The Surrealist Thread

[AntManBee]

Paul Eluard and André Breton. Photo by Man Ray.

[AntManBee]

Wilhelm Freddie "Portrait Aérodynamique" (1937)

[AntManBee]

(I'm told this has been posted here somewhere before, way back, but a search wouldn't bring it up, and it deserves a second chance anyway, so here goes.)


THE DEBUTANTE
by Leonora Carrington

When I was a debutante I often used to go to the Zoological Gardens. I'd go there so often I knew the animals better than the young ladies of my own age. It was in fact to get away from people that I found myself everyday at the Zoo. The animal I knew the best was a young hyena. She knew me, too; she was very intelligent; I taught her French and in return she taught me her language. We spent many a pleasant hour this way.

On the first day of May, my mother was arranging a ball in my honor; for nights on end I suffered; I've always hated balls, especially those given in my honor.

On the morning of the First of May 1934, very early, I paid the hyena a visit. "It's a dammed nuisance," I told her, "I have to go to my ball this evening."

"You're lucky," she said, "I'd be glad to go. I don't know how to dance, but I know how to make conversation, anyway."

"There'll be lots of things to eat," I said. "I've seen trucks full of food coming up to the house."

"And you complain," relied the hyena, in disgust. "I eat once a day, and you should see the stuff they give me!"

I had a daring idea, I almost laughed: "Why don't you go in my place?"

"We don't look enough alike, otherwise I'd go all right," said the hyena, a bit sad.

"Listen," said I, "under the evening lights it isn't too easy to see; if you're dressed up a bit, among the crowd they won't notice. Then again, we're about the same height. You are my only friend, I beg of you." She thought things over, I knew she wanted to accept.

"Consider it done," she said suddenly.

It was very early in the day, there were not many keepers about. Quickly I opened the cage and in a few moments we were in the street. I took a taxi, and at home everyone was in bed. In my room I took out the dress I was to wear that evening. It was a little long and the hyena had trouble walking on the high heels of my shoes. I found some gloves to disguise her hands, too hair to resemble mine. When the sun reached my room she walked several times up and down, more or less upright. We were so busy that my mother, who was coming to say good morning to me, almost opened the door before the hyena had hidden under my bed. "There's a nasty smell in your room," said my mother, opening a window. "Before tonight you'll take a bath scented with my new salts." - "All right," I said. She didn't stay long. I think the smell was too strong for her.

"Don't be late for breakfast," said my mother, leaving my room.

The biggest problem was finding a disguise for her face. Hours and hours we tried; she turned down all of my suggestions. At last she said: "I think I know a solution. Do you have a maid?"

"Yes," I said, perplexed.

"Well, there you are. You'll ring for the maid and when she comes in we'll pounce on her and we'll tear her face off. I'll wear her face this evening in place of my own."

"That's not sensible," I said. "She'll probably be dead when she has no face left; someone will surely find the body and we'll go to prison."

"I'm hungry enough to eat her," replied the hyena.

"And what about the bones?"

"Them, too," she said. "Well, do you agree?"

"Only if you promise to kill her before tearing her face off; it'll hurt too much otherwise."

"Right, it's all the same to me."

I was ringing for Mary the maid, somewhat nervous. I wouldn't have done so if I didn't hate balls so. When Mary came in I turned to the wall so as not to see. I admit it was over quick. A short cry and that was the end. While the hyena was eating, I looked out of the window. A few minutes later she said: "I can't eat any more; both of the feet are still left, but if you have a bag I'll eat them later in the day."

"You'll find in the closet a bag embroidered with the fleur de lys. Empty out the handkerchiefs in there and take that one." She was doing as I had told her. The she said: "Turn around now and look how beautiful I am!"

In front of the mirror the hyena was admiring herself in Mary's face. She had eaten carefully all around the face so that just what she needed was left. "Yes indeed, you've made a good job of it," I said. Towards evening, when the hyena was all dressed, she announced: "I feel in fine form. I've the impression I'll be a big success tonight."

When we had heard the music downstairs for some time, I said to her: "Go on, now, and remember not to stand next to my mother: she'd know it wasn't me, for sure. Apart from her, I know nobody. Good luck." I kissed her as she left but she did have a strong smell. Night had come. Tired out by the emotions of the day, I took a book and, near the open window, I gave myself over to rest. I remember I was reading Gulliver's Travels by Jonathan Swift. It was perhaps an hour after that the first sign of something untoward came. A bat entered by the window, uttering little cries. I'm terribly afraid of bats. I hid behind a chair, my teeth chattering. I was hardly on my knees when the sound of beating wings was drowned out by a loud noise at my door. My mother came in, pale with fury. "We had just sat down to eat," she said, "when that thing in your place gets up and cries, 'I smell a bit strong, eh? Well I don't eat cake.' Then she tore off her face and ate it. With one bound she disappeared through the window."

