A Leak In The Safe

He thought that the light had ceased to shine in the west and the black wings of night approached across the misty ocean.

European culture had uttered its word. And this word had arisen like an ominous symbol. And this symbol was a dancing skeleton.

And the best in mankind which was not yet asleep was turning into sectarian madness and the ecstasy of delirium.

We "decadents" are convinced that we are the final link in an endless chain of experiences – that central station from which new paths will lead.

– Andrey Biely

Indeed, in its wider manifestations, the symbolist movement may be interpreted as a sort of modern Renaissance – one followed by a reformation, the politico-religious debate and strife that have predominated since the 1930’s and driven the esthetic vision very much underground.

For Biely the word was symbol, a unity of two incomprehensible substances: space and time.

– George Reavey

One of the objects of the Symbolic quest: that the myth, charged with special cosmic powers and appeals to the irrational, gave new meaning and sacredness to a succession of human gestures.

– Francine-Claire Legrand

"Symbolism" was the term Biely always used for the primary concern of his art and life – the tie between man and the transcendent. Rather than being a merely a literary fashion or a category of fictional devices, therefore, this was for him a radical epistemological stance: a new form of cognition, most often based in visual perception, that would accomplish nothing less than the transformation of mankind.

This is a classic example of a symbol as Biely understood the term. The perceiver creates an artifact – the image that exists only in the words that embody it – by infusing something he has seen with his "internal experience." And because these are rooted in a transcendent realm, the resulting symbol becomes an expression of a supernatural truth.

– Vladimir E. Alexandov

The life and works of a symbolist writer are inseparably connected, for his writings reflect his inner experiences insofar as they enable him to glimpse, in moments of creative ecstasy, the absolute that lies beyond the veil of Isis.

Symbolism implied a revelation of ultimate reality through the physical phenomena of our world.

– Oleg Maslenikov

The Symbolists did not wish to separate the writer from the man, the literary biography from the personal. Symbolism did not wish to be only an aesthetic school, a literary trend. It constantly endeavored to become a vitally creative method, and therein lay its most profound, and possibly unrealized, truth: its entire history, in essence, passed in the constant striving toward this truth. It was a series of attempts, at times truly heroic, to find the union of life and creativity, its own kind of philosopher’s stone of art.

– Vladislav Khodasevich

The symbolist, on the other hand, redefines the whole process of knowing and the status of reality in the light of poetic method. He tries to take both poles of perception into account at once, to view the subjective and objective worlds as functions of each other by regarding both as functions of the speech in which they are rendered. Here is the sum of his quarrel with reason.

– Charles Feildelson, Jr.

True symbols, in the sense that the term is here used, are the means by which we express our understanding, or helplessness in understanding, of what we cannot articulate verbally or by any other means. Symbols actually accrete and store the power with which we credit them, and become the more inexhaustible of that power the more they are used, providing the user still feels within himself what the power is.

– R. P. Blackmur

He got into everybody’s unconscious with his symbols. That’s part of what he’s about, you know.

– Gregory "Gigi" Hemingway

To find new and unexpected links and to add new possibilities to symbol was to many generations the essence of "wit."

Suffice it to say that to him and his contemporaries the Garden of Venus was still peopled with symbolic beings whose very beauty was charged with meaning.

– E. H. Gombrich

Whether celebrated in a poem or painting, Rossetti’s susceptibility to feminine beauty pervades all his work without abatement. The result is a tension between the actual model and the written or painted object that the artist utilized in order to re-create an alternative metaphor of exquisite beauty which fused real and imaginary viewpoints.

– Maryan Wynn Ainsworth

It must not be thought that in the Intelligible World the gods and blessed see propositions; everything expressed there is a beautiful image.

– Plotinus

He is often sublime, at times grotesque, and he is always bordering on the pathological. His painting is the fruit of hyperaestheticism, of abnormal, intolerable intensity. Attraction towards the inherent reality of things is not enough to explain this profound and complex art. He is certainly very conscious of the beauty of colors, but he regards them primarily as a fantastic language, a means of interpreting and visualizing Ideas. In almost everything he does he is a symbolist.

