The Brooklyn Rail

So much is going on now, everywhere, including a large assembly in Paris to celebrate the one-hundred-year anniversary of the Surrealist Manifesto. Since I cannot roll myself to that, I would like right now to reflect on the massive importance of the multitudinous areas reached by Surrealism in its full-blown being. Many of the overviews of Surrealism tend to deal mostly, or even only, with the painted and painterly side of Surrealism—including the recent New Yorker piece by Jackson Arn—whereas the verbal manifestation of Surrealism was equally an intrinsic part of the movement from the beginning.

Let me take, for two major examples, Antonin Artaud’s splendiferous “The Mountain of Signs,” from which I quote only the last part, and André Breton’s experimental and massively important Communicating Vessels [Les Vases communicants], alluding to a scientific experiment in which side-by- side glass vessels exchange gas elements—a diagram picture will follow. These are only two of the leading texts of the worldwide movements of Surrealism, so I am supposing that readers interested will continue far beyond my paltry indications.

Surrealism connects. It celebrates the existence of “a capillary tissue,” enabling a mental and experiential circulation between states of being, emotions, worlds even, as between elements verbal and visual. It guarantees the constant exchange and thought that must exist between the exterior and interior worlds, an exchange that requires the continuous interpenetration of the activity of waking and that of sleeping. This consciousness, connected and connecting, is the one to which surrealism makes appeal, so that inner and outer states of thought and writing and art-making. All forms of creation communicate like those glass vessels.

Now I want to turn to a magnificent text by Antonin Artaud called “The Mountain of Signs.” It’s about a tribe called the Tarahumara and their land which is full of signs, and the text itself, of which I cite just the last paragraph, simply astounds the present-day reader. With its singular lyricism, this passage represents the crazed consciousness of the singularly mad genius Artaud. I read it as a prose poem in its ultimate state.

Thus, as I was making my way across the mountain, these spears, these crosses, these trefoils, these leafy hearts, these composite crosses, these triangles, these beings which confront and oppose each other to signify their eternal war, their division, their duality, awakened in me strange memories. I recall suddenly that there were in History certain Sects which had incrusted the rockfaces with identical signs, and the members of these Sects wore these signs carved in jade, hammered in iron, or chased. And it occurs to me that this symbolism hides a Science. And it seems strange to me that the primitive Tarahumara people, whose rituals and thought are older than the Flood, could have already possessed this Science long before the first Legend of the Graal appeared, long before the Rosicrucian Sect was founded.

Now I want to select one Breton prose poem, indelibly essential to his strange vision, supremely Surrealist style and thought, and called “The Verb to Be.” This kind of writing, the prose poem itself, seems to me to be the center of Surrealist style. It seems to me that this is the kind of text one should honor Breton for, and indeed we do. I am quoting it in its entire length of one breathless paragraph for the extent and distance are essential to its subject so honored.

The Verb to Be

I know despair in its broad outlines. Despair has no wings, it is not necessarily found at a cleared table upon a terrace, in the evening by the seaside. It is despair and it is not the return of a quantity of little facts like seeds leaving one furrow for another at nightfall. It is not moss upon a stone or a drinking glass. It is a boat riddled with snow, if you please, like birds falling, and their blood has not the slightest thickness. I know despair in its broad outlines. A very small form, fringed by jewels of hair. It is despair. A necklace of pearls for which a clasp can never be found and whose existence does not hold even by a thread, that is despair. As for the rest let’s not speak of it. We haven’t finished despairing if we begin. I myself despair of the lampshade around four o’clock, I despair of the fan around midnight. I despair of the condemned man’s last cigarette. I know despair in its broad outlines. Despair has no heart, the hand always remains in despair out of breath, and despair whose death we’re never told about by mirrors. I live off this despair which so enchants me. I love that blue fly streaking in the sky at the hour when the stars hum their song. I know in its broad outlines despair with its long, slim breaches, the despair of pride, the despair of anger. I rise every day like everyone and I stretch out my arms on a flowered wallpaper. I remember nothing and it’s always with despair that I discover the lovely uprooted trees of the night. The air of the room is lovely like drumsticks. It is time weather. I know despair in its broad outlines. It is like the curtain wind giving me a helping hand. Can you imagine such despair: Fire, fire! Ah they are still going to come… Help! There they are falling down the stairs… And the newspaper advertisements, and the illuminated signs along the canal. Sandpile, go on with you, you old sandpile! In its broad outlines despair has no importance. It is a drudgery of trees that is going to make a forest again, a drudgery of stars that is going to make one less day again, a drudgery of days fewer which will again make up my life.

And now in conclusion, I want to read a few sentences addressed from the Breton of Mad Love to his baby daughter. This is the kind of writing for which many of us value Surrealism, me for a lifetime.

Forever, and for a long time—those two great warring expressions that confront each other whenever it’s a question of love—have never exchanged more blinding sword-thrusts than today, above me, in a sky entirely like your eyes, whose whites are still so blue. Of those two expressions, the one that wears my colors, even if its star may be waning now, even if it must lose, is forever… Despite everything, I shall have maintained that this expression forever is the master key. What I have loved, whether I have kept it or not, I shall love forever.

So very beautiful. I can’t resist quoting that anytime I can, and that letter to his baby daughter ends with this brief and all important sentence:

I want you to be madly loved.

These texts come from his book called Mad Love (L’Amour fou) (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1987) which I translated with great happiness. This was the way in which I was in touch with Breton’s wife, for whom and about whom the book was written, Jacqueline Lamba.

So those to me are the principal tenets of Surrealism, and I shall love them forever.