[AntManBee]

Man Ray "Untitled (Rayograph)" 1943

[AntManBee]

Leonor Fini "Cortege" 1960

[AntManBee]

Claude Cahun/Marcel Moore, 1929-30

[AntManBee]

SKIN OF LIGHT
by Rene Daumal

The skin of light enveloping this world lacks depth and I can actually see the black night of all these similar bodies beneath the trembling veil and light of myself it is this night that even the mask of the sun cannot hide from me I am the seer of night the auditor of silence for silence too is dressed in sonorous skin and each sense has its own night even as I do I am my own night I am the conceiver of non-being and of all its splendor I am the father of death she is its mother she whom I evoke from the perfect mirror of night i am the great inside-out man my words are a tunnel punched through silence I understand all disillusionment I destroy what I become I kill what I love.

[AntManBee]

Man Ray "Untitled (Rayograph)" 1922

[AntManBee]

Leonora Carrington "La Tentación de San Antonio" 1947

[AntManBee]

Max Ernst "Temptation of St. Anthony" 1945

[AntManBee]

Max Walter Svanberg "The Possessed Constellation"

(Sorry for the discolorations in the picture, it's the only one I could find.)

[AntManBee]

From "Manifesto of Surrealism" by André Breton, 1924:


We are still living under the reign of logic: this, of course, is what I have been driving at. But in this day and age logical methods are applicable only to solving problems of secondary interest. The absolute rationalism that is still in vogue allows us to consider only facts relating directly to our experience. Logical ends, on the contrary, escape us. It is pointless to add that experience itself has found itself increasingly circumscribed. It paces back and forth in a cage from which it is more and more difficult to make it emerge. It too leans for support on what is most immediately expedient, and it is protected by the sentinels of common sense. Under the pretense of civilization and progress, we have managed to banish from the mind everything that may rightly or wrongly be termed superstition, or fancy; forbidden is any kind of search for truth which is not in conformance with accepted practices. It was, apparently, by pure chance that a part of our mental world which we pretended not to be concerned with any longer--and, in my opinion by far the most important part--has been brought back to light.

/.../

Man proposes and disposes. He and he alone can determine whether he is completely master of himself, that is, whether he maintains the body of his desires, daily more formidable, in a state of anarchy. Poetry teaches him to. It bears within itself the perfect compensation for the miseries we endure.

/.../

Those who might dispute our right to employ the term SURREALISM in the very special sense that we understand it are being extremely dishonest, for there can be no doubt that this word had no currency before we came along. Therefore, I am defining it once and for all:

SURREALISM, n. Psychic automatism in its pure state, by which one proposes to express--verbally, by means of the written word, or in any other manner--the actual functioning of thought. Dictated by the thought, in the absence of any control exercised by reason, exempt from any aesthetic or moral concern.

[Brian Olewnick]

The difference between myself and the Surrealists is that I am a Surrealist.

--Dali

[AntManBee]

Surrealism is above all a state of mind, it does not advocate formulas. The most important point is to put oneself in the right frame of mind. No Surrealist is in the world, or thinks of himself in the present, or believes in the effectiveness of the mind as spur, the mind as guillotine, the mind as judge, the mind as doctor, and he resolutely hopes to be apart from the mind. The Surrealist has judged the mind. He has no feelings which are a part of himself, he does not recognize any thought as his own. His thought does not fashion for him a world to which he reasonably assents. He despairs of attaining his own mind.

-- Antonin Artaud

[AntManBee]

MANIFESTO IN A CLEAR LANGUAGE
by Antonin Artaud


If I believe neither in Evil nor in Good, if I feel such a strong inclination to destroy, if there is nothing in the order of principles to which I can reasonably accede, the underlying reason is in my flesh.

I destroy because for me everything that proceeds from reason is untrustworthy.I believe only in the evidence of what stirs my marrow, not in the evidence of what addresses itself tomy reason. I have found levels in the realm of the nerve.

