Story here...
Showing posts with label fire. Show all posts
Showing posts with label fire. Show all posts
Wednesday, February 3, 2010
Monday, January 18, 2010
Arrival of the Birds
“What is to give light must endure burning.” --Viktor Frankl
In the medieval bestiaries, the salamander (from the Greek salambeander, or chimney-sweep) is defined as a creature impervious to fire. Often, the salamander is depicted not only in the midst of flames, but also by an apple tree, with an old man looking rather ill and holding a bitten apple collapsing next to it, showing the salamander’s dark reputation for poisoning fruit. According to The Medieval Bestiary, one bestiary shows “the salamander as a snake spiraling up an apple tree; the snake has an apple in its mouth, making the scene very similar to some manuscript illustrations of the temptation of Eve.A man holding an apple stands near the tree, a hand to his head and looking sick.” I’ve chosen to pursue a different aspect of the poison stories, however: I would rather suggest that this whole idea of the apple that causes so many problems in The Garden (which some say was actually a pomegranate--and I’ll come back to that) is really fear of the new. Everything is set in Eden: the rules are in place, the Father runs things. Then the children reach the age where they become their own people. It becomes time for the old order to undergo an upheaval, for changes to be made, for the young to implement their own ideas. This part of the process of life shows up in all mythologies. For example, in the ancient Greek myths, Cronus, the youngest of the Titans, overthrew his father and became the new ruler, and then tried to have all his own children killed so that the same could not be done to him. But one of his sons, Zeus, escaped, and he grew up to overthrow his father and become the new leader. In those stories (as in the story of Oedipus), the idea of the “Old Guard” trying to hold onto its power past its time is shown in a particularly ugly light--as killing one’s own children. But in the story of Adam and Eve, it is the “upstarts” that become the sinners. The idea of assuming they might one day know as much as or more than their father is unforgivable, and the day they choose not to follow his rules is the day we all become exposed to the idea of an eternity of burning in hellfire. The depiction of the salamander poisoning the apple tree shows another possibility for this story, however.
As St. Augustine says, not all that burns perishes in the fire; some fire is cleansing, in fact. And the salamander, here, is an animal that can walk through fire, bringing you to the other side. So though Eve eats the apple that this salamander/snake has offered, and apple depicted (in a sense) as having been poisoned by the one offering it, she is not necessarily then condemned to burn eternally in hell-she could, instead, ride out of the fire on the back of the salamander--that is, she could follow her new ideas through the difficult process of “revolution” and into a new, fresh world.
So, the woman riding the salamander here could be Eve, though when I was drawing her, I was thinking of St. Sophia, who was born two months premature, at the end of the frost but in the midst of a village fire. She was brought into a world in flames and as soon as she was born, her family evacuated the village along with everyone else. She became the saint responsible for the end of winter, and was called upon to protect the harvest from late frosts. So she is a good representative for the end of the old ways, of something "frozen" in place, and the process--the fire of passion--that leads one to the new. The flames thaw that ice, and allow for new growth.
And here, it’s interesting to note that the tradition of stringing up lights during the winter holidays dates back to festivals surrounding the winter solstice--the longest night of the year--when fires were lit in an effort to coax light back to the world. The end of the old year, the beginning of the new.
And as for that apple that might really be a pomegranate--that brings us to another Greek myth, the myth of Persephone (or the Roman Proserpina), who was abducted by Hades and brought to the Underworld to be his wife. Her mother turned the world dark and wintry as she searched for her missing daughter. When Persephone was found, it was discovered that she had eaten of the pomegranate that she’d been offered while in the Underworld, and the rules stated that whoever ate while in the Underworld stayed in the Underworld. However, because no one wanted the world to be dark and wintry forever, the gods got together and forced a compromise on Hades which allowed Persephone to rejoin her mother for part of the year, during which Spring would come and the world would flower again. So, though she ate of a forbidden fruit, which condemned her to eternity in the underworld, Persephone was able to survive it--and to bring new life to earth.
In his book “A New Earth,” Ekhart Tolle adds another detail to the life of the salamander (an amphibious lizard) as he describes the slow and difficult process some water creatures underwent, facing down the difficulties of gravity and air in order to learn to live on dry land. First, they only lived in water, then, slowly, they became able to drag themselves out for small amounts of time, until finally they could travel farther and farther away from the water and still survive. In the book, he posits that it is unlikely those creatures would have gone through such a struggle if it had not been necessary, by some danger, or some new lack of nutrients, to do so. Because of their need to shed the old way of life, they became entirely new. And then:
“Most crawling reptilians, the most earthbound of all creatures, have remained unchanged for millions of years. Some, however, grew feathers and wings and turned into birds, thus defying the force of gravity that had held them for so long. They didn’t become better at crawling or walking, but transcended crawling and walking entirely.”
