Scraps by Michel Leiris

Author:Michel Leiris [Leiris, Michel]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780300212389
Publisher: Yale University Press
Published: 2017-03-28T00:00:00+00:00

Eliminations now in progress: my love for Verdi’s operas; a little tune to sing (one of the sort that “keeps going through your head”): Un au-delà de l’art, un au-delà de l’ére, un au-delà des lyres, un au-delà des lors . . . [something beyond art, something beyond the times, something beyond poetic talents, something beyond starting then]. But, as the actual consequence of the fact that I have just gone on an extended tour—by that quasi-supernatural means of displacement referred to in the expression “airway”—that took me, this time, after Martinique and Guadeloupe, almost as far as the Iles de la Vierge and then to Marie-Galante, and to the Saintes (visiting them by sailboat), and interrupted my nausea in the purring of these pages, shouldn’t I use the interval thus created to readjust my viewpoint and recognize that—despite certain stray impulses as testified to by this very trip, devoted to studying problems that arise in the French Antilles as in every place where men of different colors live together—I am nowhere near having eliminated everything that assumes the appearance, in my eyes, of the grand aria under the starry vault or the fancy-dress ball in the duke’s palace?

The period before my departure had, in fact, been punctuated by moving images produced in me by theater performances or manifestations having to do with opera.

On the stage of our Académie nationale de Musique, a German Salome, her white throat richly timbred and her face tantalizing, rolls over and over almost naked, a melody incarnate making one dream of an art with positive coordinates, such as eroticism can be, and not of a futile magic in which everything operates only symbolically. On this stage, now darkened for the meeting in the cemetery in Un Ballo in maschera—an opera whose plot is moved forward (if one thinks about it) by the coloratura in male dress, a comic-opera page in the role of unwary advisor or overly talkative confidant whom nothing marks, at first sight, as the messenger of death—a pale figure veiled in black hesitates, vacillates, sways to the left, to the right, opposite prompt, prompt side, like a mad butterfly bumping into things; his voice—emerging from the most exquisite milling machines—brushes against us, penetrates us as might an anxious soul forcing entry into our hearts; in the last scene of this opera (as I saw it put on in Paris by the Teatro San Carlo of Naples) masqueraders, hooded cloaks, people in black velvet masks, and plumed savages move about in a splendidly lit place which is not so much a stage as an infernal grotto unconfined by any background since what one sees—in an infinitely receding space—is the very Hearth of Dance, a trap for our gaze, which cannot discern where the fictional architecture takes over from the real architecture and which allows itself to be led, without ever reaching the end of it, through a space that is carved out among the many columns and proves to be, as far as our eyes may see, filled by ever more dancers.

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