ANDRE BRETON & ELISA CLARO

(Quoted from the book:) The last personal testimony we will visit before returning to the bountiful fields of literary fiction is by a modern poet of “ancient perspective”. It’s not by chance, my love, that this poet born at the turn of century, the French André Bréton, was a key figure of Surrealism, a movement that called for the primordial role of intuition in art in general, and in poetry in particular. Having studied esoteric tradition in depth, Bréton was a profound connoisseur of ancient knowledge. Well, then, it’s in the autobiographical Arcane 17, where he writes to his beloved Elisa, with whom he married almost immediately after meeting: “Before I met you, but what am I saying, these words make no sense. You know that the first time I saw you, there is no doubt I recognised you.” This, Blanca, is love at first sight, what in French is known as coup de foudre, “thunderbolt”. That is to say, a sudden love that sweeps you off your feet, which Bréton himself baptised as amour fou, “mad love”. “Naturally -he points out- I'm talking about a love that holds absolute power, that is connected for an entire lifetime, that refuses to see as its object anyone other than that one being. In this respect, this experience, as distressing as it has been (it’s relevant to point out here that Breton and Elisa ended up getting a divorce), has taught me nothing: so powerful is this aspiration for me, that I am aware I could not renounce it without sacrificing everything I live for. I am still bound to one of the most powerful myths, to which no apparent setback in the context of my adventure would prevail.” The myth he is referring to, my dear, is none other than love predestination, the myth of twin souls. A myth he subsequently articulates: “Every human being has been thrown into this life in search of that one other being of a different sex which, from every perspective, is its counterpart, to the point that one without the other appears as the result of a dissociation, of a dislocation of a single block of light.” 

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