Rev., Dec 3-4-5-6, 2021.
Taking all poetic states to be vigilogogic I will argue that the whole vigil-hypnagogic zone is, for Nerval, a representation of “real” Paris, and that, then, it is mirrored, in the unseen ambient and sentient space beyond, by Dream Paris, the Mystic city, and they interact in a loop
in this new state, however, and this would be the purpose of the dream, to accustom him to it, he has a new power, a kind of clairvoyance, he hears a woman scream, but he says, “to my mind terrestial events were bound up with those of the invisible world”, admitting that he does not quite understand these strange relations, how it works is, he hears the scream, then he hears it echo in the spirit world, as such
this creates a tremor, or frisson, or nomos, sent through the whole of Paris, and it so scares him that he thinks that this perturbationi will destroy the link, “had I disturbed the harmony of that magical universe, from which my soul drew the certainty of immortal life. Perhaps I was accursed for having attempted to penetrate into a terrible mystery in violation of the divine.“ So, secondarily, in addition to being the spirit world, that is heaven, or the world of the immortals which he, as a Catholic, hopes by faith to ascend to upon death. Now, he is not so sure, and it is shaking him up. Then, he even thinks, so it recoiling negatively upon him, to attack him, he fears that because he made that tight rope walk he is accursed, he saw and learned things that he should not have.
At another point he posits that God rules over this world, for him Jesus, but then also seems to acknowledge further out, the god of Lucretius, who is so immense that he is effectively powerless, “This is a god that ‘did not admit of a singular royalty.” So, it is not simply that the spirit world is catholic world, but that he has split it off from the church and has been populating it in recoil with his own beliefs. He then speaks to a poet who gives him a good dose of all these “god is everything” speisl, and this casts him into another phthsis.
It is at this point that Kubin provides a provocative picture, a man as if almost but not quite, crawling, maybe, out of bed. If he is getting up in the morning it is with reluctance and it is not going to be a nice day. I suppose the intent was to show the effect of depression over a specific problem, that it feels like to wake up again to an unresolved crisis, making you immediately want to go back to sleep. This is a proskynetic pose, indicating lack of energy, a heaviness and unwillingness. It is a Not Wanting to Live, Not Wanting to Get Up demon, It could also be the four o clock demon, who depletes things to nothing.
I am going to argue that his hearing an echo of the woman’s cry in the spirit world means that by his dream he has fallen into a first level state of mesmeric in-turning, nothing dramatic yet, except that he understands the occult principle of correspondences as a belief. In his next attack of depression he wanders and comes across a funeral. He follows it, but says, though he did know who was being buried, “I now know that the dead can see and hear us” and as a result they might think kindly of him, following a cortege.This momentarily resurrects in him hope for eternal life, if only by meeting up with one’s dead relation after. Such a liebestod death is noted. By the specificity of it that would be an occult belief, but this seems to be but a magnetic sleep fantasy given an extra poetic spin, but not yet to the point, which would be a higher level, where he says he sees the dead. He cannot find Aurelia’s grave, so runs back to his house, where there is a reliquary. Again, keeping a reliquary, while giving it such intense meaning is poetic, it is not cult, it is not occult. He calls them superstitions, but even that is just vigilogogic poetic reading of life. But then he does have in there a mummy cloth, laurel leaves from Beruit, and a mosaic from Saint Sophia, meaning relics of a more religious quality. Then there is a piece of paper with the info on it about where the grave is. Then he had “terrible dreams,” deciding not to return.
