I am fascinated by the mental picture of a locomotive upside-down. It’s an image I associate with dreams, and thus Surrealism. I think it first came to me from a J’aime Lire story I read many times as a kid. I cannot remember its title but it was about a young orphan and his grandfather, who had managed to build a time-machine, going back in time in order to retrieve a long-destroyed – and thus expensive – painting by some famous painter (I think Chagall?). They are being threatened by thugs who simply want to make money out of it. The boy and his grandfather end up tricking the thugs, I don’t really remember how, and the art remains safe, away from their financial interest. I cannot remember if the painting is shown at all in the book (though my sense of logic tells me yes!) or if I just created its image in my head, but it has been fascinating me ever since.

Years later, I looked for this painting but didn’t find it. I’m pretty sure it was made-up. But I still hold onto this image. I sort of found it when I studied Man Ray and Paul Eluard’s Les mains libres in high school. There’s a drawing entitled “Rêve” that depicts a kind of flying, upside-down locomotive above city buildings, along with the notion, in Eluard’s poem, of a bent Eiffel tower and of twisted bridges. I love both the drawing and the poem because they depict the notion of the familiar being distorted just enough to represent the power of imagination, something that I enjoy both in dreams and in Surrealism, among other things.

Also in high school, but two years earlier in fact, I came across Magritte’s La durée poignardée and had some sort of revelation. This painting depicts a locomotive coming out of an otherwise empty fireplace. On top of it, there are two candlesticks on each side of a clock, and above them is a mirror. It’s interesting to note that the candlestick on the right has no reflection. To me, the locomotive, emerging at full-speed and on a straight line, seems to stab the fireplace which becomes a tunnel, that is where the title comes from. The locomotive represents modernity, embodied by a machine that overpowers mankind and imposes its rhythm on them. The clock, which represents time, seems to be receding because of the mirror, unlike the locomotive which is going forward. Magritte said this about the painting:

« L’image d’une locomotive est immédiatement familière, son mystère n’est pas perçu. Pour que son mystère soit évoqué, une autre image immédiatement familière – sans mystère – l’image d’une salle à manger a été réunie avec l’image de la locomotive. »

As I was supposed to relate the painting to Surrealism, I wrote that the scene seems “normal” until the insolite element – insolite not because of its content, which is familiar, but because of its unexpected presence which makes it out-of-place – bursts in to break the realism, or rather the illusion of it. The painting associates two pictures which, at first glance, do not belong together, using the fireplace/tunnel as a point of connection, in order to create a feeling of shock in the viewer.

My persistent fascination with this painting led me to write, two years later, the following poem:

Le Progrès Poignardé

Loco, fou est cet engin au rythme effréné

Sifflant l’universelle mélodie du tocsin

Bête fougueuse et anarchiste

Elle disparaît dans l’antre obscure sans laisser d’autre trace

Que des oreilles bourdonnantes et des pensées embrumées

Terrifiante et assassine, sans cesse,

Elle avale l’or ténébreux dans son gosier vorace

Crissant « Charbon ! Charbon ! Charbon ! » comme leitmotiv

There are many ways in which the image of the locomotive keeps coming back to me: most obviously with the Hogwarts Express, but that one does not produce the same effect on me at all. More interestingly, there is Zola’s La bête humaine, also read during my first year of high school, a book that I absolutely loved, especially the scene in which there’s an accident and the locomotive is described as a torn human body. Obviously, my reaction to the Magritte painting was very much influenced by Zola’s novel.

One last example is that of the famous picture of the Montparnasse accident of 1895 which depicts a locomotive hanging from the wall of the first floor of the station that is half demolished. Last year, I wrote in a paper that “The pitch-black locomotive crosses the rectangle of the picture diagonally in a motion that feels very transgressive and is impossible to escape when looking at it. I believe that the black-and-white is very important because it displaces the image both into the past and into the unreality of history. The situation is so irrational that the picture seems to come from a nightmare. To me, it coincides with the idea of the past as a dangerous place of chaos, tragedies and unreason that we may have […] of the middle-ages or of the pre-democracy, pre-consumer society times. It makes us feel both safer about our lifetime – we do not use locomotives anymore, this technology was probably more experimental, this could not happen again – but also more uncertain – if it has happened, it can happen again; technology can be dangerous.”

This is what the image of the locomotive ultimately is to me: a symbol of a dark (and somehow also black-and-white), scary (for some reason), remote past. It is also something I sense in the image of the Normandy clock. My grandparents own one, and I was absolutely terrified of it as a child. Nowadays, still, I have very mixed feelings about it. Thinking about it makes me uneasy, and yet I am so attached to it that I would love to be able to own it after the death of my grand-parents (that probably has to do with the fact that my grand-father is himself quite attached to it). Hearing it ring in the middle of the night is both chilling when I think about it, and also a source of comfort when I actually hear it because it means that I am in a place where I feel happy and safe.

Ultimately, apart from this actual object, both Normandy clocks and locomotives make me think about time, scary time.