Thus, even the laws of genetics were overcome--no rule, it seems, is all that hard or fast when necessity strikes. If we want to enough, we can pass through the fires of hell and keep walking. If we so desire, we can quit walking entirely, and fly.
So that is the story here: She rides on the back of the salamander through the flames, which become wings for the salamander. Notice its offspring, leaping with new found wings from the tree. Notice the long body of the next-generation bird, and then the smaller, rounder form of the highest one. Sophia/Eve/Persephone’s snowy dress falls away, and the new material blooms Fire Lilies (not the orange lilies, but the ones which depend on fire in order to flower*), one of which she breaks off to offer her ride. A pomegranate tree blooms from the flames, new leaves and blooms and fruit forming on its trunk, distinct from the snow-covered hedge and frozen fountain further behind.
This drawing is my addition to the post “may my heart always be open to little,” on continuum, with the e.e.cummings poem of that title:
may my heart always be open to little
birds who are the secrets of living
whatever they sing is better than to know
and if men should not hear them men are old
may my mind stroll about hungry
and fearless and thirsty and supple
and even if it's sunday may i be wrong
for whenever men are right they are not young
and may myself do nothing usefully
and love yourself so more than truly
there's never been quite such a fool who could fail
pulling all the sky over him with one smile
- ee cummings
*I used the ones in the Taschen Book of Botanical Prints as my models. The hedge and gate were borrowed from the beautiful lawn of Clive Hicks Jenkins.
 |
| Arrival of the Birds, by Zoe Blue |
In the medieval bestiaries, the salamander (from the Greek salambeander, or chimney-sweep) is defined as a creature impervious to fire. Often, the salamander is depicted not only in the midst of flames, but also by an apple tree, with an old man looking rather ill and holding a bitten apple collapsing next to it, showing the salamander’s dark reputation for poisoning fruit. According to The Medieval Bestiary, one bestiary shows “the salamander as a snake spiraling up an apple tree; the snake has an apple in its mouth, making the scene very similar to some manuscript illustrations of the temptation of Eve.A man holding an apple stands near the tree, a hand to his head and looking sick.” I’ve chosen to pursue a different aspect of the poison stories, however: I would rather suggest that this whole idea of the apple that causes so many problems in The Garden (which some say was actually a pomegranate--and I’ll come back to that) is really fear of the new. Everything is set in Eden: the rules are in place, the Father runs things. Then the children reach the age where they become their own people. It becomes time for the old order to undergo an upheaval, for changes to be made, for the young to implement their own ideas. This part of the process of life shows up in all mythologies. For example, in the ancient Greek myths, Cronus, the youngest of the Titans, overthrew his father and became the new ruler, and then tried to have all his own children killed so that the same could not be done to him. But one of his sons, Zeus, escaped, and he grew up to overthrow his father and become the new leader. In those stories (as in the story of Oedipus), the idea of the “Old Guard” trying to hold onto its power past its time is shown in a particularly ugly light--as killing one’s own children. But in the story of Adam and Eve, it is the “upstarts” that become the sinners. The idea of assuming they might one day know as much as or more than their father is unforgivable, and the day they choose not to follow his rules is the day we all become exposed to the idea of an eternity of burning in hellfire. The depiction of the salamander poisoning the apple tree shows another possibility for this story, however.
As St. Augustine says, not all that burns perishes in the fire; some fire is cleansing, in fact. And the salamander, here, is an animal that can walk through fire, bringing you to the other side. So though Eve eats the apple that this salamander/snake has offered, and apple depicted (in a sense) as having been poisoned by the one offering it, she is not necessarily then condemned to burn eternally in hell-she could, instead, ride out of the fire on the back of the salamander--that is, she could follow her new ideas through the difficult process of “revolution” and into a new, fresh world.
So, the woman riding the salamander here could be Eve, though when I was drawing her, I was thinking of St. Sophia, who was born two months premature, at the end of the frost but in the midst of a village fire. She was brought into a world in flames and as soon as she was born, her family evacuated the village along with everyone else. She became the saint responsible for the end of winter, and was called upon to protect the harvest from late frosts. So she is a good representative for the end of the old ways, of something "frozen" in place, and the process--the fire of passion--that leads one to the new. The flames thaw that ice, and allow for new growth.
And here, it’s interesting to note that the tradition of stringing up lights during the winter holidays dates back to festivals surrounding the winter solstice--the longest night of the year--when fires were lit in an effort to coax light back to the world. The end of the old year, the beginning of the new.
