The Arcades Project - Operi

with the human nlaterial on the inside of the arcades as -with the l11aterials of their
constnlction. Pnl1ps are the iron uprights of this street1 mld its glass breakables
are the whores. Here was the last refuge of those infant prodigies that saw the
light of day at the time of the world exhihitions: the hriefcase with interior
lighting, the meter-long pocket knife, or the patented umhrella hanclie with huiltin
watch and revolver. And near the degenerate giant creatures, ahorted and
broken-down nlatter, We followed the narrow dark corridor to where-between
a discount bookstore, in which colorful tied-up bundles tell of all sorts of failure,
and a shop selling only buttons (mother-of-pearl and the kind that in Paris are
called de fitntaisie)-there stood a sort of salon. On a pale-colored wallpaper full
of figures and busts shone a gas lamp. By its light, an old woman sat reading.
'They say she has been there alone for years, and collects sets of teeth "in gold, in
wax1 and broken," Since that daY1 moreovel; we know where Doctor Miracle got
the wax out of which he fashioned Olympia.' TIley are the tme fairies of these
arcades (more salable and more worn than the life-sized ones) : the fOffilerly
world-famous Parisian dolls, which revolved on their musical socle and bore in
their arms a doll-sized basket out of which, at the salutation of the minor chord, a
lambkin poked its curious muzzle.
All tills is the arcade in our eyes. And it was nothing of all tllls. They radiated through the Paris of the Empire like grottoes. For someone
entering the Passage des Panoramas in 1817, the sirens of gaslight would be
singing to him on one side, while oil-Ianlp odalisques offered enticements from
the other. With the killdling of electric lights, the irreproachable glow was extinguished
in these galleries, which suddenly became more difficult to find-which
wrought a black magic at entranceways, and peered from blind windows into
their own interior, It was not decline but transformation. All at once1 they were
the hollow mold from which the image of "modenllty" was cast. Here, the
century 11urrored with satisfaction its 11lost recent past. Here was the retirement
home for infant prodigies ...
When, as children, we were given those great encyclopedic works World and
Mankind, New Universe, The Earth, wouldn't our gaze always fall, first of all, on
the color illustration of a "Carboniferous Landscape" or on "Lakes and Glaciers
of the First Ice Age"? Such an ideal panorama of a barely elapsed primeval age
opens up when we look through the arcades that are found in all cities. Here
resides the last dinosaur of Europe, the consumer. On the walls of these caverns,
their imnlemorial flora, the commodit)\ luxuriates and enters1 like cancerous
tissue, into the most irregular combinations. A world of secret affinities : palm tree
and feather duster, hair dryer and Venus de Milo, prosthesis and letter-writing
manual come together here as after a long separation. The odalisque lies in wait
next to the inkwell, priestesses raise aloft ashtrays like patens. These items on
display are a rebus; and one ought to read here the birdseed kept in the
fixative-pan from a darkroom, the flower seeds beside the binoculars, the broken
screws atop the musical score, and the revolver above the goldfish bowl-is right