L'Univercennes du Bois de la Cité Sacrée

To Virginie L. 

The Anglo-Americans were the first ones
To round up pundits in the vicinity.
The neck of the woods where they used to hang dons
Now's fine purlieu to build a university.
Helen of Troy had the Edgar of Paris
Mentally rooted to the spot, high above
Sea marvel, like the Poor Clares in Venice
Made the Holy Spirit hover as a dove.
She did not tout for customers nor dealers
All sorts of birds came in droves and disappeared
Foucault's white turtleneck awed would-be leaders
There're no masters, even Lacan grew a beard
Today everyone seems to sit in an armchair
En plein air, Virginie's viridity glare

Lost University remains

The documentary by Virginie Linhart about the Vincennes's experience was an odd moment. At the end of the beginning we see the professors retell the years of their youth there, a moving please-be-seated travelling band. Of some bizarre backwater spot, a real oxbow lake, mister minister Faure had given the keys to a bunch of brilliant and sharp teachers. A cultural evolution, like an avicennising of the classes below the trees in the forest behind the scenes. A strange bonanza, imposed by the young & wild ones, Ms Cixous insists on saying. 

Without bothering to lock the doors, these talented men and women brought something new into the french educational system. Certes l'idée n'était justement pas de faire système, l'ouverture des connaissances était à l'ordre du jour, elles s'observaient sans voyeurisme dans la fente d'une aube nouvelle dont la lumière raserait de son calcium tous les os creux, et dépatinerait la matité des hernies, de la vieille aristocratie académique. De façon généreuse plus que gratuite, vêtues de la toge de la déesse Satis plutôt que des chiffons de la guenipe politicienne du gratis. Some sort of a brand new Cherry Orchard saved from the hands of a vile monopolistic family of pitiful grabbers. Peut-être autre chose que la simple battue d'une baguette dans l'air du temps, un signe.  

Indeed a very strange idea reassembling the eyewitnesses of the lost time, standing daylight ghosts of a bygone age, upon the terrain of such a delicately scorched earth, once a house that Jack built, now a vanished monument cataloguing the departed bones of some université mémorielle des champs. As if these non-ruins were the testimony to the fierceness of a present that doesn't exactly present itself right in the vivid light stimuli of its derailed orbital velocity. Something still hurts their beating hearts. The memories of the professors are at work again, churning what's left of the past, inhaling the smoky dark matter of what's passing around the burning leftovers of a sun sans shadows. The ancient green colours may not have faded but the venerable volcano is gone, forever, even though everything might be buried beneath the absence of the lava, you can hear the merchants of the Souk, breathe the smell of pot. Then they whipped the locks, stole about anything worth reselling, even a party of visiting Communists were disgusted.

The healing fields of knowledge reverted to woodland. Killjoy, Madame Saunier pronounced it to be gibberish. They unbed the maid. Hélène's got the face, the bearing of a goddess. The government took her body to Saint-Denis and I kept the head. (I'm sorry for the hasty drawing, c'est tiré de mon carnet noir, un seul trait, lors d'un moment dans la lune comme toujours, flash du film de Linhart la Jeune.) The only real victory a witness remembers is how a truck driver became a tenured professor with a chair of History, a compelling example of the theory of Reproduction pursuing the elite. Now the backdoor is sealed. They've returfed the place.

J'aurais aimé vivre cette période, il y avait vraiment de très beaux ateliers de mathématiques (Bourbaki continué), un plaisant labo d'informatique, les enseignements donnés sur la musique semblaient sériels et concrets, concertés et sérieux, loyaux et discrets. Les cours de théâtre étaient sans doute d'un pourrave à toute épreuve, mais c'était dans la nature des choses qu'ils le fussent, leur contre-conformisme révolutionnaire n'étant que l'expression d'un pindarisme consacré.  Jeunes poètes chinois, vieux part-time coolies, déracinés, enracinés, les étudiants avaient l'inestimable possibilité de mettre au bon pas d'une belle hélice la marche en eux d'un monsieur Hulot toujours un peu divagant, candide faucheur de rhinocérite, dans les hautes herbes des baguenaudiers. Au-delà des histoires politiques, en deçà des intimidations franches et molles de la part des fausses juvénilités de la Toison morte, vraies vieilles-barbes Mao-castristes qui camouflaient mal le manque d'attention au silence de la marche du monde humain sur le visage des agitateurs professionnels lacéré par d'invisibles tics, petits avatars outils d'une barbarie à déifique usage, antiquités vivantes déjà en 1969, le savoir excipait de la fumée des sables vitrifiés du miroir ancestral. 

Low on drugs, the film is Robert Linhart's great reawakening among the sempervivum, the ribwort, the bladder-senna, the sweet peas and linseeds of the memory sowed by his magnificently caring daughter Virginie.

Black incorporated