And as for that apple that might really be a pomegranate--that brings us to another Greek myth, the myth of Persephone (or the Roman Proserpina), who was abducted by Hades and brought to the Underworld to be his wife. Her mother turned the world dark and wintry as she searched for her missing daughter. When Persephone was found, it was discovered that she had eaten of the pomegranate that she’d been offered while in the Underworld, and the rules stated that whoever ate while in the Underworld stayed in the Underworld. However, because no one wanted the world to be dark and wintry forever, the gods got together and forced a compromise on Hades which allowed Persephone to rejoin her mother for part of the year, during which Spring would come and the world would flower again. So, though she ate of a forbidden fruit, which condemned her to eternity in the underworld, Persephone was able to survive it--and to bring new life to earth.
In his book “A New Earth,” Ekhart Tolle adds another detail to the life of the salamander (an amphibious lizard) as he describes the slow and difficult process some water creatures underwent, facing down the difficulties of gravity and air in order to learn to live on dry land. First, they only lived in water, then, slowly, they became able to drag themselves out for small amounts of time, until finally they could travel farther and farther away from the water and still survive. In the book, he posits that it is unlikely those creatures would have gone through such a struggle if it had not been necessary, by some danger, or some new lack of nutrients, to do so. Because of their need to shed the old way of life, they became entirely new. And then:
“Most crawling reptilians, the most earthbound of all creatures, have remained unchanged for millions of years. Some, however, grew feathers and wings and turned into birds, thus defying the force of gravity that had held them for so long. They didn’t become better at crawling or walking, but transcended crawling and walking entirely.”
Thus, even the laws of genetics were overcome--no rule, it seems, is all that hard or fast when necessity strikes. If we want to enough, we can pass through the fires of hell and keep walking. If we so desire, we can quit walking entirely, and fly.
So that is the story here: She rides on the back of the salamander through the flames, which become wings for the salamander. Notice its offspring, leaping with new found wings from the tree. Notice the long body of the next-generation bird, and then the smaller, rounder form of the highest one. Sophia/Eve/Persephone’s snowy dress falls away, and the new material blooms Fire Lilies (not the orange lilies, but the ones which depend on fire in order to flower*), one of which she breaks off to offer her ride. A pomegranate tree blooms from the flames, new leaves and blooms and fruit forming on its trunk, distinct from the snow-covered hedge and frozen fountain further behind.
This drawing is my addition to the post “may my heart always be open to little,” on continuum, with the e.e.cummings poem of that title:
may my heart always be open to little
birds who are the secrets of living
whatever they sing is better than to know
and if men should not hear them men are old
may my mind stroll about hungry
and fearless and thirsty and supple
and even if it's sunday may i be wrong
for whenever men are right they are not young
and may myself do nothing usefully
and love yourself so more than truly
there's never been quite such a fool who could fail
pulling all the sky over him with one smile
- ee cummings
*I used the ones in the Taschen Book of Botanical Prints as my models. The hedge and gate were borrowed from the beautiful lawn of Clive Hicks Jenkins.
Friday, July 31, 2009
A Week of Kindness?
(Cover)
This post was cleaned up considerably by the multi-talented Gabriel. Don't miss his monkey!
According to this website:
...
In his earliest collage books Ernst generally made up completely new scenes out of many separate pieces, but for most of Une semaine de bonte he used complete existing illustrations as base-pictures, altering them with pasted-on additions. His base-pictures were chiefly the relatively crude and usually lurid wood-engraved illustrations of French popular fiction that were plentiful in the books and periodicals of the late nineteenth century. The subject matter of such literature was torrid love, torture, crimes passionnels and the subsequent incarcerations and executions (by guillotine), hatreds and jealousies among the very wealthy and the very indigent: the inferior spawn of Eugene Sue and Emile Zola. Ernst made his trip to Italy with a suitcase full of such pages."
According to Ian Turpin, in his Phaidon book Max Ernst, "The Dada revolt took a number of forms, from the overtly political to a faith in a new art as the only possible saviour of mankind...it was this latter aspect that attracted Ernst on his discharge from the army in 1917...Ernst's contribution to the Dada attack on both modernist art and accepted values in general was collage," where he could juxtapose bizarre elements to "attack contemporary values in general, particularly the reliance on reason."
Text from Werner Spies, introduction to "Max Ernst: A Retrospective"
"The joins and overlappings [between pieces of the collage] had to be concealed from the viewer. This is why Ernst frequently published his composite imagery only in printed form, in photographic reproduction or in versions later touched up with watercolour. Thanks to these tactics of concealment he succeeded in presenting collage as that which he thought it should be: a completely developed and autonomous system in which the origin of the separate elements is submerged in the final, total image. He was out to produce irritating imagery in which, as in the perfect crime, every clue to its identity had been erased. The joins between the collage elements, moreover, were not so much physical as mental in nature. The hinges linking one piece of source material with another had to remain invisible..."
