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Tuesday, Nov 24, 2009
If you just stopped right there and said That's enough, I must buy this book and read it aloud to my beloved under the sheets, at whatever the price (My copy doesn't seem to have a price on it) you'd be in good shape. But there are pictures too. Who is that nude, corpselike sleeping woman whose hair falls out of the picture onto the floor of our study, whose eyelashes are so brittle with detail you can feel them brush against your cheek but whose body is so soft with blur it's just like she was right here in front of us, so detailed in the face and yet so mysterious in her more passionate and alluring areas? That's a photograph by Jacques-André Boiffard, "Renée Jacobi," from 1930, it says in the back, and you could see it if you went to the Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris, Musée national d'art moderne, I guess.
And there's this enormous weird hand crawling out of a snail shell by Dora Maar, too. And all through the book, while you're reading lines like "pilots steer according to my eyes / builders grow dizzy listening to me / architects leave for the desert / murderers bless me / flesh quivers at my call / the one I love does not listen to me / the one I love does not hear me / the one I love does not answer me" from "The Voice of Robert Desnos," you can look at that luscious untitled nude by Man Ray on approximately Page 63.
And if you demand an explanation, Caws provides one in her introductory essay, "The Poetics of Surrealist Love."
Had you forgotten, or didn't you realize, that surrealism got its start from the crazy dadaists? Ah, what glorious liberation from the ordinary did that troupe bring to the souls of early 20th century Europe (dadaism was founded in Zurich in 1915, she says). "The dadaists greatly enjoyed undoing every idea of the rational in favour of the violently active and highly coloured," she says. And they still do, I imagine, if you can still find one, what with rents so high. "Their performances included simultaneous readings of the same text in different languages, and combined outlandish costume with gesture, noise, art and drama."
In case you're bored with "The West Wing."
Oh, and maybe after so many Salvador Dalí paintings you'd forgotten that, as Caws says, "Surrealism began as a literary movement, visual art only being fully accepted when Breton later acknowledged that 'vision is the most powerful of the senses'' and downplayed the aural: 'Let the curtain fall on the orchestra.'"
Wouldn't it be great to live in a world where guys with mustaches ran around saying, "Let the curtain fall on the orchestra"? Well, I guess that's why so many of us fled the suburbs for the great American cities, hoping to find crazy guys with mustaches and manifestos. It's still a dream worth pursuing: to find a dark basement club where the only light comes from the spark of the new. Especially now: This is no time to become a bond salesman. Why not light out for the territories, culturally speaking? These poems, and Caws' condensed history of surrealism, provide a wonderful reminder of how powerful and necessary are the voices of the irrational.
Know what I mean?
Oh, but there's so much more, now that the dogs are walked and I've got some coffee, and Monk and Mulligan have moved on to "I Mean You" (take 4). Sure you can't hear that? Here, I'll turn it up.
"Surrealism laid great stress on the liberating power of sexuality, which found a firm support in the texts of Sigmund Freud. Breton's text 'Mad Love' (L'Amour fou), published in 1937, illustrates how for Freud, sexual love 'breaks the collective links created by race, rises above national differences and social hierarchies.'" Caws explains how the French surrealists' desire for freedom "linked the surrealist revolution with the French Revolution two centuries before."
It's a good 10-page introduction to about 100 pages of poems by such greats as the aforementioned Breton and Desnos but also by Pablo Picasso, Salvador Dalí, Frida Kahlo, Paul Eluard, Octavio Paz and others.
I wish I could say I have a favorite. That would indicate that I have at least some critical faculties, wouldn't it? That I could at least make a few comparative judgments? Let me just instead quote some more of the more beautiful and interesting lines.
From Octavio Paz in "Clear Night" (extract): "your name is downpour and your name is meadow / your name is high tide / you have all the names of water / But your sex is unnameable / the other face of being / the other face of time"
From Benjamin Péret in "Wink": "Parakeets fly through my head when I see you in profile / and the greasy sky streaks with blue flashes / tracing your name in all directions."
Many of the poems seem to be incantations or chants, rather than arguments, and work by the accretion of images, so that at the conclusion what is left in the mind is not a single unified vision but a collection of disparate objects. It's like the poets are in your head, up on ladders, painting on your brain. For instance, in Péret's incantatory "Hello": "my opal snail my air mosquito / my quilt of birds of paradise my hair of black foam / my tomb burst open my red grasshopper rain / my flying island my turquoise grape."
Or in Picasso's "Her Great Thighs," a sort of catalog of her body parts -- "her hips / her buttocks / her arms," etc., is followed by a more wide-ranging collection of things: "the oil lamps and the little bells of the sugared canaries between the figures -- the milk bowl of feathers, snatched from every laugh undressing the nude from the weight of the arms taken away from the blooms of the vegetable garden ..."
So what the poem invents is not so much a narrative or an argument as a strange machine, or a painting or sculpture of the world, things not held together by functional or narrative relationship but by unconscious associations they have for the poet, or by a visual or tactile affinity. These are exotic recipes for a strange feast.
And finally, ladies and gentlemen, I will make a pronouncement, I will say that there is a good reason this book exists, I will place it in context, I will suggest that it serves some purpose in our culture, that it reminds us to do something we had neglected to do, that it stands in relation to something, that it sheds new light on something formerly in shadow, that it is something to look through to see something else, that it is indeed something, that it is more than something, that it is more than what it appears to be, that it is an important reminder, that it is important in and of itself, that it is necessary, that it is essential, that we cannot believe we lasted this long without it.
Then I will get a snack.
