Leonora Carrington

Mary Leonora Carrington (born April 6 1917 in England, died May 25 2011 in Mexico City) was a Surrealist artist.

Quotes

completed 1950, published in English in 1976

When Carmella gave me the present of a hearing trumpet she may have foreseen some of the consequences. (first line)

Houses are really bodies. We connect ourselves with walls, roofs, and objects just as we hang on to our livers, skeletons, flesh and bloodstream. (p13)

"I am never lonely...Or rather I never suffer from loneliness. I suffer much from the idea that my loneliness might be taken away from me by a lot of mercilessly well meaning people. Of course I never hope that you will understand me, so all I ask is that you do not imagine that you are persuading me into something when you are actually forcing me against my will." (p18)

Strange how the bible always seems to end up in misery and cataclysm. I often wondered how their angry and vicious God became so popular. Humanity is very strange and I don’t pretend to understand anything, however why worship something that only sends you plagues and massacres? and why was Eve blamed for everything? (p20)

If I remember correctly writers usually find some excuse for their books, although why one should excuse oneself for having such a quiet and peaceful occupation I really don't know. Military people never seem to apologize for killing each other yet novelists feel ashamed for writing some nice inert paper book that is not certain to be read by anybody. Values are very strange, they change so quickly I can’t keep track of them. (p21)

“...I believe in inspiration, an inspired conversation between two people with some mysterious affinity can bring more joy into life than even the most expensive kind of clock. Unfortunately there are very few inspired people and one has to fall back on one’s own store of vital fire, this is most exhausting especially, as you know, I have to work day and night even if all my bones ache and my head is swimming and I am fainting with fatigue and nobody understands my mortal fight to keep on my feet and not to lose my inspired joy of life even if I do have palpitations of the heart and they drive me like a poor beast of burden I often feel like Joan of Arc so dreadfully misunderstood and all those terrible cardinals and bishops prodding her poor agonized mind with so many unnecessary questions. I can’t help feeling some deep affinity with Joan of Arc and I often feel I am being burned at the stake just because I have always refused to give up that wonderful strange power I have inside me that becomes manifested when I am in harmonious communication with some other inspired being like myself.” (p25)

Before taking up the actual facts of my experience, I want to say that the sentence passed on me by society at that particular time was probably, surely even, a god-send, for I was not aware of the importance of health, I mean of the absolute necessity of having a healthy body to avoid disaster in the liberation of the mind. More important yet, the necessity that others be with me that we may feed each other with our knowledge and thus constitute the Whole…The time had not come for me to understand. What I am going to endeavor to express here with the utmost fidelity was but an embryo of knowledge. (from first page)

I am afraid I am going to drift into fiction, truthful but incomplete, for lack of some details which I cannot conjure up today and which might have enlightened us. This morning, the idea of the egg came again to my mind and I thought that I could use it as a crystal to look at Madrid in those days of July and August 1940—for why should it not enclose my own experiences as well as the past and future history of the Universe? The egg is the macrocosm and the microcosm, the dividing line between the Big and the Small which makes it impossible to see the whole. To possess a telescope without its other essential half—the microscope—seems to me a symbol of the darkest incomprehension. The task of the right eye is to peer into the telescope, while the left eye peers into the microscope. (August 24, 1943)

Typically, young women of her class were expected to marry someone rich and titled, but she rebelled almost from childhood...She was a wonderful mother to those children and a treasure for Mexico and for me...She made a decision to live her own life and not the life that was expected of her. Or perhaps she followed a vocation more than she made a decision. I am filled with admiration for her integrity—defending it against the rules of a social class that prevented gifted people from becoming all that they had in them to become. Carrington never gave in...She defended her integrity from the beginning of her life in a very blunt way
- Elena Poniatowska Interview with The Paris Review (2018)

Widely read in alchemical writings, a regular pilgrim since 1971 to the lamas in exile from Tibet, analysed by followers of Jung, and loyal to a fierce and personal brand of feminist idealism, Leonora Carrington never altogether sheds in her quest for wisdom a wonderful, saving mischievousness. Her great friend and collector Edward James wrote over her door in Mexico, "This is the house of the Sphinx." A sphinx, yes, but a sphinx who sets riddles not to confound or mock but to provoke laughter and open doors in the chambers of the mind, where love and fear and the other passions have their seat. She has said, "I try to empty myself of images which have made me blind": in many ways she is breaking spells which blind others' sight too, although the landscape she travels remains a place enchanted.
- Marina Warner 1987 introduction to The House of Fear

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Leonora Carrington