Collage would thus offer, to my mind, a way of rebuilding the world, in the manner of the Foucault/Borges quote at the side of this blog, in which the elements of the world are re-ordered, the logic of organization completely re-thought and re-structured, and we place things that were never before imagined paired together, and we try this thing (life, society) again. This text, Une Semaine de Bonte seems to focus its efforts on showing how bizarrely paired are the things of the world we live in right now, this "Creation of God's" that has somehow showed itself to be a monster, a monster developed, perhaps, from the clash of our true desires for life with the repressive and unnatural structures of society. This book was created during a period of great disillusionment and fierce rejection of what was seen as a violent, dangerous, insane authority--ALL authority, in fact. This was the mood of the period immediately following World War I. Here is a collection of some of the images, divided into day-sections, of Une Semain de Bonte, along with my thoughts on what he might have been doing with this work:
Sunday's Title Page
Ernst breaks the week into its individual days, giving each day a title page which announces its "element" (four of which are alchemical elements, in their order of use by alchemists) and an "example," or representative of that element, along with a-theoretically, at least--related quote. Each title page is followed by a collection of collages following the stated theme.
(Sunday)
(Sunday)
(Sunday)
(Sunday)
(Sunday)
Sunday, which is the Christian day of rest, not the day of creation--in his book is the day of mud, which to me would, in this book, symbolize the act of creation, as the first man is made from mud, here symbolized by the male, aggressive and passionate king of the jungle: the lion. This begins the book with the creation of man and his sort of violent position as the leader of the world, which goes well with a patriarchal form of religion, and then immediately subverts it, by creating that man on the day religiously and very seriously set aside as the day of rest, the day God did not create man.
(Monday)
(Monday)
(Monday)
What he seems to be creating here is a more "honest"--that is, a more surreal, vicious, illogical and frightening--version of the Christian creation story, the seven days in which God created the world. The title then, is ironic--it's a rejection of the idea that it was any kindness at all to have created this world as it is. Throughout, he seems to suggest also that part of the (massive) problem with the world is the very underlying system of beliefs that created it; for example, the rules and regulations governing the way humans view each other, judge each other, and interact with each other.
Supporting this theory, on The second day, water (represented by water) appears. Water is not only a feminine element, it is also the element symbolic in dreams (with which these surrealists were as obsessed as I) with emotional states and your level of success in dealing with them. A stagnant pool suggests one thing about your emotional life, whereas a glorious afternoon sailing on an endless ocean suggests another. You can become overcome by a tidal wave, you can be overly concerned about the presence of the pee-pee of others in a public pool, you might suddenly discover you're able to breathe underwater. In many of Ernst's watery scenes, some people can walk on the water, while others drown. At any rate, in the first image, a bridge is broken off, and an undeveloped (the joints are still apparent as with a doll) female appears as part of the wreckage. Formed from Adam's rib? In the next image, she is more wholly human, though naked. And then she appears, all sauced-up with the top of the shell (reference to Aphrodite, rising from the water on a shell?) on her head...
(Tuesday)
(Tuesday)
(Tuesday)
(Tuesday)
(Tuesday)
The third day brings in the dragons and serpents, which to me would represent the appearance of the devil in the garden, with his fabulous offerings.
