preface:
Stockholm surrealist group: polemics over dreams
Some of its members revisiting some questions of largely academic interest whether the surrealist atopos is closely related to Foucault's heterotopia, whether the latter is closely related to the ship of fools, whether Foucault's ship of fools is Breton's ship of fools, an interesting debate took place in the Stockholm surrealist group based on the interpretation of a dream each by a couple of members.
MF started out harshly with a dream about himself. "Now I am going to bore you with a rather dull and painful dream. The sadism of the act follows logically from its subject. Because: in a Stora Saltet issue I reread the other day, Niklas and I had each written a text about our own person. Bizarre, I thought. Immediately thereafter I ended up in an uncomfortable position in a written discussion with a significant person, where a long line of thought I developed was interpreted as if being about myself. I still haven't come up with a way to correct the misunderstanding, I overreact, I repeat to myself antipersonalistic ponderings, from reasonable ones like 'I don't exist, except as a relay station for associations' to highly doubtful such as 'The single common denominator of all the important events in my life is that there is one factor which could always be subtracted from the picture without chainging its meaning: myself'. And at night when I'm asleep that famous 'old man inside me' punishes me by bringing up the subject of my birthday, which is the annually recurring event when one is allowed, even in the most selfsacrificing duty ethics, or even supposed, to focus on one's own person.
/.../ I leave out the dream itself here, but when awakening I heard a ridiculous little glockenspiel tune being repeated over and over again (I often wake up to these repetitive audial hypnagogies); after a while I recognise it as John Cale´s 'Ship of fools'. Poor me. How I resent the sweetly witty, and how I prefer the harshly unreasonable, like yesterday, when I couldn't remember a single dream image but during my entire breakfast I had PJ Harvey's growling going on in my head 'I wanna bathe in milk!'"
NN quickly replied "Isn't the Ship of fools and the Milk bath the same method, that is idealistic selfpersuasion?", which may have made sense as strategies in the dream visavis the birthday setting and other complications, and cited Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj saying "The self is so self-confident that unless it is totally discouraged it will not give up. Mere verbal conviction is not enough. Hard facts alone can show the absolute nothingness of the self-image."
The next day or so, NN replied with a dream of his own. Only part of it is cited here: "A coherent sequence about some kind of marine creatures, obviously belonging to the same mythological family as the siren and the sea monk. They were intelligent, had their own language, and their appearance was almost spherical, with a narrow hindbody and tail like on an anglerfish or a flounder, and were sparsely pubescent on the head. They were called SOMS, which made me associate to SEAMONSTERS while the capital letters gave the impression of being an acronym. Somebody has a suggestion what SOMS might mean?"
MF went on about personal associations and film reminiscences, and made a serious attempt to understand the word, supposing it to be "of greek origin, as in chromosome, allosome, autosome, which all are derived from Soma = body. But it could also be from indoeuropean soma, a mythical drink giving much pleasure and knowledge, or from greek somnus (sleep), somnium (dream) or somphos (spongy, porous). But if an acronym I would guess an english-language one (english uses acronyms more); something so-to-speak sticking out its chin, like Sexualrepressed Obsession Matrixes? Sons of Mothers? Or, in order to avoid bad feelings, something descriptive and uncontroversial like Somnimarine Obese Monsters?" Then he went into stingy polemics against the apparent denial of the sensory concrete aspects of the milk bath in focusing on a symbolic aspect.
There came in some other suggestions as to what SOMS might mean, based on "Sound of Music" or "Swedish Oral Medicine Society", personal associations, google searches, or jokes; or all three.
Next morning, the phrase waking up MF was "HALIBUTS DON'T BREAK", connecting to the possible flounders of NN:s dream. An interpretation of the phrase was offered, which is of minor importance here.
NN duly thanked for the suggestions and associations. He went on to defend the symbolic interpretation by a general defense of psychoanalytical methodology. Then for a short time arguments got nasty, before a need was felt to displace the discussion into some more constructive efforts, where NN first offered a poem, claiming among other things that "sensuality six weeks a year/ is transformed into an ugly family just like others/ on the beach" where it "hands out icecream with slaps in the face and insights with intentions/ concretions with artifacts of nothingness/ abstractions with boiled potatoes and currant jelly". JE, sitting on the top of a canarian volcano studying the sun and reading Novalis' "Disciples in Sais" outlined a needed "archive of representations" by way of a mathematical series of operations between latent and manifest; an archive that would track the transformations between latent contents and manifest dreams and make them available for games. MF stubbornly felt he needed to specify why milkbathing is interesting considered as sensory experience and wrote en essay about it (to which JB reminded of a few significant aspects missed).
Monday, September 7, 2009
The sense of milk bathing
1. Bathing
Bathing means three things: embracement, splash-dance and submerging.
Embracement is to be enclosed in a more dense, distinct, rather homogenous medium, the whole skin as an organ of touch, and all the various sensory organs concentrated in the face, and everything comes near and becomes more languid, intensely sluggish, and the sounds and the electric jolts and the temperature differences and the smells all move faster, and one becomes omniscient and oversensitive. An acute sense of nivellation, totalisation, as every limb, every inch of skin, I might be excused the siphonophoran analogy of saying every citizen of the body, is just as much wettened and just as much part of the waterworld. Everything is naked, feeling and tasting reaches everywhere simultaneously. And then there is the archimedean aspect; being enclosed in a denser medium has the consequence of relative weightlessness, related to flying in dreams and other distinct phenomenological states less conditioned or just less restrained by common gravity. Floating but not floating. Weighing but not weighing.
Splashdance concerns the medium as an extremely mobile and topographically complex interface, and a decrease in the effects of gravity, a wrestling, dancing and hugging which does no longer recognise up and down, which has more and simultaneously less of concealed and revealed, a perpetually changing surface of peaks, valleys, drops, slopes, coatings, connecting things temporarily and flashwise, is a frenzy and a cacophony.
Submerging focuses on the medium as a horizontal interface, a razorsharp limit, the difference in the world; and must be regarded as the central moment in the milk bath (leading for sure to embracement. In a submerging process there are three central structural elements; a) the suspension above the surface, everything is hanging, what tension, the gravity of that which rests in its restrained falling, endless waiting with aching muscles, b) the horizontal, razorsharp interface itself, and the transgression in the passage through it, c) the embracement and homogenisation of the life world beneath.
But living in this homogenous, this embraced being, what is that? Well it is living in the dream, there are all these strong images of falling when falling asleep, and of passing down beneath, or up above, a distinct surface, when moving from a hypnagogic state to a waking. Inside the medium, and thus inside the dream, everything is possible but also slower, softer, safer, more comfortable, more implacable, more necessary, without any arbitrariness. On a certain plane this is of course an intra-uterine existence (and the dream just like the bath is a womb).
