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Giorgio de Chirico, The Nobleman and the Bourgois, 1933
The artist's Double has declared his independence from the
wheel of the Eternal Return. He obeys no law, but instead
appears in the period he chooses. He is not a projection of the
needs of either the living or the dead. Taking the sun with him,
like a weapon aimed at the ego, he can no longer be bothered to
imitate every gesture of the pedestrian.
It had been years since the metaphysical revolution had
attempted to subvert the myth of progress, in its own, perhaps too
subtle, manner of subversion. For all the good that it did. Since
1920, many towers had been built to equal that of Babel, though
this time, much more durably, out of glass. The Italian Committee
for Eugenic Studies had been closed, knowing a great deal less
than when they opened. They should have studied themselves
first. As if the current race could be improved, as if statisticians
knew what time was, as if anything so simple as the measurement
of a skull could have altered the long arc of our descent.
Neoplasticism had subjected the ratios of Phidias to germ warfare
. Cubism was born again as evangelical Abstract Expressionism.
The point of ontological convergence kept getting moved to some
land beyond the Workers' Paradise, to some sky beyond the
triumph of Neoliberal Economics. Always, the enigma remained.
The thread that binds a people to its creations. The reason for the
gulf that separates the two hands of a clock.
De Chirico was sad. The 1972 New York Cultural Center
retrospective, called De Chirico by de Chirico, had not provoked
any radical new theories about or reassessment of his oeuvre, as a
hieroglyphic dream had once led him to expect. He had done
what he could. Mocked by his enemies, the knot people, grouped
with reactionary critics like Sir Alfred Mummings, a dinosaur,
and his only source of applause in one lecture on the Baroque, his
obsessions a test of patience even for his friends, he would leave
any unmet challenges for some starving artist in the future to
resolve. Perhaps, already, the clockwork mechanism of the fates
had arranged for their introduction, or would do so at the earliest
convenience of the daimon. Perhaps, even now, this unknown
poet/artist had managed to probe the implications of some few of
his symbols, a book had been published, and a reader had turned
to a page at the end of the first section. It was time, again, to set
sail, but in a boat no longer seaworthy.
Giorgio de Chirico, The Return of Odysseus, 1968
Death would untangle the huge knot that was life. Death, in its
turn, was a different type of knot. In a small room hung with
fishnets by the docks, the Metaphysician brooded on the
conundrum of the Eight, that perfect figure, which a prehistoric
hand had once stamped on his forehead, like a curse. It was this
action that had generated the topology of his pictures, those
faithful reproductions of the nonexistent originals, which he had
first seen in a vision from 1912. Or perhaps it could be said that
even at that time, in a kind of reverse perspective, the complete
works of de Chirico were already in existence, waiting only for the
artist who would claim them, and for a bit of blood to reactivate
their symbols.
In a letter from 1912, de Chirico wrote, "Thought must so detach
itself from all human fetters that all things then appear to it
anew—as if lit for the first time by a brilliant star."(12).
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12) Giorgio de Chirico, Manuscript from the Collection of Paul
Eluard, from "Appendix A" of James Thrall Soby's Giorgio de
Chirico, page 248.
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