“I don't see a circle: I only see circles described in one direction or another, what are called cycles. The problem is therefore reduced to this new statement: What are the pleasant directions? What are the unpleasant directions?  In other words: What directions do we associate with pleasure and pain?”

Charles Henry, 1885

“[Victor-Émile] Michelet says Paul Adam was one of the three or four minds of the Symbolist generation who really grasped what a symbol was and could thereby vivify his work with that perception; the others apparently only acceded to the 'threshold of allegory.' Adam swam deep into 'the oceans of gnostic intellectuality' and knew how to penetrate beyond appearances. 

“'Possessed of prophetic powers, Adam could read into the subterranean wefts beyond nature on 'which were embroidered the events of 1914 and the following years.' That is to say, he predicted World War I and subsequent events. 

“Paul Adam constructed his stories, the lives of his characters, the twists and turns of his dramas that link them into logical sequence, on the tarot. His dramas are the eruptions of invisible reality, symbolized by any manner of combination of the tarot’s seventy-eight cards. And if this all sounds implausible, Michelet reproduced a letter in his Companions of the Hierophany in which, in the most charming French prose, Adam congratulated Michelet on having penetrated his secret: that yes, the tarot had been for him a constructive key, indispensable to a 'thousand intutitions': 'I remain a docile disciple having received the highest recompense of his zeal, that of your approbation. Paul Adam. June 1919.'”

Tobias Churton, 2016

 

PAUL ADAM

French novelist (1862-1920), important for his LETTERS FROM MALAYSIA (1898) and for having sprinkled his work with small utopian and anticipatory sketches. A dozen of his stories interest us in whole or in part.

In chapter XVI of CLARISSE (1907), a floating factory off the coast of Brest uses the perpetual movement of the sea to produce electricity, which is then stored in “liquid accumulators,” jugs of energy which are conveyed worldwide for all purposes.

In USEFUL HEART (1892), we find a communist utopia with phalanstery. Locomotives pull harrows, plows, etc. The workshops are decorated and “functional” music lightens the work.

THE FUTURE TALE (1893) presents in 55 pages a coming war in which, very soon after the start, the combatants fraternize and establish an era of perpetual peace.

Under the title “Future Grandeur de l'Avare” (in the collection CRITIQUE DES MOEURS (1893)), we read this: “[..] machines which will feed, clothe, heat, refresh and gladden the world by means of the tappings of index fingers on the ivory of motor buttons,” and this again, which surpasses everything, in terms of energy: “The muscular contractions aroused by the yawns of strolling pedestrians will suffice to produce the initial force immediately stored, condensed, multiplied in receivers established everywhere.”

“There are moments when human genius slumbers. There are others when it is exalted by the fever of creation. Chemistry, physics and biology evolve with a miraculous rapidity, translated before our eyes into such miracles as the ancient poets revered. Without harness, chariots run with a magical speed. Tritons plunge into the bosom of the sea with the submarines. Icariuses fly. Jupiters by the millions manipulate the lightning. Phaetons pass in a day through the spaces of the European sky. Swifter than Iris, the message-bearing thought, entrusted to the waves of an aerial vibration, spreads from Europe to Africa, Asia, America in a fraction of time. 

“Did the nymphs of the waterfalls know that they would one day deliver up the force of their waves to the power of a dynamo, that would change them into electric lightning glowing over whole regions?”

Paul Adam, 1894

 

“I suppose that a moon-man or an alien from some distant planet, upon arriving at our world, and wearied by his long travels, might seek to refresh his palate and warm his belly.” 

Claude Debussy, 1912

 

“Debussy was such an unusual personality. With most geniuses their work, their dreams, color the rest of their lives. It was not so with him. It was as if someone had taken a bit of genius, put it in a box and thrown it violently at his head. It stuck, yes, but it was not a part of him, of his everyday life, his modes of thought.”

Maggie Tetye, 1958

“In the films I made with Liška there wasn’t much action as such. It was he who put all the main action into music. Rhythm was always very important for me, and he found rhythms in them I had no idea were there. It was fascinating. He’d pick out a whole lot of subtler rhythms I was quite unaware of. ‘Unconscious rhythms’ he called them.”

Jan Švankmajer, 2000

Link: The Fantastic Mr. Fox: a biographical essay by David Herter

 

“Debussy was a very, very strange man.”

Mary Garden, 1951

 

“It is the spirit of anarchism that reigns in France in the artistic moment, a need for destruction, a sort of delirium that wants to abolish everything that exists.”

Gabriel Mourey, 1899

“'Even with all of this, professor,' he said, 'I still don’t understand, how so suddenly your horrible myth of the stars can somehow become living.'”

Hanns Heinz Ewers, 1921

 

“Imagination is decidedly a very good thing: it allows you to credit people with ideas even more stupid than those they undoubtedly already have.”

Joris-karl Huysmans, 1879

 

“Debussy uses chords like Mallarmé uses words, as mirrors which concentrate the light from one hundred different angles upon the exact meaning, while remaining symbols of that meaning and not the meaning itself. These strange harmonies are not the end, but the point of departure of the composer's intentions. They are the loom upon which the imagination must weave its own fantasies.”

T.E. Clark,  1921

 

“The Epoch to come will be mystical. Mystic and theistic. It will inaugurate the miracle of man disdaining pain, abstracted in imaginative dreams, in the habitual hallucination, returned to the primitive and divine essence, become also creator, creator of his ecstasies and his Heavens.”

Paul Adam, 1893

 

“It had come to this: no one was safe from inventions that leapt out from ambush onto humankind. The sporadic arrival of new inventions was like the epidemics of earlier centuries that had ravaged humanity, emptied cities...The tamed masses conducted themselves peaceably in the zones; were allowed to shout: 'Down with new inventions!' Their hostility made it easier for the new rulers to reintroduce quotas for incoming technologists and scientists, and to secure their own position. A circle of cities and regional zones emerged. London, ever watchful, kept a close eye on them. But the rulers of the cities, handed great power by popular support, sat there scornful and arrogant, men and women both, and laughed. Laughed at the trust the people placed in them; of course they’d help to ensure that the ground the cities stood on would not be undermined by new inventions. Laughed: 'We won’t let them undermine you. If only you knew what ground it is you stand on.'”

Alfred Doblin 1924

“Please remember, monsieur, that the triangle is not a sentimental instrument.” 

Claude Debussy, 1909

“Where am I?”  

“Very far from your tottering globe, which you will never see again, very far from your sad sun, which is dying slowly in the bosom of its cold planets. Your worlds have fallen into the gaping depths of the immensity, and you would search in vain for Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn and Uranus. All those children of darkness have returned to eternal oblivion.”

Jane de La Vaudère, 1893

 

“She seemed to be undulating in the caresses of the nocturnal star, a jealous watcher.”

Édouard Schuré, 1897

“Verlaine, Mallarmé, Laforgue brought us new tones, new sounds. They cast glimmers on the words that had not yet been seen; they used methods unknown to the poets their predecessors; they conceived the verses or the prose like musicians and, like musicians again, combined the images and their sound correspondence.”

 Paul Dukas, 1921

“O solemn procession of magnificent suns

Knot and unknot your great, golden masses,

Gently, sadly, to somber music

Conduct your sleeping sister's slow cortege.”

Jules Laforgue, 1890

“It’s devoutly to be wished that this ardor for finding ways of bringing art before the public should be cooled, otherwise there will soon be more fake artists than real art—and I’m not even certain this moment hasn’t already arrived.”

Claude Debussy, 1891