The Ways of Paradise, page 9
13. Here, it is hardly necessary to underline the Hegelian influence.
14. Hagaparken, without a doubt. The Swedish spy Enbom lived in a cave in this park during the summer of 1951.
15. The State and the Media v. the Enbom Gang. Images of an overgrown child and fabulist daydreamer emerge from the descriptions of people who knew the man now incarcerated for life:
To begin with, it is said of him that his clothes were never brushed, the collar of his overcoat covered with thick layers of dust and hair, and so on. His superiors would reprimand him for such things, and he was known to reply that he wasn’t made to be a railwayman. Sometimes the rail traffic inspector had to order him to put on a clean shirt. ‘And the very next day, he’d wear an immaculate white shirt, but only for one day.’
Remarks of this kind about his outward appearance have been made by nearly all who knew him at the time and who provided testimonies. He is characterized as having a dirty and unkempt appearance even in uniform. He did not cut his hair. He had to be told to wash and take care of himself. His clothing was at times in tatters.
Excerpt from Gunnar Inghe and Gustav Jonsson’s statements. Cf. Clarté, no. 1–2, 1953; Arne Trankell, op. cit.
16. ‘[T]o the utmost degree unkempt in his outward appearance.’ Martin Lamm continues: ‘Lidén, who had met him [Swedenborg] in London in 1769, says, “His clothing was soiled and even sordid; his face and hands appeared not to have been washed for several years”. The Pastor Ferelius of the Swedish Legation tells us that Swedenborg never washed his face or hands and never brushed his clothes, “saying that neither dust nor filth stuck to him”’. Martin Lamm, Swedenborg, 1915.
17. According to C. G. Jung in Wandlungen und Symbole der Libido (1911–12), an Eastern legend tells us that the Crusaders, in order to become invulnerable, smeared themselves with the pope’s excrement.
18. Ibid. Jung writes: ‘As is easily seen from the intimate connection of faeces and gold. Here the most worthless comes into the closest relation with the most valuable.’ Alchemists were searching for their prima materia in excrement, one of the most cryptic substances out of which they hoped to see the mystical figure of the filius philosophorum emerge.
19. That is, not only among neurotics. A seemingly paradoxical identification between gold and waste matter seems to be widespread in the human imagination. In Charakter und Analerotik (1908), Freud references several analogous notions. He says they may stem from the fact that gold and ordure represent the most and least valuable things according to man; as the two poles in a pair of opposites, the association is easy to make. In certain archaic cultures that use shells as a form of payment, shells are referred to as the excrement of the sea. See also N. O. Brown, op. cit.
20. Freud’s Hungarian colleague Sándor Ferenczi put forth that excrement is a child’s first toy. In the child’s pleasure-filled play, excrement will eventually be replaced by other, more cleanly substances, such as clay and mud – odourless variants of excrement. And clay is in turn replaced by cleaner, drier, adult-approved materials: sand in the sandbox, which manages to retain the same ersatz function in children’s play. Nevertheless, children sometimes fall back into the messier stage by pouring water or even their own urine into the sand. Of the sand, they make cakes; this can be interpreted as a remnant of the original coprophilic impulses.
At the next stage, small stones of different shapes and colours take the place of sand. Then follow glass or marbles, which are classified according to a hierarchy of value in the manner of primitive currency. And at the next level – the cleanest by all appearances – the marbles are replaced by money; we amass piles of money (‘money does not stink’). A vestige of this link exists in language usage, as in the Swedish expression besitta rikedom (‘to sit on one’s money’ or ‘be in the possession of wealth’, cf. the German besitzen). See Sándor Ferenczi, ‘The ontogenesis of the interest in money’, in Zeitschrift für Psychoanalyse, no. 2, 1914; Cf. also Norman O. Brown, Life Against Death, 1959.
21. Berch, for example, says: ‘Whether he meant this seriously, or if it was just a mind game, remains unclear.’
22. He ordered tonnes of asphalt and glue to be poured, which ran down the slopes like lava. Cf. the description of Robert Smithson’s 1971 work Broken Circle/Spiral Hill in Emmen, the Netherlands. Broken Circle: green water, white and yellow sand, four-metre-wide canal, four-metre-deep sand quarry; Spiral Hill: earth, black humus, white sand. Just as visitors were once taken aback by the clinical cleanliness of Mondrian’s studio, the filth and disrepair of Smithson’s studio did not fail to astonish.