The dream then casts him back into the an unfamiliar room, and it is contrast to the “external world,” which means he is back in the Paris of His Dream world. So, he is over there, the room, the mirror, then a figure he thinks steps out of the mirror, gives him a message, and it all vanishes.
the desert that he sees, which shows up in angelspace, etc, is what I call the phthchth, vast, empty, meaningless, he climbs down a cliff into it, so, there is the cenote to the sight of monsters, but it is interfered with by the ghost of a dead relative who chastises him for not mourning her as much as her mourned for the end of his love with Aurelia. At this point, the energy is as if intercepted by the form of a near death experience as he describes a time-tested trope of seeing all sorts of people, all passing before his eyes, but with the poetical touch that in this form of it they dropped back into the darkness like the beads of a rosary whose string has snapped, so chaotically, all at once, splat
and then he saw the physicality of presence harden into statues of a classical sort, and at the end of the path a large confessional, which in turn made him feel guilty about his faith, and turning his back on Catholicism. He has been, since the Revolution, agnostic, but now feels some guilt (his dream world, then, and this might be a sign of schizophrenia, is a minefield of traps which catch him and make him feel guilty, he basically pinballs from one trap of guilt to the next, not my problem). So, the confessional, the door of truth
Nerval’s Confessional 12 5 21
but, then, thinking of his mother, he drops down lower. And he elaborates, but in a fascinating passage, it is about Germany, and I read dubruck’s book on Nerval’s romance with Germany, so this also brings us close to the seeress of Prevorst.
He says that his mother, like mothers and wives used to, followed behind the army, presumably Napoleon’s into Germany, but there died. It was custom, and a genre, which provides visuals to imagine a miasmic half-life zone below the phthchth, a hell on earth, green-befogged Chloros
a queer, nonplace, but which seems to take into it his longing. But, the mother dies. For that he was placed with his grandparents in a region full of “strange legends and bizarre superstitions. His grandfather dug about for Roman antiquities, and dug up Venus, Mars, Neptune, Amphitrite, and in the town square was a Pan, so it is a pagan city, it is also a celt city, as Esus and Cernunnos are over the door of the cathedral. His grandfather said “God is the sun”. I am going to have to argue that Nerval had developed in his mind a redoubt below the desert of the phthchth, which is below the internal world of dream, a mirror world of Paris, and that in the space past the Confessional at the end of it, passed into and down to a level of imagined hell on earth, a mystic pagan land of Roman antiquities and pagan gods ruled by the sun god. This almost sounds like my own ruritarian fantasy world of the Rhine, the foo fighter triangle, currently being explored (not to get carried away, but the whole time I have been writing this essay there has flickered at my back window a kind of bouncing reflection, a foo vision, true, annoying, 1144am Dec 3 21). (and it is, of course, one the birthplaces of horror, that is, the German ghost story influence on Frankenstein, the influence of Burger on Wordsworth as mentioned in Woodlands Dark, the whole aura of gothic art out of Germany, moving west and north. Nerval, in fact, lives in this back and forth.
I might place it roundabout Quedlingen, which takes some current interest, as it was there that the SS sought to institutionalize its vril cult of the Black Sun, but Ouijan and Hartog are the main towns of that fictional ruritarian redoubt, and this sounds like a familiar transrhineian fantasy of a world below earth to give substance to the feeling of being in hell in earth. It was in some fiction on this zone that Nerval made his mental way back to Paris. He now goes back entirely to Paris, I mentioned something similar in a post this morning, since the Times was congratulating itself on recognizing Warhol’s catholicism.
The interesting or fascinating thing about this famous zigzag is that some of the cities I wandered about, entirely in that state, in 1979, such as Lyon, have seemed, ever since, to be dream towns, unreal, but, somehow, magical, I am grateful they slept for me and did not kill me (Bourdain’s Rhineland suicide brought all this back to me too, a few Junes ago). Same sort of thing here. Then, same thing, one hundred and twenty five years before my incident, he starts just going to the churches of Paris. He comes as if in an anabasis back UP into Paris, but it is not real Paris, it is his dream Paris, fata morgana Paris, now materializing in the narrative like a peripteral-walled periacqueductal-dematerialized and talus-formed dream Paris, that is, a mental construct created by the dreaming brain, in ambience, later to fata morgana to light sleep. This is the Paris that Kubin draws so nicely, strange encounters on isolated, lonely streets
It is also where he only goes into churches, and while in conscious life he might’ve shrugged at faith, not the Virgin in her power is entirely restored of her agency, so he carries out the cult, this is, in fact, the Paris I toured in my depression in ‘79, I was not in “Paris” of the tourists, or museums or restaurants or girls, I was lost, stuck, couldn’t do any of that, so it was this out of the way, alone touring, magical, in fact. He then of course partakes of an even more extreme ritual event, with a ring that has inscribed the name Allah on it, he wants to give to his restored dream faith the intensity that perhaps a good orientalist regretted not having in his faith, seeing it in Muslims, and also to make a syncretic statement that all god is one god, ultimately.
