Picture Love

In Proust's In Search of Lost Time, Swann famously loves Odette de Crecy by seeing her as Jethro's Daughter in the Botticelli painting The Trials of Moses. Later, in Volume II, Marcel, the narrator, will likewise love Albertine through "those Michelangelo figures which are being swept away in a stationary and vertiginous whirlwind". These examples of love refracted through art reminded me a year or so ago of some of Barthes' writing on the imaginaire, the manner in which we superimpose our own imagining onto our thus selected desire and I wrote about it a little. Perhaps these works of art are indeed merely tropes, no different from other literary stylings, on which Proust could express his characters' love. How nice these flourishes remain, and how true to the grandiose impressions we have of our new loves.

Valentine's Day, despite how lucky I have been in love, has nonetheless generally made me uncomfortable and I find art an honest yet still distracting way of expressing or enjoying it. Last year, I went to The Tempest with my new love, my aunt and her partner, which solved the need to speak for several hours and allowed the rest of the evening to be focused on the play rather than this still uncertain relationship. Other years, I have largely tried to avoid the heart-shaped, chocolate-covered celebration, always unsuccessfully, not because I do not feel love for one or many, but rather because I am not sure how to express it on demand. I do not proclaim well. I am more spontaneous in my desire and appreciation, believing, as I do, that Love is truly important, fundamental even.

In Greek mythology, specifically remembering my recent reading of Hesiod, after Chaos the first creation is Eros. How this occurs Hesiod does not explain, but only after Eros do Gaia and Okeanous, and the others, appear. Eros remains an independently created entity, though one who produces progeny with some of those first created. Similarly, when Zeus overthrows the Titans, Aphrodite, rising from the castrated penis of Kronos, becomes the first personification of the previous abstracted deities. The rest of the Olympians then appear. Love is always the first in the new world.

Perhaps because there is something static in Love, a kind of ever presence, Love is difficult to describe. Lust moves us and so words more easily build on each other in an attempt to convey the passion, the way we 'fall' for someone, 'tumble' into bed together, 'stoke' the fires of desire. Love is simply there, present. Though Love may share traits with the other passions such as being inopportune, undeniable, there is something undefinable about it that is different from the others. Having started speaking of Proust, I must here intervene to say that both Swann and Marcel discover their own jealousy in coveting the women they desire, a jealousy that overwhelms and undermines any other feelings, including any fascimile of love they might have created for themselves. They each believe they love, but maintain desire through jealousy. Swann finds a picture of Botticelli's painting to keep on his desk to remind him of Odette. Does he love? There is only the question.

I am sometimes asked if I would love the man I love any less if I did not like the works of art that he creates, or if he were not an artist. The question is dumbfounding because, as I know too well, he can not help but paint or draw and is compelled to return to it if he spends too much time away. I love his pictures–it is true–and perhaps had I not liked his paintings as much as I did when we first met, I might not have bothered getting to know him better. Who knows? He admits he let his feelings grow upon seeing my home and approving of my aesthetic sensibility. Did I picture him when I closed my eyes as a young girl? Not exactly. Did he me? I sincerely doubt it. And yet the pictures mutate to fit the one standing in front of us...if we are lucky, imaginative, both. The art of love is, for me at least, a picture I will see tomorrow, when he smiles at me sitting at a communal table in a crowded, loud dumpling house in Chinatown, where we meet because I still can't stand Valentine's Day and where there is no art on the walls to distract either of us from a ritualized acknowledgment of love. Love, then, is not always a pretty picture, picture perfect as it may be.

Le Merveilleux

The holidays frighten me with the potential for things going awry. This year, however, I have someone in my life who is just too marvelous for words. I finally begin to understand Breton's tenet of "le merveilleux" and how on earth it relates to beauty or love.

To introduce a surrealist ethos without discussing the marvelous is impossible, and yet because Breton develops the idea across his essays and reveals the experience of it in his fictions, a simple summary seems particularly shallow. This may be said of many surrealist conceits but the marvelous is particularly prone to being confused with the fantastic or to sounding like over-intellectualized sentimentality.

There is a history of literature of the fantastic that is different from Breton’s expression the marvelous. The fantastic is usually associated with science fiction and attempts to incorporate the alien into the rational world. The marvelous on the other hand is, as Hal Foster puts it in his work Compulsive Beauty, disruptive. Louis Aragon perhaps explains it best in Paris Peasant by stating "the marvelous is the eruption of contradiction within the real."

“Le merveilleux est toujours beau, n’importe quel merveilleux est beau, il n’y a même que le merveilleux qui soit beau”. This memorable line from the first Manifesto is repeated often and everywhere. The statement is expressive only in the context in which it is presented, otherwise the statement seems like sophomoric over-glorification of either the marvelous or the beautiful. Breton explains in the manifesto how alive the marvelous is. It imbues works with energy and gives them life. Works are marvelous that sustain the moment of surprise and this experience is what is truly beautiful.

The marvelous lives and grows in some Hegelian unfurling. “Le merveilleux n’est pas le même à toutes les époques ; il participe obscurément d’une sorte de révèlation générale dont le détail seul nous parvient: ce sont les ruines romantiques, le mannequin moderne ou tout autre symbole propre à remuer la sensibilité humaine durant un temps” (The marvelous is not the same in all ages; it participates obscurely in a sort of general revelation, in which the details only remain: they are the romantic's ruins, the modern mannequin and all other symbols adequate to shaking human sensibility during a particular time). The marvelous performs in different manners at different times but continues to reveal even if only a few details are captured in the imagination of a culture. Artists present the marvelous through their works and this alters their viewers, rattling the nervous system of one person at a time with the goal of altering the society. The marvelous is progressive both in time and effect on society.

The marvelous in my case is changing the way I think about the holidays, changing the way I think about myself in love, all of which really is just too marvelous for words.

Love in Surrealism

In his 1939 writing on Masson, in Le Surrealisme et la peinture, Breton reiterates his strong sense of the significance of love by believing “que l’art, avant tout, doit être amour plutôt que colère ou pitié”. Art must be love, not in the sense of adoration, but rather as a path towards collectivity. In L’Amour fou, Breton explains how when a man loves, he cannot help but engage with “la sensibilité de tous les hommes” and that in order to do them justice, he must delve into the very depths of their way of being. Love brings man into contact with another and creates an interest in partaking of another worldview.

In the Surrealist Dictionary, the definition for “amour” includes the quote from L’Immaculée Conception that reciprocal love is that which “met en jeu l’inhabitude dans la pratique, l’imagination dans le poncif, la foi dans la doute, la perception de l’objet intérieure dans l’objet extérieure”. Love then creates this charged space where contraries can co-exist. Neither the imagination nor thinking is dominant.