Deep under the parasol I see the marvelous prostitutes
Their dress a bit faded on the side of the streetlight color of the woods
With them they walk a big piece of wallpaper
Such as you cannot contemplate without a lump in your throat on the ancient floors of
A house under demolition
Or a white marble seashell fallen from a fireplace
Or a net of those chains that behind them are blurred in the mirrors
The great instinct of combustion seizes the streets where they stand
Like grilled flowers
Eyes in the distance raising a wind of stone
While they sink immobile in the center of the whirlwind
To me nothing equals the meaning of their unimplemented thought
The freshness of the gutter in which their booties dip the shadow of their beak
The reality of these handfuls of mown hay into which they disappear
I see their breasts that are a point of sunlight in the dark night
The time they take to rise and fall is the only exact measure of life
I see their breasts that are stars on the waves
Their breasts in which forever weeps the invisible blue milk
Un homme et une femme absolument blancs
Tout au fond de l’ombrelle je vois les prostituées merveilleuses
Leur robe un peu passée du côté du réverbère couleur des bois
Elles promènent avec elles un grand morceau de papier mural
Comme on ne peut en contempler sans serrement de cœur aux anciens étages d’une maison en démolition
Ou encore une coquille de marbre blanc tombée d’une cheminée
Ou encore un filet de ces chaînes qui derrière elles se brouillent dans les miroirs
Le grand instinct de la combustion s’empare des rues où elles se tiennent
Comme des fleurs grillées
Les yeux au loin soulevant un vent de pierre
Tandis qu’elles s’abîment immobiles au centre du tourbillon
Rien n’égale pour moi le sens de leur pensée inappliquée
La fraîcheur du ruisseau dans lequel leurs bottines trempent l’ombre de leur bec
La réalité de ces poignées de foin coupé dans lesquelles elles disparaissent
Je vois leurs seins qui mettent une pointe de soleil dans la nuit profonde
Et dont le temps de s’abaisser et de s’élever est la seule mesure exacte de la vie
Je vois leurs seins qui sont des étoiles sur des vagues
Leurs seins dans lesquels pleure à jamais l’invisible lait bleu
(1922?)
White Work and Blue Milk: Reading André Breton’s “Un homme et une femme absolument blancs”
by Jacques Houis
The title may allude to the White Work (Albedo) in alchemy. The philosophical Mercury,
represented by the Rebis, the alchemical androgyne: the purified reunification of the sexes, of fire and water, sun and moon, the offspring of Mercury and Venus’s adulterous
liaison: the hermaphrodite, Hermes and Aphrodite.
Tout au fond de l’ombrelle je vois les prostituées merveilleuses
The poet as seer. The prostitutes shield themselves from the sun under parasols. Ombrelle= Ombre elle. The shadow is also shade in French, reflects coolness but has a dark connotation. That of prostitute? But these are marvelous prostitutes. The word “merveilleuses”, using the principles of the phonetic cabala, generates the poem- mères (mothers) and mer (sea), combined with veilleuses (feminine noun for one who stays up at night, one who watches over, and night-light)
Leur robe un peu passée du côté du réverbère couleur des bois
The prostitutes bring nature with them. A common theme in surrealism, the city as a natural environment. The streetlight is tree-like, “couleur des bois.” Its light has faded the prostitutes’ dresses, like a sun in the night.
Elles promènent avec elles…
Parisian prostitutes often walked dogs so they could say that was the reason they were out at night, a fragment of realism.
…un grand morceau de papier mural
Comme on ne peut en contempler sans serrement de cœur aux anciens étages d’une maison en démolition
The realism in surrealism again, with the image of wallpaper glimpsed on the walls of a building under demolition. You cannot contemplate it without emotion (serrement de coeur) or, applying the phonetic cabala, without a commitment to emotion (serment de coeur-oath of the heart). The syntax also yields a double reading. You will feel a lump in your throat if you contemplate it, but also you will not be able to contemplate it without a lump in your throat. And what does this “mural” depict? Something ancient, lost, demolished:
Ou encore une coquille de marbre blanc tombée d’une cheminée
Or a white marble seashell fallen from a fireplace. A scallop shell no doubt, the emblem of Venus Aphrodite, born of the sea foam, also the sign (coquille Saint Jacques) of the pilgrims who made their way from the medieval church Saint Jacques de la Boucherie (of which only the Tour Saint Jacques remains today) much restored and augmented in the 14th Century by Nicolas Flamel and his wife Perrine, with proceeds supposedly derived from Alchemy, to Santiago de Campostella in Spain, via Rocamadour, the site of chapels harboring “black virgins”, the medieval remnants of the cult of Aphrodite. Now, this pilgrimage is called the “camino Santiago” and “camino” in Spanish (way or path in English) amounts to “chemin” in French, and the word “cheminée” meaning both chimney and fireplace, is a homonym of “cheminer”, to walk along. As for “tombée”, une tombée, when a noun; it means fallen as an adjective and fall as a noun. In English, prostitutes are known as “fallen women.” The process at work here is one of “overdetermination”, a term coined by Freud and adopted by literary criticism, to describe the manner in which meaning emerges in the unconscious, by accretion of fragments (the unconscious not being able to generate statements, it “means” the way images do): the sign of Venus has fallen as the result of a certain itinerary. But what tells us Venus is truly involved, beyond the (probable) allusion to the scallop shell, and to white (sea foam) and marble? The next line does:
Ou encore un filet de ces chaînes qui derrière elles se brouillent dans les miroirs
This overdetermines the Venus meaning, confirms it, as it is an allusion to the net of chains her husband Vulcan-Hephaistos, the blacksmith, fashioned to imprison her and Mars, one of her lovers.