Unfortunately, this, and I may have skipped some, this taken from my reading notes, he sits through more of some service, then heads to the Place de Concorde, and “my intention was to do away with myself.” If the author of the Red Comet wants to do a correction course to reappraise the poet Sylvia Plath by her art not her suicide fine, it was certain that Nerval lived at a time when the romantic suicide was a trope in art, and thought to be the noble end for all great poets. But this awful remark indicates that he is not just dreaming in this Paris, he is pinballing and frantic, and bouncing from place to place, in a mood of suicidal ideation which has escalated to intention and to means, literature as suicide note, Paris as suicide weapon. This sort of danger, in my view, pushes him closer to self-tearing-apart and true schizophrenia, and likely why he was repeatedly institutionalized, the crazy acts that might be taken for excesses of stage magnetic sleep got much more dangerous when taking on the quality of madness. He says, “I made for the Seine, but something kept me from going through with it,” I just said as much, between the commas, about my experience in Notre Dame
“Church or educational center? Litmus test for me? My only crisis (concerning depression) was what I call the Great Depression, happened once, in 1979, it came down on me, weirdly, in Florence, I broke off from my travelling companions, whose couch I had camped on for a winter, sponging, I zigzagged, broke, north, eventually got to Paris, I got a really really cheap room, no $, I walked, I came to Notre Dame, crowded, tourists, a circus, but in it depths, I felt it, “They really believed, they really believed,” is what I thought*. It was going to be ok.
Keep that, everything else extraneous”.
That is, I may well have been so depressed that I was in danger, I do not recall, and yet I do recall a frantic armtwist in real time, a desperation to stop the pain, and that mantra, which I repeated a number of times, did, in fact, stop it, and I knew I was going to be ok. This part is true.
Then, however, he went to the Seine, it was night, or stars were shining above, then they all went dark at once, “like the candles seen in the church,” This scared him, “I thought that the final hour had come” and that the end of the world was announced by the Apocalypse of Saint John was here.
Nerval’s Paris, 12 5 21
Thus, this is a classic Black out, but further out onto the edge, on a place of sacrifice, which he seems to have placed at the Seine, his river of death, and from it the world went black
I place this all in a fata morgana dream Paris that he nonetheless in a state of half-waking syngogy, in the second nightmare, when he did not know if it was one or the other, awake or asleep, and inside the intention of suicide he saw the sky go black, and fill with images of the Apocalypse, that is, like Durer and Glaser and germans in the 16th century, his mood caused his view of the world to expand in lateral darkness but then pull in in vertical height for a low sky to come down on him, just like in a print and it is HERE, HERE, that he says, “I believe I saw a black sun in the vacant sky and a bloodred orb above the Tuileries, I said to myself, eternal night is upon us, and the darkness will be frightful. What will happen then they all realize there is no more sun?”
This is the most important vision, from my POV, and my study of the Black Sun, of Aurelia, he SEES the Black Sun. And, as I worked it out, him travelling out past ambience into a dream Paris, it appears in the sky of the far mind exactly where it appears in the same mindsky in every other instance I have read of it (including now the Nazi occult belief in the Black Sun).
The Black Sun of Nerval, 12 5 21
And there is more, in fact, he sees the Black Sun, but more, “I saw a black sun in the vacant sky and a bloodred orb above the Tuileries. I said to myself, eternal night is upon us, and the darkness will be frightful.” What will happen when they all realize there is no more sun?” A few things. He sees this vision as a premonition of the fate of the world, thus once again he seems to rise up, even in his black mood, to the clear-seeing state of clairvoyance, fifth stage of mesmerism. Second, the black sun is paired with a bloodred orb above the Tuileries.
