Here I am, dumbly staring out the window and tapping my lips with a pencil, trying to find a way to write about Cirlot. It’s not because I don’t know what to say about him, far from it. Among so many things that I am passionate about, one of them is reading Cirlot and thinking about her issues. No, my reservation is something that more closely resembles fear, specifically the fear that Hofmannsthal felt among the statues of Greek women who leaned over him with “enigmatic smiles”, asking for silence. But it is not Cirlot, naturally, who asks me for silence, but rather my fear of not living up to what talking about him means, at least for me.. All of his works seem to me, in more ways than one, to be major works: the cycle of bronwyn, actually any of his poetry books, all his writings on art, everything I find lying around whether it be fragments of his letters or his scattered thoughts (or his dreams: are they his work, his dreams?). Also his daughter Victoria, who, at least as far as I am concerned as an enthralled reader and admirer, I consider one of his best works. The one that most, really, next to the one that most.
But come, dictionary of symbols. Since I am stranded here, what is the mystic Cirlot —one of the greatest poets of the 20th century, and undoubtedly one of the greatest of its mystics— saying about the window, at which I have been looking for half an hour?
Window. By constituting a hole, it expresses the idea of penetration, possibility and distance: due to its quadrangular shape, its meaning becomes terrestrial and rational. It is also a symbol of consciousness, especially when it appears at the top of a tower, by analogy with the human figure.
Well, I’m not literally in a tower, but I’m actually in a tower. And all that lies ahead of me—the page and a half of jumbled print on which I depend for this article—is a possibility. Cirlot knew better than anyone what the game of possibilities meant. “The silver palace”, the two tributes to Bécquer. You see? I am already looking forward to talking about these two poems.
(My life is getting stranger every day, even if it doesn’t seem so.)
“All these definitions, still scattered like the cattle that embodied the lyre, were compiled more or less secretly in the margins of his purely professional works“
Cirlot’s life was stranger every day, although it didn’t seem so. She once cut her hair, like Géricault before painting The raft of the Medusa (“blue hairs of the Divine Medusa Gorgon”, Cirlot wrote, “my true beloved”), and, as far as possible, he avoided “the practice of sex”. He lamented that “everyone in this country believes in indestructible evidence, in the solidity of the universe… They have enough with common sense,” while he went around chasing cracks that opened elsewhere, composing poems, contemplating the candlelight souls of objects. In that hunt he found new definitions for old concepts. A lyre was no longer just an instrument to sing to the goddess or to place the head of Orpheus on its strings; it also symbolized—in the form of the scattering of the lambs—”the harmonious union of cosmic forces.” A cord did not allow an absolute ligature if the explanation of the Jâbâlâ Upanishad. And a window was this: a dependency, the hint of an opening and a possibility. All those definitions, still scattered like the cattle that embodied the lyre, were compiled more or less secretly in the margins of his “purely professional works”, over the years, until they crystallized in that wonder that he called thus : dictionary of symbols (“traditional” in its first edition).
The first time that Cirlot openly mentions this work was —as far as I know— in a letter addressed to Andre Bretonwritten on the eve of the last day of 1955, and published a few months later in the first issue of the magazine Le Surréalisme, même. He began the letter—to “dear friend and teacher”—with a note of regret, for having written books “that almost embarrass me, on art of any time and place,” but also with a kind of nervous though veiled enthusiasm for another work that circulated through the gaps in his work: “I am preparing a symbolic summa, place of confrontation of the knowledge on symbolism of the occultists, psychologists, anthropologists, orientalists, historians of religions and writers. I believe that it is necessary to reach a certain knowledge of a series of things (qualities of materials, landscapes, dreams, beings that disturb us, besiege or curse us) about which “there is no science yet”.” The inverted commas is fine, because a science that assailed that knowledge would either immediately cease to be a science, or would destroy and annihilate everything that came its way. But the science to which Cirlot refers was of another type (nothing to do with materialistic science, actually a pseudoscience) which he describes a bit later:
One day I had a female body in my hands, I hardly remember it, but instead I am obsessed with the lunar pallor of the leg, the semi-transparency… I understood that this greyish transparency, of cloudy gauze or glass, was the beginning of the true mystery, that It is neither in seeing nor in ignoring, but in almost see.
