SINCE I STILL CAN LOVE

BORIS VIAN AND THE FIFTH ELEMENT

Boris Vian in the centenary of his birth Facing the encyclopedic quantity of novels and poems written on a timeless argument like love, we do not need any explanations. Literature is the most congenial art to describe and to express feelings of love, as it reflects, like a mirror, amorous conditions in the course of the centuries, from the antique myths to contemporaneity. Each epoch traces love from diverse cultural and sociological points of view, from the Platonic concept to cathartic practice, from sexual passion to romantic love, from sublime affection to neurotic obsession and violent destruction. There are infinite folds in the narrative fan of love. Let us think of examples like “Orlando Furioso” by Ludovico Ariosto, “Vita Nova” by Dante Alighieri, “Romeo and Juliet” by William Shakespeare, “Jane Eyre” by Charlotte Bronte, “Madame Bovary” by Gustave Flaubert, “Anna Karenina” by Lev Tolstoj, “Due” by Irène Némirovsky or ”Be my knife” by David Grossman. Everything has been imagined. Everything has been written. So does it make sense to write about love in modern times? * “They are breaking the world” from the book “I wouldn’t want to die”, Ed. New Compton.

And nevertheless French writer Boris Vian, at the age of twentyseven, wrote in the preface of his novel ““L’Écume des Jours” (in the English versions: “Foam of the Daze” and Froth on the Daydream”) in 1947: there are only two things in life that really count: love in all its forms, with lovely girls, and the music of New Orleans and of Duke Ellington. All the rest may disappear as it is ugly. Two famous authors of the 20th century paid tribute to this magic love story. One is Raymond Quenau who considers the novel one of the most heartrending of modern times while Daniel Pennac resumes the plot in his epilogue with these words: The love narrated by Vian is the love that saves everything, including our own destiny. This is the story of Colin and Chloé who meet on a party, fall in love at first sight and get married in the course of a few days.

Colin and Chloé in the film “Mood Indigo” by Michel Gondry, 2013

Coming back from their honey moon, Chloé gets sick. In her lungs a terrible disease has settled down, a water lily which renders her breath terribly painful. This mortal flower can only be defeated by the perfume and the freshness of other flowers. Still in love but getting more and more desperate and poor, Colin accepts the hardest and most unimaginable works but his efforts are invain. The final pages of the novel are indoubtedly memorable, describing Colin and Chloé’s apartment which gets more and more limited and does not let the sun rays pass when death comes closer and their love ends.

Manifesto Le W:Halll Centre Culturel de Woluwe Saint Pierre, Brussels.

With this cult book eclectic genius Vian, pushed by an ardent desire to live, anticipates his remarkable heritage to his readers, this extraordinary artistic and intellectual capital marked by crossing various disciplines which falls completely out of the rules. Written in 1946 after the end of the Second World War, the novel expresses a ferocious critic in face of capitalistic society, his disdain of wastefulness and money, his pacifist attitude, and in the end the feature that characterized his short life: his illness. The poetical water lily consuming Chloé’s lungs, is the illness that

consumes his heart. Vian dies from a cardiac arrest in 1959 during the screening of his film. In spite of his short life, there was enough time to get graduated in engineering, to write cult novels and an infinite quantity of poems, to be member of the College of Pataphysics, to compose and sing more than five hundred songs, to be an actor, to play the trumpet and to introduce the Jazz of New Orleans to Paris.

Boris Vianplaying the trumpet Born in 1920 in Ville d’Avray, Vian is contemporaneously son and father of his own period, absorbing its tendencies and trying to revive these in the most prolific aspects. With his diversified artistic production, between music, literature and theatre, he experiments any kind of innovation, analysing the deep layers of human spirit in an unusual manner, demonstrated in his celebre love story “L’Écume des Jours” which emanates felicity just as much irony, tragedy, and agony.

The plot and its setting are immersed in a surreal undefined atmosphere. The places and the objects have a secret life, like the animals and the flowers. Each page of the novel recalls a certain something of our imagery and each page reveals a density of meanings hidden behind the curtain of a plot of love and death. There are numerous keys of interpretation but if we want to master the multiple meanders of Vian’s semantic universe, we should

concentrate on the water lily, queen of natural ponds, surrounded by many legends, a symbol of pureness which gets transformed into a flower of the evil. And also on many other flowers that enrich the novel’s scape longing for an analysis through the prism of culture. Art cannot change the world, but it can communicate and bear witness to the society for reflection. Artists are witnesses of their time and probably they perceive certain changes before common people do so. Looking back in history of literature, it becomes quite clear that the connection between love, disease and epidemics represents a topic which was treated by celebre authors of all the times, from Alessandro Manzoni in “The Betrothed” to Gabriele Garcia Marquez in “Love in the time of Cholera”, though we discover a clear evolution in the social representation of the disease.

