The Ways of Paradise, page 7
Upon arrival in Crete he meets Ariadne, daughter of Minos and Pasiphaë, and the two fall in love. Ariadne wants to help her beloved. She obtains a ball of thread from Daedalus that will enable Theseus to find his way out of the dark labyrinth. Theseus penetrates the labyrinth, kills the Minotaur and finds his way back out by following Ariadne’s thread.
On Crete Minos rages and punishes Daedalus. He shuts him inside the labyrinth along with Daedalus’s son Icarus. But Daedalus, as usual, finds a solution. He fashions large wings which he affixes to their bodies with wax. They escape the labyrinth by air, but Icarus, intoxicated by the joy of flight, soars higher and higher towards the sun. The heat of the sun melts the wax and Icarus falls into the sea.
Icarus’s death does not, however, quench King Minos’s thirst for vengeance. He searches for Daedalus throughout Magna Graecia, aided by a riddle: Who knows how to string a thread all the way through a spiral seashell and back again? At the home of King Cocalus (from the ancient Greek koklos, ‘shell’), Minos finds a man who solves the riddle by making a small ant work its way through the winding shell with a thread. This man could be none other than Daedalus. However, Daedalus sensed the danger and, thanks to Cocalus’s daughter, managed to scald Minos in the bath using an ingenious device that substituted boiling pitch for bath-water.
51. Note that despite the abundant references to the labyrinth in ancient literature, one cannot find a single author who claims to have seen a labyrinth on Crete with their own eyes.
52. More precisely, an analogy or correspondence. ‘It is not known, at the present day, what correspondence is… It was different for the ancients; for, to them, the science of correspondencies was the chief of all sciences.’ Emanuel Swedenborg, Heaven and Hell, 1758.
53. Allow me to recall the etymology of the symbol. The Greek verb symballein roughly means ‘to throw together’, ‘to unite’. In ancient Greece the noun derived from it, symbolon, characterized the sign of recognition created when a coin or bone fragment was broken in two to provide proof of identity between, for example, a messenger and the recipient. Each kept his own half, and when they met, each could verify the other’s identity by checking that the two irregular edges along the breakage matched like two pieces of a puzzle. Figuratively speaking, the symbol therefore bears witness to an absent and otherwise invisible part. Cf. Thomas Aquinas’s expression ‘corporeal metaphors of spiritual things’.
54. ‘Interestingly enough, neither Gold nor David Greenglass had originally remembered that the recognition signals they had shown each other had consisted of portions of a Jell-O box label. In his first statements to the FBI, David had recalled only that the signal was a cut or torn piece of card. And Gold, in his July 10 interrogation, had spoken of “two torn pieces of paper of an irregular shape, but which matched when put together”. It was Ruth Greenglass, in her first signed statement of July 17, who identified the signal as the halves of a Jell-O box panel.’ Joyce Milton and Ronald Radosh, The Rosenberg File: A Search for the Truth, 1983.
55. ‘Absens et presens’ – an absent, heavenly and a present, earthly Jerusalem. The latter served as an incomplete image of the former. The value of visiting holy places has long been disputed. Whereas pilgrims like Chateaubriand do not for a moment evince doubt, Nerval doubts, and long before him, Church Father Gregory of Nyssa: ‘When the Lord invites the blessed to their inheritance in the Kingdom of Heaven, He does not include a pilgrimage to Jerusalem among their good deeds. I knew the birth had taken place in Bethlehem long before I’d been there, in that very place. I knew of the Resurrection before I had seen the holy grave. Yes, do set off on a pilgrimage, but be it beyond the body and not from Cappadocia to Palestine!’ However in the eschatological thinking that flourished around the year 1000, the wish to be in Jerusalem at the end of time grew ever stronger: it was then that the two Jerusalems were to meet.
