José Jiménez

"Where birds do not sing, what have we deprived ourselves of? Where wheat does not sprout, what can we expect? This world without love, orphan of the sun, what is it to us?"

Paul Eluard: Les Jeux de la Poupée (1939), IV.

"Où les oiseaux ne chantent pas, de quoi ne sommes-nous pas sevrés? Où les blés ne poussent pas, que pouvons-nous espérer? Ce monde, sans amour, veuf du soleil, que nous est-il?"

Paul Eluard: Les Jeux de la Poupée (1939), IV.

 

1. Cooking food, growing cereals

A Hassidic story entitled What rich people eat tells how a wealthy man went to see a zadik or spiritual leader. When the latter asked the visitor what he ate, the man answered that his tastes were very simple, and that bread, salt and water were enough for him. "What foolishness!" the zadik retorted, adding: "You rich people should eat well and drink nectar" And he did not allow the visitor to leave until he had made him promise that he would do so in the future.

Surprised by the strange advice, the zadik’s followers asked him why he had spoken to the visitor in such a manner. And the wise man answered, "If he eats meat, he will know that the poor need bread. But if he eats bread, he will imagine that the poor can eat stones."

With the profound social sense characteristic of Hassidism, the story speaks to us about the central role of bread in human nourishment. And even about something which is more important from a symbolic viewpoint, of its function as a human leveller: everybody, without exception, poor or rich, is entitled to bread.

This function of anthropological integration played by bread, of ‘humanisation’, explains its importance in the most diverse mythical or religious systems of belief, not forgetting its emblematic nature from a political perspective (‘the conquest of bread’) in the lay ideals of social emancipation typical of modern times.

The nourishment of human beings, obtained from the growing of cereal, its subsequent preparation and cooking, bread, the symbol of an alliance established since time immemorial between human beings and the fruit of the land, is the best access to the richness and complexity of meanings behind The Rhythm of Time, the beautiful multimedia installation by Patrick Mimran.

Everything is set for the meal. The banquet. The ritualistic celebration. The large pictorial panels with the phases of the sun dialogue with the food and the objects arranged on the large table as if in offering. The projections of light, the words, the sound and the music underline the dynamic nature of the process: all the senses converge sharing an inner rhythmic pattern. The video images link the past with the present, gestation with childhood, cultivation of the land with the utopia of a shared humanity.

Sounds and ways of life: words, music, colours, light... flow in front of our eyes, surrounding us in a play of metaphorical resonance. Evocation of the sun, natural light and human food in the house now destined to art, the Almudín of Valencia. An ancient building constructed with gothic forms and long time centre for the trade in cereals, its origins can be traced back to the 13^th century with its historical itinerary continuing practically to the beginning of the 20^th century. It was converted into a Palaeontological Museum from 1908 to 1989, and in recent years into a venue for art exhibitions.

Wheat, cereals and art works as forms of humanity, as nourishment for human beings, united in the arc of the image. The plastic, poetic and synaesthetic universe created by Patrick Mimran takes us to the deepest strata of anthropology. Unlike other animal species –which, on the other hand, are our brothers and sisters- human beings are characteristic for preparing their food, for "cooking" it.

In the context of myths, Prometheus stealing fire to give it to humans represents the passage from nature to culture. It does so, above all, through its symbolisation of the human dominion over that natural element which allowed the preparation of food: that is, the move from ‘the raw’ to ‘the cooked’. That move made humans definitively different from the beasts. On a parallel plane, the appearance of agriculture had the same meaning: ‘To the Greeks, cereals and in general all cultivated plants oppose wild plants as the cooked opposes the raw’ (Vernant, 1979, 69).

Once the ‘human condition’ through the cooking of food and the cultivation of the fields is fully achieved, there is another no less important "leap" for the development of what we have come to call culture. That leap is the one which takes place with the establishment of a set of norms of behaviour during meals, turning human ingestion of food into a process even further removed from the strictly "natural", animal dimension of eating. In all their diversity and variation, "Table manners" establish norms of respect towards others, allowing us to turn the act of eating into a cultural phenomenon.

It is not an exaggeration to say that in certain anthropological contexts, the cultural configuration of food allowed the establishment of a levelling of all humans amongst themselves and of all of them with the gods. Food was in this way inserted into the same context as the ritual. Like other regimented, stereotyped forms of conduct in which, by sharing all sort of experiences, humans were able to evoke the absent and the invisible. Ancestors and the Gods. Praying before eating, blessing the table in an act of thanksgiving to the divinity for the food is a sign, still in force, of the ritual origin of human food.

