“Death, shouts the old man, belongs to faith. You are quite right to believe you will die, of course. That comforts hou. If you did not believe this, how would you manage to bear the life you are living ?”
Translated from Claude Jaeglé, Portrait silencieux de Jacques Lacan, PUF, 2010.
Jacques Lacan died on September 7, 1981.
"Don't be waiting up for me this evening, for the night will be white and black."
(La rue de la Vieille-Lanterne, Lithographie de Célestin Nanteuil)
These are supposed to be the last written words by Gérard Labrunie, aka Gérard de Nerval, left to his aunt, a lonesome evening of the immemorial year 1855. He was found at dawn, January 26, hanging from a railing in squalid rue de la Vieille Lanterne, near Chatelet quarters, Paris bas-fonds of the times.
Yes, he hanged, this man of gloom - the widower - the unconsoled. And, yes, he had troubles of mind, after 1849. Factually, a severe melancholia, maybe associated with schizophrenias or bipolar disorders.
But once you have read the work, once you know the fellow (a meeting with the man and he was your friend for life, said Théophile Gautier), you will be ending with the received image of Nerval the silly man, lobster on leash and making poetry from tarot's guide.
Let aside for a while the distracted soul, and let us consider the strong and sanguine and demanding body, the hard boiled spirit, the woman worshipper. Women ? Brave Gerard is known to have been a constant unlucky man, isn't he ? Maybe. maybe not exactly. The fact is the man has a "type" :
« (...) la femme idéale des tableaux de l'école italienne, la Vénitienne de Gozzi ; bionda e grassotta, la voilà trouvée ! » (1840, Letter to Théophile Gautier, Œuvres, Pléiade, II, p. 1432).
And Gautier answers : « Enfin tu as trouvé le blond, ce blond au pourchas duquel nous avons bu tant de chopes de bière. » (Pléiade, I, p. 796). In Baden, Vienna, in Venetia, in Brussels, Nerval soul often swoons as pale ladies wander.
Blonde, or redish, but black eyed ones. A type we know very well, don't we, since Byron ("Her hair, I said, was auburn, but her eyes were black as death"). Since Musset's Rosine. Since Petrarque's Laura. But Nerval and fellow Gautier turn it their light own way. Light, sometimes, always sensual.
(Titien, Vénus au Miroir - Washington)
Besides, the search for faces/bodies coincidates with an artistic search. And "besides" is a wrong word. It is simply a one and unique search for Geai Rare. "We had decided, contrarily to the spanish taste of these days, to write a blond and even, possibly, a redish novel", theorizes (making fun of it, though not only) Gautier. As for Nerval, there is no joking at all (under this serious lightning, this "soleil noir"). And soon, the lightness become freshness, colors blacken, suddenly pale means white.
Jenny Colon dies before summer 1842. Sophie Dawes, baronne de Feuchères, fantasmatic and distant vision, owner of Mortefontaine's domain, in 1840.
(Jenny Colon , Gravure de Prud'hon)
Gautier’s Cydalise had vanished in 1832 winter (from phtisia, of course). A Venetian blond known and immediately forgotten (or never forgotten, it’s quite the same), a dark eyed pale Austrian tanned under the sun of French South. They have all gone for good. Every single black and blonde is know laying under the cool wood of Arcadia. Cemetery girls. Just like her mother have been for all his/her life. Nerval was not Three years old yet when she passed, he did not speak an intelligible language for human beings. Certainly never did.
"Ou sont nos amoureuses?
Elles sont au tombeau!
Elles sont plus heureuses
Dans un séjour plus beau."
Aurelia, Cydalise, Jenny. Isis, Mary, Pandora. One. The nights would be white and black. In sunhine and in shadow. Ride, Nerval boldly ride,...
French actress Sylvia Bataille died in December 22 sd or 23 rd (the French and English Wikipedia versions disagree, if you have any information please let us know…), 1994.
One the most impressive Sylvia’s performance took place in Une Partie de campagne (english title : A day in the country), by Jean Renoir. This classical, marvelous tribute to his father Auguste Renoir, was shot by the « boss » (le « patron », Renoir’s nickname in the profession) in summer 1936, but was released only after the war. The shooting was terrible, partly because of bad wether conditions, mainly because of financial troubles and because of conflicts and arguments within the casting. What a movie : think that Georges Bataille (the French writer and nonconforming thinker) and Henri Cartier-Bresson are both featuring, as seminary students. Bataille really considered priesthood in his youth, which gives more weigh to the fact. At that time, Sylvia and Bataille were separated, though they only divorced after war, precisely – no link, do we suppose, but how innocent we are – in 1946.
Because of these shooting problems, the film was long regarded as unfinished. Though it is, with no doubt, a masterpiece. Read the precious George Kaplan's chronique over the movie production, and meditate Pontalis phrase about Sylvia’s character Henriette Dufour, evocating the stunning love scene in the island, on a windy afternoon : « la scène où elle s'abandonne, couchée dans l'herbe, à ce qui soudain lui arrive, la surprend, l'envahit : ce plaisir qui n'a pas de nom. » (I underline). "I think it shoud be better if we went back" (video), did she begin to say, before she at last yielded to life.
