image: Tour Saint-Jacques, on Rue de Rivoli in the 4th arrondissement, July 9th 2017, 15:00 — it was raining, lightly.

Litmus Test

David Turnbull
Jul 10, 2017 · 1 min read

Andre Breton, crazy in love…mad love, l’amour fou, is walking in the sun past his ‘great monument to the unrevealed world’, the Tour Saint-Jacques. In the autumn, for ‘La Nuit du Tournesol’, which will be published in Minotaure, issue seven — 1935, he will select photographs of the ‘Tour’ by Brassaï, and a Helianthus by Man Ray. Tournesol can be translated as sunflower, but also litmus, extracted from lichens and used to make the blue filter paper that turns red registering acidity, pH, more or less. He knows, of course, he wrote about it….complicating this, a little bit:

‘In Paris the tower of Saint Jacques careening

Like a sunflower*

Nearly collides with the Seine

Its shadow slides imperceptibly among the tugs’

from: Andre Breton, “Vigilance”, translated by David Antin, published by Jerome Rothenberg, as he says, ’sometime in the 1960s’ — posted on: poemsandpoetics.blogspot.fr / Sunday, April 26th 2015

original:

À Paris la tour Saint-Jacques chancelante

Pareille à un tournesol*

Written by

Professor of Architecture at The Cooper Union in New York City, Design Director for PITCHAfrica / Waterbanks and ATOPIA Innovation, FRSA

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