And then we are already in that problematic chain of symbols in Róheim ("Gates of the dream") where all dreaming is transgression which is penetration which is longing to the womb which is regression; everything pointing forward points backward, and everything integrates conventional coitus and the crawling back into mother's tummy. The foremost problem is that it carries too far too quickly, synonymising most of what there is, risking missing the unique characteristics of anything. (I had already avoided to say "inbracement" rather than embracement, after CJL Almqvist's term for carnal as well as cosmic intercourse in his swedenborgian-erotic classic "Murnis".)
Back to our childishly stubborn concretion. The surface is a membrane to pass through. And since we don't have all that much feelings connected with this on certain levels such as that where molecules pass over membranes, we soon arrive at a more meaningladen level; that of mucus membranes. Human membranes are all water surfaces, delimitations visavis another world, warmer, more real and unreal, where that selfsufficient connectivity is abandoned, one's as it is called bourgeois body, in order to seek another equally abandoned human on that little island on the other side of the river of oblivion. But it is also obviously ambiguous: to penetrate, with a male sex which is a metaphor for the whole body or vice versa, penetrating a water surface equals being penetrated by a water surface, a body arching up against oneself stretching out into oneself, and vice versa, it is a totalising and multisexed embrace, permeates and is permeated, it is in fact something like a basal trope of the pansexual because it starts off exactly where the simplest sexual strategies becomes interchangeable and/or irrelevant.
And so what happens when we have arrived? Intrauterine existence. Yes who knows? There was a chapter about it in Breton/Eluard "The immaculate conception". And another chapter in the same book, about a walk on the bottom of the sea, where we stroll and politely greet famous serial murderers. There seems to be something unavoidably pastoral idyllic about it, a sunken little idyll, an atlantis, where everything is just a little condensed and jellyfish swim by and long hairs calmly wave and everybody move a little slower, octopuses with hats, mermaids, pennants from the towers, uncle Lenin standing waving in the aquarium. No I haven't got a clear image of intrauterine existence. It is an analogy with the dream, only without that firmness and compelling arbitrariness.
Speaking of firmness, if we now know that the water body is an intrauterine pansexual dream world which is out to get you, isn't it bizarre that the bathtub itself is made of china or enamelled tin; it is indeed a strangely hard uterus. Hence the blankets, the fat, the honey, with which it is robed or greased like a shock absorber. And such shock absorbers are potentially encompassing mediums themselves.
Blankets are a soft wrapping, tender grave shroud, the pupal chamber of a mummy, a bridal gown wanting to encompass in an insurveyable way which is directly comforting in the way it wrappingly embraces. Now we need to introduce the concept of thigmotaxy, which is the way earwigs, cows and often people cannot settle down to rest until such a large part as possible of the body is pressed against something, one puts oneself away in crevices, tunnels, somebodys arms, simple booths or coffins. A couple of days after the morning when I woke up at PJ Harvey's shouting I actually dreamt, depressedly, that I had a new apartment and preferred to lay wrapped in blankets in the bathtub, the dry and hard bathtub, in the firm conviction that it could possibly be warmer there, but I knew it wasn't, it was only the logical possibility itself that it could be that was enough, was something at all to grasp at in my existence devoid of happiness.
Fat is more homogenous than blankets, but it sticks everywhere, holds together, and repells water, it is itself a mucus membrane, but specifically a mucus membrane which suffocates. The sticky yellowness of fat is the evil water, which drug hallucinations and other fantasies of suffocation focuses on. Mountain ranges of fat tissue, where scolopenders rush around with their fifty poisonous legs, and all one's relatives stand lined up in a row for a photograph.
Honey, must be the good cousin of fat, just as sticky, adherent, alive, mucusmembranish, but so sweet and good, so beautiful and fragrant, it doesn't suffocate but gilds and embellishes, so wittily and playful, so luxurious and bizarre. And nevertheless so burningly sweet and stalkingly sticky.
We will have to introduce the third relative, mustard, still just as yellow and sticky, fresh and breathable like honey but without its flattering and mild character, yes well actually almost corrosively acrid, keeps the mildly flowing honey at bay with stabs and the maliciously flowing fat with counterfire, mustard is a miracle potion and nobody's friend. Maybe I'm on the track of something here, maybe fat, honey and mustard are actually the three tissue types of gold?
Because there has to take place at least some miracle, it's expected as the culmination of a stay in the uterus. Here the controversial rebirth comes in. (Controversial, as it was polemics over the meaning of rebirth in the interpretation of a dream that triggered writing this essay.) What is rebirth? I don't know. I thought it was nothing more than being awoken in the morning, the last swimming strokes up to the insistently light and noisy world where one keeps one's identity and lifestyle, where one stands naked since paradoxically outheld in an embracing clarity, embracing light. But why would it be rebirth if it does not lead to anything new? One tends to think it is new every single time.
2. Milk
The honey covering the inside of the tub as a protecting and softening fat layer is expected to interact with the milk. Milk and honey together, milk and honey are the two animal substances which don't seem animal, animal labor for the early schlaraffenland days of their offspring, the highest serum of offspring care in each of the two dominant animal lineages, in mammals among the deuterostomes and in bees among the protostomes. Joined, can they make anything else but simply more body? Isn't milk and honey together, after all, blood? Aren't they a metaphor for blood (like wine in christianity) already when you're supposed to bathe in it to stay young? Isn't that a vampiric act, resting on the same mythological, magical and infantile theory that the lifeforce rests in the blood, and bathing in it makes that lifeforce percolate through the membrane of the skin? And for that reason it is only logical that some would like to return the metaphorical praxis to its pure form, and prefer to bath in real blood instead of the symbolical milk of the blood. Blood gives life. Even medical science claims that today, in their campaigns for enlisting blood donors. Blood gives youth? Perhaps that rests on the calculation that the more life accumulated the younger once becomes. That's what vampires found their ideology and their mythological life on. If only one succeeds to collect incredibly much life perhaps it's even possible to transcend to being unborn? The sea lies still, without oneself to bathe in it.
Blood and milk are also similar on a concrete phenomenological level. These two traditionally lifegiving liquids are both vividly colored and sticky, very nutrious, rich and strangely thick tasting. Their analogous character is probably as distinctly exploited as possible, in a polarising form, in the wellknown division among the east african massai, into female food which is milkbased and male food which is bloodbased and never will the two meet.
So what is milk, perhaps we need to ask. Well milk is the primary offspring food in mammals. Milk is mothers milk. Our Ur-economy, as sketched by freudians-lacanians but not marxists. Then it is a different thing that milk secondarily, in certain cultures, has come to be associated with locally or commercially available cow's milk.