Nerval’s Tuilleries, the black sun and the bloodred orb 12 6 21
Here is another one. Another vision in the sky, in middle Europe, in the early modern period. This image, for including in it the bloodred run, relates to the Regenkreuz visions in the sky in Germany, Nerval’s dreamland, in the 16th century, this also relates to Glaser’s sighting of the same over Nuremberg in 1561. And, surprisingly, it also relates to Jung, in the Red Book.
Jung had a “waking vision” from a train window heading into Schaffhausen on the Rhine, in 1914, whatever he saw, it made him 1) think it was the devastation of Europe, and 2) that he had picked up the vibe of a collective consciousness having its own as if meteorological visions, and thus his psychology took a collective turn. But what did he see? I was startled by this image in the Red Book, first impression, it could be a visual record of this vision
But, once again, I think Jung puts a lot of pressure on mandalas, hoping that as a cross, with a radiating but organic blood red emanation, even, not unlike pictures of the aurora borealis, shimmering precipiterally to earth, he sees the mandala as a block to the vision of destruction. And in between, in a style that looks an awful lot like some of David Altmejd’s sculpture, currently addressed on my rmarts site, there is a floating guru
then, later, he has another drawing which is of a type we have seen in Blake’s Robert and here above in Kubin’s drawing of Nerval running naked in the streets, under the power of a star, being thus zapped
Certainly this buildup form, what to call it, pregigerian in its organic intensity, is not entirely pleasing
and with it he attains to epigogy, that is, he sees monsters
but it all does seem, on first impression, related to the bloodredness of a vision of flood (that is, I suspect the catastrophic nature of the flood he saw, maybe he saw Schaffhausen overflow, was that because it was blood). So, this part of Nerval’s visions indicate now a schizo falling apart.
Then, he takes it further, to pure panic. He runs down the rue Saint Honore (and it is fun to hear these fashionable places transformed by panic and depression into the devil’s road), and when he gets to the Louvre, I am going to say this is back in toward the dream, in the ambient spin space, he sees the sky again, but this time, the wind was whipping the clouds across the sky, and” I saw several moons darting by overhead, I though the earth had shot out of its orbit and was careening through the heavens like a ship that had lost its mast, drawing closer to the stars”.
Nerval’s Six Moons of the Louvre, 12 5 21.
He contemplated this confusion, “for two or three hours.”
Hmm. Here is Nerval, in 1852, describing a scene not unlike the one described by Glaser, seen over Nuremberg in April, 1561. The geography between the two sights is the foo triangle of Europe, the most fought over land of it, home of his pagan ur dream or nightmareland. And I have to say that when I was a-wandering similarly I DID in fact have to just sit and not press myself and let myself just sit and watch and stay put, for as many hours. Strange.
Coming home at Les Halles he also wonders about how the peasants are going to react when they realize that morning is not going to becoming, that “the night is not going to end,” This, is, of course, a horror movie trope, Mr Jones, etc, others, it is also true in 2010 Arthur Clarke for unclear reasons is playing with visions of many moonedness and life on other planets. It is clear that Nerval in his dream Paris has had a foo vision, and as such measured against the line from mesmerism to my dream theory, he had a dramatic escalation to a dark or negative form of full sleepwaking, seeing death in everything, over all, everywhere.
