Alien Eyes, image by AC Evans
PARADISE DERANGED
La beaute sera CONVULSIVE ou ne sera pas – Andre
Breton
Ladies and gentlemen:
Please try to forget, if you can, those
heretical convulsionnaires,
dismissed by Diderot as ‘a sect of fools’ and derided by experts of the day as
an unfortunate by-product of deranged gynaecology, or of the 'moral
inferiority' of women.
More
profitably, consider Baudelaire's view when he said inspiration ‘has something
in common with a convulsion’ and noted further that all sublime thought is
‘accompanied by a more or less violent nervous shock which has its
repercussions at the very core of the brain.’ The constitutive qualities of
‘convulsion’ may be detected in the oneiric aura of Paquita Valdes, as
described by Balzac in La
Fille aux Yeux d’Or (1835).
He wrote: ‘there was something sombre, mysterious, sweet, tender, constrained
and expansive, an intermingling of the awful and the celestial, of paradise and
hell…’ Again, consider this landscape from Flaubert's Salammbo: 'An
immense mass of shadow lay spread out before them, containing vague crests that
looked like the gigantic waves of a petrified black ocean.'
A more
recent example, ladies and gentlemen, may be the up-tempo classy yet
anarchic 1960 mambo-cha staccato interpretation of Frenesi by the Edmundo Ros
Orchestra with crystalline vocals by Caterina Valente; perhaps he ideal
soundtrack of convulsive beauty on account of a predominant sense of ‘apparent
gratuitousness’. It was Garcia Lorca who reminded us that it is not a matter of
theatrical intonation, dynamic vocal flourishes, skill or virtuosity (without
question in this case), 'but of a style that's truly alive.' Just like a
little girl the poet saw in Puerto de Santa Maria singing and dancing a 'corny
Italian song... with such rhythms, silences and intention...', that 'she turned
the Neapolitan gewgaw into something new and totally unprecedented...'
She has duende!
Convulsive
Beauty is paradise deranged.
Thank you for
listening, and
Goodnight!