Unfinished (unachieved ?) abandon, no name pleasure.
We know since 1938, Sylvia lived with psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan. The one who – among many others feats – was the last private owner of L’Origine du Monde, the famous Courbet cul(t) painting. In fact, they both, Sylvia and Lacan, bought the scandalous oil on canvas, and installed it in… their country (« campagne ») house.
Other "parties de campagne", other laying aside some other couch, other swooning then probably began. Were these achieved ? Do someone own the origin, once in a lifetime ? Can somebody lay down over the countryside and give a definite name to pleasure ?
After Sylvia’s death (let's suppose it happened during the 22 sd/23 rd night, under a quiet murky light, when she finally abandoned herself to what suddenly happens, invades her for the first and last time, and can be named after all) French governement agreed that the legacy should be payed by the donation of L’Origine du Monde. The painting is at the Musée d’Orsay since 1995 : thank to French public service, you may yourself go and pursue and accomplish Sylvia and Lacan’s quest.
Paris, Belle-Epoque. The invention of the street lamp (17th century), and its wide spreading during the 19th, was a revolution. During the 1880-1900 period, we van say a good public lightning is present in the broad streets of the capital cities of Europe. In Paris, the first electric lightning is expanding : the honest citizen is no more locked in at home, avoiding the "Apaches", the bad guys of the times, as you can read in Fantômas serial.
But the good old "bec-de-gaz" (gas lamps) are still there, and will remain long in the side streets and the back alleys. Around this milky lightning of the French réverbère, it's not day light, though. It's not day, it's not darkness. You're not awake, you're not dead. You move like in a dream. (Rêve)rbère... Creatures of the night are not eliminated, they still sprowl around, hide down the corners, thrive behind the urban curtains.
Nowadays ? Electric light overflows in (almost) every corner of our big cities. But dont' we have, anyone of us, our own creatures of the night ? Inside our own personal surroundings, some hurry, somme wander. In our capital city, many a top hat burgess is fearing the irresponsable behaviour of the underworld inhabitants, even if they appear to be cousins and children. And these children of the darkness that live in me, love to walk the lines, by the réverbères. Some of our characters, in us, play swinging from light to shadow, and passing again through the shades, would say J.B. Pontalis.
Photographer Brain L. Frank roamed northern Mexico and the American Southwest, documenting the Colorado River's suffering, close to disappearance.
Thanks to French site "urbain, trop urbain".
BBC reading of some Apollinaire's war poems, on Sunday 14th November. Presented by Martin Sorrell, emeritus professor of Modern Languages at Exeter University.
In the short accompanying text of the brodcast, BBC naturally traduced "Ah Dieu! que la guerre est jolie", the poet words, by "Oh! What a lovely war!", but in their title, they mistook and wrote "lively" instead of "lovely". I decided to prefer and keep the "wrong" way.
Here is the sound file :
http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/console/b00vvx8m/Oh_What_a_Lively_War
As-tu connu Guy au galop
Du temps qu'il était militaire
As-tu connu Guy au galop
Du temps qu'il était artiflot
A la guerre
See also Soirées de Paris, early XXth century revue once directed par Apollinaire, and, theses days, being reedited (Editions De Conti) in Paris ! The news are Apollinaire...
Last (but..., as we know), the revue was freshly reborn (on the web).
http://www.lessoireesdeparis.com/
and above : http://jmcedro.posterous.com/apollinaires-revival-les-soirees-de-paris)
(Subverting The Tempest's quote.)
L’île des Morts (Die Toteninsel). Arnold Böcklin, 1880, Öffentliche Kunstammlung Basel, Kunstmuseum.
Eh, l'angoisseux, l'agonisant quand tu verras,
le ciel : un dôme d'or tacheté de points noirs
stellaires, et la lune une pastille noire
sur un grand ventre de lumière
le temps sera venu : voici ta mort dernière
voici ta naissance première.
(Roger Gilbert-Lecomte, in Oeuvres complètes, Gallimard. Photo DR)
One of the most precious contributor to folk and progressive rock creation in the sixties and the seventies, in my opinion.
The ballad of Casey Deiss makes a tribute to a musician taken by dope in the late 60's, wose death was astonishing : in Italy where he lived, just like Shawn Phillips (who was in Positano in the 70's, hence my title), one day he stepped outside his door with an axe in his hand, and was struck by lightning. He has lived and "he died in light", insightfully writes Shawn Phillips.
He loved poetry and women, and more poetry and more women. With greed and reason.
"Then let us pray that come it may,
(As come it will for a' that,)
That Sense and Worth, o'er a' the earth,
Shall bear the gree, an' a' that.
For a' that, an' a' that,
It's coming yet for a' that,
That Man to Man, the world o'er,
Shall brothers be for a' that."
(From A Man's a Man, for A' that. Painting : The Parting of Robert Burns and his Mary, by Charles Lucy, 1844. Photo : Bridgeman Art Library)