Anatomic drawing of a water lily in the lungs

On the one hand it deals with metaphor and narration, penitence and existential punishment of a world collapsing on itself, on the other hand, in the Eighties, American intellectual Susan Sontag undermines the representation of disease liberating it forever from any kind of metaphors in her legendary book ”Illness as Metapher” (1978).

Lung Cancer At the research of the red thread which represents the semantic entropy of the novel best, Elisabeth Vermeer conceived an exhibition project for Design for Everyday Life, emblematically entitled “Kind of blue”* The multifaceted scenario, completed by collateral events and performances, is a passionate homage to her preferred novel “L’Écume des Jours / Foam on the Daze” which she read repetitively in her life. In coherence with her usual style of project design and facing a literary text mostly above the lines, the curator chose a totally unexpected key of access to Vian’s sensual and magic universe and its dreamlike surrealistic atmosphere. The narrative structure of the fairy tale, following Vermeer’s opinion, can easily be transferred to the stage of our present, in spite of neologisms and anagrams. Tracing parallels between the individual and the collective fate, one perceives the same impotence to copy with an unknown disease that consumes human energies and resources of our personal world and of the global one without any logic. One more reason to get to know the author and the novel in its shocking modernity. * Kind of blue is the title of a masterpiece by Miles Davies he recorded together with John Coltrane in 1959. Jazz musician Vian met both, Miles Davies and Duke Ellington.

In “Kind of blue” everything starts from nature, like in Vermeer’s previous projects and everything starts from the plants that play a crucial role in the couple’s story and in everybody’s life. Entire pages of the novel describe plants, flowers, like living elements of splendid beauty. But with the plot’s progression flowers assimilate traces of negativity. In affinity with the places where the plot is set, flowers express their own lives, change appearance and function following to the events and the protagonists’ actions, from the first kiss to the wedding, from the disease to death. Fresh flowers fade away, joyous celebrative flowers become funeral.

The two heroes correspond to the two fundamental elements of the life of plants: water and light. Chloé belongs to the universe of the waters and malefic water lily inhabiting her lungs gets nourished by water. Colin’s character is caressed by the Sun, there is no trace of humidity in sync with his personality’s solar spirit, the hedges and the bent trees. His home is decorated with mimosa. For the celebration of the wedding Colin transforms their room into a paradise in blossom, plenty of lilies, white gladiolus flowers, red roses and blooming white buds.

Colin and Chloé in their wedding scene in the film “Mood Indigo” by Michel Gondry, 2013, with Audrey Tautou and Romain Duris

The first part of the book abounds with floral beauty, grace, the splendour of harmony and the delicate perfume which accompanies the everyday life of the protagonists and determines the aesthetics of the places which they inhabit and the refined style of their look. The second part is dominated by the water lily’s appearance.

Sick Chloé (Audrey Tautou) in her room

To keep Chloé alive, enormous quantities of flowers are necessary, roses, hyacinths, narcissus, violets, gladiolus flowers, pansies, orchids, peach tree branches in flower. Her room overflows from flowers, but there is no way to change her destiny. But why a water lily of all flowers? Beside botany, ancient history may help us with this as it confirms numerous legends about the water lily’s origin and the meaning of this water plant.

One of its legends arrives from the Amazon and resembles to the mythological episode of a nymph who gets transformed into a flower. In Egyptian culture water lilies accompany the dead as funeral decoration. For the Greeks, the water lily in its absolute pureness was the symbol of not reciprocated love and also of Platonic love. In botany the water lily reigns all the natural ponds like the indigenous species, Nymphaea Alba and Nymphaea Candida, with delicate white flowers. There are hundreds of hybrid species in different colours and shades, yellow, cream, fuchsia, red, amber, peach, with star-shaped or round petals.

