MAGICAL BODIES, TRAGIC BODIES: THE DESTRUCTIVE CREATION OF UNICA ZÜRN

par Georges Bloess

Unica Zürn? If there hadn't been, to rescue her from oblivion, the beautiful retrospective of her drawn work, presented at the Halle Saint-Pierre during the summer of 2007, very few would today associate this name with a great artist. Unica Zürn nevertheless had a brief period of notoriety at the beginning of the seventies, when her two narratives The Man of Jasmine and Dark Spring were published in French; alas, already posthumous and very ephemeral glory. But above all, she would have remained a perfect unknown if Hans Bellmer hadn't discovered her in 1953, during a stay in Berlin. Since that date, their two names have remained indissolubly attached to each other. However, was Unica only Hans Bellmer's companion? History seems to have been very unfair to her: not only does she owe her – quite relative – celebrity to him, but she also owes her existence as an artist to him: the discovery of her talent, her blossoming, are to be credited to Hans Bellmer; the revelation of a poetic vein and an exceptional disposition for drawing is due to none other than the creator of the Doll. Unica Zürn is above all the product of an encounter; we will therefore not be surprised if the encounter constitutes, in Unica's work, a privileged motif. Here are the terms in which she recalls the friend's first visit:

"When he truly comes, he brings her a notebook of white paper, as if drawing should be a salvation for her; and she reads this dedication: 'here is something for the desperate, who begin to swim in the whiteness of these sheets to find there, perhaps, thanks to a first sign, a new beginning.""

Hans Bellmer has, for his part, celebrated, magnified their encounter; however, in Unica, it is placed under the sign of magic and redemption.

"Magic." To pronounce this word is to immediately evoke the use André Breton makes of it to qualify a vast current of modern painting: "Magical Art." Nevertheless, concerning the particular case of Unica Zürn, it must be specified immediately: this magic is not limited to art, it exercises its hold much more deeply than in the sole domain of representation: on the bodies themselves. It marks and engraves itself there. What is its first effect, how do we recognize, from the outset, its effectiveness? By the fact that it impregnates the slightest event, the most minute detail, with the seal of necessity. From this encounter which now belongs to the legend of 20th century art, we can observe this: within the mythology of famous couples that have punctuated it, it is our own desire that we see reflected; desire for a relationship owing nothing to chance, but on the contrary, everything to a sort of providence. As for Hans and Unica's relationship, our desire is fulfilled beyond all hope. Let us see, for example, what becomes of it in these Games for Two (since that is the title Unica chooses to give to a small drama where she mixes text and graphic representations) which constitute the couple's ordinary schedule. In Unica's mind, these "games' quickly reveal their stakes. If they aim, for Hans Bellmer, to prolong an experience, to relaunch a work, to accomplish a desire (so numerous are the drawings, sketches, devices that he will complete or realize later, with Unica, this time!), they take on, in her eyes, a vital function: to create is, for Unica, to survive; to enter the universe of her drawings and poems, narratives and short stories, is to witness less the birth of a work than the spectacle of a desire to create oneself, to come into being, by overcoming old sufferings, by closing the wounds left by childhood traumas, by repairing the failures of her adult life.

With the same impulse is therefore named the means, or the terrain of this creation: it is her own body that provides it to Unica, her body, understood in its total physical and psychic reality, her own body to which she must either gain access (for it is not an "immediate given"), or bring fundamental transformations. For all those to whom Unica's work and biography have become familiar, it is tragic to observe that this terrain is at once the only possible one and at the same time that of her failure; Must we incriminate her motifs and tools, the genres to which she applies her talent? We can discuss this. The fact remains that they have not sufficed to liberate her from a sort of fatality, but have contributed, on the contrary, to her destruction. Through this work, however admirable, but poignant, pathetic, tragic, and through the whole of her journey, I would like to observe the mechanism in which she is caught and the implacable logic of events that lead her to her ruin. Or more precisely, the movement of two logics that confront each other: that of magic and the marvelous, on the one hand, and that more "mechanical' of life, with its cortege of instincts and desires. Faced with the latter, the weapons of dream and creation prove powerless or inadequate, and the last of Hans Bellmer's "dolls' will emerge crushed, disarticulated – remaining forever in our memories as a sacrificed creature, as the victim of a fantasy – ours? hers? –, for which there was no place in this world.

