Status Updates From Giorgio de Chirico: The Cha...

O Quetzalcoatl
Strident rigid banner of zinc
black above the roof tiles of my paternal
house, which I will never see again.
Magnetic pole in the snowy air.
On the sidewalk white with dust and cold, étrange jouet, of my already far-off
childhood.
I think of a city in Alaska on a winter
morning, white below the white
mountains, near the dark
sea.

Heraclitus "teaches us that time does not exist and that the past is equal to the future on the great curve of eternity. Perhaps the Romans wanted the image of Janus, the double-faced god (Janus Bifrons), to mean the same thing; and each night a dream, during the deepest hour of rest, shows us that the past is equal to the future, memory that mixes with prophecy in a mysterious marriage."

In Apollinaire's review of de Chirico's work on show at the Salon des Indépendants of 1914, he observed how "(the strangeness of the plastic enigmas that M. de Chirico offers to us is still lost upon the majority. It is that most modern of resources, surprise, upon which this painter draws in order to depict the fatal character of modern things."