And we have several competing abstractions of the word, illuminating its concretion. Some would say that milk is anything milky, that is cloudy water (water with precipitated minerals), phenomenologically a water without clarity, without transparence, without merciless truth, a less watery water. Others would start talking about latex as milk sap, which is specific wound liquids in certain plants (blood again); you remember the taste of the bleeding white in dandelions, you know the rubber tree bleeding latex which is industrially used (the phenomenology of rubber probably has very little to do with milk though). Some would start talking about generalising milk on a consumistic level and pull in all kinds of milk substitutes (artificial dilutions of denaturalised protein from vegetabilic sources; soy milk, oat milk, almond milk) where it obviously parades as a commercial name for any white drink for meals whatsoever. Still others would get stuck in the dynamism of sexual metaphors and start nagging about, eventually confounding, milk and sperm, that isn't a very striking similarity, and probably not a very interesting path, but still probably contributes to increasing the expressivity of milk drops in certain locations in certain situations.
But, in elucidating the milk bath we must naturally give the primary conceptions the first place: milk is mothers milk, and everything else is one or another theory or metaphor for whatever ought to be sorted into the same category as mothers milk.
And nevertheless it remains cow milk, prepared as a commodity, homogenised, pasteurised, packed, sold and bought, which dominates the determination of the sensory concretion of milk for most people, or perhaps rather a projection of many of the original promises of mothers milk onto the commercially available perverse representation. But what characterises milk? Milk is fat and sweet, fresh and nourishing, selfcontained and contradictory, it is like a mixture of forest creek and whipped cream cake. And at the same time, through its rich content of enzymes, selfdestructive, bad smelling in itself, quickly putrid, gives extraneous mucus production and bad breath. (In the US there are still campaigns going on to make youth drink milk. The arguments that it contributes to skeletal construction, strength and health are not true; the argument that it makes young people less fat than drinking cocacola all day long may perhaps be true.)
So, there are actually certain cultures where it actually isn't a taboo to drink other animals' milk, where it has even been turned into culturally significant common social praxis, even for grownups, even commercially organised. Such a perverted society is Sweden where we live. The conspiracy theorists keep talking about the lactoconspiracy, about how the authorities forcefeed grownup men with cow milk in order to keep them dependent women-dominated easily-manipulated children. Forcefeed must here be taken in a non-literal sense, via internalised customs, for it's obviously not like among whales, where the mother simply tries to aim into the child's mouth whenever it is nearby, with a huge spray, almost like a high-pressure nozzle of uniquely fat milk. Well, milkdrinking in Sweden is as well known uniquely common. Thus, there is always a possibility to appear experienced, sophisticated, widely-travelled and cultivated by making faces at the provincially barbarian milkdrinkers with an supercilious shuddering. The population in Sweden does have one of the world's greatest frequencies of a genetic disease, the particular defect that makes childhood's ability to digest lactose NOT develop away in adolescence. All humans have those genes which switches off that temporary capacity to digest lactose, but some people, like the swedes, have a genetic reading error which keeps those genes from being expressed (the switching off is cancelled, double negation for the logician). Since locally most people have the disease, it's the opposite state which is defined as a disease: lactose intolerance. Do we here have a simple demonstration of the relativity of healthy/sick?
For it is not arbitrary to insist on association milkdrinking with its single universal form: suckling. No bottle-feds can deny the universal in this, not the least since their own neurotic insistence mythologises it even stronger via its biographical lack. And here we return to an adventurous regression of semi-Róheimian cut, and I, as a phenomenologist rather than a judging psychologist, would prefer to describe it as a non-static (flowing in all directions) and constantly ambiguous field being stretched out between pure regressional fantasies, conventional sexual forms, and pansexuality. On the other hand, I am not going to continue discussing it here. For it wasn't breasts that was the subject, it was bathing in milk.
3. Bathing as life environment and erotic future
But whoever bathes in a nourishing medium need not grope for teats, need not have an ombilic cord, is able to swim freely and metabolise through the skin; again the intrauterine in a certain (negative) utopian shape, how beautiful it would be to not need to bother, to universally not need to bother, a world where nothing is complication; dead boring, nirvana, intrauterine without all picturesque components. Usually I get upset by all these fantasies about not needing to bother to eat, because I spontaneously interpret them as rationalist-technologist-antisensory, but they are of course to an equal degree simply nirvana-directed, eating is after all an obviously very limited and insufficient way of assimilating reality (though one of the most sensorily concrete and beautiful we have).
Therefore it seems contradictory and hardly attractive to eat in the bath. In the bath, you live in a perfect world where no practical worries have a right to advance and reach you. But that's not the way it works after all. And all these small wishes start all over again. Drinking liquor in the bath is considered cosy by many. Smoking in the bath is pretty cool too. Cowboy fantasies. But what about sex in the bath? Is that an attractive thought? And now I am not speaking about the bad or good biographical experiences of individuals, I am talking about whether the thought is attractive. What does imagination say, is it possible to have sex in the bath? I cannot rid myself of demanding an answer to the question: with whom? Who would fit in the bath, who would appear sexually in that environment? There are a few classical bathers in iconography-mythology, often with one or another attractive attribute. I remember. There is Ofelia, there is Erszébeth Báthory, there is Marat, there is the biblical Susannah, there is the ghost Dana, there is Namor and Namorita, there are sirens in general, Jacqueline Lamba l'Ondine, the siren of Warszawa, but not all the true sirens, which are marine creatures, just like dugons and manatees, dolphins and large whales, Venus emerging from the sea, and many other bathers who demand vast space, large bodies of water, no confining tub walls. The ones that fit in a bathtub are a special category, gracefully relaxed in that vessel.
But all coplayers bring complications. It is difficult to imagine a shared exploration of intrauterine life. What do the naïads actually have to bring compared with the body of water itself, which is a crueler lover because more definitive and more totalising, because it is itself another world and a dream, regardless of whether it is seasoned with milk, honey or blood?
Back to the splashdance aspect, which is the collectivisable moment. A bathtub is small and hard for two people (even worse for more than two) and squeezing ones bodies into it is absurd and leads to the most elaborate difficulties of movement, it is incredibly funny how difficult everything is but it often seems more comfortable to sit by the side and investigate how the two bodies in the bath, the water body and the human body, separate and reunite, unite and glide apart, give each other meaning.
But sinking oneself into milk, so it is something ritual, sacral, it is the very sinking into the very milkness, it is a magnificent delusion, it is the proceeding with raw courage and elaborate slowness to shut the waking world out with its monumental, yes pettily monumental, worries, crouching in the soft embankment in the bark in the huge tree in the night when the owls are calling and the tigers roaring, it is quite simply a vantage point, a vantage point in the very beginning of eternity, and just like in a glacial landscape, everything is white.
Mattias Forshage
Bathing means three things: embracement, splash-dance and submerging.