I. Logic of the Encounter: magic and tragedy

Although this fact has been noted by the biographers of Unica Zürn and Hans Bellmer, it is appropriate to recall it briefly: for Hans, the encounter with Unica is a shock, for she does not seem to him an unknown: he sees in her the reappearance, incarnated this time, of that doll that he has conceived, modeled and assembled, in multiple variants, since the beginning of the thirties; the most accomplished of these versions, that of 1938, is indeed not without recalling Unica's facial features. The lover of coincidences that Hans Bellmer is cannot but be troubled by this carnal presence of the figure of his desire. According to Ruth Henry, future intimate friend of their couple, he would have exclaimed: "Here is the Doll!" As for Unica, she does not hesitate, upon learning that she was born from this stranger's imagination, to detect in this coincidence the work of some necessity, the hand of destiny. This is evidenced by this affirmation, pronounced late, in this testamentary writing that is Dark Spring, which seems to give, in Unica's eyes, the measure of the event:

"Finally she knows why she lives: to have been able to meet him. Him."

Certainly: it is no longer of Hans, but of a very distant adolescent love – even pre-adolescent – that she speaks here; however, there is every reason to believe that no one other than Hans could have inspired her with similar intensity in the expression of feelings. It is striking, above all, to be able to observe that Hans Bellmer plays for Unica a role identical to that of the Doll: that of an incarnated reminiscence, so striking is the symmetry of experiences. Hans and Unica can therefore commune in this conviction that they were made to meet, that a mysterious law would one day unite them.

Mathematical law? Would there be a mathematics, an arithmetic of encounters? Unica experiences an obsessive passion for numbers. They are charged, according to her, with a beneficial or malevolent power. They impregnate all her states of mind. Without wanting to follow her in her delirious conceptions, one cannot rid oneself of a slight disturbance in observing that the important women in Bellmer's life have always, by his own admission, fifteen years less than him; that it is, for example, in 1932 that he fashioned his first doll, in the image of a young cousin, born in 1917; he felt a powerful attraction toward her (her name was Ursula, and she even lived for some time with Hans and Unica, during their stay in Ermenonville, in 1958).

The important thing, in all this, consists, for both of them, in being able to verify that their encounter obeys a secret law. Is it, in their minds, to pierce this mystery? Rather, it seems, to share and protect it, well sheltered, in a closed world, of which they alone possess the key. Here again, it is the narrative of Unica's childish loves in Dark Spring that serves as our guide. They have invented a secret writing that no one, except them, can read. It is of the first games, games of children too young for the emotions of bodies to be mobilized, that Unica speaks. But when the first manifestations of amorous attraction toward the handsome stranger glimpsed in a Berlin swimming pool appear, the secret to which Unica is bound mobilizes all her creative faculties, all her ingenuity. The adolescent feels the need to fix by drawing the features of this stranger"s face, then to "hide the sheets in her drawer, to lock it, finally to hide the key itself."

Unica therefore awakens simultaneously to amorous encounter and artistic expression. However, the two artistic experiences take root jointly in the deepest secret. Love, creation, secret, Unica could not say with more force than she does here, their absolute complementarity, even their close interdependence: to the very young girl that she still is (she is only twelve, and if the narrative is written in the third person, the largely autobiographical character is undeniable), the concealment of this encounter with an adult is imperative. She will therefore only be able to subsist in memory. What does the act of remembering mean for her? it consists in creating, notably by drawing, but also by assembling some objects and bodily remains, a small sanctuary: a hair torn from the handsome stranger, a peach pit that she offered him and that she preserves religiously, and even the photo of this man that, in her fear that one day she might be discovered, she does not hesitate to swallow.

So many relics of a body, whose activity consisting in fixing, by drawing, its contours, is only one element among others within a vaster whole (let us note that Hans Bellmer has, he too, with his Memories of Margarete, his first wife, deceased before the war, manufactured such a sanctuary – without keeping it secret, it is true). It is indeed, for Unica, a question of constructing a sort of temple that can be the witness of a destiny and at the same time preserve the intensity of these moments torn from existence. It is probable that Unica has fully joined Hans Bellmer's aspirations on this point. It is even permissible to suppose that she has largely exceeded the expectation of the one who believes he has taught her everything, from the art of drawing to that of composing poetic anagrams. Can their relationship only nourish itself from this dialogue, only in this mirror where Bellmer, new Pygmalion, contemplates his creature? It is Unica who delivers to us, in all simplicity, the meaning, the true scope of her productions: they emanate from a "desire for miracle" (Wunsch nach Wunder). A comparative observation of their realizations reveals, beyond the – quite superficial – divergence of their motifs, a deep similarity, as if the work of drawing had the effect of prolonging, or more exactly, of redoubling their encounter.

