The Eternal Return

THE ETERNAL RETURN to follow oneself blindly into the future

m. evans

“Each thing we see hides something else we want to see.�

Rene Magritte

‘the eternal return’ was inspired by Not to be Reproduced: The Portrait of Edward James by Rene Magritte. The slide of this image slipped from my bag the afternoon of the morning Patricia Pringle, the curator, invited me to present in the exhibition Slips, Shifts, and Reversals. It sparked my interest with reference to the Magical Realism the exhibtion intended to present. I thought it was fate.

Amor fati is not simply a love of fate, it is a willing to follow fate actively, thoroughly, rigorously. Many things happen in a day, in a moment, and often seem incongruent, in-contiguous, and even temporally contradictory, but maybe fate is simply hectically complex. Generally we grasp what we can from the ruins of moments and piece together a prudent memory.

Either that, or for the amor fati’s, we grab the moments themselves and arrange them into new happenings. Often nonsense is a process, wit a toy used as a tool, and reason is given vaster borders, but this slip of the slide was the first affirmation of my participation. It was also to be the first happening of my contribution... I had only to find the shifts and reversals.

At this time I was researching for my masters titled Towards a Poetics of Light: The Conceits of Light. I was therefore prone to irony and witty deceit which decidedly had to come from the initial conception itself. The title Not to be Reproduced: The Portrait of Edward James was the obvious candidate. To reproduce, albeit in a transformed mode, what itself if titled Not to be Reproduced seemed to me an adroit shift. My title “the eternal return” is a kind of ironic reflection on the Magritte title, but one that repeats and heightens the conceptual shift of the internal conceit in both title and work.

Edward James, a close friend and patron of Magritte, posed beofe Magritte’s mantle above which stands a mirror. In the painting Edward does not see his face, as would be expected from his position, but rather, what the viewer sees, namely the back of his head. This portrait was not simply painted of Edward James, it was painted for Edward James. Edward James would therefore see the back of his own head twice. In other words, the actual Edward James would be looming at the back of Edward James’ head looking at the back of Edward James’ head in the mirror.

This is the perspective of Edward James. I would like to consider a shift in perspective to that of Magritte, the conceiver and executer of the image. Magritte painted this portrait with the intention of placing Edward James within the image, the actual Edward James. Magritte presents the position of Edward James as he can never see himself, from behind, and yet presents it as the only point of view available to Edward James. Magritte paints into the portrait the specificity of the viewer - being for and of Edward James. In other words, he paints as if he were Edward James. The mirrored reflection has long been considered the appropriate vehicle for mimesis for it returns the ‘same’, the ‘I’ that is complete (Lacan Mirror stage), especially in painting through reference to Narcissus1. However Magritte inverts the anticipated reflection and returns the otherside, the backside of Edward James’ portrait, the Edward James that Edward James could never paint.

1. As Leon Battista Alberti wrote in De Pictura (1435): “consequently I used to tell my friends that the inventor of painting, according to the poets, was Narcissus, who was turned into a flower; for, as painting is the flower of all the arts, so the tale of Narcissus fits our purpose perfectly. What is painting but the act of embracing by means of art the surface of the pool?” as found in Victor Stoichita, A Short History of the Shadow, Reaktion Books, London, 1997. pp. 38.

The shift(ing): “the eternal return” is the built between of these two perspectives, and in so being, raises a third. This third perspective should not be considered as distinct from the former two but as a change or shift arising between them.

Presented in the work is a disjunction, an effect of a shift in perspective that is not simply a relativisation (and/or an accumulation of multiple perspectives), but the emergence of a stain (or blind spot) that blurs the transparency of what we see - this being the objectve element in what we see. This objective element (what Nietzsche refers to as “truth as perspective”) is where magic makes its uncanny home.

The disjunction between perspectives that raises a third is performed through a kind of decentering, where the specular reflection remains forever unavailable. The anticipated reflection is barred and yet, through the expectation induced by the physical presence of the mirror, the anticipation itself is endured. The blurr becomes a space of doubt, a suspension of reasoning that can never be reconciled. We are compelled to turn...

The turning point of doubt is two-fold and coincidental. Both forms, decentred and suspended, are intact and balanced, neither one dominating the other, however they are two sides of the one state. The reversal enters this state as an anagogical irony. We can not return. We can not go backwards. We can not reverse. Time will always move us forward, and we will always follow ourselves blindly where it takes us, or we take it. Every-which-way we turn we move forward. Every path we choose to take has already been chosen. Every decision we finally decide on we have already decided. We follow ourselves, whilst the other of ourselves lead us, following yet another other of ourselves. We can not help but be who we are. And it is specifically in the crystallisation of two-fold doubt that this anagogical irony renders itself apprehendable - as the truth of (between)-perspective.

“And this slow spider, which crawls in the moonlight and this moonlight itself and you and I on the gateway, whispering together, whispering about eternal things have we not already been there and come again and run the other path ahead in front of us, this long, terrifying path do we not have to eternally recur?”

Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra.

Man can not return, he can do no more than follow himself blindly.

With every turn, he follows the straight line that he himself walks ahead of himself.

In life, one can only struggle “to become what one is.”