If we go back to the beginning of our tradition of culture, to Ancient Greece, we will notice that all the official activities in the city-state (polis) began with a sacrifice followed by a meal (Detienne, 1979, 10). In fact, the origins of culture and sacrifice share the same figure in the Titan god Prometheus.

The necessity of stealing the fire to give it to the humans comes, precisely, from the institution of sacrifice, in which, Prometheus deceitfully destined the bones and fat to the gods while keeping the flesh and innards for mankind. The episode is narrated in the Theogony by Hesiod (535-542) as follows: "It happened that when gods and mortal men separated in Mecona, Prometheus offered a huge bull he had cut up, thinking in deceiving Zeus’ intelligence. In one side, he put the skin, flesh and the rich innards with their fat, concealing them inside the stomach. He then placed the white bones with fallacious smartness, hiding them under a rich layer of fat". Men and gods "eat". However, even if there is a principle of communication in that act of the "natural" ingestion of the beasts, there is also a principle of polarity, of counter-position.

Inviting the gods to a meal, or participating in their banquets was not a simple matter. Unlike Prometheus, Tantalus was close friends with Zeus, who admitted him to Olympian banquets of nectar and ambrosia. However, this turned his head, and he ended up betraying Zeus’ secrets and stealing the divine food to share them with his mortal friends. He was, however, playing with fire, because as well as a transgression, the food of gods was totally different to the food of mortals.

However, before being discovered, Tantalus went even further. He had invited the Olympians to a banquet. Nevertheless, when he realised that the food in his ladder was insufficient, he cut his son Pelops into pieces and added his meat to the banquet for the gods. Whether it was a proof of his good will, or an attempt to put Zeus’ omniscience to test, the result was that all the immortals recognised what they had on their plates and rejected it in horror, with the exception of Demeter, who having lost her mind after losing Persephone, ate some of Pelops flesh.

Tantalus was punished by Zeus for his two acts of transgression. First, with the ruin of his kingdom; and later with eternal torment. He hangs, perennially consumed by hunger and thirst, from the branch of a fruit tree bending over a swampy lake. His unfortunate story speaks to us of the cultural importance of the regimentation of food, of what is allowed and of what is forbidden, of the relevance of taboos. And, above all, of the clear dividing line between what immortal gods eat and the food of mortal humans.

 

2. He who eats bread

In the case of Prometheus, it is his deceit which prompts Zeus to deny fire to humans. Besides, and in a parallel action, the gods hid the grain underground. The move to the condition of culture is thus represented, like in the myth, as the end of the ‘Golden Era’ and the appearance of the need to work, to cultivate the land. In order to be able to fulfil the primary objective, to have in store at home an abundance of the ‘seasoned nourishment, the grain from Demeter (Works and Days), humans have ever since had to irrigate the furrows of the land with the sweat of their brow.

Cereals and grain are obtained through work, occupying an analogous position to that of the pieces of meat in the sacrifice, ‘cereal culture is therefore the counterpart of the sacrificial ritual, its reverse’ (Vernant, 1979, 60). The same as the victim of the sacrifice, the cereal is consumed at the end of an interchange regimented by the gods. The cultivation of grain and agricultural work are conceived as a real cult from the peasant to the divinity.

On the other hand, it is that relationship with cereal food that defines human beings and differentiates them from the gods. The latter ‘do not eat bread nor drink black wine, and that is why they do not have blood and are called immortal’ (Iliad, V, 339-343), whilst Hesiod defines humans, as farmers, as ‘eaters of bread’ (Works and Days).

There is also another important parallel to be established with the sacrifice to the gods in the sphere of rituals, of ceremonies. I am referring to the festivals, decisively marking the phases of agricultural work, as well as the passing and succession of seasons, the rhythm of time. That is how Hesiod defined the situation of those who did not challenge Nike, Justice, Zeus’ daughter: ‘Hunger or ruin shall never accompany righteous men, but they shall alternate festivals with the care of the land (Works and Days).

