Doors: Chapter 40

(Re)Making Love: a serial memoir

: Bibliothèque Nationale de France that you can reach via Métro station: Bibliothèque François Mitterrand

Come in the middle? Here’re links to ➡️ Chapter One, Chapter 2, Chapter 3, Chapter 4, Chapter 5, Chapter 6, Chapter 7, Chapter 8, Chapter 9 , Chapter 10, Chapter 11, Chapter 12, Chapter 13, Chapter 14 , Chapter 15 , Chapter 16, Chapter 17, Chapter 18, Chapter 19, Chapter 20, Chapter 21, Chapter 22, Chapter 23, Chapter 24, Chapter 25 , Chapter 26, Chapter 27, Chapter 28, Chapter 29, Chapter 30, Chapter 31, Chapter 32, Chapter 33, Chapter 34, Chapter 35,  Chapter 36, Chapter 37, Chapter 38, Chapter 39

Limits of Control, Jim Jarmusch’s film* about art and life and what we can and cannot control, perhaps about how we know what we think we know ran at the theater next to the Bibliothèque Nationale de France, the glass towers of books that go on and on and on—that Sebold writes about in Austerlitz—and that you cannot enter unless you know the code: how I think about the doors, the maze one must follow to find the doors. Actually, you can buy a reader’s card, but you cannot go into the stacks, the towers that dominate the horizon on the edge of old Paris. The reading room seduces the way my solitude does. Does my solitude reveal?

I planned to go to the Pompidou: One exhibit: THE SUBVERSION OF IMAGES, SURREALISM, PHOTOGRAPHY, FILM—but the staff is on strike. How appropriate: unable to get in to see the surreal. I stand outside and look the way I stood outside the library.

I found this photo on the web:

Roger Livet, Une regrettable affaire (A regrettable affair), c. 1947, from the album of the same name with 19 photographs, created during the revision of the film Fleurs meurtries (Bruised Flowers) c. 1929 Vintage gelatin-silver print, 22,3 x 28,1 cm Centre Pompidou, Musée National d’art moderne, Paris © J.-E. Livet

I think, What is the code? Send in the clowns, the fools, the genies and whoever else can help.

*Jim Jarmusch discusses Limits of Control in a long interview in the YouTube video I found after I’d written this. The trailer for the film is in Chapter 39.

Jarmusch talk:

Coming next: “Bridges”, Chapter 41

Love,