Monday, June 26, 2017

Arlene Corwin writes



Disrespecting Forms


What care I for forms?
I have my own.
Molded from
A lifetime writing, thinking – being.
It has, they have formed my form,
Changing forms the lingua franca;
Spinal cornerstone that’s anchored,
Stable, usable and able,
Sentient being that it is.



Where in this, the universe 
Is form unvaried, not reshaping:
Variations on a theme.
Take part!  
You are the theme, the constant mean. 
Play with that and go.
 Salvador Dalí, ‘Metamorphosis of Narcissus’ 1937
 Métamorphose de Narcisse (Metamorphosis of Narcissus) -- Salvador Dali

6 comments:

  1. "Metamorphosis of Narcissus" was Salvador Dalí's interpretation of the story of Narcissus. According to Publius Ovidius Naso, in his "Metamorphoses,"Narcissus is the son of the nymph Leiriope and the river god Cephissus. Upon his birth, the seer Thiresius predicted that he would have a long life "if he does not get to know himself." He grew into a youth of great beauty who loved only himself. Among those he spurned was a nymph, Echo, who pined away until noting remained but her voice. In retaliation, Nemesis persuaded him to drink from a clear pool, whereupon he fell in love with his image in the water and could not pull away. He died there, still bending down over his own image, and became the flower that bears his name, a “sweet flower, gold and white, the white around the gold.” For this 1937 painting Dalí employed a technique he called "hand-painted color photography" to depict the transformation of Narcissus into a hand holding an egg and flower, while a pre-transformation Narcissus poses in the background. A group of people, whom Dalí called the "heterosexuals," represented Hindu, Catalan, German, Russian, and American men and Swedish and English women, whom Narcissus had rejected. This was his first painting in accordance with the paranoiac critical method, which he described as a "spontaneous method of irrational knowledge, based on the critical-interpretative association of the phenomena of delirium."

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  2. The painting was accompanied by a poem by the painter, which was to be red while one observed the picture:

    Narcissus,
    in his immobility,
    absorbed by his reflection with the digestive slowness of carnivorous plants,
    becomes invisible.
    There remains of him only the hallucinatingly white oval of his head,
    his head again more tender,
    his head, chrysalis of hidden biological designs,
    his head held up by the tips of the water’s fingers,
    at the tips of the fingers
    of the insensate hand,
    of the terrible hand,
    of the mortal hand
    of his own reflection.
    When that head slits
    when that head splits
    when that head bursts,
    it will be the flower,
    the new Narcissus,
    Gala – my Narcissus.

    Gala (Elena Ivanovna Diakonova) had married the poet Paul Éluard in 1917 and togethe they became involved with surrealism. From 1924-1927 she and her husband formed a ménage à trois with Max Ernst. in 1929 the couple visited Dalí on the Costa Brava. Dalí, a decade younger than Gala and still a virgin due to his phobia of female genitalia, nevertheless became her lover (though she and Éluard remained close even after their divorce and, at one point, even resumed sexual relations), and the two married in 1934. They stayed married until her death in 1982, despite her infidelities with younger men, encouraged by Dalí, a candaulist. (Candaulism is a sexual practice or fantasy in which a man exposes his female partner to other people for their voyeuristic pleasure or has her engage in sexual relations with a third person. The fetish was defined in 1886 by Richard von Krafft-Ebing, based on Herodotus' 5th-century BCE account of Kandaules, an 8th-century BCE king of Lydia [his name meant"dog throttler"]. The king bragged of his wife Nyssia's beauty to Gyges, his bodyguard, and arranged for him to see her naked. But she learned of the plot and gave Gyges a choice: "One of you must die. Either my husband, the author of this wicked plot; or you, who have outraged propriety by seeing me naked." So the bodyguard stabbed the king to death, married the queen, and began the Mermnad dynasty. In "The Republic," Platon claimed that Gyges usurped the throne through the use of a magical ring tthat made him invisible.) Dalí often depicted her in his works and, in the early 1930s, he signed his paintings with both of their names, claiming that it was "mostly with your blood, Gala, that I paint my pictures."

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  3. In the painting, the artist revealed the human drama of love and death and also the transformation known as "narcissism," which Sigmund Freud defined as "the displacement of an individual's libido towards that individual's own body, towards the 'ego' of the subject." In 1938, Dalí traveled to London to meet Freud, taking "Metamorphosis of Narcissus" with him to show the psychoanalyst. Freud remarked, "Until today I had tended to think that the surrealists, who would appear to have chosen me as their patron saint, were completely mad. But this wild-eyed young Spaniard, with his undoubted technical mastery, prompted me to a different opinion. Indeed, it would be most interesting to explore analytically the growth of a work like this."

