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Giorgio de Chirico, The Anguished Morning, 1912
Parmenides held a shell up to his ear. The waves were black. They demanded
that he close his eyes, then said, "Answer, upon pain of death. If the One has an
inside, does it also have an outside?" It is said that Parmenides lived. Somewhat
later on, he died. The enigma remains. One must picture everything in the
world as an enigma. Not only the big things, those things important people see
as equally important, but even more the small ones. Why, for example, were the
cornices on certain windows of the 18th arrondissement created in that one
style and no other? No, do not interrupt. Please do not try to be helpful.
Historical information will be of little use. How many times have I said these
exact same words before?
Revolutions of new melancholy! I have found the point at which the figure eight begins. Once again, I test the tie that binds a people to its creations. After all of
our heroic efforts, we are only a bit closer to the artist who projected the first
dream, the one whose breath we inhale. Robot-operated boring screws! Tunnels
able to withstand the pressure of the ocean! How could we not cheer when the
locomotive drove straight through the Atlantic? On that side is the Other. Vast
epochs of silence. In such an imperceptible fashion how everything is changed.
No joy would be ours if the espionage balloon had not replaced the Erythraean
Sibyl. Why, then, is it now so difficult to breathe? Why does the energy in the
atmosphere not rush into our lungs? In the green sky marvelous islands pass,
like a procession of immortal birds. They pass. I ask them to stay. I ask. They do
not stay. I am told that I am far from home.
Memory bites the gladiator's ankle. Scents of clove and cinnamon are blown to
me from North Africa. Banners snap on the breeze, and the white sails are as
hard and round as breasts filled with desire. In my soul, the ache is bottomless.
Across the Gulf of Suez, south, my heart cannot help but fly. It flies with the
scent of ozone towards Mount Shendib, where it circles, where it enters through
a nonexistent door, where it finds its way to the lowest of the 30 levels of the
catacombs. There, a team from the Athens School of Archeology has pried the
lid from the lead sarcophagus of the Muse. Her bones prove radioactive. I look.
The Muse's skull glows. Why is there no harmonious amount of Strontium-90? I
look. No time has passed. Her charisma is no less dangerous than before.
That the Muse is temperamental, this I know from my experience, and how
could one not know? She can be trusted to the extent—and only to the
extent—that she might find one's talents useful. How is it wrong for me to suffer
from intestinal disturbances? The Muse judges, and I come up short. The auras
around each object do not lie.
Giorgio de Chirico, Conversation Among the Ruins, 1927
They know nothing about anything, but perhaps I cannot tell if my fellow
citizens are awake. They have never heard of the war in Transvaal, of the
element called "aether" by the Pre-Socratics, or of the bombs taped to the
undersides of their chairs. They do not know me. For they have never met me.
Bit by bit, the brush of the primordial artist has removed them from the picture.
You few who would grasp the secrets of my art, are we not already numerous
enough? Fear of my fame. Fear of the town clock. Fear of the girl running with
the iron hoop at sunset.
Nietzsche said, "I was surprised by Zarathustra." I too have been surprised. In
this participle—surprised—is contained the whole of vision. There is a room
whose shutters are closed, whose shutters never are not closed. Inside that
room: a lamp, a table, and a chair. And on that chair: a book that no one ever
wrote. I have read this book. I have culled rules from the dust that has settled
on its pages, and yet one cannot simply repeat. The problem of what the seer
should do becomes more and more disturbing.
Fear of my friends, who are also my detractors. Fear that one plus one is
not two. Fear of the increasing disobedience of the shadow, that its gestures
have no interest in following my own. Fear that life is a variety of death. Fear of
the common. Fear of occult pollution. Fear that my face will one day mock me
in the mirror, that it will not know who I am, that I will not know whose it is.
Fear that I will kill the unborn genius of de Chirico. Fear of my omnipotence.
Alternate futures incarnate and converge. Hieroglyphs assemble like a great
barbarian hoard. The manikin's head turns inside out, taking with it the
circumference of space, which a few, transformed by epilepsy, still see as their
mother. Has the war started? Is the emptiness pregnant with the shape of things
to come? Thought must so detach itself from human limitations that all things
will then appear to it anew, as if lit for the first time by a brilliant star. Fear of
the big cannon. Fear of distance. Fear of the inanimate.
Three-dimensional humans are not needed at the factory. Saturn: punch the
clock! No hands now assemble the continents that drift down the assembly line,
yet somehow—the artists of the future must examine this—no work is left
undone. As it will be, so it is. Geometers have taken apart the weather with their
tools. They steered the wind south. They have reconceived the great stadium of
the zodiac. For the spheres, they have substituted simulacra. The square is
quiet. So many ghosts are hungry. Watch the dead diagram the migrations of the
antediluvian orders. Prehistory wept.
Giorgio de Chirico, The Scholar's Playthings, 1917
It is possible that the love of new sensations is what pushes the primordial
artist, like a storm. The gods were an accident. The goal is simply to create or to
destroy, or to play with archetypes for no apparent reason. Fear of the amount
of blood spilled to make sense of Omphalos, of the gifts that please the navel of
the Earth. Fear of looking the gift horse in the mouth. Fear of the weight of
silence. Fear of the inner voice, that my other self answers to a different set of
laws, or to none. Fear of the invention of the wheel.
At the laboratory, the toys took charge. Why do the gods do favors for these
derelict Neoclassicists, these puppets in white lab coats, these raisers of stone
phalli in honor of the Cyclops, these faux prodigies of the Will? Such gods no
longer protect us. One begins to suspect that they do not love the arts, not really,
not as they once did. It may be that their hunger has consumed them. Most have
utterly withdrawn, perhaps. These last few are the issue. When they do act, they
act badly. We no longer breathe together. They have cut the string that tied
them to the Realm of Perfect Forms.
To the gods: respect and awe, and no small amount of fear. The true artist has
no choice. But he must also disassemble them. He must dare. When he does, he
may find, as did de Chirico, that the gods themselves are toys, strange clockwork
dreams. When opened, they may turn out to be empty on the inside, like the
artist, the playthings of some vaster force.
From a cattle car echoes the industrial lamentation. I know, but cannot prevent
what is scheduled to exist. Sleep detests me. Dreams provide evidence of my
election by the Fates. A chasm opens in the soul of the genius who would
celebrate the Eternal Return. Who am I and what was I saying? Medusa with
eyes that do not see.
Again, I depart from the iron train station that my father built at Volos, as at
each hand rows an Argonaut. We are the male midwives to the joyous birth of
tragedy. It is we who search the ocean for the key to the city of
electromagnetism. Again, I am sitting at my table at the café, where in 1910 I
had experienced a metaphysical breakthrough. I have just recovered from a
long and painful illness, a kind of initiatory ordeal. This has left me in a state of
near morbid sensitivity. The whole world then appears to be convalescent.
Through my blind eyes the primordial artist is still staring at the autumn sun.
Giorgio de Chirico, The Dream of Tobias, 1917
One instructs the other: I must put an end to the precession of the equinox.
I must seed the archeological record with the solitude of the hermetic sign.
Oxidation brings to a stop the clockwork of the planets. No time has gone by.
No, not a bit, no time at all. I search for the countless millions who have left,
for those who cannot return. I reach for those who have left, who cannot return,
who have not ever left. All later multiple vantage points then converge upon
that moment. Over the shop door swings the huge zinc-colored glove, with its
terrible golden fingernails. The sad wind blowing on a city afternoon. The
beauty of tall smokestacks, from which puff intelligent clouds.
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