(0) - 81 years ago, this month
A few years ago, I wrote a logical poem about a horse (the most logical poem about a horse I could have ever written). Since then, I have returned, again and again, to this idea of horse, and to one horse, in particular - the horse in Guernica. For me, the horse lives through the attack on its body. I have never been able to stand there, in front of Guernica and not feel as though the horse lives through it. For this reason I consider it, the horse, a feminist body - a feminist body, and a resilient body; a body that lives through (the horse, at the heart of the mural is like a cockroach, and as for the heart - well, the heart is a cockroach too).
I am in the middle of a series of essays, which, among other things, provide me with an opportunity to re-visit Guernica. Last year, I flew in (and out) of Madrid in the same day, all to sit in on a lecture about Picasso, and Feminism, and The Body. The lecture was part of a series of lectures commemorating 80 years since the bombing of Guernica, and 80 years since the unveiling of Picasso's Guernica at the Spanish Pavillion (part of the 1937 Paris Exhibition). I wrote about it for gorse - and while the horse isn't the focus of this particular piece, it is always there, in the back of my mind, always living through, again and again, always living through the attack on its body. I thought, given that this week marks 81 years since Guernica was first displayed in Paris, that I would share the essay - This is (0) is When:
http://gorse.ie/…/this-is-0-is-when%E2%80%A8-by-dimitra-xi…/
"1. Guernica is a representation; it is Picasso’s attempt to represent what is un-representable (from Wagner’s essay, again: ‘…within this obscene conception [insert by me: see previous reference to the ‘riveted nipple’] lurks the specter of a fully weaponised fertility – the mother as bomb’). Mothers and bombs, and bombs and mothers. From zero. From zero, what is necessary is to name things. Yes, but. Dalí, to Lorca, in another letter: ‘Let the things themselves decide where their shadows fall!’ From zero, then, zero in. From zero, begin, again. Zero. Zero is. Zero is another word for a beginning. The beginning is the end. The end is here. Here I. Here I am. I am here, again. From here, the beginning is a feeling, a feeling of the eye, of the eye turning. I want to see, see what they see, zero in, see myself in. Zero. Zero is the breast, my breast –"