term can be read metaphorically, as a protective circle, a place of refuge, a hortus conclusus. La Gerusalemme celeste, 1983.
9. It was thought that mankind was created in the centre of the world, in the navel of the earth, omphalos. Mircea Eliade has recounted several such myths, among them Mesopotamian and Jewish. Of course, paradise, where Adam was created from dust, lay at the centre of the cosmos. And according to one Syrian tradition Adam was created in the very place where Jesus’s cross was to be raised. The same notion has been preserved in Judaism, where Midrash, one of the oldest methods of biblical exegesis, identifies Jerusalem as the site of Adam’s creation. Adam was buried in the very spot of his creation, at the centre of the world, on Golgotha. Cf. Mircea Eliade, Le Mythe de l’éternel retour, 1949.
10. Regarding Melchizedek as ‘king of the world’, ruler of Salem and the midpoint of the world, see René Guénon, Le Roi du monde, 1958, as well as Heb 7.
11. It can, by the way, be noted that within Jerusalem there are two places and – under the caliph Abd-al-Malik – three religions that could lay claim to the absolute centre of the world. On the one hand, there is the rock that provided the foundation for Solomon’s Temple, the very crown of which marked the altar of burnt offerings; the same rock that was identified as the place of Mohammed’s ascent to heaven. On the other hand, there is the hill Golgotha with the Holy Sepulchre, where the centre of the world is still marked with a bowl containing a round rock. See Lars-Ivar Ringbom, Graltempel und Paradies, Royal Swedish Academy of Letters, History and Antiquities, 1951.
Omphalos in the Church of the Holy Sepulchre. After Roscher.
12. The same rock is mentioned in Fredrika Bremer’s travel notes from Palestine: ‘Here they [the pilgrims] kiss a great round marble ball, which they called the “Navel Rock” and is understood to lie in the centre of the earth.’ But the place – the Church of the Holy Sepulchre – otherwise instils in her noteworthy disappointment, ‘a childish spectacle of a tasteless and false character. Devotion or edification thou wilt not perceive in it… My own celebration of Passover was above all interior.’ Lifvet i gamla verlden. Dagboksanteckningar under resor i söder-och österland (Life in the Old World: Diary Entries from Travels in Southern and Eastern Lands), part III, 1861.
13. Referring here to the limestone Mount Tabor in Galilee, likely from ‘tabbur’, navel.
14. But can one not equally assert the inverse relationship here? Paul Cézanne’s repetition of certain subjects doesn’t have to mean that he was indifferent to the subject, that the motif was merely an artifice to render the desired form. On the contrary, his constant return to the mighty Mont Sainte-Victoire could suggest that this subject harbours a dark and mysterious meaning. Behind the outline of Sainte-Victoire we can perhaps glimpse old notions about the centre of the world. And via Cézanne this fantastical tale reproduces itself in ever-widening circles around its origin; this is how Peter Handke designates a specific geological point on this very mountain as his own centre point:
In my quest for unity I had discovered yet another clue, to which I felt committed, though I had no idea where, if anywhere, it might lead. In the preceding months, every time I had looked at Cézanne’s paintings of his mountain, I had come across this clue, and it had become an obsession with me.
Seen from the west, where the mountain shows three prongs, it reveals its strata and folds in a geological cross-section. I had read that Cézanne as a young man was friends with a geologist by the name of Marion, who in later years accompanied him on many of his expeditions in search of “motifs”. As I studied the maps and descriptions of the mountain, my thoughts began, involuntarily and inexplicably, to revolve around one and the same point: a fault between two strata of different kinds of rock. This occurs on the gently rising ridge path leading from the west to the actual crest, and it can fittingly be called a “point” because here, where one stratum penetrates most deeply into the other, it also intersects the line of the ridge. This point, which in nature cannot be discerned with the naked eye, nevertheless recurs time and again in Cézanne’s paintings, where it is indicated by a shadow line of varying length and thickness; even in the pencil sketches, the indentation is indicated by shading or at least by a delicate outline.
