Dark Eros & Gothic Dreams

Untitled painting, detail, 1960, Leonora Carrington. (Click to enlarge)
The full image can be found below the jump-break....

(From) Spirits of the Dead by Edgar Allen Poe

"Thy soul shall find itself alone

'Mid dark thoughts of the grey tombstone;

Not one, of all the crowd, to pry

Into thine hour of secrecy.

Be silent in that solitude,

Which is not loneliness - for then

The spirits of the dead, who stood

In life before thee, are again..."

(From) Speak, God Of Visions by Emily Brontë

"So, with a ready heart I swore

To seek their altar-stone no more;

And gave my spirit to adore

Thee, ever-present, phantom thing—

My slave, my comrade, and my king.

A slave, because I rule thee still,

Incline thee to my changeful will,

And make thy influence good or ill;

A comrade, for by day and night

Thou art my intimate delight..."

(From) Elm by Sylvia Plath

"I am inhabited by a cry.   

Nightly it flaps out

Looking, with its hooks, for something to love.

I am terrified by this dark thing   

That sleeps in me;

All day I feel its soft, feathery turnings, its malignity.

Clouds pass and disperse.

Are those the faces of love, those pale irretrievables?   

Is it for such I agitate my heart?"

(From) Letter to Sainte-Beuve and a prose poem by Charles Baudelaire

"Poet, is it an insult, or a well-turned compliment?

For regarding you I’m like a lover, to all intent,

faced with a ghost whose gestures are caresses,

with hand, eye of unknown charms, who blesses,

in order to drain one’s strength. – All loved beings

are cups of venom one drinks with eyes unseeing,

and the heart that’s once transfixed, seduced by pain,

finds death, while still blessing the arrow, every day."

"Dreams! Always dreams! And the more aspiring and fastidious the soul, the more its dreams exceed the possible. Every man has within him his dose of natural opium, endlessly secreted and renewed, and how many hours do we count, from birth to death, that are filled with positive pleasure, by successful deliberate action? Shall we ever truly live, ever enter this picture my mind has painted, this picture that resembles you?"

***

No tricks, just treats. Have a great holiday... with hidden pleasures... and mysterious treasures.

(Below:  Apocalypse by Cigarettes After Sex with some clips from Tim Burton's The Corpse Bride.)

(continued below...)

Carrington's imagery is not generally interpreted as romantic, but, in the untitled painting above, the frightening apparition of an angelic entity with a pierced heart lurches towards a dark, beastly, feminine figure lying abed like a gothic heroine.  A small, red bird flutters from the angel's wound over a shroud-like white coverlet. The silhouette of a cat lurks beneath the bed. Ghostly, ectoplasmic, faerie-like creatures float from the angel's head towards the anomalous female in what may be a form of communication or hypnosis... or the transference of his soul. Clearly our heroine is startled, but not aghast.

Meanwhile, at some distance behind the bed, we see what might be two women or children - gender unknown - pressed together within some kind of enclosure. Are they smiling at each other?

Leonora Carrington created original works that illuminate and resonate but, perhaps, more than any other contemporary artist, established weird narratives with her imagery, amazing us with their uniqueness and power... while, at same time, revealing entities which stun us with their uncanny familiarity. For some of us, her creatures seem as if they had been always hidden in the shadowlands of our unconscious minds.

Note, while Gothic comes in many flavors, all forms are somehow linked with death and, importantly, transcending death... but, dark Venus and dark Eros are never far behind. The blood-red rose, the pierced heart, a dismal landscape - a kind of alchemy - and, let us not forget the ghosts.

Julee Cruise and the Mysteries of Love.