– Albert Aurier

A formidable withdrawal of the modern imagination toward the past, an enormous scientific inquiry, and hitherto unknown passions for a vague and still unknown supernatural have driven us to incarnate our dreams and perhaps our trembling before a new unknown in strange symbolism which translates the contemporary spirit just as ancient symbolism once interpreted the soul of the past. Only we don’t place in it our faith and dreams, but rather we put into it our doubts, our dreads, our ennuis, our vices, our despair and probably our dying agonies.

– Emile Verhaeren

Man, do I dig Guy de Maupassant! I don’t think people read him that much any more, or study him, except maybe to translate in French class. I think his present semi-obscurity must be because he his forte wasn’t the kind of novel Oprah can recommend or the professors can assign, but rather the short story, a genre in deep commercial decline. He is seen by some as a commercial, popular hack and by others as an unbalanced raver (he did after all die insane), stigmas that would seem to be mutually exclusive, but which are still both applied. But if you read him you’ll see that his eye is quite remarkable – with breathtaking economy he’s able to nail characters with one unexpected detail and twist an original plot around them in a few deft movements. And yes, there’s hysteria and deep weirdness too — he’s the poet of obsession and mad love, as committed to the dark side as any Decadent and as swoony over nature and beauty as any Romantic, yet more clear sighted and insightful about society than any Naturalist. Maybe now that Lit Crit is an arm of Political Science, it’s his refusal to fall into any camp or color his vision with any ideology that’s hampered our modern appreciation of him. But UBU still gets it, and thank Dieu Maupassant wrote a lot and there are still multi volume editions of his works out there in which I can still find stories I haven’t yet read. If you don’t mind interesting dreams I prescribe reading one before bed. These quotes are from volume two of a four volume set of his works printed by the New Werner Company of Akron, Ohio in 1912.

During one of those sudden changes of the electric light, which at one time throws rays of exquisite pale pink, at another of liquid gold, as if it had been filtered through the golden hair of a woman, and at another of a bluish hue with varied tints, such as the sky assumes at twilight, in which the women with their bare shoulders look like living flowers.

I loved everything about her, her feline suppleness, her slow glance which seemed to glide from under her half closed lids, full of promises and temptation, her somewhat extreme elegance, and her hands – her long, delicate, white hands, with blue veins, like the bloodless hands of a female saint in a stain-glass window, and her slender fingers, on which glittered only the large blood-drop of ruby. Oh, heavens! To be her lover, to be her chattel, to belong to her, to devote one’s whole existence to her, to spend one’s last penny and sink in misery, only to have the glory, the happiness of possessing the splendid beauty, the sweetness of her kisses, the pink and white of her body with its demon-like soul all to myself, were it only for a few months!

He loved her with all the violence and passion of a man born to believe in absolute ideas.

She obtained absolute control of him, turning him into one of those delicious slaves, one of those madmen in ecstasy, whom a woman’s glance or a woman’s skirt will fling upon the stake of mortal passion.

My heart longed for her. It is a terrible yet delightful thing thus to be dominated by a young woman. It is almost torture, and yet infinite delight. Her look, her smile, her hair fluttering in the wind, the little lines of her face, the slightest movement of her features, delighted me, upset me, entranced me. She had captured me body and soul, by her gestures, her manners, even by her clothes, which seemed to take on a peculiar charm as soon as she wore them. I grew tender at the sight of her veil on some piece of furniture, or her gloves thrown on a chair. Her gowns seemed to me inimitable. Nobody had a hat like hers.

In her eye lurked a species of insanity, at once mystical and violent; and even more, a fever, an aggravated longing, impatient and impotent, for the unattained and unattainable.

At such times one feels that everything is at an end – one’s life, nay, the very universe. One gets a sudden, fearful glimpse of the abject misery of life; the isolation of every human being from his fellows; the black, hopeless solitude of the heart, which, nevertheless, cheats itself with dreams as long as life endures.

And perhaps some evening next spring, moved by a beam of moonlight falling through the branches on the grass at their feet, they will join and press their hands in memory of all this cruel and suppressed suffering; and perhaps, also this short embrace may infuse in their veins a little of the thrill they would not have known without it, and will give to those two dead souls, brought to life in a second, the rapid and divine sensation of intoxication, that madness, which gives to lovers more happiness in an instant than other mend find in a lifetime.