Delaunay's Eiffel Tower & the nature of Paris

Delaunay's Eiffel Tower
When you first arrive in Paris, the buildings ondulate, like swaying hips, drawing you closer towards a vortex. Paris is first and foremost botanical - a carnivorous Venus Flytrap - my understanding of the city of light began the day I first read about Dionaea muscipula:

"The leaves of Venus' Flytrap open wide and on them are short, stiff hairs called trigger or sensitive hairs. When anything touches these hairs enough to bend them, the two lobes of the leaves snap shut trapping whatever is inside. The trap will shut in less than a second. The trap doesn't close all of the way at first. It is thought that it stays open for a few seconds in order to allow very small insects to escape because they wouldn't provide enough food. If the object isn't food, e.g., a stone, or a nut, the trap will reopen in about twelve hours and 'spit' it out."

Reading these lines was a form of satori awakening, and I knew with absolute certainty that I was an errant dung beetle dissolving in the venomous fluids of Paris.

“The trap constricts tightly around the insect and secretes digestive juices, much like those in your stomach. It dissolves the soft, inner parts of the insect, but not the tough, outer part called the exoskeleton. At the end of the digestive process, which takes from five to twelve days, the trap reabsorbs the digestive fluid and then reopens. The leftover parts of the insect, the exoskeleton, blow away in the wind or are washed away by rain. The time it takes for the trap to reopen depends on the size of the insect, temperature, the age of the trap, and the number of times it has gone through this process.”

The lobe of this seductive predator manufactures digestive juices and an antiseptic juice. This keeps the victim from decaying over the few days it is inside the trap and purifies prey that it captures.

Rémy de Gourmont
Rémy de Gourmont, scholar of the bizarre and the obscure, eventually stopped writing on people, and devoted his efforts to treatises such as La Physique de l'Amour, which examined copulation, dismorphism and deviant behaviour in the animal and insect world, while a form of lupus was preventing him from showing an increasingly patchy complexion in public, and eventually left him trapped inside his flat on rue des Saints-Pères. See page 73 titled - Chimeras: the elimination of the male and human parthenogenesis."

The inside cover of la Physique de l'Amour shows a male Boreal toad mounting a female from behind, and in the words of de Gourmont, "pressing her like a lemon", while he "devotedly" fertilizes a "rosary" of eggs which trail behind the female. This graphic representation has to be one of the most flagrant cases of misrepresentation of a book's contents, as the book could quite easily have been titled "In defence of hermaphroditism", as de Gourmont ruthlessly views all human, animal and insect impulses with physiological egalitarianism.

De Gourmont's lifelong investigation into aberrant sexual behaviour eventually brought him to the following conclusion:

"Of all the sexual aberrations, perhaps the most peculiar is chastity"