In these celebrations, bread plays a symbolic role of the highest order: ‘the bread so frequently used in certain festivals, and offered by the attendants, tends to become by itself blessed bread’. (Gernet, 1968, 57)

The periodical nature of the festivals, parallel to the passing of the seasons, had the purpose of establishing communication between humans and the impersonal powers of nature, and of favouring their participation in ceremonies and rituals: ‘The idea of the participation of nature in mankind’s religious operations, has remained alive and is evident in agrarian cults’ (Gernet, 1968, 53).

The ceremonial banquet, the feast of food in peasant festivals, would be one of the most ancient manifestations of ritual, as Aristotle already stated in his Nicomachean Ethics (viii, 9, 1460ª): ‘Ancient sacrifices and reunions seem to have taken place after the harvest of the fruits, as an offering of the first fruit, as it was at that time when men were disposed of more leisure’. On these occasions, Aristotle pointed out, ‘honours to the gods’ were paid, at the same time as ‘moments of rest and pleasure’ were enjoyed.

Ceremonial banquets in the most ancient peasant festivals also implied the interchange and reciprocity of goods, the dominion of the ‘gift’, of donation (Gernet, 1968, 46), whose general anthropological sense was established by Marcel Mauss. Donation is experienced as a ‘present’, with the happiness caused by what is apparently ‘free’, although in fact it demands reciprocity and returned consideration.

The joyful sense of the gift, together with the idea of reciprocity, is fully perceived in Virgil: ‘happy men share amongst themselves reciprocal banquets’ (mutuaque inter se laeti conuiuia curant, the Georgics, I, 300). From here would derive ‘the notion of trade’ implied in the interchange (Gernet, 1968, 56). Nevertheless, the most important symbolic function of the whole ceremonial matter of peasant banquets, was that of ensuring ‘the return of the fruits of the land’ (Gernet, 1968, 56).

It is however necessary to underline, once again, the parallelism between sacrifice and peasant festivals, in the function of the evocation shared by the two and which means the establishing of a communication not only amongst participants and between these and the gods, but also with the dead.

In that same cultural context, and in the most remote periods of the Greek world, the living are not the only ones invited to the peasant festivals. In them, ‘in the most ancient religious background’, the dead ‘occupy a place of honour’ (Gernet, 1968, 38). The festivals, at least some of them, are defined by the celebrations of weddings, with all the corresponding associations which can be established with the ancestral rituals destined to favour and express gratitude for the fertility of the land. However, whilst these festivals usually took place at the end of Autumn, ‘the festivals of the dead were mostly celebrated at the end of Winter’. (Gernet, 1968, 41).

Walter Burkert (1972) has pointed out a structural and functional identity between sacrificial and funereal rituals, underlining the role played in both cases by the ceremonial meal. For Burkert (1972, 50), ‘the most widely used element in funereal ceremonies –so obvious that even the mention of it would seem pointless- is the role played by eating, i.e., the funereal banquet’.

It is therefore not strange that the Greek used just one word, ‘mageiros’ to name the butcher, the cook and the sacrifier. All those functions were considered to belong to the same semantic field, to a unique unity of meanings. What is determinant is the participation in the meal, and therefore ‘the offering of a victim in sacrifice is thought of and practised as a way of eating together’. (Detienne, 1979, 21).

The ceremonial banquet is, in sum, in its different manifestations, an act establishing a community, a communio. The participants, physically present or evoked, alive, dead or gods, achieve a deep unity favoured, more than anything else, by the sharing of food.

So intense is the symbolic reach of the question, that there even appears an identification of the sacrificial victim with the divinity itself. Zeus, the father of the gods, becomes a bull. An animal whose form is also adopted by Dionysus, who also appears as a child in mystic cults, in a sacred narration, in a particularly relevant myth. Whilst the god-child plays, his executioners, the Titans, covered with a mask of white earth, approach him, kill him, cut him into pieces, throw his limbs into a pot to cook them, and after that devour all but the heart. Zeus’ thunderbolt turned the Titans into smoke and ashes, the origin of human species, linked on one hand to the guilt of the Titans, and on the other to Dionysus’ divine spirituality. From the heart that was left, Zeus made the god-child reborn.

Death and rebirth, but, above all, sacrifice of the god to make the regeneration of human beings possible. In a ceremonial context where food, the ingestion of the body of the god himself plays an essential role. The parallelism with the history of Christ, the son of god, crucified to redeem the original sin of mankind through the divine assumption of human nature, is evident.