23. The notes are in private hands.
24. A portion of the word has been torn away.
25. During his tour of the monuments of his childhood in Passaic, New Jersey, Robert Smithson seems to glimpse his paradoxical paradise in a square sandbox, aka The Desert: ‘The last monument was a sandbox or a model desert. Under the dead light of the Passaic afternoon the desert became a map of infinite disintegration and forgetfulness. This monument of minute particles blazed under a bleakly glowing sun, and suggested the sullen dissolution of entire continents, the drying up of oceans – no longer were there green forests and high mountains – all that existed were millions of grains of sand, a vast deposit of bones and stones pulverized into dust.’
26. The Jordanian plains around the cities of Sodom and Gomorrah were once as fertile as the Garden of Paradise, but were utterly ravaged by fire after the cities’ destruction.
Robert Smithson, The Desert (1967)
27. Earthly paradise in the West. The collective imagination of American pioneers was strongly coloured by eschatological fantasies of earthly paradise. The first homesteaders’ descriptions of the virginal land are impregnated with the myth of the Garden of Eden. It was taken as a sign, for example, that the state of Georgia was located on the same latitude as Palestine. Virginia was described as Canaan, ‘a land of milk and honey’, New England and Maryland as ‘paradise on earth’. In the recurring prefix ‘new’ (New England, New Haven, New York) is an echo of the New Jerusalem. The pioneers drew comparisons between themselves and the people of Israel from the Old Testament: as the Jews had fled captivity in Egypt, they themselves had fled Europe, crossed a sea and reached the promised land. Yes, it was America that was designated as the ideal place for the Second Coming of Jesus Christ, according to the beliefs of seventeenth-century colonists (cf. Charles Sanford, The Quest for Paradise, 1961.) It was also in America that European utopian thinkers, such as Robert Owen in New Harmony and Étienne Cabet in Icaria, sought to realize their earthly paradises. These hopes and fantasies appear very much alive in the American unconscious. Nineteenth-century American painting bears witness to this imagining in its depiction of pristine, fertile expanses, awe-inspiring mountain ranges and bodies of water. Beyond the distant mountains in the West, the contours of Eden can be glimpsed. The same theme ran throughout twentieth-century regionalism, illustrated by the rural idylls of Grant Wood or Thomas Hart Benton, Jackson Pollock’s teacher. Are the Land Art projects of the 1970s a paradoxical extension of the same mythology? In any case, we find in these artworks the same dizzying scale and the same quest for sites, sacred places of sorts. Land Art has, however, shifted focus away from a land flowing with milk and honey to one of dry lake beds, salt lakes and infertile deserts – a land that may recall parts of biblical Palestine.
28. Expectantly and with devotion, Robert Smithson approached the shores of Utah’s Great Salt Lake, the future setting for his Spiral Jetty: ‘Slowly, we drew near to the lake, which resembled an impassive faint violet sheet held captive in a stony matrix, upon which the sun poured down its crushing light. An expanse of salt flats bordered the lake, and caught in its sediments were countless bits of wreckage. Old piers were left high and dry. The mere sight of the trapped fragments of junk and waste transported one into a world of modern prehistory. The products of a Devonian industry, the remains of a Silurian technology, all the machines of the Upper Carboniferous Period were lost in those expansive deposits of sand and mud.’ Nancy Holt, ed., The Writings of Robert Smithson, 1979.