“I believe that Cirlot’s religiosity was sustained not by the principles of organized religion but by those of a disciplined spirituality“
Cirlot, better than any other Spanish poet of his century, was a master of the almost see. She found that new way of looking away from the known paths, not because of a desire to differentiate herself but precisely because he was different. At a time when social realism or the poetry of experience dominated a country’s literary landscape, he chose to write about symbols, digging beneath the wreckage of the conscious mind to extract new ways of regarding a relic. His poetry, his delivery as a poet, would be enough (or so I want to think) to redeem a whole century that he found beauty in everyday life but he did not want to know anything about the origin of that beauty. He would have been a good asset to surrealism, and he knew that as well as Breton, were it not for his conviction, I think totally justified, that Surrealism started from the peripheries of the spirit to reach dispersion. In the criticism of surrealism He described it as “a movement that has only made the mistake in our time of trying to disassociate itself from the religious, abandoning the rope of this torn ignition to less passionate mentalities”. Surely others will know better than me, that here I use only my intuition as a reader of Cirlot and almost his brother —even if it is by way of the bastard monarchies— in the understanding of the world, but I believe that Cirlot’s religiosity was sustained not on the principles of organized religion but on those of a disciplined spirituality. (Can this be a paradox? I ask.) I perceive that playful spirituality in search, if not of an order, at least of a singularity in which each feature and each manifestation of the cosmos, with its folds and folds, is contained as a whole, in poems like “El Palacio de silver” and “Homage to Bécquer”, where an (alleged) initial order breaks down in the chaos of the images, like a mirror hit in the middle, but through the transpositions it finds a different order. Cirlot acts like a magician or an alchemist who traces the demolition materials of a stable universe back to what could still unfold from it in an (infinite?) number of permutations. Magician, alchemist, before I have also called him a mystic. He wrote, in fact, a poem — “Lamb of the Abyss” — that emerged as an apparition, and that he would have liked to see incorporated “into the work of the Hispanic mystics.” That poem, born from the ribs of the Apocalypse and Master Eckhart, is certainly mystical even with Cirlot’s own reservations towards his language, which was not expressed with his personal voice but with that of “God and the Devil” ; but I want to leave here some of his verses from a very different poem that show that his mysticism, the divine and daimonic voices, and even his own, could be softened and covered with roses and topazes by the dazzled echo of San Juan de the cross:
And did you believe
not to be…?
did you forget
my first look
when you undressed me
being already naked and delivered?
(As one who says: “my Beloved the mountains.” It is the beloved, the soul of Saint John who speaks here).
“He understood reality as a playground, with less solemnity than it seemed or that some critics have attributed to it.“
It was among those roses and topazes that Cirlot built her work, with her gaze always open to the beyond. He avoided the circumscription of literary movements to avoid being subjected to the limits confined by labels, firmly closed definitions that force us to assume a role based on what that means for us that which, when defined, also defines us. Cirlot, with an intuition that transcended poetic activity as a mere civil exercise to return it to its natural condition as a mirror and play with eternity, contemplated not only the world, but even the universe, as children see it: as a transitory effect of analogies, as something that happens between instants, and that only as an event can reveal that to the other side (the “beyond, be it supernatural or natural, transcendent or immanent”) that stops a look numb by the facts do not let pass the bars of the (so-called) reality. To a certain extent, it is curious that definitions were ignored by those who occupied themselves throughout a regrettably short life – he did not die young, but he did not die old either – in redefining the world in hallucinations, allegories, in symbols and analogies, but the definitions he found were not closed formulas but gaps that pointed to a higher meaning. He understood reality as a playground, with less solemnity than it seemed or that some critics have attributed to it (the “Tribute to Bécquer” is enough for me to imagine him perfectly happy between toy balconies), and from here and there it was taking materials to erect a tower—a kind of Arcimboldo tower, made for the rest of the birdmen—that only once resembled a tower in that it stood on a monumental but (voluntarily) insecure verticality. The tower must also have cracks, or else it would be locked into its own definition..
Cirlot was right when he said: “My constant concerns deal with matters that nobody cares about at all, although I consider them essential”. And they are essential, Cirlot. You knew it as well then as you know it now.
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Author: Juan Eduardo Cirlot. Title: Dictionary of symbols. Editorial: siruela vent: all your books, amazon, fnac Y House of the book.