74. The handwriting in the posthumous The Word of the Old Testament Explained, which Emanuel Swedenborg ‘wrote automatically’, as well as in certain passages of The Spiritual Diary (1846), differs greatly from the regular handwriting in Swedenborg’s other manuscripts; it is more angular, violent and illegible, and varies depending on which spirit is dictating the content. His own notes prove, beyond the shadow of a doubt, the hypothesis of automatic writing. In one passage, for example, he says: ‘Nay I have written entire pages, and the spirits did not dictate the words, but absolutely guided my hand, so that it was they who were doing the writing.’ Sometimes the automatism is associated with pure auditory dictation: ‘These words… were said to me verbally and almost enunciated, and this by infants who were then with me and who also spake by my mouth and moreover directed my very hand.’ Swedenborg’s dictation experience calls to mind the definition of surrealism in the First Manifesto of Surrealism (1924) as ‘psychic automatism in its pure state’, i.e. ‘dictated by thought, in the absence of any control exercised by reason’. Cf. Signe Toksvig, Emanuel Swedenborg: Scientist and Mystic, 1949.

  75. Was said to be in possession of a yellowed book on the subject of Swedish tantrums.

  76. The crossing to Île-de-Bréhat takes about ten minutes on the cutter that serves as a ferry. It was on this rocky island that Ernst Josephson descended into schizophrenia in 1888, the same year as Vincent van Gogh. Together with an artist friend named Allan Österlind, he had withdrawn to this place from the world, perhaps to lick his wounds after professional setbacks and trying conflicts within Konstnärsförbundet, the Swedish artists’ association founded in opposition to the Royal Swedish Academy of Fine Arts. The progression of his illness is closely linked to automatism and his Swedenborgian studies. Josephson’s automatic drawing arises following his contact with the French artist’s wife, Madame Dupuis. This woman lived on Bréhat and was a devotee of what was emerging as one of her time’s fashionable movements: spiritism. She treated it with the utmost earnestness, for the simple reason that she believed she could communicate daily with her son, who had drowned off the coast of Bréhat.

  Madame Dupuis invited Josephson and Österlind to spiritist séances, the latter reporting: ‘We took our seats around a table, which began to creak and rise from the ground and rush towards Josef. “Oh!” cried Madame Dupuis. “You, sir, are undoubtedly a great medium, you really should try your hand at it!” And so she taught us various ways of communicating with the spirits, in particular holding a pencil until the hand began to move of its own accord.’

  The first drawings from Josephson’s period of illness date back to these séances: simple line and figure drawings, signed by the spirits who guided his hand: Michelangelo, Raphael and Rembrandt. ‘Long into the night sat we around the table and followed J’s hand in drawing’, Österlind wrote in a letter.

  Is there a common denominator between this spiritist automatism and the surrealist automatism of André Breton and Philippe Soupault, which they published in the book The Magnetic Fields? An authority such as Anna Balakian tries to tie up the threads and refers to Pierre Janet, a French professor of psychiatry who was practically the same age as Freud. André Breton, who had at first been a medical student, read Janet’s books as part of his university education. During World War I, Breton served for a time in Saint-Dizier, where soldiers suffering from severe shock and psychosis were treated. Their obsessive thoughts, rambling speech and abnormal behaviour reinforced Breton’s interest in psychiatry and in the discoveries of Freud and Janet. Balakian points out how a number of the key concepts of the surrealists can be traced back to Janet: ‘magnetic fields’ and ‘automatism’. For Janet automatism is a state in which conscious control is relaxed. As an example, he suggests the situation in which we cannot remember how to spell a name; it has, so to speak, fallen out of our mind. We can’t think our way to the correct spelling; however, in a state of distraction, we can suddenly find it again by writing in a relaxed manner: ‘Allow the pen to run,’ advises Janet, ‘automatically, just as a medium queries their inner being.’ Janet studied medial phenomena, but, like Théodore Flournoy, he maintained that these were not related to supernatural contact with the spirit world; on the contrary, their origins rested in the layers of the human subconscious and automatism was a means of making them accessible. Researchers other than Balakian – among them Breton himself – have chosen to downplay Janet’s role and instead highlight F. W. H. Myers, the British researcher who founded a psychological research institute devoted to various paranormal phenomena.