29. In his Geographical Description of Palestine, or the Promised Land and Rocky Arabia (1784; National Library of Sweden, rare collections), Anton Friedrich Büsching makes certain attempts to separate myths from travellers’ observations, a laudable but delicate undertaking, as eyewitnesses were already hopelessly infected by the oldest story of all:
This Lake is situated in that region, where in ancient times once lay the beautiful and fertile vale of Siddim, home to the five cities Sodom, Gomorrah, Admah, Zeboiim and Bela or Zoar, and which (like Egypt; Genesis 13:10) was traversed with innumerable canals and fosses… The valley floor was full of bitumen, the pits of which are mentioned in Genesis 14:10. God’s divine lightening bolt ignited these pits and all combustible material that was in this dell. The cities sank, and in place of the beautiful valley that Korte sought and where Dr Luther thought paradise to be is the lake we know today. Disputes are still being had over the remnants of the sunken cities present in this lake. The ruins are there, as credible witnesses can confirm, but whether they are from Sodom, as was claimed or believed, is another question…
On this island, in Troilo’s account, a stone’s throw from the shore of the lake, one can discern in the water the remnants of a ruined wall, perhaps fifteen fathoms long, which appears to be charred. As the ruin is not much submerged, he ventured there upon his mount and broke off a few stones as souvenirs; on contact with fire, they burnt like coal and gave off a vile odour and acrid smoke, likewise unburnt they had a stench.
Egmond van der Nijenburg, who was by this lake the day after Easter, perceived in the same place not only a pile of stones, but what were thought to be the ruins of a city uncovered by water; and he found on the beach large trees washed up by the waves, all of which appeared to be quite old.
30. Ibid.
31. With the exception of the artist’s friend John Ruskin, the critics were acerbic; one coldly observed that William Holman Hunt’s The Scapegoat (1854–56), for all its meticulous realism, was incapable of moving and interesting him more than last Sunday’s leg of mutton. The suffering and emaciation of Hunt’s scapegoat – intended as a representation of the goat that according to Jewish ritual came to bear the sins of the people and was driven out into the desert – never quite succeeded in becoming truly transparent; that is to say, it did not succeed in expressing the corporeal metaphor of the spiritual thing, as Thomas Aquinas defined the symbol in his day.
And yet he had gone to incredible, uncompromising effort: Hunt had arrived at his destination, the Dead Sea, via Cairo. He rode on horseback to Jaffa, during the last and longest stage. He began his painting in October 1854 and worked on it from dawn to dusk throughout November, December, January, February, March, April… The region was rife with highwaymen and his servant continually threatened to abandon him. But on 10 May, at last he could note: ‘The Scapegoat is finished.’
Hunt had carefully chosen the right place for his painting, a particularly barren plain, covered with salt deposits, located near the southernmost tip of the Dead Sea, a place alleged to be the site of ancient Sodom. He writes in his diary: ‘But for a few acacia trees growing in the dry course of the storm-stream which we were following, there was no sign of vegetation anywhere… not a sign of humanity was before us… Every minute the mountains became more gorgeous and solemn… Afar all seemed of the brilliancy and preciousness of jewels, while near, it proved to be only salt and burnt lime, with decayed trees and broken branches brought down by the rivers feeding the lake. Skeletons of animals, which had perished for the most part in crossing the Jordan and the Jabbok, had been swept here and lay salt-covered, so that birds and beasts of prey left them untouched.’ Cf. G.H. Fleming, That Ne’er Shall Meet Again: Hunt, Millais and Rossetti, 1971 and W.H. Hunt, Pre-Raphaelitism and the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, 1905.
32. On the covering paper on the old back-board of the book, a brief catalogue of titles was found, which only became fully legible after the book itself was rebound in 1937. By all appearances it was a list of the books that William Holman Hunt took with him as a travel library or had acquired for his trip. Among them was Narrative of a Journey Round the Dead Sea in the Bible Lands in 1850 and 1851 (1853) by Louis Félicien de Saulcy, a noble French archaeologist, philologist and explorer. Saulcy had an all-consuming interest in Palestine, particularly in its history, languages and geography. ‘His workroom was a Jerusalem in miniature: antiquities, medallions, maps, engravings, plaster casts and photographs, all recalling and revolving around the Holy Land,’ Wilhelm Froehner reports in a biography. The desiccated environs of the Dead Sea had not yet been the subject of any significant research. Saulcy claimed to have discovered the remnants of the ancient city of Sodom at the southern tip of the Dead Sea. The journey to this sea was arduous and known to be full of dangers; a number of explorers had lost their lives or been attacked and killed by the Bedouin tribes of the region. It was presumably Saulcy’s evocative descriptions of the dramatic effects of light that strengthened the resolve of a deeply religious man like Hunt to paint The Scapegoat in situ. See Fernande Bassan, ed., L.F. Caignart de Saulcy: Carnets de voyage en Orient, 1845–1869, 1955.
