Psaumes du Gorphoncelet at Center

Artists: Lutz Braun, Timothy Davies, Isabelle Fein, Burkhard Beschow, & Anne Fellner, Cameron Irving, Tamen Perez, Clémence de La Tour du Pin, Antoine Renard, Max Ruf, Lin May Saeed, Eric Sidner, Alex Turgeon

Exhibition title: Psaumes du Gorphoncelet

Curated by: Clémence de La Tour du Pin

Venue: Center, Berlin, Germany

Date: September 18 – October 1, 2016

Photography: all images copyright and courtesy of the artists and Center, Berlin

GORPHONCELET (*)! In a dead end he rose
As there remained no more spaces to probe.
As simple joy and human innocence
Had died, and sorry human kindnesses
Had drowned by bleak refinement overwhelmed
—With left to sing nothing but solitude,
The only theme still there to be advanced,
And every hope but a new servitude,
‘Twas then he fathomed the atrocious absence,
Death’s inescapable ascendancy;
Those times would leave nothing behind but silence
Pulsing from grief as though it were remorse;
Echoes alone of such abiding silence
Endured, against each face of the body…

(*) That he took his spirituality anywhere he found it, in disgust of the vulgar or by innate grace; that he saved souls by ambushing them; that he never ceased being a saint before others, a topic of admiration, an undefinable harmonious whole in which pride was needed, that he wrote love psalms from writer’s inspiration not lover’s passion, what does it matter: he veered the Game toward the Divine.
The Precursor’s Game IX

(Descend the sky still lower than is custom,
What I create are lives that do not die;
Those children lost to centuries of brume,
Their love somehow never as whole as mine.)

your eyes demand: what is his suffering?
if so prodigious why then was he damned?
allow me to behold him…

I had planned
To carve their Hell out long before their bearing
Where love is warm, nearby hillside and crest
To lonely pleasures thresholds not yet crossed,
Havens they sought when plagued by fear and doubt;
Deep down inside they held an otherness
Half-hearted men from other shores do miss,
The pulse of their damnation still to learn;
While not the only cadence of their heart,
When on their own they would often discern
A sound of tide at twilight that would mount;
As though a gem they hid it deep within;
Above their common faith, of that abidance

They sought as one the whispered expectation
And too night’s first reflections on the surface.

So fine was Hell and tempting in their selves
On him they lay in a supreme embrace
A passion’s throe so to drain out his frost;
And then of him, his sap, his marrow nourished
They would return to their own firmament
To those forbidden depths their eyes still turned;
And so the Joy, forgotten Joy, intimate
Joy, sudden respite after the void,
Final despair at long last manifest.
(But where to place him else? Gorphoncelet,
Often I went to him for he consoled,
Exquisite heart that beat only for me;
Inside his winter shelter deep in legend,
Remote barren and white its woods and land,
Cradling the Hell he held dearly in hand;
He knew that warming his with much caress
Was flooding mine with equal tenderness
Deflecting just a bit my sad disgrace.

But ah! if never have I damned in snow,
‘Tis not for fear of my beloved freeze: (*)
Such days do see many an untold glow…

((a glow? but all they wield those kinds of glows
amid their night traveled by spells of light,
and come the hour of love my heart is keen
all to reveal to my companion souls,
time and again divine betrayal mine))

(*) Traps were laid along the path of Death (back then one knew too well the winds that brought her), her reflection set so deeply in mirrors of frozen water it remained there for hours, her footsteps, her hesitations, her dance preserved in snow, and creatures moving in knowledge of their death, she unable to accomplish her work for visible from afar. ( Legends and Off-Souls)

(There blows a wind from Saint Elie de Gueuce (*)…
Such havoc wreaked among the blessed souls,
In children, rapture! dazzling afterlives!)

Do you perceive night’s special radiance,
A gentle gleam, seen from a river’s bed,
A drifting torpor we shall not access?

You do not see our march has grown so slow,
How we keep crossing that same idle pond
Always, how skies appear always too low?

(*) LITCHEUR: here is a ridiculous Saint with a pendulum to gauge the pureness of the souls… LYDIVERQUEN: I know him: does he not own a wondrous castle, and gardens where he studies the rhythm of the Flood in plants?
LITCHEUR: the plan had been to roast him for a chance at a nice martyrdom; but he swore so rudely at the very first burn that it all fell through and he ran away to boos.
LYDIVERQUEN: perhaps it was from that moment on he became a Saint.
2nd Comedy of the Passenger

(if only you would keep your hands sedate
and so my flesh still more not penetrate,
Then tell with less fevered a voice I would
the friendship moving me to the next dead.)

– Patrice de La Tour du Pin. Damnation of the Gorphoncelet,1935. Translated by Eric Anglès