Helvetia, in Figuren leben, et la cité désirée

“Wir leben wahrhaft in Figuren” wrote Rilke – pictured here on a Swiss stamp – “We truly live in figures”, that is amongst symbols, abstractions, figments, the imagined. This is from the Sonnets to Orpheus which he wrote while living in the Château de Muzot, which is about halfway between Geneva and Locarno. Our reality is in fact something fabricated by our brains, the real world as we experience it is essentially a hallucination which is more or less faithful to our sense perceptions, but filled in with interpolation, cached memories, predictions and such. 

In his most recent book Homo Irrealis, André Aciman explores the theme-and-variations way the mind and world inter-relate and the role art plays in our inner lives. 

“Art allows us to think the unthinkable, to posit one paradox after another in the hope of firming up wisps of our lives and feelings by transfiguring them, by giving them a shape, a design, a coherence, even if they are and will remain forever incoherent. Incoherence exists, which is why composition—art—exists. Grammarians called this unthinkable, imponderable, impalpable, fluid, transitory, incoherent zone the irrealis mood, a verbal mood to express what might never, couldn’t, shouldn’t, wouldn’t possibly occur but that might just happen all the same. The subjunctive and the conditional are irrealis moods, as are the imperative and the optative. ... Most of our time is spent not in the present tense, as we so often claim, but in the irrealis mood—the mood of our fantasy life, the mood where we can shamelessly envision what might be, should be, could have been, who we ourselves wished we really were if only we knew the open sesame to what might otherwise have been our true lives. Irrealis moods are about the great sixth sense that lets us guess and, through art sometimes, helps us intuit what our senses aren’t always aware of.”

“Comme ceux qui partent en voyage pour voir de leurs yeux une cité désirée et s'imaginet qu'on peut goûter dans une réalité le charme du songe.” Proust, Du côté de chez Swann.

“Like those who go off on a journey to see a longed-for city with their own eyes and imagine that one can enjoy in reality the charm of a dream” transl Lydia Davis, Proust The Way by Swann's p.9

But reality has a way of superceding and overwriting our fragile and fleeting imagined worlds.

“He, the owner of the stamp, wanted to know where Helvetia was, but no one he asked had heard of any country by that name. More than forty years afterwards, he still remembered that he had seen in his mind from time to time for several years images of a place he supposed to be Helvetia” Gerald Murnane, Emerald Blue p.86

“Later, he had come to understand that the landscape of Helvetia was not the only such landscape he had seen. Whenever he was invited to a house that he had not previously visited, he would see in his mind at once the house as it looked from the gate, the interior of the main room, the view of the back garden from the kitchen window. Then he would visit the house, and the other house would have followed Helvetia into oblivion.” ibid. p.87

Before the strangeness of things ... the taste of dreams

'Emerald Blue' is one of my favourite Gerald Murnane stories, and the whole collection of which it is the title story, is my favourite Murnane book. In 'Emerald Blue' the narrator describes receiving a collection of foreigh postage stamps at the age of seven. "One stamp was from Helvetia. ... He, the owner of the stamp, wanted to know where Helvetia was, but no one he asked had heard of any country of that name. ... More than forty years afterwards, he still remembered that he had seen in his mind from time to time for several years images of a place he supposed to be Helvetia. ... As soon as he was able to use an atlas, he searched for Helvetia. When he could find no part of the world with the same name as the country in his mind, he felt for a few moments as awed and delighted as he would ever afterwards feel before the strangeness of things."

This seems to me a masterfully precise description of the inner life and the workings of the imagination. Of course, Helvetia is itself a wonderfully literal metaphor for imaginary landscapes. Murnane is one of those writers whose paragraphs lead you off into your own speculative world; I often find myself often reading a paragraph or two then drifting off into my own thoughts. The great figure in this vein of writing is of course Marcel Proust. Early in Du côté de chez Swann he writes how on waking from a dream of a woman he has known he would set about finding her, "comme ceux qui partent en voyage pour voir de leurs yeux une cité désirée et s'imaginent qu'on peut goûter dans une réalité le charme du songe" ... which Lydia Davis translates as "like those who go off on a journey to see a longed-for city with their own eyes and imagine that one can enjoy in reality the charms of a dream" (this somewhat sacrifices the strong overtones of goûter which has "to taste" and there's that subtlety of "une réalité")

Back to Murnane: "Later, he had come to understand that the landscape of Helvetia was not the only such landscape he had seen. Whenever he was invited to a house that he had not previously visited, he would see in his mind at once the house as it looked from the front gate, the interior of the main room, the view of the back garden from the kitchen window. Then he would visit the house, and the other house would have followed Helvetia into oblivion."