It was this spot more than anything else –
‘Die Lehre der Sainte-Victoire’, 1980 (The Lesson of Mont Sainte-Victoire, trans. Ralph Manheim, 1985).
15. Sainte-Victoire as seen from the quarry Bibémus. Dorival points out that in his autumnal years Cézanne developed a predilection for abandoned, desolate places, such as the forgotten, half-overgrown Bibémus. There he set up camp for a time, prior to having an atelier appointed on the outskirts of Aix-en-Provence a few years before his death. His landscapes from the Bibémus period, according to Dorival, all have ‘un caractère cosmique de tragédie géologique’. Bernard Dorival, Cézanne, 1948.
16. In what follows, the discussion likely references the American sculptor Robert Smithson’s work, made in extreme and inaccessible places, such as Utah’s Great Salt Lake, Texan deserts or the Yucatán in Mexico – ‘the unfocused fringe’, in Smithson’s own words. The aforementioned work Broken Circle/Spiral Hill (1971) was constructed in a former sand mine in the Netherlands.
Robert Smithson, Broken Circle/Spiral Hill (1971)
17. It now seems to have been firmly established that Sigmund Freud climbed Vesuvius in 1902.
18. Cf. the French term passages in the art-historical literature about Cézanne (André Lhote, Erle Loran, etc.). Cézanne decidedly opposes the depth of field in the old one-point perspective – a static projection of the world in which imagined orthogonal lines converge at one vanishing point, or point of focus, in the distance. A one-point perspectivist representation presumes that the artist has viewed their motif from a single, arbitrary angle. The artist is in this case static, i.e. fettered to one point and unable to so much as turn his head, similar to the people in Plato’s cave.
Aided by passages, Cézanne prevents the viewer from losing himself in the illusion of spatial depth and instead restores the background to the picture’s surface. A person’s shirtsleeve can, for example, take on the same colour as the drapery in the background, or a tree’s contours can be split up and united with a mountain in the distance; this is how passages take shape, a constant transition between foreground and background, surface and depth. The eye of the beholder wanders as if at random, back and forth, across the image; they become a flâneur. Or, as Lhote expresses it, in Cézanne’s landscape ‘you can carry out an ideal walk, not on your feet, but with your mind’. André Lhote, Traité du paysage, 1939.
19. To whom he also appeals in the foreword.
20. The passages technique in painting develops right around the same time that the arcades (Passagen in German and passages in French) are being built in the great metropolises. They are later described as follows in An Illustrated Guide to Paris from 1852 (as cited in Walter Benjamin’s Das Passagen-Werk, 1982): ‘These arcades, a recent invention of industrial luxury, are glass-roofed, marble-panelled corridors extending through whole blocks of buildings, whose owners have joined together for such enterprises. Lining both sides of these corridors, which get their light from above, are the most elegant shops, so that the arcade is a city, a world in miniature, in which customers will find everything they need. During sudden rainshowers, the arcades form a place of refuge for the unprepared, to whom they offer a secure, if restricted, promenade – one from which the merchants also benefit.’
21. Clearly referring to what is in motion inside the arcades, the circulation of people, money and goods. In his novel Le paysan de Paris Aragon defines these spaces for trade, flânerie and unexpected encounters: ‘How oddly this light suffuses the covered arcades which abound in Paris in the vicinity of the main boulevards and which are rather disturbingly named passages, as though no one had the right to linger for more than an instant in those sunless corridors.’
22. In Stéphane Mallarmé’s full vision for The Book, which he planned but never saw through, radically new modes of reading are suggested. The reader was to abandon the rigidity of linear reading for ‘a new way of reading, concurrent’. The reader could begin at the start or at the end of the work. And the pages, according to an intricate system, could be reordered so that new combinations and contexts of meaning would ever be arising. As such, The Book had neither a beginning nor an end, no fixed meaning, only perpetual circulation, like ‘les anneaux mobiles du serpent’, the snake’s circuitous movements. See Jacques Scherer, Le ‘Livre’ de Mallarmé, 1957.
