headless in saint-denis
what is the difference between goal and numéro fétiche
Hungover on a Saturday night, in a bar beneath Montmartre I’m talking to an art-historian. She used to be a guide at the Louvre but since the pandemic she works as a teacher in elementary school. We are 6 people at the table, and she tells us about Denis, the first bishop of Paris. Denis was walking down the street with his friends Éleuthère and Rustique, some time between 250 and 272 AD. The streets they walked were: Rue de Montmartre, Faubourg de Montmartre and Rue des Martyrs, which could have given away what was about to happen, but back then no one knew the street’s names yet, or that the path through the fields and forests would be paved and asphalted over time. So Denis and Éleuthère and Rustique are walking down the street and up the hill of Montmartre. Once on top, the three friends are decapitated, execution style. From the art historian’s account I couldn’t understand whether this came as a surprise to the three friends, but back then christians were apparently used to being hunted and shunned. Anyways it seems that Denis wasn’t too impressed from being decapitated. Once his head went off, he (or rather: his body) picked up his head and started walking North. No one seems to have been trying to stop headless Denis, since he walked on for 6 kilometers, handed his head to a woman that was just “passing by”, lay down and died. It was then that Denis became Saint-Denis, ending a potential mix-up that apparently1 often confused Denis with some Denys l’Aréopagite and a certain Pseudo-Denys l’Aréopagite. On the spot, where headless Saint-Denis lay down, the Basilique de Saint-Denis would be erected, and around the Basilique the city of Saint-Denis would grow.
The next day is a Sunday and I am less hungover but still dazzled enough to see how beautiful everything is, kind of on-the-outside-looking-in/on-the-inside-looking-out style. I get a café allongé at the café where they always ask me whether the coffee is “long” enough for my taste, and I always say “a little longer please”, and with my coffee I go to the nearby park on top of Montmartre, just down the street from where I live. It’s more a sandy square then a park, very chic, and even the children that are playing in the sand are dressed better than me. And then I see Saint-Denis, standing in the middle of the square above the well-dressed children: the sculpture of a headless body holding a mitre-bearing head in it’s hand. Turns out I’ve had all these long coffees under Saint-Denis watchful eyes.
Half an hour later I am going north, headless like Saint-Denis from Montmartre to Saint-Denis, but instead of walking like a martyr I rent a city bike like a loser (the pastel green and turquoise color or the Velib’ still looking humiliating to me). It must have been a nice walk in Denis’ time, through forests and fields, but today I have to cross a lot of urban blind spots between the Peripherique, the huge Stadium and around the walls of the giant cemetery. I don’t know whether Denis’ eyes on the bodiless head were open during his walk because on some paintings his eyes are closed and two angels are guiding him with their hands on his shoulders (which looks more like one long shoulder since the head is missing) but he must have still felt a nice spring breeze on his skin like the one I was feeling 1800 years later.
In the main-street in Saint-Denis I pass one of those cafés where they also sell tobacco and lottery things, and the energy is so crazy that I just have to go in. Inside it is rather dark, the only light coming from the sun shining in through the wide open door and windows. Lights off, Vibes on, I go straight to the counter and ask for a “Goal”, which is a scratch card lot for 1 euro that I used to buy on a regular when I was living in Paris just before the pandemic. Goal is said to have great chances of winning (4000€ max) but I seem to have been unlucky so far. When I say “One Goal please” the guy behind the counter, who is also speaking on the phone, answers “We’re all out of Goals” and I am baffled and say nothing because I see one Goal under the glass plane on top of the counter and I point at the Goal under the glass but he just proceeds to talk on the phone and hands me another scratch card with an asking facial expression (eye brows ⬆️ ) and I just nod and give him 1 € and take the scratch card. This one’s a game I don’t know called Numéro Fétiche (number fetish), and the goal is to scratch free the number 1 (apparently the fetish number). Not being very convinced of the whole number fetish thing I proceed to a standing-up table, and when I get closer I see that it is covered in scratch residue, small black and silver rolls everywhere, and then I realize the floor is covered in scratch residue as well and I look around and I realize there is a low scratching noise humming in the background, but I don’t see anyone scratching right now but me, me, who is about to scratch…
I scratch and reveal the numbers 7, 9, 6, 3 and 5, no fetish. I forget to take a photo of the card as I would usually do and just leave it lying there amidst all the scratch residue.
I enter the the Basilique de Saint-Denis, after having had another café allongé (no questions asked) while on the phone talking to my depressed parents who are getting more depressed every week because of the war, retreating more and more into collecting herbs from the disappearing forests of the Sauerland (the fleeting landscape) for tea induced healing. I remember the art historian from the night before having said something about the specificity of the blue light in the basilica. The Sun on-the-outside-looking-in. There is only few other people inside, all of whom are equipped with an audioguide, the kind that you have to hold to your ear like a mobile phone, making everyone look like they’re on the phone with god. Later I call my brother, and he tells me about the history of the basilica and that it functioned as a grave for all French Kings, and that in the French Revolution the plebs had stormed the church and opened all tombs and exhumed the king’s and queen’s dead remains. I remember the shrouds made of asbestos found in the Vatican, wrapping important bodies in the precious and eternal garment woven from white stone. I imagine the revolutionary citizens of Saint-Denis euphorised and headless, storming into the church’s blue light and opening tomb after tomb, spreading the bones of their former kings on the church floor, unraveling the shrouds from asbestos, putting the fine garment around their shoulders, toxic dust settling in theirs clothes and hair, celebrating with their friends and families their new found freedom while poisoning everyone they hugged, maybe passing down toxic dust from generation to generation. Instant bad karma for waking up the dead. Maybe the French Revolution failed its ideals and maybe democracy seems so weak because it got in touch with toxic materials so early. Did someone ever give the basilica a really good sweep after the revolution?
The art-historian was right, and the blue and pink light inside the basilica of Saint-Denis really is beautiful. I took some really nice selfies in there. It was Denys l’Aréopagite (I’m not sure whether the real or the pseudo one) who said that if there were an entity, that could be called The Good, it would consist of "mainly-light" or "super-light"2. I think in Saint-Denis you can get some sense of that.
https://materialisme-dialectique.com/pdf/dossier-1/Pseudo-Denys-Areopagite.pdf
No one really seems to know how the mix-up between Saint-Denis, Denys l’Areopagite and Pseudo-Denys l’Areopagite happened, who were living centuries apart at different places all over the ancient world. It seems to have something to do with Greek philosophers becoming christian, a lying Apostle Paul and the conviction that the most important teachings of God should be kept secret. In any case, the orthodox church still believes that Denys l’Areopagite and Pseudo-Denys l’Areopagite are the same person.
(άρχίφωτος και ύπέρφωτος)
Istvan Perczel (1999) Revue des Études Augustiniennes, 45 (1999), 79-120, p. 85
http://www.etudes-augustiniennes.paris-sorbonne.fr/IMG/pdf/AUGUST_1999_45_1_79.pdf