"In vain I struggle with a man whose eyes are shifty and very gentle. Each time that I get him in my grip, he frees himself by gently spreading his arms; his arms are unimaginably strong: they are like irresistible levers, gigantic cranes which rise above the swarming shipyards, floating fortresses with towers heavy as the breasts of antediluvian mammals. In vain I struggle with the man of gentle looks, who eyes me suspiciously; from each hold, no matter how strong, he frees himself gently, smiling by hardly spreading his arms...

"It is my father who appears thus in the dreams. Yet, when I look at him, he is not at all as I saw him when I was a child. And still it is he; there is something more far-away about the expression on his face, something which existed perhaps when I saw him and which, now, after more than 20 years, appears to me on all its force when I see him again in dream.

Chirico With His Mother

The Child's Brain (portrait of his father)

"Then the dream lights up again. I find myself on a piazza of great metaphysical beauty; it is the piazza Cavour in Florence, perhaps; or perhaps also one of the very lovely squares in Turin; or perhaps neither... above which are apartments, shutters closed, columned balconies.

"On the horizon, hills with villas; above the plazza the sky is very clear, washed by the storm, but one feels nevertheless that the sun is setting because the shadows of the house and the rare passers-by are very long on the piazza. I look toward the hills over which loom the last clouds of the fleeing storm; here and there the villas are all white with something tomb-like and solemn about them when seen against the deep black curtain of the sky.

'Melancholy' by Giorgio de Chirico.

Mystery and Melancholy of a Street

"All at once I find myself under the portico amongst a group of people who jostle one another at the door of a pastry shop, the shelves of which are stocked with multicolor cakes; people crowd around and look inside, as they do at the door of a pharmacy when a passer-by injured or sick is brought in from the street; but while looking inside, I see my father from behind, standing in the middle of the pastry shop, eating a cake; yet I do not know whether it is for him that people are crowding at the door; a certain anxiety then comes over me and I want to flee towards the west, a new, more hospitable land.

"At the same time I fumble in my clothes for a dagger, because it seems to me that my father is in danger in this pastry shop and I feel that if I go in, I would need a weapon as when one enters the lair of thieves. My anxiety grows.

"Suddenly the crowd presses in on me and carries me towards the hills; I have the impression that my father is no longer in the pastry shop, that he has fled, that he is going to be pursued like a thief and I waken in anxiety over this thought."

EDITOR'S NOTE

Revisiting Chirico's art in light of this early dream full of loneliness, anxiety and melancholy, full of long shadows cast down ominously empty streets, it's hard to deny it's all prefigured here. "Agonizing quests along darkened streets" indeed.

SOURCE: La Revolution Surrealiste (1924), quoted in Marcel Jean 1980:165, translated by Benjamin Kilborne and Lydia Nakashima Degarrod for their article "As in a Dream" in Dreamworks: an Interdisciplinary Quarterly, v.3 no.4, 1983, p.281

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