I was entranced by this painting by Rene Magritte I saw in the Courtauld earlier. A convoluted Lacanian reading comes to mind about the fracturing of the Imaginary, but rather than analyse it to death I’d rather linger on the incredibly specific feeling it evoked in me: not sadness but a sense of steadiness. The feeling that we must linger with what’s difficult because reality inheres in that difficulty. It points towards the “the wreck and not the story of the wreck, the thing itself and not the myth” to use Adrienne Rich’s words, while showing that you can only get to the wreck through the story, you can only get to the thing itself through the myth.