Le grand instinct de la combustion s’empare des rues où elles se tiennent
Comme des fleurs grillées
Les yeux au loin soulevant un vent de pierre
Tandis qu’elles s’abîment immobiles au centre du tourbillon
The heat emanating from the fire of the male gaze envelops them, grills them, their own eyes in the distance raising a wind of stone (provoking a phallic response?) while the fallen women sink farther into the whirlwind…But:
Rien n’égale pour moi le sens de leur pensée inappliquée
To me nothing equals the meaning of their unimplemented thought. Shades of Rimbaud. An intertext confirming the status of the poet as seer, proclaimed in the first line, which derives from the teenage poet’s letter to Paul Demeny, known as the “Lettre du Voyant”:
“When woman’s infinite servitude is shattered, when she lives for herself and by herself, man, abominable up to now,- having given her her leave, she too will become a poet! Woman will discover the unknown! Will her worlds of ideas differ from ours?- She will find strange, unfathomable, repellent, delicious things; we will take them, we will understand them.”
La fraîcheur du ruisseau dans lequel leurs bottines trempent l’ombre de leur bec
La réalité de ces poignées de foin coupé dans lesquelles elles disparaissent
Nothing equals these things, for the narrator. The city is once more naturalized. Masculine heat and dryness give way to feminine cool (fraîcheur) and moistness (ruisseau, trempent.) The gutter, the Parisian “ruisseau” or stream, turns into something like a mountain stream, distinguished by how fresh it is, their booties (bottines) become bird-like, as they dip the shadow of their beak in the gutter-stream. The mention of the handfuls of mown hay in which the ankle boots (or the prostitutes themselves?) disappear, reminds us that the horse was still an important presence in 1920’s Paris, when the poem was written. The hay, of course, is another sign of the conversion of city into country, of artifice into nature, brought about by the prostitutes.
Je vois leurs seins qui mettent une pointe de soleil dans la nuit profonde
Et dont le temps de s’abaisser et de s’élever est la seule mesure exacte de la vie
Je vois leurs seins qui sont des étoiles sur des vagues
Leurs seins dans lesquels pleure à jamais l’invisible lait bleu
Mères veilleuses and mer veilleuses, according to the phonetic cabala. Their breasts are night lights because they are points of sunlight in the dark night. As stars on the waves they are night lights of the sea, but sailors also orient themselves at night according to their position. Their own up and down movement, corresponding to breath, is quite literally “the only exact measure of life.” The last line comes closest to the poem’s occult meaning, for it presents the prostitutes’ breasts, not as sexual objects but as maternal ones. Blue milk, which can seem like a typical surrealist invention, is actually a reference to a known property of human breast milk: a blue tint. Implicit in the poem is a yearning for the emancipation of the feminine, for the breaking of Vulcan’s chains, for the implementation of the “unimplemented” feminine, for both the integration of sexuality and motherhood (note that the prostitute’s milk is “invisible” and “forever weeps”) and the synthesis of male and female found in the Alchemical promise of “a man and a woman absolutely white.”
The paintings of hands, Cueva de las Manos (Cave of Hands), Santa Cruz, Argentina, 9300 BP (about 7300 BC).
FIGURES OF SPACE explores the implications of Freud’s assertion that the “psyche is extended,” and gives a novel approach to the understanding of the subject’s relation to the world. In Mieli’s words, the subjective landscape is, given its origins, intrinsically libidinized. Topics range from humor, defined as the “making of space where there is none”, to angst, phobia and the uncanny, from sexual difference to hatred. Diverse examples are drawn from art, literature and cinema, including the works of Poe, Melville, Pontormo, Marina Abramovich, Otto Wagner, Charlie Chaplin and Philippe Petit.
Author Bio:
Paola Mieli is a psychoanalyst practicing in New York. A founding member and president of Après-Coup Psychoanalitic Association, she has written on psychoanalysis, psychoanalysis and culture, literature, art, and politics. Her essays have been published in the US, South America, and Europe.
