O
nce upon a time…
A prince and a princess who loved to travel through the Far North, each autumn and each winter… there where time and space merge into a never-ending dream. They never tired of wandering through its great cities filled with treasures, its large and vast landscapes, its pure and clear skies. One day, seized by an irrepressible desire to share this beauty, they wished to create paintings imbued with this Nordic magic, but to do so, they found themselves quite at a loss to find the ideal and worthy material of the wonders of the Septentrion they had contemplated, for it seemed certain to them that only a rare and precious material could render beauty. So they asked their good fairy for advice, and she appeared in a cloud of blue sparks. “My dear children, she said kindly, your wish is noble, and I must grant it. Here is what you are looking for !” And with a gesture as light as the fall of a shooting star, she conjured up a strange and translucent material: “It has the power, she told them, to turn into snowflakes when the cold wind blows upon it. According to legend, it is the frozen laughter of the spirits of winter. A laughter so light and crystalline that it froze in the icy air to become matter. It is called… the Ice Plastic.” At the sight of this diaphanous and airy substance, the prince and the princess, filled with exquisite delight, were charmed by its winter enchantment and immediately set to work. They painted, glued, tinkled, sculpted the material until red trees, black forests, silver woods, skies of stars, northern lights, chimeric shapes and spirals, castles of frost, and animals soft as mist emerged. They populated these worlds with enchanted characters with opal eyes and sometimes, in a charming game, they amused themselves by assembling them like enchanted mosaics, where each piece seemed to contain a secret, a star, or a sigh of the wind. Then they added a few more names from their past, like offerings to forgotten gods, and landscapes from the future, symbols of the promise of eternal… renewal !!
The prince and the princess still travel, once their paintings are finished, like two souls bound by a single heart and beating with a gentle creative ardor, lovers from the very first hour riding an invisible sleigh drawn by six reindeer with silver hooves, gliding through the silent skies.
In spring, when the snow retreats and the earth warms up under the first rays of sun, the material transforms, dissolving into a fluid and luminous substance, iridescent like fish scales. The medium then becomes alive, moist, enchanted, almost conscious… the Syrenes.
They are not creatures per se, but liquid and singing fragments, carried by sea breezes or lake waves. When the summer wind blows, they turn into pearls of foam or floating threads of water, capable of enchanting the objects they touch, making them lighter or brighter.
(Legend has it that the Syrenes were born from the tears shed by the real mermaids long ago when they saw the sea receding at the end of winter. These tears, falling on the melting snow, are said to have given rise to this strange, spring-like substance, somewhere between water, dreams, and light.)
Drawing
Dreams language
Between theater… and dream,
between story… and whispers,
where the staging of the imagination takes place,
the inner images come to life —
symbols, visions, flashes —
and invites diving into a waking dream.
For Freud, these images are messengers of desire, dormant
figures of the unconscious,
veiled voices of our inner conflicts.
The waking dream takes up the language of the nocturnal
dream and illuminates its invisible weave.
For Jung, they carry the archetypes,
echoes of a shared memory.
Through active imagination, they become bridges,
passages between the conscious and the unconscious…
where reflection and intuition reveal themselves,
a few minutes before dawn.
special page Lewis Carroll
That day, Alice was bored in a room upholstered with moving patterns, blue spirals, purple arabesques, white stars… through the window, she could see the sky lying on the ground (she was sure of it) and a floating, winding Road, with cobblestones bordered with large flowers that seemed to blink their petal-eyes. Alice, always ready to follow the less reasonable paths, went through the window. “Ah, at last!” was heard to her ear, which was as big as her toe.
It was the most imposing of flowers : a large flower, purple, with a delicate face, a little haughty, that spoke with a snobbish accent.
— « You’re late, you know. The Road doesn’t wait. »
— « Late for what ? Asked Alice.
— « For the end of the beginning, and the beginning of the end, of course. You’ve been called. By the Carpet. »
Alice looked behind her: the house had disappeared. The carpet had flown away, unrolling a long colorful ribbon that wound around the Road like a silk snake.
Further on, a blue flower with fan-shaped petals sang her a backwards lullaby. A red rose offered her a tiny mirror that reflected only things that did not yet exist.
— « It’s a word made for those who see differently, whispered a pink flower with an arched stem.
— « I see just fine, thank you, replied Alice.
— « Exactly, sighed the flower.
The further she went, the more the Road turned into a dream. The purple became a memory, the blue became question, the red became music, and the rose… became silence.
At the very end of the Road, where the thought falters and logic melts like sugar, Alice found an armchair in the middle of the void. On the armrest, an new book awaited her: Unpublished Notebooks of Lewis Carroll, signed in a familiar handwriting… her own.
And she realized that she wasn’t dreaming — she was reading.
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