So, he imagines the darkness coming down in, and staying forever, the world stuck in the far dark sentience of the Black Sun.
now, a mania. A mania is when you get overtaken by a crazy even poetic idea and then as it fails to materialize you are nonetheless still so much inside of the excitement of the drama of it that as each little lurch of it out of itself to another event happens that is just more part of the plot. That is, your doubts redoubted as proofs becomes more of the mania. I have of late in these writings become a bit more manic in my method, a little cul de sac of concentrated energy will entirely take me over, the current one being, in fact, the seeress of Prevorst and her relation to the occult, Jung, and my dream theory, and then folding into that zero point theory, and occult Black Sun theory, and the Black Sun, and Nerval, and all of it, that I have trouble not rehearsing at all times what I am going to write and it is like I am delivering a run-on thirty hour lecture on all the instant wonders I have found in a state of euphoric synchroetherrhoe, everything all at once flowing together. And so, it is amusing that Nerval, faced with the fact that there is light the next morning, in his mania, still sees it his way, he goes to Notre Dame des Victoires (I went to all the little churches), and smugly and yet harbingeringly, is shocked that the choir is rehearsing, like they have not heard about it, he watched them, as if protecting them, for an hour.
Then he goes to the galleries of the Palais Royal, center of my “world space” Paris of 1989, that euphoric adventure in dream Paris, and by then he devised an even wilder theory, half-life of rationalization, he decided that the sun as it burned was burning itself out and only had enough light to shine for three days (all of this play with the sun and eclipse echoes off the 1961 movie Barrabas, which has always been a favorite). As a result, his impression was “it looked cold and colorless,” he then goes to his German poet friend, they see he is sick, and take him to a clinic.
Nerval’s Cold and Colorless Sun over the Palais Royal 12 5 21
What part of this then is schizophrenia? Again, my guess, without applying Prinzhorn to this as yet, is that it is the suicide ideation but also intention and procuring of instrument (the Seine); a vision which perhaps mentally served to block this attempt, but also set him up for it again; a pinball franticness in his movement through Paris, the running, the spinning, that feeling of feeling the world under the streets as a whole as if spinning as on orb out of control in space. And then the mania, refusing to calm down, but using ever disproving as just more proof, with a half-life of rationalizing spin. Indeed, I think many people in the antivaxx world right now are in a state of strange mania.
The reading gets sad, he is in for a month, then out, and then it begins again. He makes a daytrip to Reims (the bombing of the cathedral in ww1 is featured in my novel, Arma Christi, I think), then has terrible writers bloc and insomnia and wanders nights around Montmarte to greet the sun with anguish. It gets bad, when he hears the bells of Saint Eustache, that makes him thinks of a battle between Burgundians, and Armagnacs, and “saw the ghosts of these ancient warriors rising up around me” This is a full on but negative mental clairvoyant vision, stage four negative. He then wanderers to Saint Eustache when he knelt at the altar, “while thinking of my mother” Thus, this episode is a pull again from his pagan redoubt, in hell on earth, sign of which, that is, appearance of which in his mind may be the indicator of trouble. He said, “the tears I shed eased my soul.”
Nerval and the Bells of St. Eustache 12 5 21
Then he has a particular paranoid end of the world vision, a third one, a Black Sun vision, It starts with seeing a hippopotamus in the zoo, then he goes sees some osteological exhibits at the Museum of Natural History, more animals, He says “the sight of the monsters on display got me thinking about the Flood’ Two things, he is seeing monsters, now, that is, he has lept up into a state of mind I call epigogy, but of the haunted sort. He sees monsters
he is back in his dream Paris, dark city of sentience, under the Black Sun. He has already had a horrifying vision of the Black Sun, and blood red sky; then that the planet was spinning out of control; then that the sun was burning itself; then shocked that people did not realize it was turning dark forever, this was the end of the world, and now, he sees a hippo, illustrated as IMPORTANT by Kubin.
