Blue Guide: The historic rail line between Brussels and Luxembourg, ‘La ligne 162’, was begun in 1846 and inaugurated in 1858 by the Grande Compagnie du Luxembourg, a group of British businessmen who originally planned a rail link to India starting with a continuous track from Ostende to Trieste. It began at Quartier-Léopold station, and took passengers to the Grand Duchy of Luxembourg via Namur, now the regional Walloon capital, and through the Ardennes, part of the territory known as ‘Les Forêts’ by the French revolutionary law of 14 Fructidor III (31 August 1795).
In May 2000, Quartier-Léopold, Europe’s oldest railway station, was renamed Bruxelles-Luxembourg, and all but the building’s façade was demolished to make way for an underground station serving the European Community quarter.
The line plays its small part in European history. Among those who used it were great exiles such as Victor Hugo and Victor Serge, escaping Communards, Rimbaud and Verlaine fleeing debt and legal action, advancing German troops in both world wars and then retreating German troops in both world wars. In May 1864, Baudelaire, then living in Brussels, took the train as far as Namur to visit the artist Félicien Rops. Attempting to return to Brussels, he boarded the 162 in the wrong direction and finished up in Luxembourg before turning around, thus completing the length of the journey twice over.
The 162 is both a local line, with some stops little more than ten minutes apart, and an international line, from which all of Europe is available. ‘Blue Guide’ is about no single journey but about hundreds of journeys taken since my childhood, and my memories of them. It is also about realising, on my first cross-European Inter-Rail trip in 1987, that the train that would take me to Germany, Italy, Yugoslavia and beyond was the same train my family had used for generations to commute the twenty minutes between Libramont and Arlon. All I had to do was stay on the train a little longer.
The Thaw: Christian Dotremont (1922–1979) was a Belgian poet and artist. He founded the Belgian Revolutionary Surrealist Circle, and in 1948 co-founded the CoBRA group of artists, which took its name from Copenhagen, Brussels, Amsterdam. He retained a lifelong fascination with ‘nordicity’, and lived for extended productive periods in Lapland. ‘Dispoetry’ is a translation of his term ‘Dépoésie’. His complete poems are published by Mercure de France, with an introduction by Yves Bonnefoy.
Article 0.5: The Right to Be In-Between: ‘The European Constitution in Verse’ was a project by the Brussels Poetry Collective in response to the failure of the European Constitution. Fifty poets from across Europe, writing in dozens of official and non-official EU languages, were invited to submit articles in verse for the new constitution, which was launched with a performance at Passa Porta in Brussels in March 2009 and published as a book in the Cahiers Passa Porta series.