The Absurd Sublime

 

In the Arcades Project Chapter L (Dream House, Museum, Spa) Benjamin’s most striking and persistent passages concern waxworks, sewers and the dead. In particular Victor Hugo’s description of Bruneseau’s descent into the Paris sewers to undertake a survey designed to expiate the cholera epidemics then common...

‘Nothing equalled the horror of this old voiding crypt, ... cavern, grave, gulf pierced with streets, titanic molehill in which the mind seems to see prowling through the shadow... that enormous blind mole, the past.’ Victor Hugo, Oeuvres Complete vol9 1881 (Les Miserables, L’intestin de Leviathan).

In dark reflection, this is an image of the shining city of human culture, as a tamed behemoth, resting sublimely indifferent on the mountain of its excrement. The Behemoth is the primal unconquerable beast of the land (as Leviathan is that of the sea) who can only be tamed by God. Hugo’s mole is then the shadow of this golden calf as the past is the shade of the present.

As the cemetery mirrors the city so the museum mirrors the sewer - its halls awash with the detritus of civilisation, its walls encrusted with the earnest yearnings of forgotten lives: gods prayed to and died for held up at the same level of importance as the combs used to untangle the hair of our forebears and the toy carts pushed by their children. In this place the reek of the past is overwhelming and it is quite possible to drown – one turns a corner and simply disappears in the fathomless sink of human creativity.

In this place is collected the sum of human experience: from agonising death to beatific generosity; from the strictest of book-keeping to the loudest laughter; all that has been dreamed, all that has been eaten, everything built, made, worn, played and fought over is here alongside all that we know of it; all of its purposes, all of its trials and its trivialities, all of its contradictions and its repetitions. It is in effect the nearest we might get to God on Earth - unknowable in its entirety and ineffable. Too sacred to be uttered, too absurd to be reasoned with.