The Brooklyn Rail

Leonora Carrington wrote The Stone Door in the early 1940s in Mexico City, but the novel wasn’t published until 1977. This month, NYRB Classics brings the Surrealist dream logic of Carrington’s vision to a wider audience. Reading this work requires suspending one’s own vision—just as a reader can’t really read The Red Book without first putting on Carl Jung’s spectacles. Where Carrington swerves from Jung is in attempting to dismantle the one-to-one correspondence of symbolism and move into a stranger space. For example, a stone door presents a paradox of symbolic meaning: the stone (solid, immovable, foreclosing, masculine) versus the door (liminal, fluid, latent, feminine). In this way, Carrington’s novel feels more like a dream that’s been fed a diet of dreams, a second-order interpretation of the world, perfect for reading aloud on a humid summer night.

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The dream left a sensation of such bitter loss that I felt life could only be lived in sleep. Occupations like washing, dressing, eating and talking became so laborious that the sun revolved more slowly on its orbit. Every human creature I saw filled me with repugnance, till I did not dare approach the window to look into the street. When anyone chanced to knock on the door I hid, shuddering with horror in the bathroom. I have never loved my fellow beings but that day the very sight of them became tedious. As long as the light lasted my nerves chattered like parakeets; little by little darkness came and the suffering was less acute. When I saw the lamps’ light in the street I went to bed and shortly found myself back in Mesopotamia.

Standing on a hill and looking back along the road I saw the city of tombs still visible in the distance. Before me the road continued like a dusty ribbon whose borders were marked by heaps of broken sculpture and miscellaneous rubbish such as partially unwrapped mummies in different stages of mutilation, painted tablets in every known and unknown language, books and parchments dried into convulsive gestures, old shoes, sandals and boots and any number of pots and casks, urns and dishes in whole or small pieces.

As I walked slowly along the road I examined these rich heaps of rubbish, stopping now and again to root about, putting anything that happened to please me in my sack.

The only tracks in the road leading away from the city were my own. A constant stream of beings passed by all bent on the same destination. Their appearance was confused and some were transparent. There were animals, vegetables, men and women. Some of them had an individual outline but others were joined like siamese twins in two’s or three’s or in greater numbers, forming geometrical shapes and objects such as five-, six-, eight-, nine- or twelve-sided polygons, triangles, squares, circles, or kitchen utensils and articles of furniture. I saw a five-legged table composed of two terriers, a field of daffodils and three middle-aged women in an embrace. Flapping over them was the carcass of a sea lion.

The motley throng streamed by without noticing me. I supposed they must be ghosts.

After walking some distance putting this and that in my sack I became hungry, and sat down on a Druid’s head to eat the funeral cake I had been given in payment for my story. It was hard and dry and difficult to eat. I would have thanked my destiny for a cup of cold water instead, but no liquid was in sight, so I ate what I could and put the rest in my sack for hard times.

Looking back along the road I saw that a vague shape was forming in the distance and advancing in my direction. This gave me some hope for a companion along the lonely road. The thing or person was difficult to define; as it approached it became larger, but it remained a vague form. Only when this fluid and embryonic shape was within a few yards of me could I distinguish a perfect oval containing a moving object within. A light from the center of the object threw out five rays, forming a star. The oval hopped along like somebody walking on one foot, though it did not lack grace.

“That,” I said aloud, “is the Egg. The Egg within the Star, the Star within the Egg.”

These words seemed appropriate, for it hesitated a few yards away and hopped nimbly onto a painted tombstone, where it perched.

“Our meeting must explain why I lost the black-bearded King. That I know.”

This produced no effect on the Egg so I realized that I must dive deeper to find the right words. When I could utter these words the reply would follow as fatally as day follows night.

Taking a small trowel out of my sack I began to dig in the roadside for the word that would open the secret of the Egg. As I worked I repeated all the long words I knew such as federation, conspicuous, anthropology and metamorphosis. The Egg did not budge an inch. I tried one syllable words like am, art, it and off. The Egg trembled very slightly, without communicating any meaning to me. I then understood that the word to address such a primitive and embryonic body would have to come from a language buried at the back of time. The very moment that I understood this my trowel grated on a hard thing in the earth, and with a cry of joy I pulled a small pipe out of the ground. I put it to my lips and blew some notes which started low but mounted the scale rapidly till it reached such a high pitch that my ear could scarcely catch the thin sound. An umbilical cord unrolled slowly out of the center of the Egg and wriggled along the ground towards me. When it reached my left foot I picked up the end and knotted it firmly around my neck. Thus united, the Egg and I started along the road in Indian file. As we advanced I played the pipe. Our movements coincided in a kind of elementary dance, facilitating the journey so much that we travelled far before I felt any fatigue.

A lonely pair we made, the Egg and I, in the great dusty plain of Mesopotamia.

So long as I made my thin tune on the pipe the Egg hopped along behind me willingly, but if I hesitated for a moment it would halt and the umbilical cord would tighten around my neck.

We continued for a long time, until I noticed that the music became slower and the notes lengthened, sounding finally more like shrieks than music. The Egg was drastically affected: the Star stretched and broke the oval contour; each one of the five prongs became a sense and each sense shot out five bright rays which bit into the earth and up into the air like long sharp teeth. The umbilical cord withered and dried till it hung about my neck like a piece of straw.