Especially relevant on a symbolic plane, is the institution of the ritual of the eucharist, where bread and wine are transformed into the body and blood of god eaten and drank by believers. It is a ceremony commemorating a very special ‘meal’: the Last Supper of Christ, the Son of God. The sacrificial death as a perspective of regeneration of life. In this case, the spiritual redemption of the whole of mankind.

These parallels were already pointed out by Henri Hubert and Marcel Mauss, in their Essai sur le sacrifice, where in reference to the myth of Dionysus, they say: ‘Transformed and sublimated, the sacrifice of the god was preserved by the Christian theology’ (Hubert/Mauss, 1899, 300). Friedrich Nietzsche however found in the counterposition between the affirmation of Dionysus’ life and Christ’s sacrifice one of the key elements of his philosophy. In any case, in the "sacrificial lamb" still designating Christ, we can identify the usual victim of a peasant’s or shepherd’s sacrifice, similar to that of Dionysus’ bull, or to any other animal symbolising ‘the spirit of wheat’.

 

3. The double, the simulacrum

Dionysus, that divinity of probable Thracian origin, who in the history of agriculture of Ancient Greece expresses a certain opposition between the cultivation of cereals and of the fruits of trees and plants, played a very important role in the celebration of meals of the living and the dead. He possesses a complex personality derived from the religious activities linked to his name. As Louis Gernet (1968, 61) affirmed: ‘the time of the year when Dionysian festivities took place was of an intense popular life with shared meals bringing happiness and consolation. But it is also the time marking the contact with the beyond, which is at the same time the world of the dead (where –according to a Hippocratic text- food comes from)".

Funereal banquets also had an important presence in all the phases of Roman culture. Amongst all the elements ornamenting Etruscan tombs from the 6^th and 5^th BC representing life in the other world, the food of the dead was the one that enjoyed the greatest duration: Of all these motifs, that of the symposium (festival of drinking), where we can see those who have left us reclined, in groups or individually, in banquets in the other world, was the one destined to remain in vogue and enjoy the longest history throughout the whole development of Roman art. (Toynbee, 1971, 12).

Besides the sacrifice and rituals of purification, the meals in honour of the dead and the offering of food in their tombs, eaten sometimes by people experiencing hunger, were fundamental in the complex Roman funerary cult (Toynbee, 1971, 50-51). Reliefs, stela, containers for ashes and altars, ornamented sarcophagi, effigies and sculptures... everything served to transpose the evocation of the dead and the ancestors to stone and marble (Toynbee, 1971, 245-281). The busts of the dead were sometimes placed in the niches in the external walls of the tombs.

The importance granted to public funerals (funus publicum) after the death of the dictator L. Cornelius Sulla in 78 BC, only exceptionally celebrated before, would later give way to grand ceremonies in the honour of the emperors (funus imperatorum), which would play an important role in their deification (Arce, 1988). Beyond the funerals, the establishing of a unitary system of representation in the period of Augustus Octavio and its political exploitation would be a key element in the universalist expansion of the Roman Empire, at the same time that it constituted a clear sign of the ‘power of images’ (Zanker, 1988).

Due to their nature of doubles, of simulacra, these images in their deepest roots, from the archaic phases of the Greek culture to the final periods of the classical culture, played a role of evocation or commemoration of those absent and of the invisible, ancestors and gods. It is precisely that function of evocation that gives sense to the public monuments in all their diversity, in all their variations, where a return to the past is always implied. Or rather, it is an attempt to maintain or bring to the present something that happened in another time and place but which must be kept alive in the memory.

This plane of evocation is where we have to locate the images, food and objects in the installation by Patrick Mimran. The Roman busts, a man and a woman, a baby, the Buddhas, the photo of Kafka, the reproduction of Van Gogh’s sunflowers... all are articulated on the offering table with the food and the test tubes, the telescope and the mapamundi. Evocations of the human body and spirit, of life’s persistence and power of regeneration. On a table that becomes a grand secular altar through its disposition, a space for the celebration of art as a shared human adventure.

Reintegrated into the sphere of the ritual, enriched by modern technological supports, the evocation through the images offers a perspective of regeneration. In a world where the banal, deception and appearance are on the rise, Mimran proposes to rescue the authenticity of the artistic work and its strength to question the superficial vision of things. A meal is not just a meal, but the symbolic place where human beings become aware of our shared identity, of what unites us in the passage through life, as well as in birth and death.