56. Here returning to the concept of ‘site’ and ‘nonsite’. The work of Robert Smithson occupies the field of tension between two poles: what he calls ‘site’ and ‘nonsite’. He might begin his work by seeking out a site, a kind of magical boundary zone facing the void, typically an inaccessible, godforsaken, peripheral place: a desert, a quarry or an abandoned industrial wasteland. One such site would then become the starting point for a nonsite, which would take shape in the physical artwork, itself placed in a gallery. The nonsite was by its nature fragmentary, consisting of a pile of sand, rocks or earth that had been brought back from the original site and encased in geometrically shaped boxes, along with certain topographical documentation of their provenance, i.e. their site. Smithson’s site was materially absent and not easily accessible to the public; on the other hand, the public could partake in the corresponding nonsite physically present in the gallery. Between these two poles reigned a tension; one might even call it a longing. As Smithson put it: ‘What you are really confronted with in a nonsite is the absence of the site… One is confronted with a very ponderous, weighty absence.’ A nonsite is therefore a kind of signifier of and fabulation around an original and absent site. Robert Smithson’s first nonsite was A Nonsite, Pine Barrens, New Jersey (1968). It consisted of containers of sand from a site in New Jersey, an old airfield with sandy runways. However, in his final nonsite, titled Nonsite, Site Uncertain (1968), any contact with an existing original site is tenuous and left open; the referent, for which ‘nonsite’ is the signifier, is dissolved. The artwork contains coal from somewhere in Ohio or Kentucky, but there is no information on the specific geographical location of this site – it seems to lose itself in time, in a distant geological carbon period. See Robert Hobbs, ed., Robert Smithson: Sculpture, 1981.
56a. Cf. utopia, from the ancient Greek ο τόπος, non-place.
57. ‘Symbola’ in Plato’s The Symposium. In which it is told that once there was a human species of spherical androgynous beings that became so powerful they threatened the gods. Zeus came up with the idea of bisecting them into male and female halves. Plato uses the very term ‘symbola’ to designate these halves: ‘Now, since the natural form of human beings had been cut in two, each half longed for the other.’ That is to say, from then on, either half went in search of the half that was absent.
58. This phrase can be said to turn Gaston Bachelard’s words into travesty: ‘A comparison is often the beginning of a symbol, one which does not yet bear its full responsibility.’ La flamme d’une chandelle, 1961.
59. An imitation of Novalis: ‘Die Aufgabe in einem Buche das Universum zu finden.’
60. According to Colebrooke’s estimation.
61. A similar question arises from the merely outlined, absent work, considered as a source for distinct, autonomous works. One could view Mallarmé’s The Book and Marcel Duchamp’s The Green Box from this perspective. The latter is a green cardboard box containing facsimiles of notes, documents and sketches, totalling 93 loose sheets, like Mallarmé’s draft of The Book. The notes all relate to the ‘great work’ of Duchamp – who, like Mallarmé, was well aware of the alchemical resonances of this word – his large glass piece, The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even (The Large Glass). Duchamp’s The Green Box was first published in 1934, although the notes date back to 1911–15, and so predate the completion of The Large Glass, which he began to execute in 1915 but only became ‘definitively unfinished’ in 1923. Despite the work in hand, the notes for The Green Box are extremely difficult to decipher, and so give rise to a growing number of interpretations. It would seem that the box lives a life of its own. Duchamp’s notes are characterized by the same hermetic algebra, the same cryptic poetry that can be found in Mallarmé’s sketches for The Book.
Marcel Duchamp, The Green Box
ALGEBRAIC COMPARISON
a/b
a being the exposition
b being the possibilities
the ratio a/b is in no way given by a number c, a/b = c but by the sign ( / ) which separates a and b; as soon as a and b are ‘known’ they become new units and lose their relative numerical value (or duration); the sign which separated them remains (sign of agreement or rather of…?…look for it!)
Stéphane Mallarmé, The Book, page 93
480 the outer limit
for a draft*
To obtain three times
the evolution** 480 – identical to itself or deployed in the opposite direction
960
through
160 x 3 – arranged so that 1st x 3, the 2nd x 3, etc. all the way to the 10th
= 48 (x 10 = 480 x 2 = 960)
or 96 x 10.
