Nude Descending A Staircase by Janus

She had felt disturbingly indeterminate lately. Or had it always been that way? When she looked down at her body it was blurred, ever-shifting, collapsing into planes, which in turns separated and coalesced, over and over. Strangely her body seemed to move without moving.

She vaguely dreamed of things called ‘clothes’ that would cover her body but she could not imagine being able to get into them and she feared they would somehow exacerbate the uncanny sense of dissolution and coalescence—of falling apart and coming together only to immediately fall apart again, over and over. The coming-together did not transition into a consolidated being-together but into a fragmenting, a breaking-up. Likewise the breaking up did not transition into a lasting fragmentation. Curiously, all this seemed to be constantly going on, but when she focused she could detect no change at all.

Apart from her sense of constantly descending the staircase and never ascending it she experienced what seemed to be a memory that there were times when she had been in the attic and that she had found there a large mirror that she had dared to look into a few times and when she saw herself in the mirror her appearance was whole and unchanging. But when she tried to examine her memory she could not be sure that she had ever looked into that mirror, but nonetheless she was convinced that if she did look at herself in that mirror, she would appear there as her true self again—whole and unchanging.

There did seem to be a fleeting memory—although possibly it was merely an inexplicable conviction, a wish to believe—that she had looked at herself in the mirror, but only very occasionally because the relief she had felt in seeing herself whole and ordered was greatly outweighed by the terrible disappointment that came with the immediate return to chaos, to ceaseless movement, when she turned away from the mirror. In any case she never was able to catch herself looking in the mirror.

One night (or was it day and how could she tell the difference?) she dreamed that in the basement was a portal, and that if she went through that portal she would be permanently returned to wholeness. That would be far better than relying on the illusion of a mirror. Was that why she always seemed to be descending the staircase? Was she trying to get to the basement?

As she descended the staircase there were sometimes so many voices that it seemed as if she was hearing the whole world speak all at once—an infinite number of voices joining together in an ever-rising cacophony she could make no sense of except when an occasional voice rose up out of the cacophony urging her to stop or another voice telling her to push on. Where did those lone voices come from? She could never actually listen to what the voices said as she would if she had been listening to a lone speaker. Sometimes she was convinced the voices were not people’s voices at all but were really just her own thoughts.

Someimes when she focused on the bewildering fact that the light seemed to come from nowhere in particular, the voices would recede and a quietness would descend on her world.

Occasionally in these quiet lucid moments, startling herself, she would realize that she seemed to be completely alone on the stairs and that she had always been naked and descending the staircase, and that her supposed memories of attics and basements, of mirrors and portals were dreams or fantasies.
At other times she could hear voices that did not seem to come from her own world. She wondered why they always seemed to be talking about artworks.


Rhiannon stood in front of ‘Nude Descending a Staircase no.2’ at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, a painting by Marcel Duchamp. She was an art student, an aspiring artist and poet, and she read extensively about the history of the arts and the lives of the great artists and poets, subjects which she found greatly interesting, so she knew some things about the art of that time. Her knowledge was not precise or comprehensive, but she understood that there was some association between this early work of Duchamp's and the fragmenting of subjects into intersecting planes of the Cubists and the focus on evoking dynamic movement of the Italian Futurists.

As she contemplated these associations she wondered what it would be like to be trapped forever in a movement which was fixed in its moments as an enduring stasis. According to her understanding all painting, well at least the best painting, was concerned with capturing the living moment in all its aliveness in a still image. She thought this sense of aliveness necessarily involved the illusion of movement or at least of the possibility of immanent movement.

As she thought about this, to her, central concern of painting, a startling thing happened. She heard a voice that seemed to be emanating from the painting itself. At first she was moved to seek the source of the voice, commonsense telling her it could not possibly be the painting. She could find no possible alternative source of the voice and the initially baffling realization that there was actually no sound coming from anywhere and that the voice was ‘silent’ in the way one’s thoughts are silent. This realisation was quite disturbing at first—how could she possibly hear a silent voice, it made no sense. but her realisation became more compelling the more she thought about it. It felt like a revelation.

