Garretcore

You’re too urban for Cottagecore and too poor for Dark Academia. Still, you long to have an aesthetic that becomes a lifestyle. Have you a room ? Maybe only one, a maid’s room once upon a time, under an attic roof at the end of a long path of winding wooden stairs ? A room, dare we say, that you might call your own ?

Then Garretcore might be the answer for you.

Stretching coin, you cook at home, one-pot soups in winter and salads in summer as you have a single hob and hardly a kitchen to speak of, but you enliven those dishes with the the lavender, thyme, and rosemary in boxes on the window sill, high over the cobble stone streets below. Those same herbs double for tinctures and teas, dried over the lone burner.

You might not shoot pigeons for dinner as some garretcore pretenders have claimed to do, but you mend your clothes by candlelight, darning in 1-2-3 rhythms of a music box’s moth-eaten waltz, Liszt perhaps, or Chopin. You thrift sheets to make dresses and or textile art. You gaze with your nose against the window all along the rue des Saints Pères for the art on display in the galleries there, so that you might splurge at Sennelier or L’Ecritoire or Delamain, or special exhibits at the Orsay or the Musée de la Vie Romantique, evening hours preferably. Rare money (earned by taking tourists through the Palais Royal or the Covered Passages) vanishes too in the « paradis » at the opera, so high up you see nothing – but you hear. At home again, you sing Mimi’s aria from La Bohème or Rodolfo’s reply as you gaze into the night sky with the moon hanging so close you could snatch it, but by what light would the poets then write ?

You have more books than amenities (plumbing a particular luxury) colonizing every little pocket of space: Louise Labé and Dante, Mallarmé, alchemical treatises, ephemerides, Balzac, the Letters of Rupert Brooke, outdated books of manners falling to tatters and encyclopedia’s containing geography that no longer exists. Or, again, collector’s editions of unknown poets who may or may not be still of this world -- no one is entirely sure-- procured at La Halle Saint Pierre.

The books, held in place by a complex lace of cobweb and leaning every which cattywampus way, are in more langages than you can speak, but not by more than a few. At all events, there’s always the Beginner’s Guide to Medieval Latin among them, if too high up for easy reach. And you do read them, by your full east French window whose sun wakes you each morning, or by argan lamp with a glass of Bourgueil. When you don’t, you always fall back to Umberto Eco’s advice to always have more books than you can read.

For similar reasons you have more journals than you could fill in a life longer than is usually granted to garret-dwellers. Some are scribbled over with notes from your cours magistral on Modigliani or the quodlibets, or your dissertation notes at the Vatican library or Visconti tarot readings (your own and those of others) but most – leatherbound or Leonardo imprinted-- are a bridal white invitation to a masterpiece that remains to be written.

You might still use them as you write strange verse forms, translate historical documents, research arcana. Come evening, though, you shelve them to take out a sheet of vergé from Clairefontaine and your dip pen, or even a plume if you feel to, and the violet ink you’ve scented from your tinctures. On a lapdesk, you write faraway friends and lovers, letters you may or may not send. Your old governess alone from your childhood who speaks to you still, disappointment to the family that you are. You write to her crosswise, folding the letter by muscle memory into a perfect eighteenth century envelope, and perhaps collage or watercolor the address. Theosophic sigils are also an option, but you think better of this.

If you don’t write you sketch -- in sanguine and slate, or perhaps pastels : quick portraits on the sly or from memory, or again the view from this room of your own, by rainbow or snowlight.

When not in this dollhouse abode, you make literary pilgrimages to the Luxembourg where Verlaine or Baudelaire once strode or Camus’ La Palette. Closer to home, you walk to the bakery everyday following the paths the Resistants trod whild dodging the black booted menace, dried flowers on the streets where they fell.

While the books mean there’s no floorspace for chairs, there’s always the street level café for drinking with friends and discussing your latest short story or lamenting the tastes of publishers. Sometimes you go there just to scribble with that pen you love for the way it runs over the page, like dreams that flee upon waking. The waiters know, and keep the Bourgueil on hand for you

But come evening again, a cheap reproduction bust of Thomas Chatterton looks on as you, in your long flannel nightie, take silk rag strips out of antique satin lingerie boxes with their French knots and ribbon roses, to pin curl your hair into the « anglaises » of another time. They complement the cosmetics you recreated from Toilet of Flora, along with your rose eau de toilette and the violet water. You label them with your dip pen, after muses and the sonnets they inspired, before drifting off on your pallet bed under the low sloping ceiling to dream in Verlaine’s alexandrins impairs.

These are some of the delights of the Garretcore life, its mansard roofs and weak lungs eaten up with creative fervor. Is it for you ?

You’ll know.

For you don’t choose the Garretcore life ; Garretcore chooses you.