  Whatever the case, it’s clear that the surrealists had a predilection for the early pioneers of psychoanalysis, including Freud, Janet, Flournoy and Myers – with the exception of C. G. Jung, who, in their opinion, had betrayed the revolutionary character of psychoanalytic theory. The surrealists must have been seduced by the atmosphere of fantasy, magnetism, mediums and hysteria that surrounded the burgeoning psychoanalytic research. Thus, both Janet and Myers shared Freud’s interest in hysteria. Janet describes the ecstasy of hysterical women in terms that would later be used by Breton, such as amour fou (mad love) or convulsive. For the surrealists early psychoanalytical studies revealed the poetic and aesthetic dimension of hysteria. It follows that Aragon and Breton devoted a double-page spread in La Révolution surréaliste (no. 11, 1928) to a tribute to hysteria on its fiftieth birthday: ‘We surrealists insist on celebrating the fiftieth anniversary of hysteria, the greatest poetic discovery of the latter nineteenth century.’ This tribute is illustrated with photographs from Dr Charcot’s archives at La Salpêtrière: women animated by childlike, passionate gestures, erotic clairvoyants and fairies. Cf. Anna Balakian, André Breton: Magus of Surrealism, 1971; Sarane Alexandrian, op. cit.

  77. The copyist.

  André Breton, Un portrait symbolique d’elle et de moi… from Nadja (1928)

  III.

  1. In this context the ephemeral labyrinthine traces made by the folds and creases of garments are close at hand. A considerable amount of older European painting has been devoted to the structure of such folds. In Rogier van der Weyden’s painting The Magdalen Reading, dating from the mid-fifteenth century, the eye follows, as if hypnotized, the meandering folds of Magdalen’s green dress. The costume, which is usually peripheral to literary motif, becomes central to the work. It creates space for a paradoxical element of free, abstract painting in the middle of the century’s meticulous Flemish realism. Here we sense, smuggled into and camouflaged by a garment, a whisper of European mysticism – provided that one doesn’t prefer, in the spirit of the Danish Marxist R. K. A. Broby-Johansen, to view the abundance of folds as a reflection of the expanding Flemish textile industry.

  During a mescaline experiment, Aldous Huxley observed such a crumpled geography in Botticelli’s Judith, as well as in his own plain, grey trousers. There he found a message about ‘pure Being’, Meister Eckhart’s Istigkeit:

  My attention was arrested and I gazed in fascination, not at the pale neurotic heroine or her attendant, not at the victim’s hairy head or the vernal landscape in the background, but at the purplish silk of Judith’s pleated bodice and long wind-blown skirts.

  This was something I had seen before – seen that very morning, between the flowers and the furniture, when I looked down by chance, and went on passionately staring by choice, at my own crossed legs. Those folds in the trousers – what a labyrinth of endlessly significant complexity! And the texture of the grey flannel – how rich, how deeply, mysteriously sumptuous! And here they were again, in Botticelli’s picture…

  Poring over Judith’s skirts… I knew that Botticelli – and not Botticelli alone, but many others too – had looked at draperies with the same transfigured and transfiguring eyes as had been mine that morning. They had seen the Istigkeit, the Allness and Infinity of folded cloth and had done their best to render it in paint or stone. Necessarily, of course, without success. For the glory and the wonder of pure existence belong to another order, beyond the Power of even the highest art to express. But in Judith’s skirt I could clearly see what, if I had been a painter of genius, I might have made of my old grey flannels. Not much, heaven knows, in comparison with the reality, but enough to delight generation after generation of beholders, enough to make them understand at least a little of the true significance of what, in our pathetic imbecility, we call ‘mere things’ and disregard in favour of television.

  — Aldous Huxley, The Doors of Perception, 1954.

  2. According to an old legend, Mary Magdalene, after the crucifixion, is said to have been led by a star to a mountain in Provence. There she went on to live in a grotto.