I now feel capable of evaluating the evidence. There is for me an evidence in the realm of pure flesh which has nothing to do with the evidence of reason. The eternal conflict betweenreason and the heart is decided in my very flesh, but in my flesh irrigated by nerves. In the realm of the affective imponderable, the image provided by my nerves takes the form of the highest intellectuality, which I refuse to strip of its quality of intellectuality. And so it is that I watch the formation of a concept which carries within it the actual fulguration of things, a concept which arrives upon me with a sound of creation. No image satisfies me unless it is at the same time Knowledge, unless it carries with it its substance as well as its lucidity. My mind, exausted by discursive reason, wants to be caught up in the wheels of a new, an absolute gravitation. For me it is like a supreme reorganization in which only the laws of illogic participate, and in which there triumphs the discovery of a new Meaning. This Meaning which has been lost in the disorder of drugs and which presents the appearance of a profound intelligence to the contradictory phantasms of the sleep. This Meaning is a victory of the mind over itself, and although it is irreducible by reason, it exists, but only inside the mind. It is order, it is intelligence, it is the signification of chaos. But it does not accept this chaos as such, it interprets it, and because it interprets it, it loses it. It is the logic of illogic. And this is all one can say. My lucid unreason is not afraid of chaos.

I renounce nothing of that which is the Mind. I want only to transport my mind elsewhere with its laws and organs. I do not surrender myself to the sexual mechanism of the mind, but on the contrary within this mechanism I seek to isolate those discoveries which lucid reason does not provide. I surrender to the fever of dreams, but only in order to derive from them new laws. I seek multiplication, subtlety, the intellectual eye in delirium, not rash vaticination. There is a knife which I do not forget.

But it is a knife which is halfway into dreams, which I keep inside myself, which I do not allow to come to the frontier of the lucid senses.

That which belongs to the realm of the image is irreducible by reason and must remain within the image or be annihilated.

Nevertheless, there is a reason in images, there are images which are clearer in the world of image-filled vitality.

There is in the immediate teeming of the mind a multiform and dazzling insinuation of animals. This insensible and thinking dust is organized according to laws which it derives from within itself, outside the domain of clear reason or of thwarted consciousness or reason.

In the exalted realm of images, illusion properly speaking, or material error, does not exist, much less the illusion of knowledge: but this is all the more reason why the meaning of a new knowledge can and must descend into the reality of life.

The truth of life lies in the impulsiveness of matter. The mind of man has been poisoned by concepts. Do not ask him to be content, ask him only to be calm, to believe that he has found his place. But only the madman is really calm.

[Squaredancecalling Steve]

GOOD DAY GOOD EVENING

It's night be the flame
And the red that colors the clouds
Good day sir Good evening madam
You don't look your age

What does it matter if your embraces
Make the twin stars bleed
What does it matter if your face is painted
if hoarfrost glitters on the branches

Of granite or marble
Your age will show
And the shade of the great trees
will walk on your graves.


Robert Desnos, translated by Amy Levin




THE TRAITS OF THE SKY

The fire that dances
The bird that sings
The wind that dies
The icy waves
And the surges of rumor
In the ear the distant cries
of the day that passes
all the weary flames
the voice of the voyager
All the powder in the sky
the heel on the earth
The eye fixed on the road
Where steps are inscribed
Which the number unrolls
To the names that have left
In the folds of the clouds
the unknown face
The one which you watch
And which has not come




Pierre Reverdy, translated by Amy Levin

[Enforcer]

Originally Posted by AntManBee

Paul Eluard and André Breton. Photo by Man Ray.

Me and Moné once we realize that the cable is out and we won't be watching the Red Wings-Mighty Ducks game tonight.

Sorry! My last derailer on this thread, I promise.

Lying,
Larry

[Enforcer]

[lazarus]

Hans Bellmer

[Richardo Caerleoni]

Magritte

[Squaredancecalling Steve]

[Squaredancecalling Steve]

[AntManBee]

Giorgio De Chirico "Combattimento di gladiatori" 1928

[AntManBee]

Giorgio de Chirico "The Disquieting Muses" 1918

[AntManBee]

Giorgio de Chirico "Torino printanière" 1914

[Brian Olewnick]

Not the world's biggest Magritte fan (aside from the non-pipe), but always liked this 'un:

[AntManBee]

Yves Tanguy "The Extinction of Useless Lights" 1927

[AntManBee]

Thanks guys for your contributions to the thread! Keep them coming.

SqDC Steve - I love that Desnos poem!

[Pete C]

The thing about Magritte is his work is purely conceptual, not painterly. It struck me when I saw a major retrospective that the stuff works just as well in reproduction. Nothing tactile about the work.

[AntManBee]

Originally Posted by Pete C

The thing about Magritte is his work is purely conceptual, not painterly. It struck me when I saw a major retrospective that the stuff works just as well in reproduction. Nothing tactile about the work.

Pete, what do you think of Dali from that perspective?