NGC 63, Friday the 13th, 2020

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Oh no, another Friday the 13th and there’s still one more to come this year in November. This happens every eleven years, so I’ll be sixty-three the next time we get another triple whammy.

I wonder what I’ll be doing when I’m sixty-three?

There is a galaxy in the constellation of Pisces, a spiral galaxy, NGC 63 - maybe I’ll go there the next time we have three thirteenths in the same year. That is if they have Friday the thirteenths. Maybe they won’t have time at all - no years, or months, or weeks, or days, or hours, or minutes, or seconds.

No time at all – timelessness, what a comforting idea, no reason to rush.

I wonder what the planet I’m on in NGC 63 will look like?

I’d like it to look like a surrealist landscape. I like surrealist art, I find the artists as interesting as the work. The really big surrealist painters were Jean Arp, Max Ernst, André Masson, René Magritte, Yves Tanguy, Salvador Dalí, Pierre Roy, Paul Delvaux, and Joan Miró. There were lots of other artists trying it though, most artists of the time tried surrealism at some point and they either liked it and stuck with it like Dali, or didn’t and moved on like Picasso.

I like Dorothea Tanning. She was married to Max Ernst, one of the biggies. Tanning is so incredibly sexy. I think she’s still alive - living in New York, in her eighties, so maybe I should say that she used to be so sexy.

It’d be great if when I arrived on this planet in NGC 63 it was populated by surrealist painters – particularly the young Dorothea Tanning. There’s a photo of her with Max Ernst, taken in 1946 in the desert in Arizona. It’s by Lee Miller, the surrealist photographer. It looks like a photograph of a dream, a dream photo. In it Ernst is a giant of a man with his trouser leg rolled up and Dorothea is a minute sylphlike dark haired girl in a flared skirt. She’s so tiny; she looks about two feet tall compared to Ernst, a weird photo – a dream, the sort of thing you may come across in a galaxy as remote as NGC 63.

If you ever get to Philadelphia check out the museum of art. There’s a painting by Tanning called ‘Birthday’. It’s fantastic in every sense of the word, a self-portrait and she is gorgeous in it. It shows her in another surrealist dream, and it looks like a bad one. A woman stands on a slanted hardwood floor in an open doorway. She’s standing stiffly, not smiling. The background is doorways, door after door as far as the eye can see, and her purple dress is flung open above the waist. It looks like satin, you can see her naked breasts. Tree roots, tendrils and tiny naked women cover her skirt. It is very erotic – she is very erotic.

There’s a small furry creature with round, piercing eyes and extended bird’s wings at the woman’s feet -her pet perhaps? I don’t know. The woman’s gaze is locked on a point somewhere far over your right shoulder, but she’s looking way beyond you - she knows that you are there but you’re simply not important. I wonder what she is seeing?

I think that she about to start a journey. Where is she going? I don’t know, but wherever it is I don’t think it’s anywhere good. Perhaps she’s off to Hell, or Mars, maybe even back in time to the start of it all. I can’t know, and she’s not telling, but I bet that when she gets there whatever or whoever she finds there isn’t very lucky for her.

I wonder if it’s Friday the thirteenth in that picture? I wonder if she’s going to NGC 63 and it is Friday the thirteenth?

I wonder if she’s coming to see the sixty-three year old me that is desperately waiting for her.

Is she going to tell me her secret? I hope so.