rêve
I.
René Magritte, "L'Art de la Conversation" (1950)
My favorite painting by Magritte is The Treachery of Images (referenced in this post). But The Art of Conversation is amazing as well.
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II.
Michel Foucault on L’Art de la Conversation:
In a landscape of battling giants or of the beginning of the world, two tiny persons are speaking–an inaudible discourse, a murmur instantly reabsorbed into the silence of the stones, into the silence of a wall whose enormous blocks overhang the two garrulous mutes. Jumbled together, the blocks form at their base a group of letters where it is easy to make out the word: REVE [dream] (which can, if we look a bit more closely, be completed as TREVE [peace] or CREVE [death])–as if all these airy, fragile words had been given the power to organize the chaos of stones. Or as if, on the contrary, behind the alert but immediately lost chatter of men, things could in their silence and sleep compose a word–a permanent word no one could efface; yet this word now designates the most fleeting of images. But this is not all: Because it is in dream that men, at last reduced to silence, commune with the signification of things and allow themselves to be touched by enigmatic, insistent swords that come from elsewhere. Ceci n’est pas une pipe exemplifies the penetration of discourse into the form of things; it reveals discourse’s ambiguous power to deny and to redouble. L’Art de la Conversation marks the anonymous attraction of things that form their own words in the face of men’s indifference, insinuating themselves, without men even being aware of it, into their daily chatter.
–Michel Foucault, Ceci n’est pas une pipe (1973), translated by James Harkness
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III.
Après un Rêve (chanson for voice and piano by Gabriel Fauré [1865-1924], performed by soprano Reneé Fleming. Translation.)
Après un Rêve (violin) (performed by violinist Joshua Bell.)
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