EYES WIDE SHUT

In Paris the Saint-Jacques Tower tottering

Like a sunflower

Sometimes bumps its forehead against the Seine and its shadow

glides

    Imperceptibly among the tugboats

At that moment on tiptoe in my sleep

I head for the room where I am lying

And I set it on fire

So that nothing survives of the consent torn from me

Then the furniture makes room for animals the same size that watch

    me like a brother 

Lions in whose manes the chairs are finally burnt up

Dogfish whose white bellies blend with the last shiver of the

bedsheets

At the hour of love and blue eyelids

Next I see myself burning I see that solemn hiding-place of nothings

That was my body 

Raked by the patient beaks of the ibises of fire

When it’s all over invisible I board the ark

 

André Breton, “Vigilance” (excerpt), ca. 1931, tr. Bill Zavatsky and Zack Rogow, from André Breton – Selections, ed. Mark Polizzotti, Berkeley and Los Angeles, University of California Press, 2003.

Last night in bed, we talked about Automatic Writing.  I can’t remember the last time we did that.

Symbols Are Containers (Arp)

Symbols are containers of the various levels of knowledge.  They represent metaphysical insight into the organizing principle of life itself.   

At their most condensed and when logically understood for what they are, symbols possess enormous power as sources of psychic energy.  They recapitulate the ontology of natural growth, and more specifically, the evolution of the human race and the intellectual and emotional development of every child.  In effect, the code of human universals resides in two contrasting forms:  the first is in each human brain, the second is in all artifacts comprising the man-made world.  

In terms of practical function and iconicity, every manufactured object and spatial enclosure represents a deductible imprint of specific universals.  Consequently, this code is carried from generation to generation by two separate means: organically through the brain of every living individual and inorganically through the trans-lingual relationships embodied in every artifact, writing, or spatial relationship.  

This invites a great paradox.   

  

All profound art and writing lies in conflict between being as the essence of spiritual revelation and the illusional permanence of the written word, the icon or the sacred space.


Jack Burnham, “Objects and Ritual: Toward a Working Ontology of Art”, in Great Western Salt Works, Essays on the Meaning of Post-Formalist Art, New York, George Braziller, 1974.

 

 

  Illustrations by Jean Arp:

          1. Head-Flag, 1926.

          2. The Navel-Bottle, 1923.

          3. Automatic Drawing, 1916.

          4. Tristan Tzara’s 25 Poems, 1918.

          5. Untitled, 1951.

    6. Lion, 1916.

ll

Herakleitos 14 (Robert Desnos Exception)

14.

One ought not to talk or act as if he were asleep.

     Top:    An automatic writing session. Simone Collinet-Breton, Robert Desnos and Jacques Baron are in the foreground. Max Morise, Roger Vitrac, Jacques Boiffard, Andre Breton, Paul Eluard, Pierre Naville, Giorgio de Chirico and Phillipe Soupault are left to right. Photograph by Man Ray, c. 1923.

   

    Bottom:   Robert Desnos at work.

TORMA ! TORMA !! TORMA !!! ("efface the trace of a dreadful past")

I.  My opinon of nature:

        The feet try in vain to tempt the ground;  it is a sated belly, refusing all superfluity.  Who would dare brag of doing as much?

II.  Whiteness is filthy.

III.  Nothing astounds me more than the taste of the commonality for dogs, cats, parrots, etc.  For my part, a creature interests me only when its reactions become totally alien to me.  The leech isn't too bad, the starfish is quite an improvement.  But the slug!  Speak to me of slugs!

IV.  Society is a concert (with its bum-notes, of course.)  But people are disconcerting.  To reassure oneself, one pretends to confound them.  People talk of the "beau-monde," or of  "mixing in high society."  Cosmic -- and comic -- demi-monde.  

V.   Demon is the anagram of monde.

VI.  The unexpected is not all that so.  Fortunately, it would otherwise go unrecognised and pass unnoticed.  Tediously, it is for this very reason that it quickly becomes tedious.


VII.  We are mistaken in not being on guard against certain ill-effects of thought.  I take it as understood that a pleasant event will take place only at the moment when I am giving it the least thought, and because I am giving it the least thought.  The thought kills the event, and from the still-born event there arise mortal emanations.  Action, that is to say, creation, constitutes the exact inverse of conscious thought.  In that second, I kill in myself something a thousand times better than my thought.  Let's think no more, dis-pense with thinking.

VIII.      Forgetting is the most living thing there is in life.  The secret of magical renewal and of virtu, valor, strength.  Reconciliation too is the only solution, the solution of continuity.

               In illness, it is the memory that usurps and invades the living being:  the body is marked and cannot, at least for a while, efface the trace of a dreadful past.  Death is the subversive subversion of all forgetting.  Since cohesion is maintained only by the onward impulse,  total fixation is at the same time decomposition.  And the corpse, when it becomes past, returns to its own past, that is to say,  to the beginning of the cycle, to the original elements.  In the consciousness of the dying man this finds expression in the well-known hypermnesia under which it falls apart.

              Forgetting is thus still the panacaea, the remedy in the absence of a remedy:  the veritable potable gold of alchymical science.  And I lived a golden star by the light of nature.  Forgetting is yellow, as Van Gogh SAW it.  Hence the melancholy of memory and the moralistic-pallbearer mannerism that takes hold of all who live in the past.  

IX.  Not life, but a fit-up between life and death.

X.  Every day they recite their "I-lesson"

XI.   IT'S ALL THE SAME TO ME (I measure myself against it, and reckon myself its equal).

XII.   Nobody has ever given me orders.  If some have reckoned to do so (in the army), I never noticed it.  I have no need to have a world that's in order.

                 I have never given myself an order.

Links:

1. TORMA!


2.  TORMA!!