A Dyke A Broad #109 Restoration Edition
Wednesday, I grabbed my bike and set off for my friend Val’s workshop just a stone’s throw from the Jardin des Plantes where they’ve installed a bunch of giant plant and insect sculptures which apparently light up after dark judging from all the barely hidden electrical wires. I wonder what will happen to them afterwards. Will they sit in some warehouse? Find a home in a museum? Travel elsewhere? End up in a dump?
At the very least, I hope they’re recycled into something else. In this age of belt-tightening, economizing, conserving, I have a horror of waste. Of things anyway. Food. Clothes. Water. Wasting things, like fossil fuels for instance, betrays a false, maybe immoral, belief in endless, even eternal, resources. Wasting time is a different matter. Even if on the human scale, it is just as finite. For individuals anyway.
This is the question. Do I owe it to anyone to make wise use of mine? I was taught wasted time was wasted life. My increasing desire to “waste” is a kind of rebellion, a desire to refuse to be productive, to produce, to please…but also grapple with the idea of eternity. Whole-hearted-hoggedly wasting it, either doing nothing at all or spending it on frivolous projects is perhaps a bid for freedom. To believe each human is valuable in themselves, not for what they produce. And that my existence, a blink, a blip on the human timeline, still has time for sheer joy.
Wednesday I shared some time with Val, a custodian of it, as a restorer of old and ancient books. She’d requested my presence for a mysterious task. I didn’t even ask what it was when she texted me. I like to visit her atelier where things exist as things, and are not dematerialized, manipulated and frozen in time.
Things age. She doesn’t try to hide it. Her art is something far more discrete and very French, to make them look merely well-preserved. Like their pages had never been ripped by the careless, chewed by worms, warped by damp. As if both Time, and human hands, had been kinder.
Of course that’s as fake as if she had made them new and shiny. “Restore” often means replace with something as identical as possible. Eighteenth century paper for eighteenth, lambskin for lamb. Valou has huge stores of paper and cardboard, leather, sometimes visits dealers who specialize in such things and have even vaster stocks. Years ago I was shocked when I realized that paintings which have been “restored,” have often been repainted, the restorer re-creating brushstrokes, matching the paint that has cracked, or disappeared entirely along with the varnish.
If they’d started from scratch it would be considered forgery, but re-creating a work’s former glory, even if only a few centimeters here and there remain of the original, that’s restoring. Still, we value it. Like we value old books. Marvel at their age, their existence. Their beauty—enhanced by their unlikely survival. It is always a miracle that such a frail thing as a book or painting can endure. A sign someone has valued and protected it. Or in some cases, forgotten it up in an attic. That’s a kind of protection, too. Every age has its book-burners. Its hate.
I made myself at home, while she gathered her supplies. My job was simple, bracing the guts of an enormous book upright while she patched the top edges of the cover along the spine, using nothing fancier than leather and glue, and a handful of tools to press and poke and smooth. One of them was metal and when she had it in her hand doing god knows she looked like a dentist.
It didn’t take long. Afterwards, I stared at the letter pressed into the leather cover, Chez La Mère Germaine, son livre d’or. The guest book of a restaurant and hotel set to celebrate their one hundredth anniversary later this month. She’d had to pull the whole thing apart, page by page almost, repairing each folio. Binding them all like Sauron’s ring. Of course, I wanted to peek inside. Luminaries had eaten there. From Mistinguett to Jean Gabin, Fernandel, Gaby Morlay. Stop by next week, she said, when the glue’s dried.
My Twitter Favs This Week
An important thread
That’s it for this week.
xoxo K
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