  3. One is reminded of Mallarmé’s reflections on the mysteries buried in the folds of pamphlets. Breaking the seal is both a compelling and painful violation, like the conquest of a young virgin or a holy walled city. Mallarmé writes in Divagations:

  Here, in the case at hand, is what I do: when it comes to booklets to read, according to common usage, I brandish my knife, like a poultry butcher.

  The virgin folds of a new book, still, lend themselves to a sacrifice whose blood stained the edges of ancient volumes red: they await the introduction of a weapon, or paper cutter, in order for possession to take place… However blind and haphazard, the strike is used up in the destruction of a frail inviolability. Sympathy would go to journalism, sheltered from this treatment: its influence is nevertheless unfortunate, imposing on the organism, complex, required by literature, the divine book, a certain monotony – it’s always that same intolerable column that is distributed, made to the dimensions of the page, hundreds and hundreds of times.

  4. Cf. the labyrinthine folds of Leonardo da Vinci’s painting The Virgin and Child with Saint Anne (ca. 1503–19), a depiction of the Christ child, Mary and Mary’s mother Anne.

  In 1910 Sigmund Freud attempted to trace in detail the psychosexual evolution of Leonardo in his study ‘Eine Kindheitserinnerung des Leonardo da Vinci’. He pored over piles of Leonardo’s manuscripts on art, science and inventions, but could find only a single fragment on his private character. In a chapter on bird flight, Leonardo abruptly recalls that when he was an infant lying in his cradle, a vulture had come flying, landed next to him and thrust the plume of its tail into his mouth. This seemingly insignificant fragment is the starting point for Freud’s research; it becomes the thread that Freud follows to uncover the most secret sides of Da Vinci and his oeuvre. And by the end of the study, his entire character seems to have been elucidated: Leonardo’s latent homosexuality as well as his prodigious faculties for sublimation. The vulture is unmasked as a symbol of the mother because maternal attachment is one of the artist’s major themes. The Mona Lisa represents both a gentle mother and a vampiric lover, The Virgin and Child with Saint Anne turns out to be a double portrait of maternity. Case closed.

  However, shortly after the publication of Freud’s essay, his friend Oskar Pfister made a sensational discovery. If the mother, masked as a vulture, appears in Leonardo’s only recovered childhood memory, or rather in his childhood fantasy, how is it that the vulture appears nowhere in his work? Well, it’s precisely in the painting The Virgin and Child with Saint Anne that he finds the vulture, half-hidden in the folds of Mary’s garments! The meandering of the folds must have been painted automatically; the brush must have been guided by the dictations of the unconscious. It was only afterwards, yes, only then that the distinct and surprising content of the folds was revealed. Pfister sketched out a diagram for all to see what he himself had seen: the vulture supine on the Virgin Mary’s lap. The vulture’s head, with its distinctive beak, rests along her back; one wing hangs over her right leg; and the cloth across her left arm constitutes the vulture’s tail feathers –indeed angled towards the Christ Child’s/Leonardo’s mouth. Mary’s garment is metamorphosed, acquiring the character of a symbol. It refers to something absent and invisible, but not to pure Being, as in the folds of Botticelli’s Judith, but rather to an unconscious, repressed and forgotten desire. Since then, a researcher has pointed out that the Italian nibbio, used in Leonardo’s memory fragment, is not in fact the word for ‘vulture’, but for the bird we call a kite.

  5. Sigmund Freud as writer or as man of science and tireless drainer of the Zuiderzee? As the eternally unhampered interpreter he is unsurpassed, whatever the veracity of his theory. A researcher such as Allan Megill finds The Interpretation of Dreams to be a wholly brilliant work, even if every single one of the book’s conclusions has been proven wrong (op. cit.). Mircea Eliade too calls attention to Freud as a writer and myth-maker, rather than as a man of science. As he writes in his diary in December 1960: ‘The interpretations proposed by Freud are more and more successful because they are among the myths accessible to modern man. The myth of the murdered father, among others, reconstituted and interpreted in Totem and Taboo. It would be impossible to ferret out a single example of slaying the father in primitive religions or mythologies. This myth was created by Freud. And what is more interesting: the intellectual elite accept it (is it because they understand it? Or because it is “true” for modern man?).’ Or, in other words: perhaps Freud is more poet than rabbi. Eliade, Fragments d’un journal, 1973.