Nymphaea Alba

The water lily, beside the numerous species we have already mentioned, is the authentic heroine of “Kind of blue” and of the beautiful site specific water installations created by Francesco Geronazzo. Born in Veneto but transplanted to Margaret River in Australia – to stay with the love of his life, the artist has been engaged for a long time in narrating the universe of the plants, flowers and nature by means of a particular imagery which is the result of his research oriented towards vegetal morphology. But his method of redrawing such a variety of plants goes beyond the traditional botanic drawing, as Geronazzo reduces the formal register into rigorous minimalism he expresses either by means of etching, drawing and sculpture. In his laboratory he studies the plants’ sections, he elaborates their shapes, inspired by tropical monumental water lilies with the objective of producing a number of artworks floating in the water which simulate the surface of a vegetal fabric of water lilies in a pond.

Leaves of a water lily in a pond

This very complex procedure modules the morphology of around 50 species of water lilies in the world. Their leaves extend to remarkable dimensions until a diameter between 25 and 30 cm,

and a plant can join a covering of 120 to 140 cm of the water mirror. On the surface every leaf has a subtle layer of water repellent wax to offer respiration, while the structure on the lower side permits the plant to float in a balanced way. In compliance to these qualities Geronazzo shaped a certain quantity of lightweight elements in acetate similar to the water lily’s leaves, by differing their size. Corresponding to the morphological diversity their colours mark a perceptive transformation analogous to Chloé’s disease.

Francesco Geronazzo, preparatory works for the environmental installation “Natural Elements”

in his laboratory in Australia, 2020

The curator’s privileged project areas are botanical gardens with ponds of water lilies, historical and monumental fountains, and parks with small lakes that represent ideal places to implant choreographies inspired by flowers. To favour the coexistence of art dedicated to nature in spaces inhabited by plants, like ponds and green houses, corresponds to the curator’s intent to realise a site specific unique and totalizing opus that reflects the research of the unitary principle that governs the work of Man and the work of Nature.

This is the precise outline the curator desires to present to the public, a possibility to live some poetical, magical and surreal moments connected with the symbolism of flowers, with their history and the story of the exhibition venues, narrating art and botany, and divulgating the history of other precious collections.

Pond with water lilies in Claude Monet’s Garden in Giverny

The exhibition project gets completed by a series of etchings in copper engraving technique on textile fabric. These indoor elements can be showcased on a wall and represent kind of an inventory the shapes of the leaves vary and the inventory of all the flowers listed in the novel. “L’Écume des Jours” is full of quotes regarding the most diverse aspects of creative botany. Flowers are described like “animated beings” with temperaments and emotions, determining the atmosphere of the plot evolving from paragraph to paragraph, from chapter to chapter. Flowers appear from zero, like blue freesia from a leak of water, azure and pink orchids grow like a lightning on a frozen soil. Clothes are full of silver sprouts while the air smells strawberries, jasmine and carnation. When Colin desperately searches for work, he accepts to brood the barrels of rifles which can only be shaped with the help of the temperature of a human body, but with all the love he has he only cranks out barrels with steel roses.

Geronazzo’s contribution is certainly a visionary one on the interpretative level, on the ecological level, on the human level. The first prototypes in fabric, looking like digital imprints, indistinct radiographies or viral shapes, were generated some months ago when the world could not yet imagine a pandemic caused by an unknown virus. Like Boris Vian who, seventy years ago, wrote about a lung disease that takes away the breath. In this framework we might recall other dark periods in history we can revive by reading books about the Plague of Athens, the Black Plague in the Medieval Age, the Spanish Flu of 1918 and the Asian Flu of 1957.

Francesco Geronazzo, “Natural Elements” Pigments and chalcography ink on fabric, 2020

What remains, is the universal message of love that unites us in a recovered generosity of feelings towards the others. Let us decline, together with Colin, his intense desire to love: Je voudrais être amoureux, dit Colin. Tu voudrais être amoureux. Il voudrait idem (être amoureux). Nous, vous, voudrions, voudriez être. Ils voudraient également tomber amoureux…

Love is the source of any vital process, and also of reconstruction. Love dies and blossoms like nature. When Colin is asked what he does for a living, his answer is charming and disarming at the same time : j’apprends des choses et j’aime Chloé. To learn and to love, this means a lot in times like these.

Francesco Geronazzo, “Natural Elements” Pigments and chalcography ink on fabric, 2020

Links and references:

Trailer Mood Indigo by Michel Gondry https://www.videodetective.com/movies/mood-indigo-us-

/890286#.Xm5b9rGKrNw.link

Boris Vian www.borisvian.org

Francesco Geronazzo www.geronazzo.com

Kind of blue ©Elisabeth Vermeer, 2019/20

www.designforeverydaylife.com