every séance or piece is a game, a fragmentary description, but as such sufficient. 3 competitors, doubling
*fireworks
**veil, one of the aspects in the book the yacht.
62. A relationship confirmed by Aragon’s dedication of his novel Le Paysan de Paris to André Masson himself.
63. ‘The metaphysics of place’ – this expression is used by Louis Aragon in Le Paysan de Paris. In this novel the author explores the sacred places (‘lieux sacrés’) of the city of Paris. But these places, which he calls ‘recreations of Ephesus’, reside hidden in what is commonplace, and are unlike ancient places of religious worship in that they are not marked out by commemorative plaques or as tourist attractions. Instead in the heart of the noisy city, they lead discreet, as yet unrevealed existences, but are nonetheless a kind of node for modern mythologies. Aragon explores two of these places in Le Paysan de Paris: first, the great glassed-in passages of the Opéra (Galerie du Baromètre and Galerie du Thermomètre); then, in the latter part of the book, the forgotten Parc des Buttes-Chaumont of the Belleville district in the 19th arrondissement, a fair distance from the city centre. Both the park and the passages emerge as dreamy, anachronistic settings of a bygone era. The park is half in oblivion on the outskirts of Paris and the passages, which once heralded the apotheosis of the Second Empire and the arrival of a new era, were demolished shortly after the novel was published. Aragon takes the reader on a tour of these metaphysical places. He is conscientious and meticulous, like an ethnographer, a prolix guide who alternates between very precise information and imaginative associations.
In the tours of the passages, nothing escapes him. Everything is registered: restaurants, cafés (notably Café Certa, the Dadaists’ café; ‘It was while sitting here one afternoon, towards the end of 1919, that André Breton and I decided that this should henceforward become the meeting place for ourselves and our friends, a choice motivated partly by our loathing for Montparnasse and Montmartre, but partly also by the pleasure we derived from the equivocal atmosphere of the passages’), hairdressers, shops (their signs), menus, price lists, headlines exposing the controversy surrounding impending demolition, theatres and music halls. Yes, the author goes so far as to take us to one of the brothels in the passages, ‘Mme Jehane, massage’. In Aragon’s tour, the passages appear as dreamlike, seductive arrangements, fantastical aquariums bathed in muted blue-green light.
The Parc des Buttes-Chaumont was constructed around the same time as the arcades. Today a sign at the entrance to the park explains the site’s motley history. For several centuries it was used for the gallows and as a repository for excrement from Paris’s latrines. Then, little by little, the attractive geology of the site was exploited, with gypsum being mined in open quarries, which explains the dramatic irregularity of the terrain. It was under Napoleon III that an engineer by the name of Alphand was commissioned to transform this dour place into a park, a task into which he seems to have hurled himself body and soul, determined to realize his every passing fancy. The highest point of this romantic park is crowned by the Temple de la Sybille and linked to the other hills by two bridges: the ‘suicide bridge’ and a suspension bridge above an artificial lake. This is where, on an inky night, Aragon goes, accompanied by his two friends André Breton and Marcel Noll, following a whim of Breton’s. The hills, caves, statues and monuments of the Buttes-Chaumont are described in detail. The three friends stroll through the park, conversing enthusiastically and indulging in the wildest speculations, like little boys on an adventure. In the warm night, the garden, with its unusual topography and amorous couples, acquires a special aura of euphoric mystery. According to Aragon, urban parks are remnants of man’s longing for a lost paradise. Our love of a park’s nature reveals an atavistic sensitivity to the mythical. The park conjures unconscious fantasies. It’s the place where ‘the city dwellers’ wild dreams stir’; the ‘décor of desires’.
64. A kind of broken optical instrument.
65. One could say that these labyrinthine arcades were zones for various forms of illusion-making. Here dioramas, mirrors, theatres and cinemas were all crowded, but these passages were also seductive in their commercial function, as forerunners of the modern department store. Goods were demonstrated to passers-by through illuminated shop windows displaying enticing scenographies. The wealth of society appeared as ‘an immense accumulation of commodities’, writes Marx in the first chapter of Das Kapital. Aragon describes the atmosphere of the arcades as suggestive, fickle and full of spectres; ‘fantomatique’, he says. This spectral world brings to mind the adjectives with which Marx characterizes the commodity: ‘secret’, ‘enigmatic’, ‘supernatural’, ‘mysterious’. Commodities are ‘fetishes’, capable of ‘somersaults’ and ‘metamorphoses’ in their uninterrupted circulation between buyers and sellers.
66. This meeting place at Café Certa gave rise to the following birth certificate by Walter Benjamin: ‘The father of Surrealism was Dada; its mother was an arcade. Dada, when the two first met, was already old.’ Benjamin, op. cit.