Surging almost always from the void of the page, their extremely fine line establishes a division, a partition generating a tension: "She is seated before the white and empty sheet [...] This delicious sensation of tension returns, with these questions: what will the first sign look like? What could be born from it?"

In a slight irritation of the sheet that it is permitted to confuse with the skin itself, one becomes two, an attraction takes birth, the line tenses, embracing desire, or rather bringing it to the surface. The hypothesis has nothing exaggerated: we borrow it from Hans Bellmer's own terms, when he describes the climate of their common writing of poem-anagrams; he evokes there this "excitement" that makes their elaboration by two authors of opposite sex desirable. One cannot enough approve the beautiful proposition made by Agnès de la Beaumelle comparing Bellmer's drawing line to the cords having served to tie up Unica's body in order to multiply its erogenous zones (one can suppose very likely the perfect complicity, in this strange ritual, between the victim and the officiant), especially since Hans Bellmer has left in his portfolios, toward the end of the fifties, more than one Rope-Woman.

It is therefore appropriate to reverse the formula and to speak, no longer of a necessity to create, but rather of a creation of necessity. Far from contingencies and ordinary relations, it is a question of proceeding to the construction of a closed world, situated outside of time. Here it goes with drawing as with the composition of anagrams (where Hans Bellmer observes, amazed, Unica's talent). This is evidenced, when the figures do not simply surge from the void, by backgrounds evoking a mesh, or brick walls (would these evoke for Hans the Milles camp where he was interned for a time, at the beginning of the war? The hypothesis is quite fragile, for such decor already appears in his drawings several years before this episode), or simple formal rhythm shared only by the lovers. This moment of fusional intensity, this culminating point of desire was, always, Bellmer's quasi-exclusive motif. For her part, Unica expresses its law in a lapidary manner: the horizontal line expresses according to her the feminine, which is simply crossed by a vertical line, masculine.

Doubtless she places under a crueler light the amorous mythology of her friend: no longer under that of a conquering Eros, but under that of a fatality. Did she not experience, still adolescent, love as:

"The most serious feeling (ernst) [...] she begins to tremble [...] to shed tears."

She adds these phrases, which resonate like a fatal omen: "Who could bear love without dying from it?"

And to feel, after her visit to the beloved being whom she will see no more, an "unfathomable suffering" (abgrundtiefes Leid* – the translation only partially accounts for the abyss suggested by the original language). Among her writings are many formulas evoking the ambivalence of the magical world of art and desire, such as "the frightening beauty" (das Schrecklich Schöne), or "the saving prison" (*rettend Gefängnis*). Be that as it may: this world of desire, from which all joy seems absent, how important it is to protect it from life, from irruption, from the effractions of the real body! One would need to be able to maintain it suspended in an eternal non-accomplishment: "She would like to live always in the state of waiting. A single kiss, and everything would be finished."

II. Logic of everyday life: the other tragedy

Indeed: life, this unthought, this hidden face of her existence, Unica refuses to envisage it. When the situation becomes too critical and she is nevertheless constrained to it, she collapses before this frightening spectacle. The simple word "banal," so frequent in each of her narratives, already resonates like a condemnation. This grayness of everyday life is unbearable to her. But if it were only that! life belongs to time, it is consequently alterable, perishable. Unica is particularly sensitive to this phenomenon, and it is not rare to find under her pen the expression of a terror in the face of the insult of time that damages her face; sometimes she is frightened by her ugliness (perfectly imaginary: each of her portraits brings a denial); more than once she worries about the physical degradation that would be caused by efforts or violent emotions, such as, for example, auto-eroticism to which she says she indulged during her stays in the asylum. Beyond everything that could harm what she supposes to be her "physical integrity," her entire production testifies to a sort of incapacity to inhabit her body, to truly give it life – the almost systematic use of the third person, in her narratives, offers an audible proof of this. But doesn't this infirmity have as a corollary a more general disgust of the body? Perhaps this disgust explains the privilege given, in her drawings as in her writings, to gestures of simple touching of others; Unica's creatures are characterized by their tactile precaution, as if touch were the most audacious gesture that it is permitted to effect toward the object of her desires – "Allow me, O Stranger, to touch you," such is the title of the second drawing dedicated to her encounter with Hans Bellmer, the ultimate gesture beyond which the relationship would fall into the unleashing of instincts. During sequences of acute crisis, it is the body that becomes the object of delirious attacks in her. Thus, during an internment at the Berlin-Wittenau hospital, she believes she glimpses a pile of corpses, convinces herself that these are the martyrs of concentration camps. Wasn't this hospital indeed an extermination camp? She sees herself, in contact with this inert mass, half engulfed by objects, automatons, but also by remains of "raped girls' whose aborted embryos litter the ground. Doubtless the unbearable violence of this description only responds to the violence that she turns against herself; the still burning memory of an abortion undergone in 1956, for which she feels a keen guilt, if we believe the narrative she makes of it, is not foreign to this paroxysm of terror. From all sides she feels attacked, the slightest injection that a doctor administers to her is experienced as a veritable rape.