33. ‘In spite of it all, the camp provides a maximum sense of freedom.’ This note was written from the remote Perm-36 camp by Russian dissident writer Andrei Sinyavsky. Later, as a refugee in Paris, he refused to sit at a desk; instead he wrote all his books sitting on the edge of his bed, a habit he retained from the difficult times in the camp.
34. In several letters.
35. ‘The Orient is identified with commemorative absence. How else can we explain in the Voyage, a work of so original and individual a mind, the lazy use of large swatches of Lane, incorporated without a murmur by Nerval as his descriptions of the Orient?’ writes Edward Said in Orientalism. In Gérard de Nerval’s Voyage en Orient, the narrator is in search of a lost paradise, from Cairo to Beirut to Constantinople. He travels in circles, for the Holy Land does not allow focus to fall upon a single vanishing point; instead it dissolves into a vague absence. He avoids both Jerusalem and Nazareth. He believes himself to no longer be able to find the truth in these geographical locations – one of his travelling companions informs him that the angels have already transported the Virgin Mary’s dwelling to Loreto, Italy and thus the detour to Nazareth is not worth the effort. The contemporary East he encounters on the journey is abandoned and in ruins. Nerval’s voyage threatens to annihilate his Orient.
Instead, as we’ve seen, Nerval impregnates this modern landscape of disillusionment with mythologies and reveries drawn from his own reading, and for long spells this reading takes precedence over his real journey. Whole chapters of Voyage en Orient are simply compilations of works and travel accounts by other authors, such as Lane’s Modern Egyptians, Creuzer’s La Symbolique et la mythologie des peuples anciens, Herbelot’s Bibliothèque orientale, Sacy’s Exposé de la religion des Druzes, Abbé Terrasson’s Sethos and many others. This book, thus, becomes a conjuration against the disappointments of his own journey, against his apprehensions that on his arrival the centre will turn to ash, or, as Nerval wrote in a letter to Théophile Gautier: ‘I have already lost Kingdom upon Kingdom and province upon province and soon my fantasies will have no place of refuge; but I most regret having driven Egypt from my imagination, now that I have solemnly placed the country in my memory.’
The outline of a crumbling Sicilian labyrinth dating back to the Romans could be a figure and symbol of Nerval’s route of travel. The dolphins outside the fortress wall suggest that the labyrinth comes from a city by the sea. The labyrinth is now housed in the archaeological museum of the city of Syracuse. The centre of the labyrinth itself has been left empty, a white square (cf. Aragon’s words about Paris: ‘the labyrinth without a Minotaur’). Over time, parts of the labyrinth have collapsed and its formerly cohesive structure has crumbled. The corridors and passages are no longer unconditionally subordinate to the centre, but instead compose a sort of liberated yet incoherent domain, a stage set for fanciful tales. Cf. Jean Richer, op. cit.; Edward W. Said, Orientalism, 1978.
36. Clearly the imaginary representations engendered by the mere utterance of a place name can give rise to a world in itself detached from what those names designate. The young narrator of Marcel Proust’s novel daydreams about the names of towns in Normandy and northern Italy: Balbec, Venice, Florence, Parma. ‘But if their names thus permanently absorbed the image that I had formed of these towns, it was only by transforming that image, by subordinating its reappearance in me to their own special laws; and in consequence of this they made it more beautiful, but at the same time more different from anything that the towns of Normandy or Tuscany could in reality be, and, by increasing the arbitrary delights of my imagination, aggravated the disenchantment that was in store for me when I set out upon my travels. They magnified the idea that I formed of certain points on the earth’s surface, making them more special, and in consequence more real.’ Marcel Proust, In Search of Lost Time. Swann’s Way, trans. C. K. Scott Moncrieff, 1922.