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  4. In Paris in 1937 Dalí published a reproduction of the painting in a book which also included his explanation of the painting: "If one looks for some time, from a slight distance and with a certain 'distant fixedness', at the hypnotically immobile figure of Narcissus, it gradually disappears until at last it is completely invisible. The metamorphosis of the myth takes place at that precise moment, for the image of Narcissus is suddenly transformed into the image of a hand which rises out of his own reflection. At the tips of its fingers the hand is holding an egg, a seed, a bulb from which will be born the new narcissus - the flower. Beside it can be seen the limestone sculpture of the hand - the fossil hand of the water holding the blown flower."

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  5. The book also contained another poem by Dalí:

    Under the split in the retreating black cloud

    the invisible scale of spring is oscillating in the fresh April sky. On the highest mountain, the god of the snow, his dazzling head bent over the dizzy space of reflections, starts melting with desire in the vertical cataracts of the thaw annihilating himself loudly among the excremental cries of minerals, or between the silences of mosses towards the distant mirror of the lake in which, the veils of winter having disappeared, he has newly discovered the lightning flash of his faithful image. It seems that with the loss of his divinity the whole high plateau pours itself out, crashes and crumbles among the solitude and the incurable silence of iron oxides while its dead weight raises the entire swarming and apotheosic plateau from the plain from which already thrust towards the sky the artesian fountains of grass and from which rise, erect, tender, and hard, the innumerable floral spears of the deafening armies of the germination of the narcissi. Already the heterosexual group, in the renowned poses of preliminary expectation, conscientiously ponders over the threatening libidinous cataclysm, the carnivorous blooming of its latent morphological atavisms. In the heterosexual group, in that kind date of the year (but not excessively beloved or mild), there are the Hindou tart, oily, sugared like an August date, the Catalan with his grave back well planted in a sun-tide, a Whitsuntide of flesh inside his brain, the blond flesh-eating German, the brown mists of mathematics in the dimples of his cloudy knees, there is the English woman, the Russian, the Swedish women, the American and the tall darkling Andalusian, hardy with glands and olive with anguish. Far from the heterosexual group, the shadows of the advanced afternoon draw out across the countryside, and cold lays hold of the adolescent’s nakedness as he lingers at the water’s edge. When the clear and divine body of Narcissus leans down to the obscure mirror of the lake, when his white torso folded forward fixes itself, frozen, in the silvered and hypnotic curve of his desire, when the time passes on the clock of the flowers of the sand of his own flesh, Narcissus loses his being in the cosmic vertigo in the deepest depths of which is singing the cold and Dyonisiac siren of his own image. The body of Narcissus flows out and loses itself in the abyss of his reflection, like the sand glass that will not be turned again.

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  6. Narcissus, you are losing your body, carried away and confounded by the millenary reflection of your disappearance your body stricken dead falls to the topaz precipice with yellow wreckage of love, your white body, swallowed up, follows the slope of the savagely mineral torrent of the black precious stones with pungent perfumes, your body...down to the unglazed mouths of the night on the edge of which there sparkles already all the red silverware of dawns with veins broken in ‘the wharves of blood’. Narcissus, do you understand? Symmetry, divine hypnosis of the mind’s geometry, already fills up your head, with that incurable sleep, vegetable, atavistic, slow Which withers up the brain in the parchment substance of the kernel of your nearing metamorphosis. The seed of your head has just fallen into the water. Man returns to the vegetable state by fatigue-laden sleep and the gods by the transparent hypnosis of their passions. Narcissus, you are so immobile one would think you were asleep. If it were a question of Hercules rough and brown, one would say: he sleeps like a bole [sic] in the posture of an Herculean oak. But you, Narcissus, made of perfumed bloomings of transparent adolescence, you sleep like a water flower. Now the great mystery draws near, the great metamorphosis is about to occur. Narcissus, in his immobility, absorbed by his reflection with the digestive slowness of carnivorous plants, becomes invisible. There remains of him only the hallucinatingly white oval of his head, his head again more tender, his head, chrysalis of hidden biological designs, his head held up by the tips of the water’s fingers, at the tips of the fingers of the insensate hand, of the terrible hand, of the excrement-eating hand, of the mortal hand of his own reflection. When that head slits when that head splits when that head bursts, it will be the flower,

    the new narcissus,

    -- Salvador Dalí

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