To flee the real! It is a leitmotiv in her. This real presents itself, most of the time, under the traits of the sexual. The slightest allusion to sex, and "the charm is broken," she remembers, in Dark Spring, concerning such a schoolteacher who made all the young girls in his class dream, until the day when they glimpsed his pregnant wife: in the blink of an eye he lost his halo. It is therefore necessary, Unica concludes, "to take refuge in imagination to bear life," and, in order to preserve love from all defilement, "to elect a man for a deep and secret feeling." Hence the epithets of "stranger," of man "come from afar," with which she adorns all those she admires while protecting them, while preserving them in advance – as she does with Henri Michaux, with Gaston Ferdière – from any possible physical rapprochement. Faced with a threat to her body, her instinctive reaction is to absent herself from it, "as if she had become bodiless' (als sei sie körperlos geworden). This threat can come from the man, whose seduction can conceal a redoubtable ambivalence. Ambivalence that spares her father, mythified and glorified in Dark Spring (whose introductory phrases evoke the beginning of a bodily awakening, a joyful fan, a veritable "envelope" of sensations in the newborn child), but who has, subsequently, the fault of being too absent and of not protecting her sufficiently from the aggressions of which she is the object. But many men reveal themselves, through her works, as beings as dangerous as they are admired, "sharpshooters' (Meisterschützen) becoming in her bestiary, either "eagle," or "scorpion." A masculine figure for which she feels only aversion and disgust: her brother, of whom she says she suffered incest, around the age of ten, an event that must have left her with an indelible wound ("your wound' – deine Wunde –, this brother says to her, pointing to the slit of her sex, thus suggesting that this wound preceded the incestuous act that has just occurred).

As for women: one figure dominates here, that of the Mother, cold, indifferent, from whom she says she was abandoned. But worse still: it is from this mother that she claims to have suffered the first incestuous assault, the first attempt to penetrate her body. Mother's tongue, brother's penis, these organs will doubtless be confused forever in an equal detestation. This will be extended to the visions that the paintings hung in the long vestibules of a house that all feelings of affection have deserted offer her; on the reproductions of The Rape of the Sabines, it is for Unica only a swarm of opulent matrons, that the masculine heroes of whom she dreams do not suffice to make her forget.

To the physical aggression on her body is added, to bring to its height the child's distress, the feeling of her abandonment. A disunited parental couple, offering at home to Unica the repeated spectacle of its recomposition with thirds and fourths quickly replaced, gives her to understand that she is a negligible quantity, a superfluous being. Is it from some feeling of pity that a friend of her father's one day gives her a doll? The fact remains that this doll will suffer a deserved vengeance: Unica dismembers it, tears out its eyes, etc. But it is permissible to suppose that this episode progresses, underground, in Unica's mind, and that a feeling of kinship with this derisory toy, symbolizing her abandonment, accompanies her forever.

