Kiesler's Egg and the Hall of Superstitions

     During the whole of a human lifetime, Kiesler remained hiding
in the solitude of New York, and he roosted.  Like Christopher Columbus,
his head was full of eggs that he roosted on day and night.  He brooded
upon one with particular care until the egg of eggs hatched from the egg
and overshadowed the gross constructions of our architecture.
     In his egg, in these spheroid, egg-shaped structures, a human being
can now take shelter and live as in his mother's womb.
     This egg-shaped house joins the elements together perfectly.  It rests
on the earth, it floats on water, it blazes in fire, it slides through the
air.  It is created to melt harmoniously into continuity and eternity.
     It has surpassed those primitive constructions of human bones--
virgin-forest skyscrapers, those pitiful materialist cubes.

     Man has broken with nature.  Now, anxiety-ridden, he flees nature.
Fear has caused him to discover madness.  Fear has made him create cities,
countries, and all the rest of his diabolical inventions.
     Kiesler wants to cure man of his anxieties and cramps, and have him
re-enter nature easy and free.  He wants to rescue man's soul from petrification.

     In the Hall of Superstitions at the Surrealist Exhibition of 1947,
Kiesler is showing us the invasion of anxiety.
     Confusion, insanity, and superstition rise up and pullulate pale as
chalk, surging up from the bottomless lake in which Max Ernst's cherished,
wicked, and shiny children seethe and swarm, voracious, showing their
pitiless teeth, the bottomless lake in which an indefinite dark green
spawns and threatens to multiply infinitely.
     A hairy light strikes the visitor.
     An iron cough resounds.
     Petrified days click on their coat hangers.
     Suddenly the visitor is surrounded by cosmic retinas.
     The food of death slides along rails of flesh.
     An inscription by Miró, who is probably telling us about a bullfight
in which a star is being put to death, drifts through the soul's milky way.
     In the middle of black draperies, a giant dot of snow rises against
bad influences.
     A skeleton of ashes, rising slender and dry on the edge of a lake,
has swallowed his own skull.
     The Cross, the Gibbet, Jubilations, Lamentations are the signs of
the Totem Monument.  A tiny instrument, the stick with which the
hide-bedizened cave lord lit a fire, inspires the most tragic sign.
His discovery led to the cruel vanity of man.  Cretinized, man now
dances the dance of the fear of death.  How did this sin, this fall
come about?  The answer to this question is merely its echo, its repetition.
     In the black draperies Kiesler has left openings in certain places.
Through one of these openings, a Euclid by Max Ernst stares at us with
caterpillar eyes across a vine leaf.  His cheeks look like a bird's-eye
view of a flagstone square.  Euclid loved the surrogates of the palpable
world.  He walked about on a plain that wasn't a plain, just as we believe
ourselves to be bodies, but aren't.
     The Ariadne thread that Kiesler so carefully laid out through the
Surrealist Exhibition will ultimately lead us to an easier life, a more
luminous one in which man will be conscious of the brief span of time
that is his on earth.  He will no longer behave like a rabid dog.  If
man stopped concentrating on vile actions, small talk, and frog croakings,
he would soon peacefully lose himself in the clouds.
     Since 1934 Kiesler has been using only waves for his eggs.  His
"end-less" houses sing and are redolent like the blue nest of daylight.
In his "end-less" houses the soul of man plays a greater part than his
body.  The Immaterial and the Holy act and speak powerfully as in André
Breton's Ode to Charles Fourier. 

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