The Star and the Egg had become a small white child who stood frail and luminous in the road. All that remained of the Star was a five-pronged crown of root and bone on the child’s head.

The music had not been still for long when the child spoke: “Be fed by my death; I am half born but my death will be complete. All the colors on Earth have made me white; all the animals under the sky have made my body, but my soul is the rope which hangs from the half circle of light into the half circle of darkness above and below the horizon.” When it had spoken the White Child wrapped its hair around its face and walked on ahead of me. I followed in silence, knowing that our steps would go towards the person that I must find.

The country changed gradually into hills and ravines. Occasionally a wan tree became visible here and there. The painted tombstones thinned out to single dots and were replaced by rocks carved into animals or people or sometimes left in their jagged shapes.

The Child and I were alone. The ghosts had disappeared. As we advanced I began to notice high mountains on the horizon, their peaks white with snow. Then far along the road the dust rose and I could distinguish six horsemen riding hell-for-leather in our direction.

The six men were dressed in colored rags and metal jewels, their shaggy horses covered with embroidered blankets haphazardly affixed with chains or rope. As they came they hurled armfuls of Bohemian glass on the road, making a great clatter. The noise of broken glass and the thud of the horses’ feet delighted them, and as they ground to a halt in front of the White Child each man shrieked with mirth in six different keys. The foremost of the six men held aloft a wheel. I counted the spokes. They were eight, like a spider’s eight legs.

“I am Calabas Kö,” said the man who held the wheel. “We have come out of Hungary to take the White Child.”

“Then we must move in time,” it piped. “I am afraid.”

Whereupon one of the men grabbed the Child and tied it to his horse’s girth by its hair and they whirled around to gallop back towards the snow-topped mountains.

The morning has been tedious. I have not been able to move away from the window, watching the street, waiting for some sign outside my dreams.

The street is empty and foreign except at night. Outside everything is tainted.

How shall I ever get to the market to buy lunch?

The sign can only appear when I have ceased to need my will. I lurk around the mystery murmuring maledictions on the feebleness of my words.

Hardly daring to touch what I want to say, yet knowing that if I had enough space around me it would be a piercing shriek. White, long, sharp as the crack of a whip.

This is a love letter to a nightmare.

For centuries they dressed up love for easy digestion in the body of a fat little boy with wings, pale blue bows and anaemic looking flowers. Behind this bland decoration Love snarled its rictus through the ages. With shrieks of adoration it flung itself on human breasts, “to crush you, to suck your life away. I cannot drag my own weight over the crust of the earth so you must carry me on your back so that in time you will be cripped with my weight.” These words are in every heart in the mating season.

Is this the result of loving a fellow creature? Somewhere I am frightened of my loneliness and feel incomplete with myself.

Love, goat, tiger. . .

Blind Jug, tell the future?

A time, a date, when?

“Midnight,” replies the Blind Jug.

Under what sign, Blind Jug?

“Under the sign of Fire and of Air, Ivory and Milk.” How many will be to see the Sign? “Four, the Moon.”

And how shall we know?

“Urin, the microscopic ocean.”

In some mysterious way these words will enter life.

The air was rare and chill so I thought that I was already amongst the highest mountains. Heavy snow burdened the branches of the fir trees. Streaming grey clouds crept along the earth and about the rocks, leaving icy teeth where they passed.

Built into the mountainside a few yards from me was a great stone door on which was crucified an immense black parrot. As I approached I could see that the bird was still alive, though a long iron nail pierced its heart and the blood oozed out in a scarlet rope. The heavy head hung motionless between its shoulders and the hard yellow eye gave an occasional blink.

“This is the frontier of Hungary,” said my thought. “I must walk, swim, creep or sail through the Mountain Kescke to the source of the Danube which flows into Hungary from a subterranean ocean.”

The parrot screamed. It began to speak in a rapid nasal voice, but I could see in its eye that it did not understand what it said.

“Anybody who knows may enter but time begins so harness your memory.”

It repeated this phrase six times and died.

Try as I would I could find no way to open the door. I kicked and knocked and shouted: “Let me in, Let me in.”

The pipe which had enchanted the Egg into motion had disappeared. I was bitterly alone in the land of the dead, on the wrong side of the great stone door.

Several days have passed. I have only slept a few hours, an empty black sleep.

Since the death of the black parrot I have remained alone outside the stone door in the mountain, kicking and knocking and shouting: “Let me in, Let me in.”

All through the night I try to get back; to no avail, I can find no means of opening the stone door.

In the daytime I wander about the marketplace thinking, but the Indians keep their world tight and closed over a secret they have probably forgotten for centuries.

The long tentacles of vision and understanding have withdrawn and all that is left is the ragged black hole of my loss. Loss and the world around. A noisy puzzle whose solution is another puzzle noisier and more stupid. The circle widens towards nothing.

An answer is hiding somewhere, if I could only read.

A green shawl has fallen on the arm of a chair. It draws the contours of a horse, a green silk horse, a horse hiding under my shawl.

Lovers get drunk on bitter milk; I am hermaphrodite in love with one of my own dreams. Beast fed with the shade of a dry funeral cake.

Oh Satan, let me love myself again, loving the nightmare of a dead King has made me hate life.

Goodnight, goodnight, I am lost forever in the country of the dead.