Amour fou and passion linked together move the universe
Love creates and love destroys.
A theme, that of amour fou, of mad love, which has crossed literature and art.
The unreasonable, obstinate and tenacious love, which can lead to ruin but also to sublimation.
This is the theme behind one of my illustrations, a scarf and finally a long scarf.
It all starts with André Breton and Surrealism.
Love for the Surrealists is identified with the divinity
In sexual love all the divine power is revealed.
However, carnal love, being also divine, has a great spiritual power that coexists with the other half, the earthly one.
In 1932, Breton wrote that the beloved woman is “the cornerstone of the material world“.
If love is reciprocal, if opposites are set, each individual involved is completely transformed and together with him/her, the whole universe changes.
Clearly, to reach this state of grace, spiritual love and physical love must walk hand in hand, interpenetrating and enriching one another.
In every philosophy and religion studied by the Surrealists, from Kabbalah to Taoism to Zen, there is a clear need to put theory into practice.
Or rather, there must be no fracture between theory and practice.
There is no spiritual work that does not need a material contribution, there is no spiritual and material change of the universe if there is no love, the instrument par excellence of transformation.
At the basis of the surrealist thought on love, there is the awareness that on a psychic level “we are all androgynous, male and female at the same time… It is no coincidence that all divinities are androgynous… perfection is reached only when the male and the female live together in a single being…” writes Arturo Schwarz in “Surrealismo, una filosofia di vita” and continues “… to quote a text of kabbalah, the woman is the future of the man, just as the man is the future of the woman. One reaches this awareness only if one is fortunate enough to love madly and be reciprocated with equal passion. In fact, only in this way can the lover, identifying himself with his partner, discover the other half of his personality“.
The sin of Adam and eve, is the antithesis of surrealist thought about love
Eve is guilty of the forbidden fruit.
To Eve are attributed all the faults: the loss of immortality, the having caught the fruit of knowledge despite the prohibition, the expulsion from Paradise.
Thus love and knowledge become two mortal sins.
For the Surrealists, instead, knowledge is necessary and decisive for the transformation of oneself and the universe, and the woman exists in every man, just as the male part exists in every woman.
But here we don’t talk about loose morals and limitless libertinism.
On the contrary, the search for the missing part of oneself is decisive and difficult to achieve.
Love, understood as the completion of self, is demanding.
It searches, discards, investigates, reveals, discovers.
Here imagination is unleashed, love becomes obstinate, insane, dilated in space and time.
Love must open the mind, it must leave room for fantasy and imagination.
This constant search for balance between the masculine and feminine self, between the individual and the universe, opens up scenarios that are not rigid and rational.
The dream is unleashed, as are intuition and emotions.
What we do not know is the real world to discover and Surrealism wants to find new tools of knowledge to understand the world and the individual. Through freedom-without freedom there is no possibility to move in the knowledge of the world- and love-without love there is no self-knowledge.
Knowing oneself to understand the world and transform it.
The anarchy of the heart is mad love, which penetrates into the meanders of the world that we do not know.
Surrealism is always contemporary for this reason, because it is no longer a movement but a philosophical and transformative conception of society without a specific geographical and temporal location.
Love here is doubled: it is love for oneself and love for others.
Empathy is necessary because one reflects oneself in one’s neighbor.
Here there is no promise of eternal love after death, but there is the urge to seek realization in the present moment.
The need for freedom, for self-realization, the dream of transforming the world from oneself, what is it but a contemporary manifesto?
Amour fou and Surrealism
In Amour fou, André Breton describes an insignificant event that happened to him and his wife on the Brittany coast in 1936.
An event that can happen to anyone and therefore left in oblivion, because it has no great significance.
He and his wife walk around, bored.
Suddenly they both feel a kind of mutual repulsion that increases as they walk. The repulsion results in aggressiveness and an absolute need to break up. But all this takes place in the silence of the walk, which lasts several kilometers.
Feelings emerge aggressive without manifesting themselves.
This unresolved, terrible and irrational resentment, in the long walk to a forest, slowly loosens, melts and resolves.
Returning in the evening from the seaside resort, they talk about it with their relatives and discover that they had walked near a house where a murder had taken place.
A man had killed his wife after taking out an insurance policy that even included murder.
From that moment on, the murderer was cursed by the entire region and the house remained empty forever.
An insignificant event, a state of mind that starts from a death instinct and then changes into the usual love for the beloved, reveals an underground reality that would never have come to light if the narrator had let go of the feelings felt.
In fact, if we begin to pay attention to insignificant events and let our mind and imagination relax and start to oppose scepticism and rationality, we discover that these events multiply and become more and more present in our lives.
Almost a parallel universe that appears to us every day but to which we pay no attention. and the more they multiply, the more they take on meaning and the more they transform our reality.
The image we have of the world will begin to change the whole interpretation of reality will begin to change significantly.
Reality escapes us, as love often does.
But searching beyond rationality for a totalizing life and love opens up realities that coexist in our lives.
In short, how to say: love in a total way and you will really transform the world.