Then he sees a large skeleton figure in the museum, and in both cases given where he is seeing this, this is the unhinged regions of the far mind, deep, hippocampal, amphitrian, each is a monster, he is seeing, in panic, monsters rise up, like in Amityville Horror, two more demons, he might just as well have quoted Rosa’s demon, in the museum of natural history, they rise up, they become the storm clouds
then when he gets out, it is pouring rain, but it is not just that, it is the FLOOD, things are far more serious! This is the beginning of the real, the biblical Flood! In Paris, in 1853, The water was rising in the nearby streets, The Flood in French painting of the time would reaffirm the frantic manic nature of his vision
Then it gets worse, “I ran down the rue Saint Victor and believing I might be able to stem the global tide, I threw the ring I had bought at Saint Eustache (so a magic ring) to stem the tide” (did not Caligula do this on the north coast of France against the incoming sea, killer of so many immigrants,too?) The rain tapers off, he thinks that he has saved the world. This is not good, mentalitywise
Nerval’s flood 12 5 21
this crude graph, which will be converted into a formal scirpograph, is still a psychographic graph, that is, the black clouds situate the mania as taking place in the sentient mind, the rain is psychodynamic downward falling, the monsters as visions of epigogy, a state of consciousness in which one sees monsters of the world, the vision of the flood is a paranoid fantasy of Avornos, hell on earth level one, coming up and engulfing the world. I place them here to indicate my interest in seeing if anyone has ever shot a movie in which scenes like this occur, we shall see.
Having saved the world, some calmness ensues. But then he goes to a shop and buys two ‘velvet screens covered with hieroglyphics, wonder what they were, I suspect psychometric reading thereof, which would be half-waking mesmeric scrying. For him they were a consecration of divine forgiveness. He takes a nap, has a vision of all his positive female guiding goddesses. The revelation tells him, this recorded, he states explicitly, in a dream, I will reveal myself to you, so another saintly vision with teleological meaning.
Now I skip ahead, after another visit, he breaks out of a straightjacket and at this point, “I had become a god, and possessed healing powers”, he is now saying that he is in full clear-seeing, cosmic consciousness mesmeric clairvoyance, a state that Kerner says only the Seeress and AJ Davis had reached in the 19th century. He has a full on divine mania breakdown in the institution, of less interest to me, clearly then off into schizophrenia. His descriptions of his manias inside the institutions are not fun reading, it strikes me that in his mania he went entirely into negative prototype space and converted perception of all inmates with him into figures in cult or worship who had a job in the cult but as if in a temple. I suppose the drawing by Kubin is meant to signify the fact that he had turned them all into things.
One image is of interest, to the topic, When he looked at the leaves of a tree he saw the leaves impishly bobbing so as to create images of knights and ladies borne along on caparaisoned steeds. This is of interest given that knights battling were also seen in the sky over Germany in the 16th century, part of the mindset of the times. But, then, he wont stop with it, and so the involution, outwardly the figures represented the triumphant ancestors, but then he says this proved to him that “there was a massive conspiracy among all living creatures, to reestablish the world in its original harmony”, and “THAT THE MAGNETISM OF STARS PROVIDED THEIR MEANS OF COMMUNICATION AND THAT THE MINDS COMMITTED TO THIS GENERAL COMMUNION WERE LINKED BY AN UNINTERRUPTED CHAIN STRETCHING ACEOSS THE EARTH AND THAT ALL THEIR SONGS AND DANCES AND GLANCES, DRAWN EVEN CLOSER BY MAGNETIC ATTRACTION, TRANSLATED THIS SHARED ASPIRIATION”.
Then the picture of him on his bed, by Kubin, and he says that the clutter is as bad as Dr Faustus’s study, he describes the room, but the key hallucination here is again artistic, a bluish light comes in, that is, this is the Blue Room, in pain, it causes bizarre images to appear, the most bizarre was a charnel house as history, where the history of the world was scrawled with blood. Then, the giant body of a woman stood painted before my eyes, except that she had been hacked apart by a saber, and other women were just a tangle or limbs and heads. Once again, this dream vision horrifies him, tears him apart. This appears to be, in fact, a meeting with the god of carnage (my name for him is Psallictus, since she is the female side, Pscallicta, the god of tearing you to pieces), the ultimate sign of mental illness victorious, having schizo’d the schizo into pieces, gone. Beyond this Blue Room vision, he also encounters a little girl, she has a lantern, she has a cat, this is a Pinkie image, but possibly also a pinax, a lost ideal image in the context of it being torn apart, which he holds still in his brain.