23. A paradoxical, cyclic motion it may seem: particulars are understood via the whole and the whole via particulars. As such, the very process of understanding, the hermeneutic work, in Heidegger, Gadamer, etc. can be described as walking in a circle, though not one that is closed, ‘circulus vitiosus’, but instead one that is freely circulating and ever-widening, moving towards broader horizons. Therefore, the expression ‘hermeneutic spiral’ is often preferred to ‘hermeneutic circle’. Adrian Marino argues that ‘the hermeneutic process is bound up with circular development. It runs through various circles, which constantly convey a series of alternate connections, retreats, old paths with new credibility, a demonstration “in spiral fashion”.’ L’herméneutique de Mircea Eliade, 1981; see also Gerard Radnitzky, Contemporary Schools of Metascience, 1968.
24. Their promenading and flânerie in Paris has no apparent destination and is guided instead by chance impressions. The Surrealists move as if automatically. Aragon writes in 1926: ‘[I] lived a chance existence, in pursuit of chance, which alone among the divinities had shown itself capable of retaining its authority.’ Yet still not unconditionally, for the surrealists pointedly avoided all sites of note and picturesque tourist draws. They turn their backs on the Left Bank in favour of traversing a more ordinary Paris, like the Opéra quarter with its grands magasins and newspaper kiosks. But, in fact, this is highly volcanic ground, filled with sites that imbue the passers-by with either euphoria or unease – street crossings, parks, statues, signs. André Breton calls for a map coloured by the surrealists’ extreme sensitivity to place, where pleasant places are designated in white, repulsive places black and the rest grey. In this geography there are remarkable magnetic nodes such as the Tour Saint-Jacques, Place Dauphine, Parc des Buttes-Chaumont, the Opéra arcades. Cf. Marie-Claire Bancquart, Paris des surréalistes, 1972.
25. Ibid.
26. Here it is falsely presumed that a centre is always situated in a fixed location. Among nomadic peoples the situation differs, of course. Eliade offers one such example of a moveable axis mundi: the sacred pole of the Achilpa people of Australia. These people carry the pole with them on their travels. Proximity to the pole means that one is always at home, and through the pole a connection to the sky is opened up. Were the pole to break, however, it would be tantamount to catastrophe, bringing the ‘end of the world’ and a return to chaos.
The anthropologists B. Spencer and F. J. Gillen have observed the outcomes of one such catastrophe: the tribe’s members were seized by death anxiety, roved aimlessly and, in the end, sat on the ground to await death. (Mircea Eliade, Le sacré et le profane, 1965.) Among Jewish people, the tabernacle, which denoted the presence of God, Shekhinah, was in constant movement until it found a fixed location when Solomon had his temple built.
27. The border city Perpignan was the centre of the world, according to the artist Salvador Dalí, for there the metre, the measure of everything, was formulated. He also discovered that the city’s train station inexplicably resembled the only drawing Sigmund Freud left behind.
28. It hardly needs to be pointed out that a centre may just as well be located at the periphery, like a humble fragment. Marcel Proust asserted that Vermeer’s View of Delft was the most beautiful of all paintings, and when the painting was exhibited at the Jeu de Paume in 1921, not even his infirmity could prevent him from seeing it again. A photograph from this visit has been preserved, taken the year before his death. Proust has just stepped out into the bright sunlight and is standing erect, as if gripped by a grand, solemn ceremony. What has he seen? Proust incorporated the episode into his novel In Search of Lost Time. There the aged and sickly author Bergotte takes great pains to make his way to an exhibition to see the same painting by Vermeer, which he also loves. But this time, the whole doesn’t interest him as much as an apparently inconsiderable detail: a little patch of yellow wall. At once the patch illuminates Bergotte’s consciousness, ecstatic and merciless. ‘His giddiness increased; he fixed his eyes, like a child upon a yellow butterfly which it is trying to catch, upon the precious little patch of wall. “That is how I ought to have written,” he said.’ Bergotte realizes that his writings have become ever more desiccated and lifeless, and he would gladly trade them for this exquisitely painted yellow patch.
