LEONORA CARRINGTON

par Braulio Arenas

If I must really convince myself that there is, facing my life, a sacrificial stone on which I must incline my forehead to look at myself in my own blood (and this conviction will last just the time necessary for me to turn toward a mysterious priestess brandishing a tarot card, on which it is written that it is of absolute necessity that I cross the gallery and that I climb the two steps which, it is said, represent the asphyxiating dualism of all existence), then, and only then, I will follow the diagonal of these arcana: the avenue called of the future, in the shadow of the trees of the past.

The tarot cards, wonderfully painted by Leonora Carrington, bubble in her abundant imagery ("and this card – the priestess explains to me while brandishing it –, it seems to be a legacy from Atlantis'), intertwine like magical syllables before forming a real word, or constellate with images the edges of the mirror, as if such a deep night could not contain so many stars.

Now, the tarot cards spread like a wave under which glide the bacchic undines, and it is Belle, Charles V's beloved, who leans at the edge of the river to interpret its prophecies, while Duke Miguel places a tricorn on the mandrake's head to invest it as a field marshal, and the gypsy's golem, in a dead-end street bathed in tears, resolves love in a complex trigonometry of specters.

Tarot – river in the open air, underground river. In pursuit of this swimmer, I dive into a dark gallery, the one that cuts – also in the diagonal – the roots of the castle. In this gallery come and go, a torch in hand, sometimes embedding themselves in the shadows of the walls, sometimes diving head first into the water (the torches crackle), Anne Ward Radcliffe, Clara Reeve, Horace Walpole, Robert Maturin, Edward Young, John Ford, Cyril Tourneur, John Webster, and the specter of the monk Lewis, the specter. All come and go, impatient like the eve of a feast, all go and sing, all laugh and come, all await the arrival of Leonora Carrington.

For Leonora Carrington is the ray of light that we were all waiting for, a ray of light that refracts in the diamond called poetry, and will spread its magical colors through the room, hitherto black, of the world, a ray of light that completely floods the ghost ship, a ray of light that enters through the skylight of the cell (and this no longer quite belongs to symbolic language, if one considers man prisoner of reason), a ray of light transformed into a key of freedom, or a key of freedom transformed into a light of love.

For, if it is indeed a question of the contradictions of the present, or of our present, then one must recognize that the passage through the famous gallery is absolutely necessary. It resembles an indispensable initiatory ordeal, exact and terrible, which partakes of the quest for the grail. Yet, at the exit we are received in the land of the mirror (we have left behind us the land of mirage), and Alicia Liddell and Leonora Carrington urge us to provide the first reports on the new land.

Reports of enchantment that we in turn listen to, observe and read with avidity, and it is then that the earth begins to turn under the impulse of light, and that everything seems natural, true and pure to us. For this stone is no longer a sacrificial stone, but a nest from which intact hearts fly away, like birds of blood. And this inspired priestess no longer brandishes a tarot card (like the one she had waved in her hands before I rushed into this underground gallery), she is herself the card, a card of light written with her own luminous hands, with a dark world as addressee.

And these two steps, where the banal dualism of existence had crystallized, have they not led me to a summit at the top of which the past and the future, dream and reality, order and adventure, penetrate into a whole and merge?

Oh, hallucinatory reality of Wonderland! This avenue (Alicia Liddell explains to me) is the avenue of the future, but these trees (Leonora Carrington adds) are the trees of the past. And both continue to communicate to me the joyful reports concerning this new land: Wonderland, the marvelous, which (like salvation that is within reach, or the dream within reach of the pillow), is within reach of the mirror.

Oh, what hallucinatory reports are those of Leonora Carrington! Listen to her divinations, read these marvelous texts (the rabbits raise their eyes from their macabre feast to see pass, swift, the wandering stars that are her hands; she does not want in any way to make her entrance into society, and clothes the hyena in an elegant costume, or goes to Madame Epouvante's dwelling, just in time to attend the horses' ball and to write, with magnetic accuracy, Penelope's biography), or enchant yourself, but definitively, before her painting where spreads the fairy life of poetry – but definitively –, her painting applied by means of a crippled seagull wing on her sky in perpetual process of healing. Her colors, enclosed in a clepsydra, distill, second after second, time (a time that seems to preside over arcana XVII), to change it into space (with the belief contained in arcana 16). And in a happy accord, time and space slide from Leonora Carrington's fingers to pass into the painting, where we see them seize the usual forms of reality by stripping them of their superfluous clothes: the characters, animals and thematic landscapes of Leonora Carrington seem to observe us from another world, from another time and another space that are ours, but treated by alchemical process by this great transmutator of light.