Embracement is to be enclosed in a more dense, distinct, rather homogenous medium, the whole skin as an organ of touch, and all the various sensory organs concentrated in the face, and everything comes near and becomes more languid, intensely sluggish, and the sounds and the electric jolts and the temperature differences and the smells all move faster, and one becomes omniscient and oversensitive. An acute sense of nivellation, totalisation, as every limb, every inch of skin, I might be excused the siphonophoran analogy of saying every citizen of the body, is just as much wettened and just as much part of the waterworld. Everything is naked, feeling and tasting reaches everywhere simultaneously. And then there is the archimedean aspect; being enclosed in a denser medium has the consequence of relative weightlessness, related to flying in dreams and other distinct phenomenological states less conditioned or just less restrained by common gravity. Floating but not floating. Weighing but not weighing.
Splashdance concerns the medium as an extremely mobile and topographically complex interface, and a decrease in the effects of gravity, a wrestling, dancing and hugging which does no longer recognise up and down, which has more and simultaneously less of concealed and revealed, a perpetually changing surface of peaks, valleys, drops, slopes, coatings, connecting things temporarily and flashwise, is a frenzy and a cacophony.
Submerging focuses on the medium as a horizontal interface, a razorsharp limit, the difference in the world; and must be regarded as the central moment in the milk bath (leading for sure to embracement. In a submerging process there are three central structural elements; a) the suspension above the surface, everything is hanging, what tension, the gravity of that which rests in its restrained falling, endless waiting with aching muscles, b) the horizontal, razorsharp interface itself, and the transgression in the passage through it, c) the embracement and homogenisation of the life world beneath.
But living in this homogenous, this embraced being, what is that? Well it is living in the dream, there are all these strong images of falling when falling asleep, and of passing down beneath, or up above, a distinct surface, when moving from a hypnagogic state to a waking. Inside the medium, and thus inside the dream, everything is possible but also slower, softer, safer, more comfortable, more implacable, more necessary, without any arbitrariness. On a certain plane this is of course an intra-uterine existence (and the dream just like the bath is a womb).
And then we are already in that problematic chain of symbols in Róheim ("Gates of the dream") where all dreaming is transgression which is penetration which is longing to the womb which is regression; everything pointing forward points backward, and everything integrates conventional coitus and the crawling back into mother's tummy. The foremost problem is that it carries too far too quickly, synonymising most of what there is, risking missing the unique characteristics of anything. (I had already avoided to say "inbracement" rather than embracement, after CJL Almqvist's term for carnal as well as cosmic intercourse in his swedenborgian-erotic classic "Murnis".)
Back to our childishly stubborn concretion. The surface is a membrane to pass through. And since we don't have all that much feelings connected with this on certain levels such as that where molecules pass over membranes, we soon arrive at a more meaningladen level; that of mucus membranes. Human membranes are all water surfaces, delimitations visavis another world, warmer, more real and unreal, where that selfsufficient connectivity is abandoned, one's as it is called bourgeois body, in order to seek another equally abandoned human on that little island on the other side of the river of oblivion. But it is also obviously ambiguous: to penetrate, with a male sex which is a metaphor for the whole body or vice versa, penetrating a water surface equals being penetrated by a water surface, a body arching up against oneself stretching out into oneself, and vice versa, it is a totalising and multisexed embrace, permeates and is permeated, it is in fact something like a basal trope of the pansexual because it starts off exactly where the simplest sexual strategies becomes interchangeable and/or irrelevant.
And so what happens when we have arrived? Intrauterine existence. Yes who knows? There was a chapter about it in Breton/Eluard "The immaculate conception". And another chapter in the same book, about a walk on the bottom of the sea, where we stroll and politely greet famous serial murderers. There seems to be something unavoidably pastoral idyllic about it, a sunken little idyll, an atlantis, where everything is just a little condensed and jellyfish swim by and long hairs calmly wave and everybody move a little slower, octopuses with hats, mermaids, pennants from the towers, uncle Lenin standing waving in the aquarium. No I haven't got a clear image of intrauterine existence. It is an analogy with the dream, only without that firmness and compelling arbitrariness.
Speaking of firmness, if we now know that the water body is an intrauterine pansexual dream world which is out to get you, isn't it bizarre that the bathtub itself is made of china or enamelled tin; it is indeed a strangely hard uterus. Hence the blankets, the fat, the honey, with which it is robed or greased like a shock absorber. And such shock absorbers are potentially encompassing mediums themselves.
Blankets are a soft wrapping, tender grave shroud, the pupal chamber of a mummy, a bridal gown wanting to encompass in an insurveyable way which is directly comforting in the way it wrappingly embraces. Now we need to introduce the concept of thigmotaxy, which is the way earwigs, cows and often people cannot settle down to rest until such a large part as possible of the body is pressed against something, one puts oneself away in crevices, tunnels, somebodys arms, simple booths or coffins. A couple of days after the morning when I woke up at PJ Harvey's shouting I actually dreamt, depressedly, that I had a new apartment and preferred to lay wrapped in blankets in the bathtub, the dry and hard bathtub, in the firm conviction that it could possibly be warmer there, but I knew it wasn't, it was only the logical possibility itself that it could be that was enough, was something at all to grasp at in my existence devoid of happiness.
Fat is more homogenous than blankets, but it sticks everywhere, holds together, and repells water, it is itself a mucus membrane, but specifically a mucus membrane which suffocates. The sticky yellowness of fat is the evil water, which drug hallucinations and other fantasies of suffocation focuses on. Mountain ranges of fat tissue, where scolopenders rush around with their fifty poisonous legs, and all one's relatives stand lined up in a row for a photograph.
Honey, must be the good cousin of fat, just as sticky, adherent, alive, mucusmembranish, but so sweet and good, so beautiful and fragrant, it doesn't suffocate but gilds and embellishes, so wittily and playful, so luxurious and bizarre. And nevertheless so burningly sweet and stalkingly sticky.
We will have to introduce the third relative, mustard, still just as yellow and sticky, fresh and breathable like honey but without its flattering and mild character, yes well actually almost corrosively acrid, keeps the mildly flowing honey at bay with stabs and the maliciously flowing fat with counterfire, mustard is a miracle potion and nobody's friend. Maybe I'm on the track of something here, maybe fat, honey and mustard are actually the three tissue types of gold?
Because there has to take place at least some miracle, it's expected as the culmination of a stay in the uterus. Here the controversial rebirth comes in. (Controversial, as it was polemics over the meaning of rebirth in the interpretation of a dream that triggered writing this essay.) What is rebirth? I don't know. I thought it was nothing more than being awoken in the morning, the last swimming strokes up to the insistently light and noisy world where one keeps one's identity and lifestyle, where one stands naked since paradoxically outheld in an embracing clarity, embracing light. But why would it be rebirth if it does not lead to anything new? One tends to think it is new every single time.