That is, he is in a euphoria of mesmerism, fifth stage, clear-seeing, full cosmic consciousness clairvoyance, but in a conspiracy form, turned upside down. I have not involved the traps of rationality enough in my tour, but this sort of paranoid fantasy can only be doubled in on, or involuted, for the leaves, to then form figures, to then form an idea of conspiracy, by the fixation on it, the clamping down over it, of paranoid fantasy derived from rationality in exploitational mode run amok. Since it is hard to see how his rational mind found a way to colonize the confused far dream space of his mind, and he does shortly after this, with breathtaking change in mood, say all his fellow inmates seen to be asleep or like specters out of Tartarus, it is clear that it is by the perception of a Sleeper, an internalization thereof in him, that he cast into hell on earth, in a hell on earth, the asylum.
He goes on about his state of mind inside, again, he is god, he understands everything, he heard things, secret voices called out to me in warning and encouragement from plants, tree, animals, and the tiniest of insects. He saw the patterns of the world, “harmonies that had heretofore escaped me now issued forth from the configurations of stones, angles, cracks, apertures, leaf patterns, colors, smells, and sounds”. Everything is alive, everything corresponds, the “MAGNETIC RAYS THAT EMANATE FROM ME OR FROM OTHERS FLOW DIRECTLY THROUGH THE INFINITE CHAIN OF CREATION WHOSE TRANSPARENT NETWORK IS IN CONTINUOUS COMMNICATIONS WITH THE PLANETS AND THE STARS”.
This is a dark parody of mesmeric clear-seeing, the soul of the Seeress a mirror held up to the full universe, to see all its laws, and understand all. Here it is, in Nerval, as a form of mad euphoria. In fact, this description of the state fills in a bit more about the nature of it, left a bit too open in Kirner.
The intrusion of the rational mind, which creates a friction, beyond polarity, which tears things apart, then once again immediately sets in, no sooner does he have a euphoric fantasy of living in white album, alert to the impellations of magic as described by Baker, linked to the stars, and the virtus that they emit into the world, than he sees in electricity, the new thing, a bastardization of same which can be taken over by malicious others, to control people. There is all the more reason to believe that malevolent or despotic spirits could enslave other minds by dividing them in order to conquer. He thinks that in the past necromancers managed to subjugate entire races and to keep generation after generation subservient to their eternal scepter.
Throughout, then, in Nerval’s descriptions, I find dream states which correspond to hypnagogic reality, and thus have “visual wisdom”. That is, the structure of sane dreaming is there. What is different, and hard to visualize, is the franticness of it, the intense recursive quality, the intolerable polarities, up and down, repeatedly. The overall desperate and crazy exaggerated nature of his visions, they do seem unhinged and thus headed toward schizophrenia. But the fact that Nerval could find in his mind a way to draw these scenes indicates that he was not at all times in such a phase, and maybe could not have written an account of it if in such a phase
Finally, the book, though by some to be unfinished, just tapers off, no real ending. And then in real life, came his suicide.
The overall purpose of Nerval’s Aurelia, commissioned as therapy by his carer, was to push against insanity with the force of an I, to ameliorate all splitting in a controlled voice. But, then, when he finished it, and the mss is said to have been found in the pocket of his jacket, on his body, dead, he committed suicide in any case. Descriptions of the suicide seem to parse it behind earlier incidents in the book, the seeing of the Aurelia lookalike, the running naked under the star in the street, the vision of the black sun and the bloodred orb, the vision of the six moons over the Louvre, the cold and colorless moon over the Palais Royal, the Flood itself over Paris, etc. It is staged as yet another psychoparisien dream event. One account says that he was making his way on an avenue, until his attention was captured by an Egyptian mummy in a shop window. This then sidetracked him, which then took him down a narrow street between the main boulevard and the river. It’s possible he saw the mummy as a standing encounter with death, a kind of grim reaper announcing the end to him. He then walks on the far path to the far place. We know that previously he thought to make use of the Seine as his suicide weapon. He also saw the Seine as a black river, under a black sun. It might also have been a river Styx to him, his visions of monsters encouraged by it. Dore later made a vision of the scene.
End pt 2.
rmarts 