  6. Not how it happened.

  7. ‘Coming level with the Rue de Meaux we failed to notice the red dotted line which traces the border between the Quartier de La Villette and the Quartier du Combat. We had already passed the Bolivar Métro station where the Rue Bolivar is terminated by a spiral staircase, having started off among the rich pastures of new business and residential blocks. The Rue Secrétan then starts up, finally reaching the great Paving-stone depot not far from the Jacquard vocational school. Thus it is that, at the approaches to the park in which nestles the town’s collective unconscious.’ Aragon, Le Paysan de Paris (italics mine; in reference to the Parc des Buttes-Chaumont).

  8. Humlegården as the ‘town’s collective unconscious’. Cf. here Ernst Josephson’s 1888 medical file from the mental hospital in Uppsala. The painter had just been repatriated to Sweden from the island of Bréhat. ‘Appears to have no hallucinations at present, but had before. (He claims to have seen smoke and vapours and sensed a foul smell rising from several parts of Humlegården in Stockholm.) His memory is generally good. Thinking apparatus lively, rash. False notions: he believes that all men of honour, among whom he counts himself, are being persecuted by a gang of Freemasons and Seraphim (Knights of the Royal Order of the Seraphim).’

  9. Characterizing parks as ‘the décor of desires’ (Aragon) brings to mind the labyrinths of love that were in vogue in landscape architecture between 1550 and 1650. These labyrinths – resonant of ancient, magical, fertility rites – gave allegorical shape to the convolutions of love. They were made of high trimmed hedges arranged in concentric circles, following a pattern that seems to have its origins in French church labyrinths. The hedges provided an ideal haven for the secret exchange of kisses and a hiding place for intimate encounters. At the centre of these labyrinths of love, a maypole was placed, as a fertility symbol and a reminder of the tree of life in paradise. See H. Kern, op. cit.

  10. On the subject of parks as a starting point for labyrinthine urban wanderings, see report no. 21, 1951 in the Swedish Public Inquiry Commission Reports archive:

  Nilsson’s statements, with the consent of the Prison Administration and at the request of District Commissioner Zetterqvist, led to the aforementioned being brought to Stockholm, where on 21 June 1950 he was taken around in order to identify the building in which the pastor lived. The transport went on for two hours and was led by Winberg, assisted by Paulsson. Before the transport began Nilsson was asked if he hadn’t heard the name of the pastor in question and if he couldn’t remember on which street the pastor lived. Nilsson responded thus: he could not remember the pastor having offered his name; regarding the street, he only knew that it ‘lay in the southerly Söder neighbourhood’. The transport to the scene, which began at Humlegården, thereafter followed Nilsson’s directions, and it transpired that, once south of Slussen in the Old Town, Nilsson was unable, despite painstaking examination, to locate the building inside which he had been. Finally Nilsson asserted that he was certain the pastor’s home was located east of Götgatan, on a steeply sloping street that led to a crest and was lined with old, low wooden houses. The pastor is said to have lived on the second floor of a stone building. Nilsson could only remember the shape of the staircase – a spiral – and that there was but one door on each landing.

  ‘Investigation by the Swedish Chancellor of Justice into the Kejne Affair, etc.’, 1951.

  11. More precisely, the National Library of Sweden, built in Humlegården (Cf. Aragon’s words, ‘where the city dwellers’ wild dreams stir’.)

  12. The park as the city’s wilderness, alluding to the enigmatic Berzelii Riots which took place in Stockholm in the summer of 1951. In the small hours of the night, Berzelii Park became a meeting place for people from the underworld: prostitutes of both sexes, pimps and other trouble-makers. Fights and disturbing displays of behaviour broke out with regularity, attracting crowds of curious night wanderers. The daily newspaper Dagens Nyheter reports on the violent night between 25th and 26th August: ‘The crowd then retreated to Berzelii Park, which in a few moments crowded with people. Howls and whistles filled the air, and the atmosphere became ever more tense. Each policeman drew his weapons and, with great swift movements, drove the crowd out into the small streets adjacent to the park.’

 

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10