#ogives

un chambranle- frame (of a door or window)

la tiretaine- tartan

un camelot- huckster, street vendor

le commérage- gossip

une voûte- vault (like a vaulted roof)

un lambris- dashboard, panneling

une menuiserie- carpanter’s workshop

l’ogive (f)- ogive (apparently it’s an architecture thing, see gif below)

fainéant.e- lazy (literally ‘do nothing’)

bataillard- warlike

coudoyer- to be pressed together elbow to elbow

éblouir- to dazzle

ternir- to tarnish

épargner- to spare

déchiqueter- to shred

ciseler- to chisel, to carve, to whittle

Satie - Ogives (1889)

Monday afternoons I work the lunch shift. I take mini-breaks when I can between taking orders and putting plates together. So I’m chatting with friends on discord, and one of them drops the news: Notre-Dame is burning. That afternoon I was filling with dread, sneaking another peak at the development, wishing and praying that the church would be saved. Every few minutes, it seemed to be getting worse and worse. The roof was being lost. The spire caught flame. And there was talk of the possible collapse of the bells that could bring the towers down as well. Now that the fire is out, I’m relieved to see that, as extensive as the damage was, it was nowhere near as bas as I was afraid it would have been. But in the fear of those hours and reading news stories about heartbroken people around the world, especially French people, and the people of Paris, I couldn’t help but think of the opening to Victor Hugo’s Hunchback of Notre-Dame. The preface of the book tells us that the author had been rummaging around the bell towers and found the Greek word for Ananke, a personification of fate, inevitability. It seemed to have been carved in there by someone in the Middle Ages. But at some point afterward, the cathedral was renovated and that word was erased from the wall. Hugo uses this section to meditate on the possible motivation for the nameless person of generations ago putting that word as their only mark on history, and then on the sadness of that word being erased along with him. He ends the passage suggesting that maybe some day the church itself will vanish. I still cannot stop thinking about this brief passage, and how heavy the sentiment is. Had the worst happened, and Notre-Dame were to completely have burned down, one of the great monuments from the middle ages, the most iconic church, full of art, a masterpiece of architecture, would have been gone off of the face of the earth forever. Even something that we think of as timeless, like that specific cathedral, can be taken away at any moment. It is only inevitable. Ananke. While these piano pieces by Satie have nothing to do with Hugo’s novel, they were inspired by the architecture of Notre-Dame cathedral, specifically the pointed arch windows. These are short works, stoic, and they combine plain-chant like phrases with louder chorale passages. They’re brief meditations on what it feels like to experience being inside one of the great old cathedrals, to feel the heaviness of the stillness and tradition, and feel a connection with God. And if not God, at least an acknowledgment that you are in a space that is part of something greater and older than you. The music here also tries to recreate the echo that the church organ causes. And the score lacks bar lines, which can help the performer get into a trance-like flow, letting the music happen without strict attention to rhythm and counting.

Ogives on the Gates Glacier (via National Park Service, Alaska Region)