III. Deserted body, revolt of organs: creation at the peril of the self?

Instinctive lucidity of childhood, which makes her act with pertinence: Unica is quite right to give free rein to her hatred of this doll. But does she already know that this toy is only a simple copy, or an anticipated image of her own fate? For shortly after this episode, she attempts vain rapprochements with her mother. It goes badly for her; her mother rejects her, the text of Dark Spring says it with implacable precision: "Her mother pushes her away as if she were an object." And it is indeed under the traits of a creature devoid of all autonomous life, of a body emptied of all spring, of all initiative, that Unica describes herself, or lets herself be guessed, in most of her drawings. Her actions are commanded from outside, as if, in a state close to hypnosis, she were undergoing a superior will; as if she had become a marionette and someone were pulling the invisible strings of her limbs. The House of Illnesses, written in 1958, is a small book mixing texts and drawings and which stages, in a half-pathetic, half-comic tone, this situation. A certain Doctor Mortimer (!), object of her mistrust, exercises such power over her that Unica's eyes obey his orders; but this doctor already considers them as dead objects. She feels a great weakness invading her, and yet cannot help "clinging to Doctor Mortimer," her persecutor.

This passivity, this abandonment to those who maltreat her, haven't they, indeed, always procured pleasure for her? Let us recall the narratives of her childhood games, in Dark Spring, where she was captive of a tribe of Indians: her companions tied her up solidly, the ropes marked her flesh harshly; later she was rewarded for her stoicism; but perhaps the pleasure already preceded the reward? The House of Illnesses takes an additional step: this passivity appears there, even more than as a pleasure, as a veritable need; "I need, she writes, someone [...] who gives me advice [...], who tells me: now, do this." For everything can then happen as if she were dispensed from acting: "Not to act [...] the best of situations." Which then allows one to absent oneself from one's body, to draw from this state a strange benefit, to feel "a calm similar to death at the center of one's body" (eine Todesruhe in der Mitte des Leibes).

Thus she thinks to escape the ambivalences of pleasure, for she dreads her own attraction to these games: "The game becomes dangerous, and that is precisely what she desires [...] she suffers in silence [...], lost in masochistic dreams."

After more than one description of a sadomasochistic game, she makes this confession that dispenses with all commentary: "She loves fear and terror [...] in the midst [...] of these men."

While she deserts her body, freezes and absents herself from herself, it is a whole population of organs that takes advantage of this loss of vigilance and acts in her place. The House of Illnesses makes her body very precisely a theater, and Unica only occupies there the place of a front-row spectator. We can consider this device as a key of access to the whole of her drawn work: is Unica not the simple passive witness of scenes that surge to the surface of the sheet? Doesn't the "magic" of her visions reside precisely in the fact that she contents herself with "revealing" a world, invisible but already present? It is the same, one would be tempted to say, with her anagrams: this type of poetic writing does not invent, but limits itself to sounding the abyss of language, to disengaging its virtualities, to making appear, under the "surface" of a vocable, its hidden face. But let us give the floor to Unica herself: Inexhaustible joy for her: the search for another phrase hidden in the phrase. It is thus that we see, in The House of Illnesses, organs become characters and at the same time habitations; they are flesh but also chambers, vestibules and inner courtyards, contents and containers. From a malodorous chamber has, for example, escaped a liquid: it is milk, which immediately confuses itself with the place of childbirth. Certain of these chambers are struck with interdiction, thus reproducing the bad/good distribution so dear to Unica – one of these chambers bears, opportunely, the name of "Bluebeard." We will not be at all surprised that these organs are capable of aggressing, of wounding, including "mortally." Thus, the eyes of this Doctor Mortimer can "emit a sting": this is only the superacute expression of a constant suspicion in Unica; for every gaze, even that of a loved man, concealed for the adolescent heroine of Dark Spring, a muffled threat. It is a world "without pity" (erbarmungslos), having nothing of a "place of healing" (kein Haus der Genesung), that shows itself to us in this House. Another way of saying that an implacable necessity reigns there, however subject to an equally rigorous bipolarity.

And it is therefore to this perpetual exchange between the positive and the negative, which is "the life of unbridled imagination" (die bewegte Phantasie), that Unica attends, as a powerless spectator; "a continuous river of thoughts and images falls upon me," she writes; however it is not she herself who sees, she describes herself on the contrary as observed by eyes external to her; she is, in the proper sense of the term, "medusized' (she said herself, as a child, subject to an "absolute fascination").

What is it then, for us others who penetrate into Unica Zürn's work, to "contemplate" her productions? It is to become the witnesses of this strange process where everything that should only be representation, system of signs of all nature – letters, numbers, musical notes on a score, even, on occasion, banal radio message –, participates in a multiple life, enters into movement. The symbolic systems intertwine, penetrate into her, become charged there with a significance that inscribes itself in her flesh: "these same sonorities [...] become language in her body." Not without lucidity, Unica recognizes that a sort of "black magic" operates in her. The languages that insinuate themselves into her are endowed with an autonomy, a consistency and a vitality such that she perceives them as living beings; when she explores the hidden meaning of a phrase to compose a poem, the latter, she says, "undulates in me like a serpent." (One cannot fail to relate to this sensation the hypothesis, emitted by Hans Bellmer, of an identity of structure between body and language).