Somehow it seemed perfectly fitting, while at the same time completely paradoxical—a silent voice, a static movement. From her readings in another main area of interest—philosophy—she recalled Parmenides’ denial of the reality of movement, his assertion that any change at all is merely an illusion and his disciple Zeno’s paradoxes which seemed, on the face of it at least, to deny the possibility of movement.
While she was absorbed in these thoughts the silent voice continued to intone on the periphery of her awareness. To hear it I must be silent she thought and try to discern what the voice is saying.
It was difficult, so difficult. It was akin to trying to catch your own thoughts and view them with all their content revealed and yet without actually thinking them. Like trying to get to a position outside of your thoughts and view them in an instant of revelatory stasis. Just like Parmenides’ paradox it seemed.

Entering deeply into a state of profound stillness Rhiannon began to experience strange fantasies that felt somehow like real memories. Awake yet in a kind of trance she dreamed of an attic with a mirror, and a basement with a portal. She dreamed her body was constantly morphing into fragments and re-consolidating only to morph again. She felt herself constantly descending a staircase without moving at all just like the figure in the painting and she felt all this to be a kind of prison and she felt a yearning to escape, but no sense of where an escape might lead. This was the strangest waking dream she had ever experienced. At last she clearly heard a voice which said: “In the attic of the sky dreams of release, in the basement of the Earth transformation”.

She had often wondered about something she termed ‘the other side of life’, so she was able to relax more and more into the experience of hearing the voice from the painting and all the strange fantasies and thoughts it evoked. According to her speculative idea of the other side of life, when people imagined gods, angels or any magical being it drew those beings ever closer to being real, to actually having their own independent lives. The idea was that when such figures imagined by many people, the power of that collective imagining brought the imagined figures to life.

Where and how such a life could be enacted she could not imagine. In the light of this idea she thought of the figure in the painting that countless people had looked at and wondered about. Had the thoughts and emotions and fantasies of all those people somehow brought the figure in the painting alive only to trap her forever in a frozen moment of descending a staircase? Were the dreams of attics and basements, which seemed like memories, just traces of the viewers thoughts and fantasies which had somehow been projected into the painting?

For days after seeing the painting and her uncanny experiences as she stood in front of it, she could think of little else. On the seventh day, on remembering the strange words she had heard at the end of her trancelike daydream in front of the painting: “In the attic of the sky dreams of release, in the basement of the Earth transformation”, she was moved to write a poem, which she felt was directly inspired by her bewildering experience which paradoxically seemed to her to make perfect sense, and she was especially moved by those mysterious words, “In the attic of the sky dreams of release, in the basement of the Earth transformation” which she felt to be in some way related with her ideas about the “other side of life”. The poem read as follows:

Images are endlessly proliferated
in the book of love
and the book of dreams
the engines of survival hum
and sing and roar
and scream
in the human deeps and shallows
where nothing is as it seems

On the other side of life
we feel the deep magic of seeming
of visions and of seers
to bring forth
the invisible from the visible
the unseen from the unheard
or the banquet
from the inexistent meal

Music wafts across the river of dreams
the lucid dreamer
creates symphonies
for her ears alone
and paintings
that are not of this world
that reveal unknown archangels
with obsidian eyes

And impotent Gods who limp
complain and drag their feet while labouring to tame
animals with a thousand heads—
forever failing until Hercules
performs his thirteenth labour
smashes the gates of Hades
drinks the Styx dry
and liberates the hordes
of the dead
into the landscapes
of the waking dream—
the land of lucid sleep
where the dreamer falls under spells
cast by mythical shamans—
eternally the world of dream
encompasses all the worlds—

And far above the roof of this world
and far beneath its shifting floor
is the realm with permeable walls
that opens a million stairways and doors—
the visionary painter imagines an infinite gallery
where every painting shows
every world in fullest detail
and explains it all—

This the omniscient dream of all dreams
where the dreamer knows the gods
within the dream that shows their place
and traverses then every hidden path
and finds and traces
every tiny line imprinted
on every mortal
and immortal face

The poem had come to her as a whole. She had no desire to edit it. She couldn’t say exactly what it meant but it seemed to settle the strange case of the ‘Nude Descending A Staircase no2’ and the uncanny experiences she had while in front of it and her obsession with it for a week afterwards. Once the poem was written she gave the matter no further thought.