2. Milk
The honey covering the inside of the tub as a protecting and softening fat layer is expected to interact with the milk. Milk and honey together, milk and honey are the two animal substances which don't seem animal, animal labor for the early schlaraffenland days of their offspring, the highest serum of offspring care in each of the two dominant animal lineages, in mammals among the deuterostomes and in bees among the protostomes. Joined, can they make anything else but simply more body? Isn't milk and honey together, after all, blood? Aren't they a metaphor for blood (like wine in christianity) already when you're supposed to bathe in it to stay young? Isn't that a vampiric act, resting on the same mythological, magical and infantile theory that the lifeforce rests in the blood, and bathing in it makes that lifeforce percolate through the membrane of the skin? And for that reason it is only logical that some would like to return the metaphorical praxis to its pure form, and prefer to bath in real blood instead of the symbolical milk of the blood. Blood gives life. Even medical science claims that today, in their campaigns for enlisting blood donors. Blood gives youth? Perhaps that rests on the calculation that the more life accumulated the younger once becomes. That's what vampires found their ideology and their mythological life on. If only one succeeds to collect incredibly much life perhaps it's even possible to transcend to being unborn? The sea lies still, without oneself to bathe in it.
Blood and milk are also similar on a concrete phenomenological level. These two traditionally lifegiving liquids are both vividly colored and sticky, very nutrious, rich and strangely thick tasting. Their analogous character is probably as distinctly exploited as possible, in a polarising form, in the wellknown division among the east african massai, into female food which is milkbased and male food which is bloodbased and never will the two meet.
So what is milk, perhaps we need to ask. Well milk is the primary offspring food in mammals. Milk is mothers milk. Our Ur-economy, as sketched by freudians-lacanians but not marxists. Then it is a different thing that milk secondarily, in certain cultures, has come to be associated with locally or commercially available cow's milk.
And we have several competing abstractions of the word, illuminating its concretion. Some would say that milk is anything milky, that is cloudy water (water with precipitated minerals), phenomenologically a water without clarity, without transparence, without merciless truth, a less watery water. Others would start talking about latex as milk sap, which is specific wound liquids in certain plants (blood again); you remember the taste of the bleeding white in dandelions, you know the rubber tree bleeding latex which is industrially used (the phenomenology of rubber probably has very little to do with milk though). Some would start talking about generalising milk on a consumistic level and pull in all kinds of milk substitutes (artificial dilutions of denaturalised protein from vegetabilic sources; soy milk, oat milk, almond milk) where it obviously parades as a commercial name for any white drink for meals whatsoever. Still others would get stuck in the dynamism of sexual metaphors and start nagging about, eventually confounding, milk and sperm, that isn't a very striking similarity, and probably not a very interesting path, but still probably contributes to increasing the expressivity of milk drops in certain locations in certain situations.
But, in elucidating the milk bath we must naturally give the primary conceptions the first place: milk is mothers milk, and everything else is one or another theory or metaphor for whatever ought to be sorted into the same category as mothers milk.
And nevertheless it remains cow milk, prepared as a commodity, homogenised, pasteurised, packed, sold and bought, which dominates the determination of the sensory concretion of milk for most people, or perhaps rather a projection of many of the original promises of mothers milk onto the commercially available perverse representation. But what characterises milk? Milk is fat and sweet, fresh and nourishing, selfcontained and contradictory, it is like a mixture of forest creek and whipped cream cake. And at the same time, through its rich content of enzymes, selfdestructive, bad smelling in itself, quickly putrid, gives extraneous mucus production and bad breath. (In the US there are still campaigns going on to make youth drink milk. The arguments that it contributes to skeletal construction, strength and health are not true; the argument that it makes young people less fat than drinking cocacola all day long may perhaps be true.)
So, there are actually certain cultures where it actually isn't a taboo to drink other animals' milk, where it has even been turned into culturally significant common social praxis, even for grownups, even commercially organised. Such a perverted society is Sweden where we live. The conspiracy theorists keep talking about the lactoconspiracy, about how the authorities forcefeed grownup men with cow milk in order to keep them dependent women-dominated easily-manipulated children. Forcefeed must here be taken in a non-literal sense, via internalised customs, for it's obviously not like among whales, where the mother simply tries to aim into the child's mouth whenever it is nearby, with a huge spray, almost like a high-pressure nozzle of uniquely fat milk. Well, milkdrinking in Sweden is as well known uniquely common. Thus, there is always a possibility to appear experienced, sophisticated, widely-travelled and cultivated by making faces at the provincially barbarian milkdrinkers with an supercilious shuddering. The population in Sweden does have one of the world's greatest frequencies of a genetic disease, the particular defect that makes childhood's ability to digest lactose NOT develop away in adolescence. All humans have those genes which switches off that temporary capacity to digest lactose, but some people, like the swedes, have a genetic reading error which keeps those genes from being expressed (the switching off is cancelled, double negation for the logician). Since locally most people have the disease, it's the opposite state which is defined as a disease: lactose intolerance. Do we here have a simple demonstration of the relativity of healthy/sick?
For it is not arbitrary to insist on association milkdrinking with its single universal form: suckling. No bottle-feds can deny the universal in this, not the least since their own neurotic insistence mythologises it even stronger via its biographical lack. And here we return to an adventurous regression of semi-Róheimian cut, and I, as a phenomenologist rather than a judging psychologist, would prefer to describe it as a non-static (flowing in all directions) and constantly ambiguous field being stretched out between pure regressional fantasies, conventional sexual forms, and pansexuality. On the other hand, I am not going to continue discussing it here. For it wasn't breasts that was the subject, it was bathing in milk.
3. Bathing as life environment and erotic future
But whoever bathes in a nourishing medium need not grope for teats, need not have an ombilic cord, is able to swim freely and metabolise through the skin; again the intrauterine in a certain (negative) utopian shape, how beautiful it would be to not need to bother, to universally not need to bother, a world where nothing is complication; dead boring, nirvana, intrauterine without all picturesque components. Usually I get upset by all these fantasies about not needing to bother to eat, because I spontaneously interpret them as rationalist-technologist-antisensory, but they are of course to an equal degree simply nirvana-directed, eating is after all an obviously very limited and insufficient way of assimilating reality (though one of the most sensorily concrete and beautiful we have).
