Birth: The Curse

BIRTH IS A CURSE;
DEATH IS A BLESSING

A series by Eliana Szabo for
Symbolic Imagery 2020

PART ONE

Charcoal on paper; approx. 25x48inches

I cannot grapple with the first moment of time. Every individual discomfort leads back, ultimately, to a cosmogonic discomfort, each of our sensations expiating that crime of the primordial sensation, by which Being crept out of somewhere ...



An abyss indeed, a gulf into which we do not fall but from which, instead, we emerge, to our universal chagrin.

PART TWO

Innocence: The Bliss

Acrylic on bristol; 11x14inches each

So carefully have we been taught to cling to things that when we would be free of them, we do not know how to go about it.
This very second has vanished forever, lost in the anonymous mass of the irrevocable. It will never return.



Innocence being the perfect state, perhaps the only one, it is incomprehensible that a man enjoying it should seek to leave it. Yet history from its beginnings down to ourselves is only that and nothing but that.

PART THREE

Love: The Ascension

We should have been excused from lugging a body: the burden of the self was enough.



The only way of enduring one disaster after the next is to love the very idea of disaster: if we succeed, there are no further surprises, we are superior to whatever occurs, we are invincible victims.

Acrylic on canvas; 2x3ft

Death is the best thing nature has found to please everyone. With each of us, everything vanishes, everything stops forever. Without the least effort on our part, we own the universe, we drag it into our own disappearance.



At a grave, the words: game, imposture, joke, dream, come to mind. Impossible to think that existence is a serious phenomenon. Over the gates of our cemeteries should be written: "Nothing is Tragic. Everything is Unreal."

PART THREE

Death: The Blessing

Charcoal on paper; approx 34x24inches

© Eliana Szabo 2020

Words by E. M. Cioran