(Wednesday)
(Wednesday)
(Wednesday)
(Wednesday)
Day four leads us to the story of Oedipus, an obsession of Freud's that perhaps caused him to lose a little balance (note: for a fantastic opposing view on the Oedipal complex, read An Interpretation of Murder, an excellent novel and representation of this time period, with excellent insight on the psychological ideas that were then developing). In Wednesday's section (Blood and Oedipus), he introduces improper relations, and an interesting note here is that he was at this time, in a taboo marriage with a cousin--so this idea of relationships prohibited by closeness of blood was a bitter one. Yesterday, the demons came, and today the love that might save me from those demons is prohibited--perhaps even a demon itself. For some reason, Oedipus is conflated in his mind with bird-headed humans--why? Ernst had an obsessive relationship with birds in his paintings, and often showed them caged, or trapped in some other way. As a child, he was informed of the birth of his sister at the same time as the death of his pet cockatoo, and the event was to stand over the rest of his life like a dark shadow. He described it (in the third person) thus: "In his imagination he connected both events and charged the baby with the extinction of the bird's life...A dangerous confusion between birds and humans became encrusted in his mind." The suffering of the war and the way that human beings were treating each other, in what "Ernst regarded as the failure of reconciliation between conscious and unconscious, reason and intuition," (17 Phaidon, Max Ernst, Turpin) was a topic that he was consistently commenting on in his art work; he was very aware of unconscious/subconscious psychological forces and their symbols from university studies as well as from the Surrealist group's obsession with Freud, and in a description of this work of collage as compared to his other works, Turin has written: "The characters of Une Semaine de Bonte are in general both closer to the picture-plane and larger in relation to the surrounding space...There is consequently a feeling not so much of a conflict between conscious and unconscious, as of a direct assault by the latter on the former"(17). If we take this work to be that, and we take his tendency to show birds in a trapped state--trapped by the oppressive, guilt-ridden lives of humans, perhaps, then the bird-headed creatures of Wednesday might represent all that life (subconscious desires; repressed activities, feelings, and sexuality; creative urges) that we have suppressed, finding its way out into the light of the world, as it will, in its own, monstrous form. The reference to Oedipus might also refer to the sense of being crippled, trapped, and condemned by the generation before us, and also feeling so much remorse for our own unnatural actions that we might desire to gouge out our eyes rather than continue to see the results of that. The improper relation to our own blood might have more to do with war, here, than sex.
(Thursday, Rooster)
(Thursday, Rooster)
(Thursday, Easter Island)
(Thursday, Easter Island)
"Those among them who are merry sometimes turn their behinds toward the sky and cast their excrement in the face of other men; then they strike their own bellies lightly." .. "Laughter is probably doomed to disappear."--Marcel Schwob (quoted from two separate works). From these opening quotes, the element (darkness), and its representative (the Rooster's Laughter), I see Thursday as Purgatory--our current plight. A plight which because of our unwillingness or inability to turn away from the hypnotic (think of the impending Hitler, think Franco) force of rigid, tyrannical, repressive structures that are against our nature, against the nature of the universe, even, we face the loss of laughter (surprise, joy--which the rooster's laugh is but a sick twisting of), and sink closer and closer to the bottom (darkness, hell). Within the overall structure of the "Week of Kindness," this is the the descent into banality and its natural evolution into hell itself. Here we see images of torture, suicide, stalking, and freakish experiments. The second representative of darkness is Easter Island, which is present as a series of large, blocky masks, as if the stone sculptures had grown bodies, dressed in contemporary attire, and begun taking part in society.
Why Easter Island as a representative of the darkness, the dark side of man, the purgatory present as a path to hell? According to Wikipedia, on Easter Island, "For unknown reasons, a coup by military leaders called mararoa had brought a new cult based around a previously unexceptional god Makemake. The cult of the birdman...was largely to blame for the island's misery of the late 18th and 19th centuries. With the island's ecosystem fading, destruction of crops quickly resulted in famine, sickness and death." As Ernst already had an association formed in his mind between birds and man's evil, the Easter Island heads then become almost parallel to the laughing rooster heads as a sign of our descent.
Friday's element is sight, and its given manifestation is the interior of sight. He divides the section into the "First Visible Poem," (where he quotes Paul Eluard: "And I object to the love of ready-made images in place of images to be made.") the "Second Visible Poem,"
(Friday, Second Poem)
and the Third, which is very short, consisting of a row of handshakes, and a row of eyeballs gazing at each other, both rows with eggs stationed in various places.
Saturday's element is unknown, but its example is "The Key to Songs," and the section is opened with a silent quote. The images seem to be of women in various states of falling.
(Saturday)
(Saturday)
My feeling is that these last two days refer to the duty of turning inwards (the interior of sight), to come to understand and process who we are and who we could be, what exists underneath our daily routine and daily submissions: it is a refusal of "ready-made images," and an exhortation to begin creating our own (for example, collage...). To look at ourselves and to connect with ourselves (the rows of eyeballs, the rows of handshakes). To be willing to take the leap, as it were, to experience the sense of falling that comes from disconnecting with our current supporting structure in search of a new way of living. To cut and paste from the "lurid" stories around us until we have a new cohesive image, one that makes better (even if not logical) sense.
I end here with what I imagine to be Ernst's response to this week of unkindness:
"The Virgin Spanking the Christ Child Before Three Witnesses: Andre Breton, Paul Eduard, and the Painter"
The Full Text
Note: Each day's section opens with a quote from a surrealist text. I didn't touch most of the quotes, but would be fascinated to hear what anyone else has to say about them. The link to the full book is offered to the right of this blog. This is just the structure of the entire body, as I see it, but there is an awful lot going on in each collage.
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