December 03, 2004
There are Women walking slowly between shrub trees’ trunks, playing in distant meadows seen as if from behind a widescreen, sitting in front of cream-white fountains. They exist and do not exist at the same time; they are ghosts from the past and echoes from the future, which had appeared in a strange dream whose revelations we still expect in real life. The watcher is mirrored in their eyes and sees, that all these women bear the watcher’s face – it is almost impossible to catch a glimpse of their own faces. It is unbearable to look at these sighing, distant Women, it is also painful to take one’s eyes off them.
Who are they, where are they coming from, where are they going? What does it mean, when they put on their amazing, incredibly gorgeous and grandiose dresses, although the only eyes watching them are the eyes of autumn wind, which blows heavily through their hair? Why are their smiles to the utmost degree sad, although there are pearls of desire rolled in the corner of their eyes and shining like a poisonous liquid?...
Dante Gabriel Rossetti began to paint his worried, ghastly ladies after the death of his wife. That is why all these forever wandering women bear the same face, have the same expression and the same cloud of read hair crowning their heads: endlessly mirrored echoes from the past signify desperate calls for the bride, who – alas! – is there in this world no more... They belong neither to Heaven nor to Earth, they are still searching for their place, they do not even know, that they exist somewhere between Life and Death. They cannot speak, they cannot hear – they utter not a single sound, but their appearance is overhwelming, they pass through withered gardens and give unheard sighs under the rusty moon...
Although it may sound a bit odd, these are the ideal Symbolistic Women. This very state they are in is the most moving feature, which cannot be caught and named. They are neither live nor dead, they are weeping in the darkness of the night and they are whispering incantations in the daylight, although one cannot see their faces clearly.
These Women belong to no-one and nothing belongs to them either. They do nothing, make nothing, dream nothing. The mere sense of their existence is to exist in someone else’s eyes. They are there only to be looked at...
Lord Ewald, the main hero of Adam’s “Eve of the Future”, begs Edison to create an almost miraculous woman for him – an artificial incarnation of a certain miss Alice. Ewald cannot stand his unbearable passion towards his untouchable beloved, who is as long desireable, as long she stays behind a kind of mist. Edison, not only as a man of his word, but in the first place as a genial engineer, inventor and expert in all sciences, creates a charming woman, who thinks, speaks, who is responsible and who behaves to the utmost degree as a human being. And what is the proof that she is so natural as “real women”? These very words that she utters before a spectacle: “I love everything, that is artificial” – and thus it becomes obvious, that she is so similar to all those live women, who claim that art and flourish (and everything that turns one’s life into an endless fantasy, as, for instance, Huysmans in his “A rebours” brilliantly displays) is the core of life in this poor old “real world”... Artificial being with artificial opinions is as genuine as never before...
All symbolistic women bear a great Enigma inside. There are no men who would be able to destroy Woman’s might by ascertaining the deepest secret. Some are too old and cannot even climb the scree to cast themselves at the Sphinx Woman’s feet. Some are too young not to catch fire at first sight and burn in flames of passion and desire. Only if one is sur enough to bear the Sphinx’ look, one may try to answer the question: “I am thy secret. Thy secret is man himself”... But only the main hero of a certain Moreau painting is strong enough not to become another Sphinx’ victim. And what about those, who died out of “lovehatred” and suffered from “devilinnocence” exhaled with incredible might by their love objects: by mysterious, ghastly, remorseless, invisible, lurking Women?...
Post a comment