by Ivan de Monbrison

We live in the oblivion of our metamorphoses, wrote Paul Eluard in 1946, it is the introductory verse of a poem entitled Our Movement, the title of the collection in which the poem itself is found being emblematic: The Dire Desire to Endure. There is a quadruple alliteration (in French) here,  testifying above all of the author’s dire desire to survive himself, to survive his pain, to overcome all of his own disasters.

For, as human life, is because it is above all always contingent to reality, in short, only a perpetually announced disaster, and although announced beforehand, is due to be almost always ignored by  people, or just  barely avoided, and this only in the last resort most of the time.

Therefore, we could extrapolate that: metamorphosis is above all subject to motion. But before anything else a motion set within ourselves, within our skull, so to say, and this how small and narrow this skull is usually found to be. Jumping from one instant to the one which follows it closely, the mind slides from one thought to another, perpetuating itself by some sort of an extension tending towards the next thought, the former one still lasting enclosed inside a following instant without losing on its way its original nature. In this way each single moment while chasing the next one is always potentially the weakest link, by sheer essence, locked inside us within the chain of Time.

What we commonly call the mind is it seems all but logical to us now, itself nothing more than the totality of those confused echoes repeating themselves between our neurones, like the deafening chime of all the bells of a church ringing together.

It is the same verse of Éluard precisely which was used as a quote at the beginning of the film: La Dénonciation, made by Valcroze, and released in 1962. The movie relates the simple story of a man captive of his own past, of an original betrayal to a noble cause, and whose own metamorphosis actually falls short in the story to succeed but for only at the very end being achieved, and this as for any good Christian, by the sacrifice of his own life, redeeming him from his original sin.

What are our metamorphoses standing for, of what material are they made of? We could take as a good example perhaps the amazing one of the same actor Maurice Ronet. Who from being a dandy at the beginning of the story turns, and this before our dazzled eyes and in a little less than two hours printed on cinematographic film, into an unfortunate suicidal man. This takes place in the movie Le Feu Follet, by Louis Malle, released in 1963 just a year after La Dénonciation.

Each human being must always find within himself the strength to survive its one nature, and therefore to constantly go through the mechanism of some kind of a metamorphosis.  But this too is precisely what the character fails to do in Louis Malle’s film. This film is the narration, made out of a novella by Drieu la Rochelle, of the last day of the life of the poet Jacques Rigaut, who died at the age of 30, after shooting himself in the heart in November 1929.

Paul Verlaine had touched this topic before the 20th century  in one of his late poems, he did this as he was still in prison at that time for having shot at his lover the poet Arthur Rimbaud. This around 1873, in a verse that echoes from a distance the one of Paul Eluard (the poem by the way already containing a lot  of the material from which Apollinaire would draw for his own writing later on). This is verse that we would like to refer to you here:

it will be like when we ignore causes,
a slow awakening after many metempsychoses.

Here it is all about another kind of motion, that is the one of going from one body to another, sometimes even from a human being to the one of an animal or  a plant. But, what is the difference between a metamorphosis and a metempsychosis? Could this in fact be the absence of any possibility of redemption in the former, of any posteriori of rebirth, and so to speak of a resurrection unlike in the usual definition of a metempsychosis? Éluard was a communist and an atheist, Verlaine a believer, which perhaps explains the difference between the two in the end.

There is only one successful metempsychosis for all Christians, it is of course the one of the Messiah, invested by his own divine magic, he through Time is always due to come back to save us, and more precisely to save us from ourselves before anything else. But what a failure it is in that case and if it is the intended goal of the Christian belief here! Out of an ancient Idol, most likely initially of Babylonian origin, the church and the West turned it into something else, a little more prosaic maybe, through a simple sleight of hand. In an easy to figure out and radical way metempsychosis becomes in Christianity by the way of a self-sacrifice of Christ, quickly followed by its redemption, a universalist way of deceiving Death, and therefore Time, both of them altogether in just one shot.

Metempsychosis ignores the use of Thought,  its own perpetual motion forward and the useless loop it always make inside us, because, obviously, it has no use for it. Metempsychosis leaves us with this pathetic illusion of this useless motion, and at the same time, goes, in theory, far beyond it.

Thus, any individual who has lived long enough to get a clear feeling of it,  understands almost by instinct after many years of running behind one’s own fleeting shadow, that each of us is to be born and to die several times but only in the span of a single life. Since, ultimately, science teaches us that Space and Time are but one and the very same thing, both of them acting thus within the limit of our Reality by the use of a single motion that they share together in the Universe .

Moreover, metamorphosing oneself continuously so as not to die too quickly becomes a vital necessity from early childhood until the end for all humans on Earth. We die many times before being actually really dead, the ultimate death being probably only a morbid symbol (merely a made out word to point out the exhaustion of our bodies) of the transmutation of ourselves into putrid corpses hidden in so many unfortunate wooden boxes, which we usually call coffins. No need of glasses for us to clearly see here that the definition of the physical  stop of the motion of the brain, through thinking, by the simple word of death is undoubtedly meaningless. The act of dying to oneself while still alive is therefore in fact the only one which allows the spirit to remain free during one’s own lifetime. If actually the word death itself carries any real founded meaning this would be according to each person’s belief, to move through metempsychosis into another one, or to dissolve totally into random atoms after it.

Ivan de Monbrison is a bipolar artist and writer from France, born in 1969