The Stone Door
Divination is difficult with isolated incidents. Weaving them together into prophecy is an arduous labor which demands constant vigilance. Hazard is a word dropped out of the unknown. Several hazards sometimes make a whole sentence. My memory twitches into a sharp image of something never seen, yet remembered and so acutely alive that I am possessed.
A pine forest white with snow in a country where the people are dressed in bright colors. A noise of smashed glass. Little ragged horses as swift and powerful as tigers. Snow, dust and cinnamon.
Wearing a mask I am on all fours with my nose almost touching the nose of a wolf. Our eyes united in a look, yet I remain hidden behind myself and the wolf hidden behind himself; we are divided by our separate bodies. However deeply we look into each other’s eyes a transparent wall divides us from explosion where the looks cross outside our bodies. If by some sage power I could capture that explosion, that mysterious area outside where the wolf and I are one, perhaps then the first door would open and reveal the chamber beyond.
Last night in a dream It returned. A creature wearing a shaggy skin and smelling of dust and cinnamon. Screaming, I entered the fur, wool or hair, crying tears that were dark and sticky like blood. Tears thick with centuries of agony remembered all at once, they matted the furry coat and stank of birth and death. Shamelessly abandoning all that anguish to this man, animal, vegetable or demon. Then I was in entire possession of the five sensorial powers and their long roots were as visible as the sun. The light of a vision or a dream is united to any given luminous body outside. No longer alone in my own body.
Thoughts and dreams but not a particle of dust to prove their reality. Meanwhile I am wasting each living day in captivity.
Leonora Carrington (1917–2011) was born in Lancashire, England. In 1937, a year after her mother gave her a book on surrealist art featuring Max Ernst’s work, she met the artist at a party. Not long after, Carrington and the then-married Ernst settled in the south of France, where Carrington completed her first major painting, The Inn of the Dawn Horse (Self-Portrait), in 1939. In the wake of Ernst’s imprisonment by the Nazis, Carrington fled to Spain. She eventually escaped to the Mexican embassy in Lisbon and settled first in New York and later in Mexico, moving in a circle of like-minded artists that included Remedios Varo and Alejandro Jodorowsky.