Being the terrain of encounter of this innumerable life can, at moments, seem exalting to her; it is "the pleasant feeling of finding oneself at the center," that is to say of being a medium, of being in turn nothing more, except a body saturated with signs. This exaltation nevertheless has a price. The theater whose staging escapes her, this pure space which is, at the origin, that of the sheet, can empty itself of the crowd that Unica has convoked, and leave subsisting there only fatal omens, such as these wings of birds without body ("Flügel [...] Vernichtendes"), creatures come to annihilate her; or, further, a "diabolical [...] eye," or again this other unique eye, Doctor Mortimer's monocle (possible reappearance of a childhood memory), "the most repugnant death among all the personalities of death." These are still the "tentacles' of the octopus that she cannot manage to forget, after her reading of Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, tentacles that one sees again on the skull of the "handsome stranger" and which strongly resemble the goat horns figuring on another drawing. Once deserted, this space exercises its attraction fully; just like the Erlking in Goethe's poetry, it can make itself tempting and Unica cannot escape its seductive force, which she nevertheless feels as "mortally dangerous." It is no longer this simple projection mirror, reassuring surface of the sheet with well-circumscribed limits.

Discreetly, but distinctly. The House of Illnesses sketches the threat of an attraction to the void: "I thought of this wide window [...] I felt as if the direction was seeking me, through the open window [...] toward the left, there, behind."

This void, how many times has she been confronted with it during her existence! She experienced it exaltingly and terrifyingly, as a very young child, when her father launched her above him, to catch her only "just before the fall' (unmittelbar vor dem Absturz). Or also when she competed with her playmates: "to experiment with the weightlessness of bodies, they jump, madly audacious, from the highest wall." But this void is, some time later, the frightening corridor that must be crossed each evening without having received the slightest mark of parental affection. To fill it, there will be the amorous experience, always synonymous with plenitude, but alas so ephemeral! This experience will each time be erased by the return to everyday life and its boredom that she qualifies as "yawning" (gähnende Alltäglichkeit). And when the adolescent's mother and brother league together to punish her for the audacity she had to go visit the handsome stranger, when they break her dream, there is no more natural gesture for the young girl than to prepare for death, to climb the window and respond to the call that, in The House of Illnesses, this space had launched at her.

Frightening, stunning confusion, in Unica Zürn, between the inventions and creatures of her imagination and reality! Barely a few months separate this last evocation of the void, whose precision and care for detail freeze our blood, from this tragic passage to the act committed one day in October 1970. The vision of a broken doll, glimpsed in a distant past by Hans Bellmer (who has, at the beginning of the year, signified to her his decision of definitive separation) and surged several times under Unica's pen, imposes itself this time on us as the accomplishment of a destiny inscribed in her existence from the origin.

Was this destiny ineluctable? Could she escape it? To judge by her creative journey, the question deserves to be asked: her last writings, of a more clearly autobiographical character like Vacation at Maison-Blanche or Dark Spring, are distinguished by the fluidity and continuity of a narrative, as if Unica had succeeded in establishing a link of a different nature, a coherence between the events of her life. The writing in the third person, here? It constitutes in our view a simple distancing, a writing procedure compensated by the deliberate use, in our view, of the present, which rhythms with contained emotion the violence of the description – while this present could, in earlier texts, testify to an incapacity to establish a chronology, to establish a hierarchy between events.

This creative turning point has therefore not sufficed to reverse the weight of a particularly heavy lived experience. Her initial wound, she could not transform it into a miracle; the proximity, in the German language, between "Wunde" (wound) and "Wunder" (miracle) is nevertheless so close! A simple consonant, and everything would be different. But how to overcome the double violence of an early parental intrusion, followed by an abandonment as manifest by these same parents? How not to want to seek, throughout her life, to "give" the best of oneself in order to overcome a guilt – in the creative act as in the amorous relationship – while considering oneself unworthy of attention? Unica lived love as a sacrifice, and it is in the terrible logic of her life trajectory that the end she chose for herself is inscribed.

Paris, January 2011

© Mélusine March 2011