Paul Holman...Tara Morgana IV

Tara Morgana IV

1

The memory of a bewildering romance:
her tongue had turned white, the
ugly flight jacket bought the day
before had suffered a three cornered
tear. Her eye imposed the spectre
of a building upon a gap
in the city, but I found
nothing better to do than sketch
the map of mountains, fissures and
interconnected lakes which the action of
heat and sudden rain had developed
upon the path.

2

She gazed into the mirror treated
with seven excretions: ophidian skin, mottled
breasts and shoulders. The fumes settled
into the handsome animal mask of
my father, not as he was
in life, but as it had
proved convenient for me to represent
him to myself. By this time,
she was delusional, ransacking the house
in search of the one object
that caused her damage. I marked
a cross upon the tablecloth, then
added four dots at the intercardinal
points, connecting them with the looping
walls of that labyrinth through which
I follow him now.

3

She vanished among men of unguessable
temper, always older, who made no
remark about the tremble of the
skeleton at the foot of her
mattress.


From V

The transmission I failed to
summon again, as if it could
be recovered by walking in a
stupor beside that same river,
stinking of beer and mud,
above which I had glimpsed a
moth patterned city, my hand
upon the waist of the first
girl I tricked into performing
an action significant to me
(game to accept the hazard of
my company, the boredom).

Annie le Brun...Twelfth Ring

Text- Annie le Brun

Illustration- Toyen

Unica Zürn...new line of vision...

A few scans from one of my favourite books

The House of Illnesses

,br>

A remarkable illustrated text produced during one of the author’s stays in a mental institution.

After a childhood which she describes as “wonderful,” a 7 year marriage and the birth of her two children, a carreer at the Ufa film studios in her home town Berlin when she also began to write and paint, Unica Zürn’s life changed abruptly following a series of chance meetings with the painter Hans Bellmer in 1953. She left at once for Paris with Bellmer, who had already established himself in Surrealist circles there. He encouraged her to make automatic drawings and to write the anagram poems which later brought her much acclaim. Although the two lived together in growing isolation from their outside surroundings, Bellmer introduced Zürn to many of his contemporaries: Brauner, Arp, Man Ray, Ernst, Waldberg, and above all Henri Michaux. This meeting precipitated the mental illness that was to hound the last thirteen years of her life, Zürn believed him to be the incarnation of a childhood fantasy figure, which she described lated in The Man of Jasmine: “A few days later she experiences the first miracle in her life: in a room in Paris she finds herself standing before the Man of Jasmine. The shock of this encounter is so great that she is unable to overcome it. From this day on she begins, very very slowly, to lose her reason.”

The House of Illnesses was written shortly after this meeting, during a bout of fever induced by jaundice. It was originally included in the book The Man of Jasmine but without the illustrations which accompany it here. With its sometimes wistful, sometimes humourous and ultimately hopeful mood, this text contrasts strongly with many of the other texts in that book, which bear harrowing testimony to her mental crises and her dizzying descent into her own self and a world of hallucinated images.

above text from publishers of this book

@tlas press

Unica Zürn...

A flower, for the spirit that keeps me burning. Paris, Pere Lachaise Cemetery, February 16th 2008.

Unica Zurn writer/artist 1916-1970

My space for Unica Zürn

www.myspace.com/unicazurn