The Ways of Paradise (eBook)

Peter Cornell (Autor)

eBook Download: EPUB

2024 | 1. Auflage
152 Seiten
Fitzcarraldo Editions (Verlag)
978-1-80427-107-0 (ISBN)

Infos

In his foreword to The Ways of Paradise, Peter Cornell presents this so-called found manuscript, the work of a now-deceased, obscure researcher who spent three decades in the National Library of Sweden working on his magnum opus. Upon his death, no trace of this work remains aside from this set of notes and fragments which form an enigmatic set of texts on the connections between art, literature, spirituality and the occult through history, with a particular focus on spirals and labyrinths. Ranging from the Crusades to Ruskin, Freud to surrealism, cubism, automatic writing, Duchamp, the Manhattan Project, Pollock and Smithson, this cult book, first published in Sweden in 1987, is translated into English for the first time by Saskia Vogel.

Born in Stockholm in 1942, Peter Cornell is a writer, historian and art critic. He taught theory and history of modern art at the University of Arts, Crafts and Design (Konstfack) and the Royal Institute of the Arts (Kungliga Konsthögskolan) in Stockholm, and is an honorary member of the Royal Swedish Academy of Fine Arts (Konstakademien).

Textauszug

II.

1. In Paris, ahead of their departure to Santiago de Compostela, pilgrims would gather at the Gothic church of Saint-Jacques-de-la-Boucherie, the tower of which, Tour Saint-Jacques, still stands at rue de Rivoli between Châtelet and Hôtel de Ville. From here the same pilgrimage was undertaken by the legendary alchemist Nicolas Flamel (ca. 1330–1417), a poor writer who lived right by the church. One day by coincidence Flamel came across a remarkable old folio, which turns out to have been authored by the Jewish cabbalist Abraham Juif. The book contained alchemical texts and illustrations that Flamel and his wife Perenelle, despite their great efforts, could not decipher. But on the journey home from Santiago de Compostela Flamel happens to meet an old, learned man who helps explain the enigmatic pictures. This Master Canches, a Christian of Jewish origin, dies soon thereafter. Aided by his instructions, Perenelle and Flamel – by his own account in the apocryphal Livre des figures hiéroglyphiques – succeed in manufacturing both silver and gold. Be that as it may, Flamel, according to legend, became unexpectedly rich and the owner of a great number of properties, donated money to charity and to the restoration and ornamentation of churches, the enigmatic iconography of which was inspired by the images in Abraham Juif’s folio. Flamel was buried in Saint-Jacques which – with the exception of the tower – was destroyed during the Revolution. Today Flamel’s gravestone is preserved at the Musée de Cluny. His name recurs in surrealist literature, for example in the Second Manifesto of Surrealism (1929), in which Flamel’s visual world is compared with surrealist painting.

 

2. The surrealist artist Jacques Halpern did not live far from the Tour Saint-Jacques on rue de Rivoli. He passed by it often, never paying it much notice – habit does have the power to render our everyday surroundings invisible. But one day the tower emerged before his eyes with unexpected clarity, and as he walked away from it, he heard himself mumble: ‘La Tour Saint-Jacques.’ Right then, a bus passed by, number 21, and at the same moment the clocks in the Palais de Justice struck three.

On the 21st of the same month, at 3 in the afternoon, using surrealist logic, he seeks out the tower. A stranger approaches him and they enter into conversation. The stranger relays that he has come to this place, apparently driven by an irresistible force – he who never otherwise leaves his apartment at 38 rue Saint-X. The two men part ways at the metro. Later Halpern seeks the stranger out at his address, but there too the stranger is unknown, and Halpern never lays eyes on him again.

André Breton recounts this episode in the afterword to Arcanum 17, the reason being that he himself on 27 April 1947 had set a date to meet his friends Jacques Hérold and Victor Brauner at the Tour Saint-Jacques.

3. This also applies to the modern metropolis. For example, Walter Benjamin writes: ‘The city is the realization of that ancient dream of humanity, the labyrinth. It is this reality to which the flâneur, without knowing it, devotes himself.’ Das Passagen-Werk, 1982.

4. By this description one should be able to draw the conclusion that the city’s centre crystallizes in the areas around Pont-Neuf. Near the bridge abutment on the right bank, where the rue de l’Arbre-Sec spills out onto the quay, is – according to André Breton – the best view of the Seine; from there it stretches out pleasingly like a mermaid in repose. On the other side of the bridge is Place Dauphine, which Breton visits on one of his rambles with Nadja and which imbues him with a very peculiar feeling: ‘Place Dauphine is certainly one of the most profoundly secluded places I know of, one of the worst wastelands in Paris. Whenever I happen to be there, I feel the desire to go somewhere else gradually ebbing out of me, I have to struggle against myself to get free from a gentle, over-insistent, and, finally, crushing embrace.’