Therefore it seems contradictory and hardly attractive to eat in the bath. In the bath, you live in a perfect world where no practical worries have a right to advance and reach you. But that's not the way it works after all. And all these small wishes start all over again. Drinking liquor in the bath is considered cosy by many. Smoking in the bath is pretty cool too. Cowboy fantasies. But what about sex in the bath? Is that an attractive thought? And now I am not speaking about the bad or good biographical experiences of individuals, I am talking about whether the thought is attractive. What does imagination say, is it possible to have sex in the bath? I cannot rid myself of demanding an answer to the question: with whom? Who would fit in the bath, who would appear sexually in that environment? There are a few classical bathers in iconography-mythology, often with one or another attractive attribute. I remember. There is Ofelia, there is Erszébeth Báthory, there is Marat, there is the biblical Susannah, there is the ghost Dana, there is Namor and Namorita, there are sirens in general, Jacqueline Lamba l'Ondine, the siren of Warszawa, but not all the true sirens, which are marine creatures, just like dugons and manatees, dolphins and large whales, Venus emerging from the sea, and many other bathers who demand vast space, large bodies of water, no confining tub walls. The ones that fit in a bathtub are a special category, gracefully relaxed in that vessel.
But all coplayers bring complications. It is difficult to imagine a shared exploration of intrauterine life. What do the naïads actually have to bring compared with the body of water itself, which is a crueler lover because more definitive and more totalising, because it is itself another world and a dream, regardless of whether it is seasoned with milk, honey or blood?
Back to the splashdance aspect, which is the collectivisable moment. A bathtub is small and hard for two people (even worse for more than two) and squeezing ones bodies into it is absurd and leads to the most elaborate difficulties of movement, it is incredibly funny how difficult everything is but it often seems more comfortable to sit by the side and investigate how the two bodies in the bath, the water body and the human body, separate and reunite, unite and glide apart, give each other meaning.
But sinking oneself into milk, so it is something ritual, sacral, it is the very sinking into the very milkness, it is a magnificent delusion, it is the proceeding with raw courage and elaborate slowness to shut the waking world out with its monumental, yes pettily monumental, worries, crouching in the soft embankment in the bark in the huge tree in the night when the owls are calling and the tigers roaring, it is quite simply a vantage point, a vantage point in the very beginning of eternity, and just like in a glacial landscape, everything is white.
Mattias Forshage
Wednesday, March 18, 2009
NATURE AND ITS DOUBLE
Auch das ist nur eine Wolke
Art often looks organic. The analogies between the weavings of the human unconscious and natural forms have often been noticed and is indeed a longstanding theme among others in surrealist art.
For some, this analogy is a funny coincidence, for some it has deep spiritual connotations proving the human potential to tap into the springwell of the ways of nature, and for some it is an interesting field of investigating universal characteristics of morphogenesis. These can be approached by way of psychoanalytic/structuralist/phenomenological studies, or through basics of biochemistry and other chemistry, neurology, embryology and biological evolution; similar senses of architecture, analogy, cladistics, fractals, chaos, cybernetics etc apply both ways.
But we must consider also the differences, among forms of the unconscious, between those which really are mental images and those which are the chance products of gestural automatism, and among the forms of nature, between those which are products of genetically or structurally controlled growth and movement and those which are the chance products of large-scale or extremely complex processes. They may all be similar but the processes are quite different. In a sense everything is chance and even the most perverse planning struggles vainly to produce something substantially dissimilar.
For surrealism, this is indeed an older topic than surrealism itself. Take alchemy, which indeed established the concept of "art" as something involving the entirety of knowledge and the transformation of man and nature rather than a sphere integrated into the mainstream of social structure, be it majoritary or minoritary, central or detached, immediately utilistic or ideological-aesthetical. In alchemy, the ways of nature are to be intimately studied, imitated and also challenged or broken, in order to make nature reveal its secrets and for oneself, or rather the processes one is instigating, to become part of its fundamental workings. Presurrealist and late alchemist August Strindberg, in his text about automatism (which he himself practiced in painting and music rather than in the writing he became more famous for), advocated: "Imitate nature, sure, but imitate in the first place nature's way of creating!" At the same time, Strindberg's (and mine!) idol in evolutionary biology, Ernst Haeckel, a specialist in jumping to conclusions and defending controversial positions, who was working hard with replacing idealist superstitions everywhere, took this struggle - among elsewhere - to the point of publishing albums with beautiful shells, medusas, microorganisms etc, in order to prove how superior nature was, as art, to art!
However, even though the animals, plants, stones, landscapes and weathers are indeed often extremely beautiful and rich in connotations, ambiances and associations, and of course enjoyable in the same way art is (and certainly to a far greater degree than the majority of art!), this does not actually make it art or make it suitable to actually replace art, except in very particular senses or circumstances. Art is indeed still fundamentally about human experiments with the whole of the sensory field, with the whole of experience and knowledge, and thus primarily about changing man and investigating the conditions of changing reality. Natural objects are possibly not about that, and that is one of the many fascinating things about them, which indeed makes them useful for those very purposes too.
All the while, some of our output looks like unintentional creations of nature to the point of confusion (and are proud of it). The other facet of the same analogy is that certain natural objects and certain views of landscapes etc will seem obviously to coincide with a particular kind of poetic sensibility which we, for relative lack of imagination, may associate with a particular artists', group's or method's work. Though a creator in surrealism is just the tool of poetry, of a particular aspect of poetry, sometimes cultivated-incubated through long hard work and sometimes immediately accessible by chance, experiment or whim. That mediumistic experience is at the core of the surrealist experience. Seemingly it is not identical with, but has a close relation to, the experience of discovering the poetry in the natural objects, same - as poetry is in an important sense one and indivisible - and quite different in another sense. The categories of artifacts and natural objects will not confusionally merge, but the objects will meet and start playing with each other and with us on the arena of poetic experience, where their origins, and the often so ridiculous questions of the purpose or intentions behind them, will not be their most relevant determinations.
I am not talking here about natural sciences, even though a scientific or parascientific exotism and fetishism as well as a scientificoid methodology are often present in the way surrealists deal with the natural world, but only of the direct relation to the natural objects, the everyday-curious-amateur-enthusiast-naturalist approach which is the poet's. I have been talking elsewhere about surrealist zoology. Someone else will have to speak about surrealist botany and surrealist mineralogy. Surrealist landscape appreciation enters into the works with psychogeography and with this recent enigmatic concept of exteriority. Another popular habit among surrealists is metereology. Poets, dreamers, idlers, utopists and vagrants everywhere look to the sky, of course including the surrealists. Some organise in the "Cloud appreciation society". Not too long ago (2006), the organiser of that society, Gavin Preton-Pinney, published a popular introduction to the subject, "The cloudspotter's guide". It is indeed a rich book, presenting all the major types of clouds and their various conditions, and presenting a wealth of anecdotes and small explanations; physics, art and history of science, sundogs and Carmen Miranda sprites, the history of military research in weather manipulation, the story of the magnificent "Morning glory" cloud in Australia, the story of lieutenant William Rankin who spent 40 minutes riding up and down the winds inside a raging cumulonimbus on his parachute... Indeed, the book has a tiresome populistic rhetoric and keeps making elaborate excuses before every single time it introduces a scientific explanation, but the things it has to say are still so fascinating, and as far as I can judge solid, so all that whining can be excused, even by someone like me who really hates it, and I suppose for many others it will present less of a problem. In fact, there is much of the complex morphology, the morphogenic processes, and perhaps even the ontology itself of clouds, that seems to adress the very basic notions of surrealist conceptualisation of nature. For those purposes, it would indeed seem that further reading is required, but Preton-Prinney's book serves as a fine introduction to the field.