Especially determinant in this context is the presentation on the table of a jar of flour and dust surrounded by coloured wood prints alluding to the myth of Golem. The most immediate reference points of this myth in contemporary culture are in literature and in cinema. Although there are many approaches to it, those presenting greatest interest are undoubtedly the novel Der Golem, by the Austrian globetrotter Gustav Meyrink (1868-1932), who lived in Prague from the age of fifteen and left that city, bankrupt, to set up residence in Munich in 1906; and two silent movies, real masterpieces of German expressionist cinema: Der Golem, 1914, and Der Golem, wie er in die Welt kam (1920), both scripted and directed by the actor and dramatist Paul Wegener (1874-1948), who, incidentally, played the role of the artificial man in his films.

Both Meyrink and Wegener place the character in Prague’s Jewish ghetto. In the novel, he is characterised as an artificial creature, made of clay, who comes back to life every thirty three years. He lives in a room without any access, placed somewhere in the labyrinth of the ghetto. It is necessary to underline the parallel between the origin of Golem, and the creation of man by God from dust as written in Genesis (2): "And the Lord God formed a man of the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living soul".

In his work Der Golem, Meyrink represents, on one hand, the double of the protagonist of the narration, Athanasius Pernath, and on the other hand the collective consciousness of the ghetto, heralding war and destruction. And, of course, already as a proof of the identity of his origin in dust and clay, the Golem is not only ‘a product’ of man, but also his own projection, his duplication, his ‘other’.

The films presents the story of the Golem in inverse order to its chronology. In the second of them, the rabbi Loew from Prague manages to instil life into a clay figure thanks to his knowledge of the Cabbala. Although it initially protects the Jews, it will turn into a threat, although it is disarmed by pure chance by an innocent girl. In the first film, a Jew manages to reanimate the clay figure turning it into a protector of his daughter who is having an affair with a Christian. The Golem falls in love with her and she makes him throw himself from a tower, ending up as a heap of clay.

The real historical figure of the rabbi Judah Loew (1525-1609) is latent in the films. He was the religious leader of Prague’s Jewish community and in 1917 a large statue was erected in his honour at the entrance to the city hall. His sepulchre, in the ancient Jewish cemetery, is continuously visited by the most diverse people, coming to venerate him and also to ask all sort of favours from him. There is no evidence, however, proving that the rabbi Loew was a adept in the practice of the Cabbala, astrology or alchemy, and it seems that the legend of the Golem was initially attributed to the Polish cabbalist Elijah Baál Schem, who died in 1583, and later to the rabbi Loew, in the second half of the 18^th century (Staehlin, 1978, 173-175).

 

4. The most inner rhythm

The origin of the story of the Golem lies, however, ‘in the series of legends of the Jewish Cabbala about the artificial creation of life through the creative power of writing. (...) In the same manner God created the universe from the twenty-two letters, humans can repeat the creative act if they know the suitable combinations" (Izquierdo, 1994, 10). And this is what Patrick Mimran alludes to in The Rhythm of Time.

It appears that in the creation of the Golem there is initially a ritualistic nature. It emerged as the crowning of the study of the book of Yesira undertaken by a group of people. The artificial being created this way was devoid of any practical sense, ‘his creation was aimed at proving the power of the sacred words; the being created from clay was immediately destroyed’ (Izquierdo, ibid.).

Only later did the Golem appear as an independent being, to whom utilitarian functions were assigned and who posed a danger for those around him. The move from legend to literary fiction was already present in German Romanticism, and authors such as Achim von Arnim or E.T.A. Hoffman used the motif in some of their narratives.

The word Golem has a clear Hebrew origin. It only appears once in the Bible, in verse 16 of Psalm 139, which pays homage to That who knows everything. Golem is the first word of the verse, used by the psalmist to refer to himself as a still shapeless mass, lacking structure, in his mother’s womb. Its meaning could therefore be that of ‘embryo’, or with an ampler meaning, ‘homunculus’ (Staehlin, 1978, 178). We find here another interesting parallel, in this case with the tradition of alchemy and with one of the most mysterious aspects of Goethe’s Faust.

