Means of Transport in Exile

Salvador Dali, monarchist and anarchist, and consequently opposed to a consumer society, is naturally against automobiles, to which he prefers a triumphal chariot...
- Salvador Dali

As for the appearance of the wheels and their construction: their appearance was like the gleaming of a chrysolite; and the four had the same likeness, their construction being as it were a wheel within a wheel. When they went, they went in any of their four directions without turning as they went. The four wheels had rims and they had spokes; and their rims were full of eyes round about. And when the living creatures went, the wheels went beside them; and when the living creatures rose from the earth, the wheels rose. Wherever the spirit would go, they went, and the wheels rose along with them; for the spirit of the living creatures was in the wheels.
- Ezekiel

Comments

  1. GKFebruary 11, 2010 at 10:46 AM

    "Wherever the spirit would go, they went, and the wheels rose along with them; for the spirit of the living creatures was in the wheels."

    It is interesting that you quoted this passage.
    You may know Alexander Isaievitch Solzhenitsyn wrote a great number of volumes on the bolshevik revolution entitled the "red wheel" where the wheel i.e. the machine is in fact seen as crushing men, and spirit. In Ezekiel's vision everything is being reversed. Spirit dominates matter. In fact this reminds me of a little known text by Vassili Grossman, one he wrote after having contemplated the famous work by Raphael (http://www.skd-dresden.de/media/300_sixtina.jpg) before it being sent back to Germany in 1955.

    If you read french:
    "Un récit de 1955, La Madone Sixtine, livre une clé pour l'oeuvre : le tableau de Raphaël, tant aimé par Dostoïevski, fut exposé à Moscou avant d'être restitué à Dresde. Staline inspecte le tableau en caressant ses moustaches. Grossman à son tour s'approche du tableau et voit la jeune Madone au regard si triste, l'enfant si grave, il aperçoit « la force d'esprit qui se matérialise », une énergie qui se fait chair et qui inverse la découverte d'Einstein, il voit Treblinka, Kolyma, toute son oeuvre future."

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