Clouds themselves are indeed a topic dear to surrealism from before surrealism. First of all we have of course Hamlet's often cited dialogue with Polonius, in which the changing shapes of cumulus clouds as projecting screens for images of the human imagination present the first clear illustration of the paranoic-critical method. And then in the immediate forerunning of surrealism, continuing into the middle of it, we have Arp's fantasies of the machinery of "die Wolkenpumpe", the cloud pump, and its products. Then in the middle of surrealist imagery and thinking, Magritte stands out as an enthusiastic cloud invoker, but there are also significant clouds in early Tanguy, in Dalí, we have Paalen's umbrella, Noguchi's sofa, the mists of Toyen and others, Bachelardian speculation, and so on. And many of us have already noticed with Dalí how clouds are among the elements of non-conventionally-realistic figuration in painting from earlier centuries, soft forms, to the point of incarnating phantoms and concrete irrationality. But nevertheless I put even more hope to the usage of clouds in speculations of the origin and development of forms making sense, the perverse science of what Haeckel called "Generelle Morphologie".
MF
Art often looks organic. The analogies between the weavings of the human unconscious and natural forms have often been noticed and is indeed a longstanding theme among others in surrealist art.
For some, this analogy is a funny coincidence, for some it has deep spiritual connotations proving the human potential to tap into the springwell of the ways of nature, and for some it is an interesting field of investigating universal characteristics of morphogenesis. These can be approached by way of psychoanalytic/structuralist/phenomenological studies, or through basics of biochemistry and other chemistry, neurology, embryology and biological evolution; similar senses of architecture, analogy, cladistics, fractals, chaos, cybernetics etc apply both ways.
But we must consider also the differences, among forms of the unconscious, between those which really are mental images and those which are the chance products of gestural automatism, and among the forms of nature, between those which are products of genetically or structurally controlled growth and movement and those which are the chance products of large-scale or extremely complex processes. They may all be similar but the processes are quite different. In a sense everything is chance and even the most perverse planning struggles vainly to produce something substantially dissimilar.
For surrealism, this is indeed an older topic than surrealism itself. Take alchemy, which indeed established the concept of "art" as something involving the entirety of knowledge and the transformation of man and nature rather than a sphere integrated into the mainstream of social structure, be it majoritary or minoritary, central or detached, immediately utilistic or ideological-aesthetical. In alchemy, the ways of nature are to be intimately studied, imitated and also challenged or broken, in order to make nature reveal its secrets and for oneself, or rather the processes one is instigating, to become part of its fundamental workings. Presurrealist and late alchemist August Strindberg, in his text about automatism (which he himself practiced in painting and music rather than in the writing he became more famous for), advocated: "Imitate nature, sure, but imitate in the first place nature's way of creating!" At the same time, Strindberg's (and mine!) idol in evolutionary biology, Ernst Haeckel, a specialist in jumping to conclusions and defending controversial positions, who was working hard with replacing idealist superstitions everywhere, took this struggle - among elsewhere - to the point of publishing albums with beautiful shells, medusas, microorganisms etc, in order to prove how superior nature was, as art, to art!
However, even though the animals, plants, stones, landscapes and weathers are indeed often extremely beautiful and rich in connotations, ambiances and associations, and of course enjoyable in the same way art is (and certainly to a far greater degree than the majority of art!), this does not actually make it art or make it suitable to actually replace art, except in very particular senses or circumstances. Art is indeed still fundamentally about human experiments with the whole of the sensory field, with the whole of experience and knowledge, and thus primarily about changing man and investigating the conditions of changing reality. Natural objects are possibly not about that, and that is one of the many fascinating things about them, which indeed makes them useful for those very purposes too.
All the while, some of our output looks like unintentional creations of nature to the point of confusion (and are proud of it). The other facet of the same analogy is that certain natural objects and certain views of landscapes etc will seem obviously to coincide with a particular kind of poetic sensibility which we, for relative lack of imagination, may associate with a particular artists', group's or method's work. Though a creator in surrealism is just the tool of poetry, of a particular aspect of poetry, sometimes cultivated-incubated through long hard work and sometimes immediately accessible by chance, experiment or whim. That mediumistic experience is at the core of the surrealist experience. Seemingly it is not identical with, but has a close relation to, the experience of discovering the poetry in the natural objects, same - as poetry is in an important sense one and indivisible - and quite different in another sense. The categories of artifacts and natural objects will not confusionally merge, but the objects will meet and start playing with each other and with us on the arena of poetic experience, where their origins, and the often so ridiculous questions of the purpose or intentions behind them, will not be their most relevant determinations.
I am not talking here about natural sciences, even though a scientific or parascientific exotism and fetishism as well as a scientificoid methodology are often present in the way surrealists deal with the natural world, but only of the direct relation to the natural objects, the everyday-curious-amateur-enthusiast-naturalist approach which is the poet's. I have been talking elsewhere about surrealist zoology. Someone else will have to speak about surrealist botany and surrealist mineralogy. Surrealist landscape appreciation enters into the works with psychogeography and with this recent enigmatic concept of exteriority. Another popular habit among surrealists is metereology. Poets, dreamers, idlers, utopists and vagrants everywhere look to the sky, of course including the surrealists. Some organise in the "Cloud appreciation society". Not too long ago (2006), the organiser of that society, Gavin Preton-Pinney, published a popular introduction to the subject, "The cloudspotter's guide". It is indeed a rich book, presenting all the major types of clouds and their various conditions, and presenting a wealth of anecdotes and small explanations; physics, art and history of science, sundogs and Carmen Miranda sprites, the history of military research in weather manipulation, the story of the magnificent "Morning glory" cloud in Australia, the story of lieutenant William Rankin who spent 40 minutes riding up and down the winds inside a raging cumulonimbus on his parachute... Indeed, the book has a tiresome populistic rhetoric and keeps making elaborate excuses before every single time it introduces a scientific explanation, but the things it has to say are still so fascinating, and as far as I can judge solid, so all that whining can be excused, even by someone like me who really hates it, and I suppose for many others it will present less of a problem. In fact, there is much of the complex morphology, the morphogenic processes, and perhaps even the ontology itself of clouds, that seems to adress the very basic notions of surrealist conceptualisation of nature. For those purposes, it would indeed seem that further reading is required, but Preton-Prinney's book serves as a fine introduction to the field.