Golo and Geneviève de Brabant

 from Le Petit Sheriff #87 9 Jan 1954

In Los pasos perdidos (1953) (The Lost Steps), Alejo Carpentier chooses as a book to represent the unsophisticated tastes of the simple peasant people his protagonist encounters on his journey through the Andes, an account of the story of Geneviève de Brabant and Golo. Carpentier contrasts the simplistic naive tale in the gaudily covered paperback with bad paper with the "modern" novel he had abandoned in disgust which is now being read by his urbanized and spiritually lost mistress, Mouche, whom he is soon to also abandon in disgust, while pursuing the grounded and beautiful Rosario:

Mouche sacó un libro de su maleta. Rosario, por imitarle, buscó un tomo en su hato. Era un volumen impreso en papel malo, lleno de escorias, cuya portada en tricromía mostraba una mujer cubierta de pieles de oso o algo parecido, que era abrazada por un magnífico caballero en la entrada de una gruta, bajo la mirada complacida de una cierva de largo cuello: Historia de Genoveva de Brabante. En mi mente se hizo al punto un chusco contraste entre tal lectura y cierta famosa novela moderna que estaba en las manos de Mouche, y que yo había dejado en el tercer capítulo, agobiado por una especie de vergüenza triste ante su caudal de obscenidad.

Man Ray's photograph
of a marionette of
Geneviève de Brabant.
Atelier Mascotte, 1926.

This choice of book — deliberately or unconsciously or coincidentally — has itself sophisticated literary echoes as an emblem of the simple primitive child-like view of the world and its magic. It recalls a passage from Proust where he describes the uneasy and disturbing distraction of a magic lantern projecting images of that same story of Golo and his "hideous designs" and Geneviève de Brabant, intended to provide solace to a bored an unhappy child in the long hours before bedtime.

A Combray, tous les jours dès la fin de l'après-midi, longtemps avant le moment où il faudrait me mettre au lit et rester, sans dormir, loin de ma mère et de ma grand'mère, ma chambre à coucher redevenait le point fixe et douloureux de mes préoccupations. On avait bien inventé, pour me distraire les soirs où on me trouvait l'air trop malheureux, de me donner une lanterne magique, dont, en attendant l'heure du dîner, on coiffait ma lampe; et, à l'instar des premiers architectes et maîtres verriers de l'âge gothique, elle substituait à l'opacité des murs d'impalpables irisations, de surnaturelles apparitions multicolores, où des légendes étaient dépeintes comme dans un vitrail vacillant et momentané. Mais ma tristesse n'en était qu'accrue, parce que rien que le changement d'éclairage détruisait l'habitude que j'avais de ma chambre et grâce à quoi, sauf le supplice du coucher, elle m'était devenue supportable. Maintenant je ne la reconnaissais plus et j'y étais inquiet, comme dans une chambre d'hôtel ou de «chalet», où je fusse arrivé pour la première fois en descendant de chemin de fer.

Au pas saccadé de son cheval, Golo, plein d'un affreux dessein, sortait de la petite forêt triangulaire qui veloutait d'un vert sombre la pente d'une colline, et s'avançait en tressautant vers le château de la pauvre Geneviève de Brabant. Ce château était coupé selon une ligne courbe qui n'était autre que la limite d'un des ovales de verre ménagés dans le châssis qu'on glissait entre les coulisses de la lanterne. Ce n'était qu'un pan de château et il avait devant lui une lande où rêvait Geneviève qui portait une ceinture bleue. Le château et la lande étaient jaunes et je n'avais pas attendu de les voir pour connaître leur couleur car, avant les verres du châssis, la sonorité mordorée du nom de Brabant me l'avait montrée avec évidence. Golo s'arrêtait un instant pour écouter avec tristesse le boniment lu à haute voix par ma grand'tante et qu'il avait l'air de comprendre parfaitement, conformant son attitude avec une docilité qui n'excluait pas une certaine majesté, aux indications du texte; puis il s'éloignait du même pas saccadé. Et rien ne pouvait arrêter sa lente chevauchée. Si on bougeait la lanterne, je distinguais le cheval de Golo qui continuait à s'avancer sur les rideaux de la fenêtre, se bombant de leurs plis, descendant dans leurs fentes. Le corps de Golo lui-même, d'une essence aussi surnaturelle que celui de sa monture, s'arrangeait de tout obstacle matériel, de tout objet gênant qu'il rencontrait en le prenant comme ossature et en se le rendant intérieur, fût-ce le bouton de la porte sur lequel s'adaptait aussitôt et surnageait invinciblement sa robe rouge ou sa figure pâle toujours aussi noble et aussi mélancolique, mais qui ne laissait paraître aucun trouble de cette transvertébration.

Certes je leur trouvais du charme à ces brillantes projections qui semblaient émaner d'un passé mérovingien et promenaient autour de moi des reflets d'histoire si anciens. Mais je ne peux dire quel malaise me causait pourtant cette intrusion du mystère et de la beauté dans une chambre que j'avais fini par remplir de mon moi au point de ne pas faire plus attention à elle qu'à lui-même.

Marcel Proust, Du Côté de Chez Swann