In any case, what is important for our purpose is what is also pointed out by Agustín Izquierdo (ibid.) ‘throughout the whole of tradition, clay is the matter from which the Golem is made. On his front appears written the word emet, which means ‘truth’. When his creator wants him to return to nothing, he erases the first letter, so met, ‘death’, can be read. We must also bear in mind that the work emet or truth, coincided with ‘the secret Name of God used in the ritual’ (Staehlin, 1978, 180).

The word as the source of life. We find ourselves in the same context of the ephemeral angels of the cabbalistic tradition, a prolongation of the word of God and sent by him to the humans, and whom Franz Kafka refers to in his Diaries (for instance, in the entry corresponding to 26 November, 1911). The secular transposition of the question amounts to an emptying of oneself through literature: "I no longer have the strength for another sentence. If it were only a question of words, if it were enough to place one word and then one could turn away with a clear conscience in the knowledge of having filled it completely with oneself". (21 December 1910).

If it were a question of words. However, the creative effort of literature implies a total deliverance, to empty oneself. In this sense, the word is corporal, carnal reality. Therefore, when finding the right word, the suitable sentence, Kafka writes (3 October 1911): "I still do not allow it to leave my mouth, the shame and disgust as if it were raw meat, flesh cut from myself". And the narration, whether barely sketched or totally structured, is like a close relative, like a ‘consanguine’ person (5 November, 1911).

The word is simultaneously body and spirit, the beginning of life, as it is said at the beginning of the preface to Saint John’s Gospel: ‘In the beginning was the Word’. Far from the paraphrase and correction of Goethe’s Faust: ‘In the beginning was the action’, a sentence which is in itself an anticipation of the materialist productivity of the modern world.

By incorporating the Golem, Patrick Mimran places in The Rhythm of Time ‘the beginning’ of everything in the vivifying power of the word. In the spiritual breath which springs from it and gives life both to natural and artificial beings, and, in a parallel way , to works of art and to technological products. The convergence of painting and the effigies with electronic music, the light and sound effects and the video images, signifies the establishing of an arc of sense between modern technological supports and the evocation, the recovery through memory, of mankind’s ancestral meanings.

That is the reason why I still consider it necessary to return to the banquet, to the ceremonial meal. We had not finished the questioning of its meanings. Apart from not eating raw, but ‘cooked’ food, and from using certain social table manners, what defines us most definitely as human beings when eating is the use of the word: when we eat, we talk. Through it, the natural act of eating the food which is necessary to live, is prolonged on a spiritual plane which favours language. When we eat and talk, and evoke, laugh, celebrate, take conscience of ourselves and of the rest... we capture the passing of time, the flow of life, in a physical and conceptual way.

Sharing food is, for human beings, sharing the word. Therefore, in its most profound sense, the common meal is always an act of profound affinity, from the most intimate dimension to the public sphere. And when this affinity is broken or transgressed, the meal becomes the best form of reconciliation. He who speaks of the word speaks of music, and he who speaks of word and music speaks of love.

If we go back again to ancient Greece, we acknowledge that, beyond the cultural strata of mythical thought, the origin of lyricism, as opposed to the ceremonial nature of a sense of the epic and the religious and official singing, is precisely to be found in the banquet. To be more precise, in the symposium, in the moment when everybody was drinking, after eating: ‘nearly all archaic monodic lyricism preserved, containing in that definition the elegy and the iambic, has as the sole original objective the ambience and the moment of the symposium’ (Vetta, 1983, XIII).

It is important to bear in mind that in Greece, the poetic word was always accompanied by music, and on many occasions by dance. That is why we read in Alceus’ fragmentary poems, where the poet criticises somebody’s absence in the symposium: ‘...Taking part in the banquet the lyre sounds, and meanwhile he is celebrating with stupid charlatans...’ (Ferraté, 1968, 280-281).

In the banquet, the dominant poetic themes were wine and love (Vetta, 1983, XXVII). Eros’ singing, ‘the most terrible of the gods’ (Ferraté, 1968, 284-285), if we recall again a verse from Alceus, will give way to the creation of a new literary genre, now in prose: the discourses about love or erôtikoi logoi, which probably appeared in the 5^th BC, although it would be in the following century when they became more fashionable.

One of the zeniths of Western philosophy and literature, Plato’s Symposium, belongs to this genre. A succession of beautiful discourses in honour of god culminates with the exposition of the platonic theory of ideal love, put in the mouth of Diotima of Mantinea through the memory of Socrates. Whether we share Plato’s idealism or not, it cannot be denied that his ascensional conception of erotic dynamics, the sense of elevation with which he characterises Eros’ touch, would mark for ever the evolution of Western culture.