Amongst me from1 myself to myself outside any constellation in my hands alone squeezed the rare hiccup of an ultimate delirious spasm Vibrate word
I’ll have a chance2 outside the labyrinth longer wider vibrate as waves ever tighter as a lasso to catch me as a rope to hang me and let all the arrows nail me and their most bitter curare to the beautiful axis pole3 of the very fresh stars
vibrate vibrate very essence of shadow as wing as throat it’s by dint of dying the word nègre4 come out fully armed from the scream of a poisonous flower the word nègre all filthy with parasites the word nègre full of gangsters on the prowl of mothers shrieking of children crying the word nègre a sizzling of burning flesh bitter and made of horn like the sun bleeding from the claws on the sidewalk of the clouds the word nègre like the last calved laughter of innocence between the tiger’s teeth and the way the word sun is a burst of gunfire and the word night a taffeta being torn the word nègre thick don’t you know with the thunder of a summer claimed by incredulous freedoms
1 Can mean about 2 Could mean be lucky, take my chances, etc. 3Poteau-mitan Creole word designating the main roof support of the dwelling. It has a symbolic meaning in Voodoo as both the frontier and the conduit of the spirit world, the world of the Loas. 4 I have chosen not to translate this word that can mean nig… or negro, be demeaning or neutral, and which Césaire recoded as something on the order of black and standing.
MOT
Parmi moi de moi-même à moi-même hors toute constellation en mes mains serré seulement le rare hoquet d’un ultime spasme délirant Vibre mot j’aurai chance hors du labyrinthe plus long plus large vibre en ondes de plus en plus serrées en lasso où me prendre en corde où me pendre et que me clouent toutes les flèches et leur curare le plus amer au beau poteau-mitan des très fraîches étoiles
vibre vibre essence même de l’ombre en aile de gosier c’est à force de périr le mot nègre sorti tout armé du hurlement d’une fleur vénéneuse le mot nègre tout pouacre de parasites le mot nègre tout plein de brigands qui rôdent des mères qui crient d’enfants qui pleurent le mot nègre un grésillement de chairs qui brûlent âcre et de corne le mot nègre comme le soleil qui saigne de la griffe sur le trottoir des nuages le mot nègre comme le dernier rire vêlé de l’innocence entre les crocs du tigre et comme le mot soleil est un claquement de balles et comme le mot nuit un taffetas qu’on déchire le mot nègre dru savez-vous du tonnerre d’un été que s’arrogent des libertés incrédules
May lovely May in a rowboat on the Rhine Ladies were looking from high on the mountain You are so pretty but the boat is moving away Who made the river willows weep?
Now the flowering orchards congealed backwards The petals fallen from the cherry trees of May Are the nails of the one I loved so much The wilted petals are like her eyelids
On the path on the riverbank slowly A bear a monkey a dog led by Gypsies Followed a caravan dragged by a donkey While a marching tune played on a fife Faded away among the Rhineland vines
May lovely May has adorned the ruins With Virginia creeper and wild roses On the banks the wind from the Rhine shakes the willows And the chattering reeds and the naked flowers of the vines
Mai
Le mai le joli mai en barque sur le Rhin Des dames regardaient du haut de la montagne Vous êtes si jolies mais la barque s’éloigne Qui donc a fait pleurer les saules riverains ?
Or des vergers fleuris se figeaient en arrière Les pétales tombés des cerisiers de mai Sont les ongles de celle que j’ai tant aimée Les pétales flétris sont comme ses paupières
Sur le chemin du bord du fleuve lentement Un ours un singe un chien menés par des tziganes Suivaient une roulotte traînée par un âne Tandis que s’éloignait dans les vignes rhénanes Sur un fifre lointain un air de régiment
Le mai le joli mai a paré les ruines De lierre de vigne vierge et de rosiers Le vent du Rhin secoue sur le bord les osiers Et les roseaux jaseurs et les fleurs nues des vignes
Click the title link below for the PDF of the article written and read in 2000 at The Lacanian School of Psychoanalysis (San Francisco) on the occasion of the publication of Being Human: The Technological Extensions of the Body:
Such as into himself eternity finally changes him
The poet brings forth with a naked blade his century terrified at not having known that death triumphed in this strange voice! They, like a vile hydra’s start upon hearing anciently the angel give a purer meaning to the words of the tribe, proclaimed loudly the spell imbibed In the flow without honor of some black mixture. If from hostile sky and soil, ô grievance! Our idea cannot sculpt a bas relief To ornament Poe’s dazzling grave Calm block fallen down here from some obscure disaster Let this granite at least show forever their limit to the dark flights of Blasphemy scattered in the future.
Le tombeau d’Edgar Poe
Tel qu’en Lui-même enfin l’éternité le change, Le Poète suscite avec un glaive nu Son siècle épouvanté de n’avoir pas connu Que la mort triomphait dans cette voix étrange!
Eux, comme un vil sursaut d’hydre oyant jadis l’ange Donner un sens plus pur aux mots de la tribu, Proclamèrent très haut le sortilège bu Dans le flot sans honneur de quelque noir mélange.
Du sol et de la nue hostiles, ô grief! Si notre idée avec ne sculpte un bas-relief Dont la tombe de Poe éblouissante s’orne
Calme bloc ici-bas chu d’un désastre obscur Que ce granit du moins montre à jamais sa borne Aux noirs vols du Blasphème épars dans le futur.
Jacques Houis: The Millerton Mission 