CAFÉ DE LA MAIRE - One of the prime spots where Georges Perec records the swirl of life
An Attempt at Exhausting a Place in Paris - over the course of three days in October 1974, Georges Perec compiled hundreds of individual entries of instances of what he perceived in a certain local in Paris.
This dainty little forty-page Perec praline prospectus can be read several times in an afternoon. I encourage you to slow down and take your time - little will be gained zipping from page to page, most especially since in translator Marc Lowenthal's Afterward we read:
Attempt was one of Perec's clearer efforts to grapple with what he termed the "infraordinary": the marking and manifestations of the everyday that consistently escape our attention as they compose the essence of our lives - "what happens," as he puts it here, "when nothing happens."
Between my own readings of Attempt, I kept reflecting on two bits from Georges' Species of Spaces, a highly provocative essay he wrote in the same year. Here's the duo with my comments:
"Do you know how to see what’s worthy of note? Is there anything that strikes you? Nothing strikes you. You don’t know how to see. You must set about it more slowly, almost stupidly. Force yourself to write down what is of no interest, what is most obvious, most common, most colourless.”
Georges places the emphasis on seeing. Nearly all the many entries in Attempt are visual. For example: "Three children taken to school. Another apple-green 2CV" and "The street lamps progressively light up." Although there's the occasional hearing: "A funeral chimes stops." or feeling: "I went up to the second floor, a sad room, rather cold," Georges focuses on what his eyes perceive.
What I find curious is not once does Georges make mention of the sensation of his own breathing. For me, awareness of breath is rich and beautiful. If we hone our attention, we recognize the rhythm of breath occurs in four stages: inbreth, pause, outbreath, pause. The more we relax into the breath, the more we can have a direct experience of an entire universe opening up. Perhaps the simple fact that breathing is a constant is the very reason it is generally overlooked.
The second Species of Spaces quote is extraordinary: "To describe space: to name it, to trace it, like those portolano-makers who saturated the coastlines with the names of harbours, the names of capes, the names of inlets, until in the end the land was only separated from the sea by a continuous ribbon of text. Is the aleph, that place in Borges from which the entire world is visible simultaneously, anything other than an alphabet?"
This is precisely what Georges does in Attempt. And with the emphasis on the alphabet, it's no accident his first two entres pertain to letters, beginning respectively: "Letters of the alphabet, words:"KLM"" and "Conventional symbols: arrows, under the "P" of the parking lot signs."
Thus we're given a glimpse of what it means to be a born writer, some may even say, a genius writer - an exceptional ability to convert the buzz of experience coming in through our five senses into elegant language. And recall Georges Perec's goal was to write a different book each and every time he set pen to paper or sat at his typer.
And Georges urged anyone aspiring to be a writer to do the same, proclaiming there's space enough for each of us.
In the end, An Attempt at Exhausting a Place in Paris can serve as inspiration, a door to the creative life. Thank you, Georges.
Again the pigeons go round the square
I am now at La Fontaine St-Sulpice, sitting with my back to the square: the cars and people in my line of sight are coming from the square or are getting ready to cross it (with the exception of some pedestrians coming from rue Bonaparte).
French author and space cadet extraordinaire, Georges Perec, 1936-1982
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