However, more important in relation to Patrick Mimran’s work is the equation Plato establishes between the erotic and the aesthetic, when he speaks of the eros poietikes, of productive love, in a way that love would not be merely ‘love of the beautiful’, but ‘love of the generation and procreation of the beautiful’ (Symposium, 206e)

With Plato we find the last nexus between nature and human products, whether they are artistic or technological: love is a human prolongation –and subsequently divine- of the impulse to generate, of the word’s and spirit’s breath in life and in art. Eros’ wings provide the strongest ascensional movement to the spiritualising of food and of art, to the communio, to the sense of shared humanity, that we reach through the aesthetic, and not merely material, experience to which it is possible to arrive through food as much as through the work of art.

And that is ‘the gift’, what Patrick Mimran gives to us through his installation: the restitution of the ceremonial sense of food, its identification with the work of art, supporting it also on a creative use of new technologies. We are, in the end, in a profound plastic global evocation of the rhythm of time.

Of the rhythm of the poetic word and of music which accompanies the ingestion of food and marks it symbolically, humanising it in correspondence with the change of the phases of the sun and the variations of light. Of the evocation of life and death, of change and regeneration in the recurrent, incessant, cyclical passing of time. Of natural time and of human time. Of the metamorphoses of sun as a symbol of the succession of days, nights and seasons. Of the number, latent as a rhythmic support to word, music and digital technology. Of the most inner rhythm: of the sense of time, of pertinence, remembrance and sunset, which is what makes us humans, truly human.

 

References

- Javier Arce (1988): Funus Imperatorum. Los funerales de los emperadores romanos; Alianza Editorial, Madrid. 2^nd ed.: 1990.

- Aristóteles: Ética a Nicómaco. Bilingual edition and translated by M. Araujo and J. Marías, introduction and notes by J. Marías; Instituto de Estudios Políticos, Madrid, 1949. 3^rd ed.: Centro de Estudios Constitucionales, Madrid, 1981.

- Walter Burkert (1972): Homo Necans; Walter de Gruyter, Berlin. Eng. Translated by P. Bing: Homo Necans. The Anthropology of Ancient Greek Sacrificial Ritual and Myth; Univ. of California Press, Berkeley, 1983.

- Marcel Detienne (1979): "Pratiques culinaires et esprit de sacrifice", in: M. Detienne et J.-P. Vernant: La cuisine de sacrifice en pays grec; Gallimard, Paris, 1979, pp. 7-35.

- Juan Ferraté (1968): Líricos arcaicos griegos. Bilingual Antholohgy; Seix Barral, Barcelona.

- Louis Gernet (1968): Anthropologie de la Grèce antique; F. Maspero, Paris. Spanish translation by B. Moreno Carrillo; Taurus, Madrid, 1981.

- Hesíodo: Obras y fragmentos. Introduction, Spanish translation and notes by A. Pérez Jiménez and A. Martínez Díez; Gredos, Madrid,1978.

- H. Hubert et M. Mauss (1899): Essai sur le sacrifice, in M. Mauss: Oeuvres, I, by. V. Karady; Minuit, Paris, 1968, pp. 193-307.

- Agustín Izquierdo (1994): "Prólogo" to G. Meyrink: El Golem. Spanish translation by Ungría; Valdemar, Madrid, pp. 9-11.

- Franz Kafka: Diarios (1914-1923). Spanish translation in two volumes by F. Formosa; Lumen, Barcelona, 1975.

- Carlos Staehlin (1978): Wegener: el Doble y el Golem; Secretariado de Publicaciones, Universidad de Valladolid, Valladolid.

- J. M. C. Toynbee (1971): Death and Burial in the Roman World; Thames and Hudson, London.

- Jean-Pierre Vernant (1979): "À la table des hommes" ", in: M. Detienne and J.-P. Vernant: La cuisine de sacrifice en pays grec; cit., pp. 37-132.

- Massimo Vetta (ed.) (1983): Poesia e simposio nella Grecia antica. Guida storica e critica; Laterza, Bari.

- Paul Zanker (1987): August und die Macht der Bilder; C. H. Beck, München. Spanish translation by P. Diener, revision by W. Trillmich; Alianza Editorial, Madrid, 1992.