Sunday surprise addendum: Magritte and Montparnasse
[ by Charles Cameron — Lawrence Weschler in the same NYorker issue as Fredric Dannen ]
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In the same issue of the New Yorker as Fredric Dannen‘s piece on the Green Dragons referenced in my earlier post, as it happens, and indeed printed on the same pages, is one of Lawrence Weschler‘s brilliant Convergences — his term for what I call DoubleQuotes.
I’ve composed my own version out of the same two images, here:
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William Routt, in his The Madness of Cinema and Thinking Images, has this to say:
Writing under the heading “Convergences” in The New Yorker of November 16th, 1992, Lawrence Weschler explains that a train photographed dangling alongside a brick building “overshot the Gare Montparnasse, in Paris, on October 22, 1895”. What he cannot explain, and what he only points to in the way I have pointed to the coincidence between Lindsay and Deleuze, is the coincidence between this photograph and René Magritte’s well-known 1938 painting of an engine coming out of a fireplace (which is called “Time Transfixed”). The photo hallucinates the painting and the painting the photo. Their connection is delirious.
Delirious or delicious, I couldn’t let the occasion of my discussing that New Yorker issue pass without praising Weschler’s eye for the telling matcvh of images.
Image sources:
Rene Magritte, Time Transfixed, 1938 Levy & fils, Train wreck at Montparnasse Station