Twenty-five years later, in La Clé des champs, the author tries to clarify the composite feeling that the place evokes, scrutinizing it from a distance, with a kind of bird’s eye view. The Île de la Cité is often said to be shaped like a heart, but rather it strikes Breton as having the shape of a woman. At the top towards Île Saint-Louis he sees her raised elbow, behind which she is shyly hiding her face; in the rest of the island he sees her torso. Now everything becomes clear: ‘I find it unbelievable today that others before me, upon entering the Place Dauphine from the Pont-Neuf, were not grabbed by the throat at the sight of its triangular conformation, a slightly curvilinear one at that, and of the slit that bisects it into two wooded areas. Unmistakably, what lies revealed in the shade of these groves is the sexe of Paris.’ Its forest, he notes, still burns, each year, in memory of the execution of the Knights Templar that was carried out on that spot on 13 March 1313. (Here André Breton mistakes the relevant point in time; the correct date is 19 March 1314. On this day the Templars’ leaders Jacques de Molay and Geoffroi de Charny were burnt at the stake by direct order of King Philip the Fair, who was seized by rage after both of the accused unexpectedly rescinded confessions they’d previously made under torture.) The base of this triangular square borders the Palais de Justice. The sex’s proximity to this seat of punishment explains to Breton the eerie atmosphere of taboo and pressure that the place emits. All this marks Place Dauphine out as Paris’s sacred place, ‘le lieu sacré’. Breton, Nadja, 1928. Cf. Marie-Claire Bancquart, Paris des surréalistes, 1972, and Mirella Bandini, La vertigine del moderno, 1985.

5. According to André Breton, who took the information from Fulcanelli, the rue de l’Arbre-Sec near to Pont-Neuf was named after an inn that in the 1300s housed pilgrims on their way to the Holy Land. The sign bearing the symbol of a dry tree – a biblical and alchemical symbol – remained in place until the 1600s. Breton, op. cit.

 

6. Pilgrims wore a rough tunic-like jacket, a small leather sack around the waist containing only the barest of essentials and carried a wooden walking stick. Around these attributes a comprehensive symbolism developed: the walking stick was meant to help the pilgrim hold at bay wolves and angry dogs, that is to say the devil, and as a third leg it also served as a reminder of the Holy Trinity. On his jacket he might, upon return from the place of pilgrimage, affix a badge, a palm frond if he had been in Jerusalem. But another badge would eventually become more common. Yrjö Hirn recalls encountering it in a display at the Germanisches Nationalmuseum in Nuremberg: ‘The jacket’s collar is adorned with shells and upon the left breast a large shell has been sewn fast. The hat, its brim folded up at the front, is also richly decorated with shells, of which the largest, a scallop, is fixed in the middle above the forehead, whereas smaller molluscs, long, spiralled and narrow, are arranged in cruciform around the brim. An inscription states that this costume belonged to Stephan Praun from Nuremberg and was worn by him on his pilgrimage to the Holy Land in the year 1571.’ Yrjö Hirn, Eremiter och pilgrimer (Hermits and Pilgrims), 1924.

Why shells, exactly (the kind that have given us the term pilgrimsmusslor, or ‘pilgrim shells’)? Hirn suggests that these souvenir scallop shells and molluscs, sometimes cast in tin or lead, originated with the pilgrimages to Mont-Saint-Michel in Normandy, which became one of Christianity’s earliest and most distinguished destinations after it was said that the Archangel Michael appeared there in the year 708. ‘The learned archaeologist Paul Gout has, in his great work on Mont-Saint-Michel, asserted that the pilgrims who visited this sacred edifice, after being forbidden by the priests to take with them pieces of the church wall or altar covering as souvenirs, began instead to remove small rocks or shells, of the kind collected from the seashore. These latter objects – with all the requisite marine associations – served best of all as displayed memories from the sacred place, in which the ignorant inland-travellers imagined seeing a final outpost of the mainland in the sea, a place “where one might not yet be in heaven, but one has already left Earth”. It was a source of pride, in one’s pious wanderings, to have gone the long way to the ocean, and so it became common custom to hang shells on one’s costume upon leaving Saint-Michel.’ Hirn, op. cit.

A similar legend is told of Santiago de Compostela (whence, via a series of wonders, St. James’ remains had been relocated – the Holy Virgin’s dwelling, via a miracle, is also said to have been moved from Nazareth to Loreto, Italy, which turned the place into a popular destination for pilgrims). It was said that a strange fish with a shell on each of its sides swam in the ocean beyond Santiago de...

Produkt-Details

• Erscheint lt. Verlag: 21.11.2024
• Übersetzer: Saskia Vogel
• Zusatzinfo: 40 black and white illustrations
• Verlagsort: London
• Sprache: englisch
• Themenwelt: Literatur ► Romane / Erzählungen
• Schlagworte: ART • Art criticism • Culture • Duchamp • essay collection • Freud • History • History of Art • History of the Occult • literary essays • literature in translation • Surrealism • Swedish literature • The Occult • Twentieth century
• ISBN-10: 1-80427-107-1 / 1804271071
• ISBN-13: 978-1-80427-107-0 / 9781804271070