67. In Nadja André Breton, more or less at random, passes by the following locations in Paris:
La place du Panthéon
La place Maubert
Le boulevard de Bonne-Nouvelle
La porte Saint-Denis
La rue Fontaine (Breton’s address)
La rue de la Grange Batelière
Le passage de l’Opéra
Saint-Ouen
La rue La Fayette (where he encounters Nadja)
La rue du Faubourg-Poissonnière
La rue de la Chaussée-d’Antin
La place Dauphine
La rue Saint-Honoré
La rue Saint-Georges
La rue de Chéroy (Nadja’s address)
Le quai Malaquais
La rue de Seine
La rue de Varenne
Le boulevard de Magenta
Le Palais-Royal
Le boulevard Montmartre
68. Unbeknownst to him, he had nonetheless followed in the footsteps of other authors. Twenty years after Nadja, in the afterword to the book Arcanum 17, André Breton recalls: ‘Just as, at the end of 1940, a long newspaper article inspired by the worst hatred of the time came to warn me that the route given in Paris to the “avengers of the Knights Templar” merged with the one I had unconsciously followed with Nadja, I had, guided by Monsieur Jean Richer’s exegesis, no difficulty in convincing myself that here, on the purely symbolic level, I was walking with Nerval along the gilded path.’ It is likely that Breton, at the time of writing, had recently become acquainted with the original cartographic survey of Nerval’s imaginary esoteric world in Richer’s study Gérard de Nerval et les doctrines ésotériques, 1947.
69. It is anonymous but is said to be by J. G. L. Kosegarten.
70. The surrealists circulate the city at random. They get to know and understand Paris by walking around. Their ‘hermeneutic’ flaneuring could be likened to an automatic drawing from Théodore Flournoy’s Esprits et médiums (1911), projected onto a map of Paris; they left similar traces.
71. Not Nadja. It’s another woman: the ‘scandalously beautiful’ Jacqueline Lamba, whom André Breton met by chance at a Place Blanche café on 29 May 1934. That same evening, he followed her, the ‘all-powerful commander’, on a nocturnal stroll through Paris, to Les Halles, rue de Rivoli, the Île de la Cité, the Latin Quarter and Quai aux Fleurs. One of the most vibrant and frightening places they pass on their walk is the Tour Saint-Jacques on rue de Rivoli. It’s as if Lamba had known, by some astonishing means, that this tower was one of the themes Breton had taken to heart, and that he, a few years earlier, had written these lines in the poem ‘Vigilance’:
À Paris la tour Saint-Jacques chancelante
Pareille à un tournesol
(The tower of Saint-Jacques, wavering like a sunflower [and with the double meaning of ‘tournesol’ in mind: ‘litmus’])
One morning, a few days after this walk and while in a state of distraction, occupied by his morning toilette, a few phrases suddenly come to Breton’s mind: words that turn out to be fragments of his own poem ‘Tournesol’, which he had almost forgotten because he’d never been particularly fond of it. ‘Tournesol’ is a ‘poème automatique’, from the surrealists’ automatism period; Breton dates it back to 1923. And then, eleven years later, this poem calls to him. Breton digs it out, reads it and of a sudden it strikes him: it was a prophetic rendering of his nocturnal flaneuring with Lamba! Everything seems to fit, the state of mind, the places mentioned and the metaphors. Cf. A. Breton, L’Amour fou, 1937.
72. Ibid.
73. In the magazine Minotaure (no. 3–4, 1933), André Breton explores the passage to the surrealist paradise: automatism. He examines the relationship between surrealist automatism and that of mediums. Each can be characterized by a certain mechanics: the hand writes or draws as if of its own accord, and the owner of the hand can but marvel at the result. The main and crucial difference between them is, of course, that surrealism refuses to accept the existence of ‘spirits’. The message, what is being dictated, emanates not from a spirit world on high, distinct from the medium, but from within: the human subconscious, the surrealists’ holy land, or in Breton’s words, ‘a common heritage’. Whereas spiritism separates the medium from the spirit, surrealism sees as its task to unite the human conscious with its unconscious. The article is richly illustrated with various automatic and medial drawings, such as La maison de Mozart, drawn by dramatist Victorien Sardou under Bernard Palissy’s dictation, or Hélène Smith’s drawings from From India to the Planet Mars and From the Planet Mars to the Holy Land. He also provides one of Nadja’s drawings from the eponymous novel.
