by Lillian Deja Snortland
Winter of 2024, I find myself standing before Dorothea Tanning’s painting Notes for an Apocalypse at the MoMA in Manhattan.
Tanning depicts a series of taffy-like mounds that resemble composites of human bodies. In this work, Tanning corrupts commonplace purity in a delicious way. The description plaque reads, “The notion of domestic order, symbolized by the white tablecloth…Bodies and limbs are so contorted that they are difficult to distinguish and, at times, nearly dissolve into the tablecloth.” Individual figures (approximately three of them) are twisting each other and the tablecloth. The tiniest figure, with thick hands fisting their skull, writhes in pain in the bottom left-hand corner. While this creature is green and bloodless, two other assemblages of body parts are closer to shades of a sunset ablaze with pollution. Though they are abject and craven, I view them as I would exalted angels.
My eye is drawn to a contorted torso connected to a long arm, and its hand pointed toward the top right corner of the frame; almost desperately, the hand holds a circular, globular object, which might be an homage to a head, or a heart. This center is neon salmon pink—a flash of pulsating red passion amongst the paler bodily landscapes.
In spite of the surreal disguise, I not only recognize the obfuscated object, but I mourn its loss in my own life. The object’s color is passion, and its shape is desire.
Tanning, in the tradition of many surreal artists before her, treats the body as a diary for some of the most complicated impulses and queries that the human brain can conjure.
Surrealist aesthetics are free and wanton in all the ways I wish I might myself be. And although the figures in Tanning’s painting are agonizing, I also believe that the greatest accomplishment of Notes for an Apocalypse is tapping into the tragedy of ecstasy.
I have a complicated relationship with embodying ecstasy. I’m more familiar with dissociation from my body. Dissociation, for me, becomes a stiff coldness in my heart, like frost creeping across a scraggly tree. I’m reaching for the sun, for light, for heat.
When I remember my own ecstasy, I remember a person who broke my trust. I remember him folding me over myself, my palms scraping up against rough tree bark, and the cold dew of early morning wetting my shoes and socks.
It was our last evening before our term break. I would not see him again for weeks. After we’d stayed up late together in a dorm lounge, we went outside in the dark to the grassy hills of the college’s arboretum, and we made love, ferocious as always. I looked at this man often, but he faced me toward the tree. That position seemed right to me then, carving into my memory with a sharp, keening seriousness. Gray mist and light blue warning swirled in my vision as the sun started to come up, announcing the end like a herald.
We were an oil painting; I was a nymph in the forest; we were iconic and resounding, immortalized in time like the ashes of Vesuvius had passed over an ancient scene. In the half-dim dawn, I was Daphne in the midst of transformation, fleeing toward some natural, untouchable state, petrified by the contradiction of how good and terrible one can feel simultaneously.
The pace of this relationship left me off-kilter and chasing the high of risk. Our affair was tucked up in the pipe organ’s cavity of the music hall, amongst church pews, jammed up against the door of rooms where I practiced the cello, and in other crevasses – like rutting rats. And, of course, the forest. I believed naively that because I was called to task at any chaotic moment, overwhelming love meant tasting terror and arousal at all times.
With this boy, I was furtive, excited; I was alive.
When I tried to be loved, and that did not work out, I turned toward a facsimile of ecstasy. Desperation was red, pulsing out through the gray mist. I would empty myself of anything but him and still find I wasn’t enough to entice him to stay.
I was once a figure in Tanning’s painting. I was that heart buried in the figure’s hand, an active organ casting the color of a sunset. I also sought an active heart in lovers—a beacon, a lighthouse guiding me away from the grayish, pale, fleshy expanses that seem too long-spanning and enduring to be real—beckoning me, a stranger, home.
By way of my worst impulses, I am the heart in the hand, desperate to be crushed, begging someone to open some veins and let the air in, thinking my fear of being unwanted, when peaked, resembled ecstasy. An ecstasy screaming with the zeal of a thousand armies, pounding chests with fists, monotone chanting, grasping hands and staring up at some father on high to grant ablution. As my relationship in college showed me, I’m apparently hypnotized by the beauty of surrender.
