The Maenads and Crystal Period
Out in her silo, Leila sets up her still life, choosing the elements carefully. Off we follow the most intricate and the most written about period in Leila’s art that is appropriately identified with a new period, a new way of mirroring her life, the coming back of her sane mind. No wonder that Leila’s sane mind is often metonimically replaced by her maenads and crystals. What is even more intriguing is that the insight and the actual work process is carried out in the early beginning of the novel, the VIth chapter, called Experience, Strength, Hope. As early as that Leila could go on in search of her selfhood with all her heart open to serenity.
On the other hand we could ascertain the flux of at least two important mythological issues with entering the crystalline period. One is the contemporary notion of the mad woman artist enriched by the parallel with the maenads; the other is the black vision of the artists’ world run over by the sudden parallel with the enlightening white world of the maenads and crystal. Both of them are discussed at length in reference to the woman artist’s social identity. Is the choice of the still-life elements arbitrary? On the contrary it proves very careful and suggestive on the side of women artists and the narrator.
...a dozen white jumbo eggs in Lalique crystal bowl with maenads dancing around its borders, a clearcrystal egg, a white china milk pitcher in the shape of a cow, a cylindrical clear-glass vase filled with white roses and calla lilies, and under it all an antique white lace tablecloth, which I gather into folds so that it looks like snowy Alps. p.110/VI
In search of every shade of white, Leila begins losing herself in the challenge of ‘finding the kaleidoscope of colors within the word white’. There is a real outburst of happiness that clusters the whole kaleidoscope of words, suggesting happy ecstasy:
‘wholly happy, wholly content I am happy-happier than I have been in years; I paint as if in a trance; In a trance, I paint and paint; My head clear, my heart singing in my chest, I am in ecstasy; In a rage of excitement I paint; I paint and paint - rapt, happy; I am still painting like this - my mind galloping, my heart full...(p.113,4/VI).
Being the happiest woman artist ever Leila is likened to the maenads ‘dancing as they have danced for centuries’, to those frenzied women, attendants of Bacchus in his hedonistic orgies and wild, wild rites [BBM 1993]. Leila Sand is entirely absorbed in the drama of those dancing creations of her mind, painting this still life not in real light but in the light of the mind. All is light and clarity, something ‘pure, clear, complex, and glittering as snow’ that her work has never possessed before. This is her ‘glimmering testament to a new life’:
The valleys of the tablecloth glimmer as if with alpine snow; the eggs show little calcified bumps, like ovaries about to burst their follicles; the crystal egg seems to hold the future in its depths; the roses and lilies open before my eyes... 113/VI
The albino study grows much more fantastical and abstract with the coming days and so does E. Jong’s imagery which is appropriating cosmic elements to set Leila’s new period within the proper vast scale, being another manifestation of the flying metaphor in E. Jong’s oeuvre. The moon is setting behind the dancing maenads and the eggs are transformed into the whirling planets and the cow is spraying milk through the starry universe. It seems that Leila Sand can’t help imagining a whole series of large canvases based on that crystalline theme, with each of the objects - moon, maenads, eggs, cow, milk - becoming an emblem of a new life for women, for children, for the planet. She will call it ‘Albino Lives I,II,II' and so onto infinity. What really happens is not a product of the artist’s intentions and projects only. The dancing maenads and the clarity of her new vision is further on once again celebrated through the authority of Leila’s old teacher from Russia - a figurative painter who argues that the artist is a seer and a prophet. The legacy left for Leila is that the artist needs to learn not how to paint but how to see, because if an artist can see, the painting comes by itself - p.299/XVII.
Yet most of the so-called artists in the book are blind. Perhaps that is why Jong’s emphasis on the capacity to see is so closely linked with the flying metaphor and the magic image of the air. The whole point of painting is to capture the air, the light shimmering in the air between the artist and her/his pursuit, because only then the seeing artist is painting the ‘dance of the molecules, the dance of the molecules that made up what we call ‘real’. This concentration on the dance irrevocably rings the bell of the dancing maenads as another key image in Leila’s career.
Not surprisingly 'The Albino Lives' are threatened with destruction by Dart for their provocative clarity. It once again indicates that creating and art making is not an easy job. You need to pay the price of being disturbed and ridden by guilt. Dart’s last visit to Leila’s sacred place - her studio-silo, ends up with the poeticism of a non-pathetic tear:
Then wordlessly, we get up, separate, and Dart goes down the silo stairs again. I pick up my brush and paint a highlight on one of the maenads’s cheek. A tear. But only one. And Dart is gone. 290/XI
Copyright © : Iliyana Nedkova,1996-7
N.Paradoxa : Issue No.6, 1998