The novel Y/N by Esther Yi explores ablution not as a body or a sin being washed clean, but as an entire psyche being absorbed into a void, supplanted by passionate meaning-making, and then obliterated. From Yi’s novel, we see that chasing ecstasy from a place of fear leads to self-destruction and ego-death.
Y/N’s main character, an unnamed Korean-American woman living in Berlin, is infatuated with, and drowning in the very idea of, a K-Pop idol named Moon. “Y/N” sometimes stands in for our protagonist in the story, short for ‘Your Name’. She could be anyone, or you, or me.
As Y/N draws closer to Moon, the protagonist tensely embodies her passion, teasing herself on the edge of ego-death:
“My ceiling, his floor—this panel of wood has been set in place so that we wouldn’t crash into each other with the violence of desire…I was not enough for myself, my body was not enough, yet I needed it, I couldn’t think or feel anything limitless without it. I curled up onto my side in rapid contraction and stuck my knuckles into my mouth to style a cry that didn’t erupt out of my throat so much as it drifted down from Moon’s room to overtake and instrumentalize me” (Yi 157).
At first, the reader might not see fear at the core of Yi’s main character. She is cleaving in her dismissals of all things unrelated to Moon. She moves from location to location, surreal scene to surreal scene, yearning to be absorbed wholly into some idea greater than herself. But she has been instrumentalized. She both desires and rejects the state beyond precipice; she both desires and rejects ecstasy. But beyond the precipice is her undoing. When she eventually does touch Moon, the stability of her focus shatters; he rejects her and belittles her for wanting what everyone else wants.
Like Tanning’s gray-bodies, Yi’s protagonist considers her own physical desire unseemly, unruly, and grotesque at times. She continuously describes an agonizing alienation from her body, such as when she attempts one of Moon’s dance moves: “My entire body exploded in pain. Limbs had to go where they couldn’t…My head behaved like its own person…It was so hostile, so independent. Out of breath, I collapsed onto the mattress.” (Yi 53).
Y/N is, like I myself once was, prostrate in a carnal sense, all-too ready to receive. For she and I, our paths toward ecstasy made us notched arrows. But an arrow means nothing without a path of flight. We can only feel when we’ve been let loose by another, aiming straight and true, unfaltering, sailing through the wind and sinking into earth or wood or flesh. The arrow is afraid of stillness. Of ugly stillness.
Before I’d encountered Notes for an Apocalypse and Y/N, I’d chased after a callous man for three years of my life. Fervor and fixation were easy to sink into; that flush, that natural overwhelm, felt oh so heady. It seemed innate and vitally human. There is a purity to feeding an open void of desire, passion, and excitement.
Abandoning control to wildness paradoxically made me feel more powerful, though I believe now it was a false and temporary vision of power, as Y/N’s protagonist discovered as well.
I was instrumentalized by ecstasy. I’d clawed for a beating heart, prostrating myself to the point of obliteration; now, on the other side of that relationship, I’m left disquieted, rebuilding shapes of passion from a new mold. I’d be lying if I said I didn’t miss the simplicity of unadulterated want. And yet, in the name of stability and self-esteem, I must recognize how a pristine tablecloth’s wrenching and the clarity of self-denial are equally tragic sides of the same coin.
I lean forward and teeter back, somewhere in the middle of these extremes. Head turned towards the lighthouse, I remember the meaning of restraint while a cold wind kisses the back of my neck.
Lillian Deja Snortland (Instagram: @chaimihai; email: ldsnortland@gmail.com) is a multidisciplinary writer of speculative fiction, poetry, and nonfiction essays. Mediums include a collaborative book, print and digital magazine, video, theater, and gallery space. She explores themes of difference, liminal spaces, fantasy, mythology, surrealism, and the imaginative feminine.
After the Art 