Clouds themselves are indeed a topic dear to surrealism from before surrealism. First of all we have of course Hamlet's often cited dialogue with Polonius, in which the changing shapes of cumulus clouds as projecting screens for images of the human imagination present the first clear illustration of the paranoic-critical method. And then in the immediate forerunning of surrealism, continuing into the middle of it, we have Arp's fantasies of the machinery of "die Wolkenpumpe", the cloud pump, and its products. Then in the middle of surrealist imagery and thinking, Magritte stands out as an enthusiastic cloud invoker, but there are also significant clouds in early Tanguy, in Dalí, we have Paalen's umbrella, Noguchi's sofa, the mists of Toyen and others, Bachelardian speculation, and so on. And many of us have already noticed with Dalí how clouds are among the elements of non-conventionally-realistic figuration in painting from earlier centuries, soft forms, to the point of incarnating phantoms and concrete irrationality. But nevertheless I put even more hope to the usage of clouds in speculations of the origin and development of forms making sense, the perverse science of what Haeckel called "Generelle Morphologie".
MF
Multiplying the dream sciences
We made a lot of friends in hell. We promised we would try to replace some of the current sciences no matter the consequences. We'd focus on dreaming. We have been working a lot recently with dream geography, and as surrealists we have always been busy with dream phenomenology and dream poetics, occasionally with dream interpretation (Traumdeutung), dream analogies and dream->waking life dynamics, there have also been some efforts in dream demographics, dream geobiography, dream metereology, dream zoology, and external conditioning studies (which is of course just a branch of dream construction theory and therefore of poetics and mythogenesis). The latest vanguard attempt in the latter is made with a statistical approach applied on what - as far as we know - was the first surrealist antarctic expedition, which just has succesfully ended and is more thoroughly chronicled elsewhere. This is how JE introduces the report on this particular topic:
A general and interesting question in relation to dream research is in what
way changes in the external environment influence the imagery, intensity,
geography and sequences of the dream life. In order to investigate such
changes one would have to take careful notes of dreaming each night for an
extended period of time prior to, during and after the change of
environment. Dream life would then have to be scrutinized by statistical
analysis in order to facilitate some objective conclusions. If no
statistical analysis is made, it is easy to focus on and compare only those
dreams that have a high emotional intensity, with striking imagery. This
would, however, obscure a comparison of the more common dream elements
that populate the nightly experience without carrying too much weight in the
daily reminiscences. On the other hand, the statistical analysis should take
into account the differences in the imagery without consideration of the
intensity of the images, as well as comparing peak images with one another.
JE
A general and interesting question in relation to dream research is in what
way changes in the external environment influence the imagery, intensity,
geography and sequences of the dream life. In order to investigate such
changes one would have to take careful notes of dreaming each night for an
extended period of time prior to, during and after the change of
environment. Dream life would then have to be scrutinized by statistical
analysis in order to facilitate some objective conclusions. If no
statistical analysis is made, it is easy to focus on and compare only those
dreams that have a high emotional intensity, with striking imagery. This
would, however, obscure a comparison of the more common dream elements
that populate the nightly experience without carrying too much weight in the
daily reminiscences. On the other hand, the statistical analysis should take
into account the differences in the imagery without consideration of the
intensity of the images, as well as comparing peak images with one another.
JE
THE RELATIVE INCOMPROMISABILITY OF PLAYING GAMES
"Fun and Games" department
Surrealism is a hydra and its different heads keep sniffing out different secluded corners without always pointing out explicitly the coherence with where the other heads are slithering. And some people are surrealists or call themselves surrealists without ever engaging in more than a fraction of surrealism's areas of activity.
Surrealism is admittedly "a collection of methods and themes held together by a certain spirit", but only inasmuch as they have been demonstrated to interrelate by way of this spirit, by André Breton originally or by subsequent surrealist activity. Probably things have been missed, probably certain things lose their relevence over history, possibly Breton and the french surrealists, and other surrealist groups, have exercised a certain arbitrariness and subjectiveness, simply adding things they felt were important or fun for no other reasons than being important or fun?
In fact both antisurrealists and surrealists are eager to revise/update the very selection of themes. But from opposite viewpoints: antisurrealists because there are a few pieces they can bear and even appreciate if disconnected from the radical unity of the broad outlook and instead applied on some arbitrary selection of their personal favorites; surrealists because they always need to consider the possibility that especially with changing times, different local conditions, new people, there might in fact be other areas, subjects, methods and interventions that are the most relevant from the viewpoint of the surrealist perspective than has been known hitherto as such. The only ones who consider the bouquet of surrealist themes fix and intransformable are the hypocrite "friends" of surrealism: mostly the liquidationists (ex-surrealists, art people, academics and publicists) who think surrealism is sympathetic and oh so interesting in the context of interwar France rather than something adressing essential problems of the human condition (and possibly some dogmatics who think Breton was infallible, but I don't know if there are any of that kind).
But surely it must be possible to choose a particular aspect/ field and focus on that? Of course, some degree of specialisation is often unavoidable and very very useful. Lack of specialisation indeed may lead to lack of discovery and to a sense of banality. While specialisation on the other hand of course may lead to lack of grasp of totality, and the abandoning of a totalising radical perspective in favor of within-disciplinary - in one sense or another purely formal or academic - concerns.
For surrealism the problem is not that specialisation is going on, but the fact that some specialisations will be not about choosing a particular aspect to emphasise but about trying to reduce the entirety of surrealism to that aspect - and thus, to deny its breadth and heterogenous applicability - and specifically reducing it to an aspect where it has a useful function to fulfill in society and its selfunderstanding; that is, producing ideology. Of course this is typically the case with those who consider surrealism as basically art. Art you know is a typical civil career, a field of transformation of radical creative investigations into commodities, of unusual radical subjectivities into brand names (it is not only this, but it is obviously one of its more prominent functions in present society), and it is specifically the facet of activity to which surrealism is most commonly reduced and put to use in official culture in most countries. There are also those who consider it basically literature, philosophy, film, politics, that it is only about romanticism, about revolt, about imagination, about psychology, I don't know what. We also have repeated experience with the attempt of leaving art out of the equation while reducing surrealism to some kind of political philosophy: basically, the situationist deviation. Or rather: the exciting dynamic breakthrough out into the situationist desert.
But what about playing games? Compared with other ways of circumscribing surrealism to a single specialisation, surrealist games is the one facet which seems most relatively immune to hostile reductions (or fateful wellmeaning ones), since it remains obvious that it is at once an attempt to investigate aspects of a new radical sense of everyday life and an adventure for thought and the senses and with a necessary collective aspect and clearly non-commodity-producing and non-careerist. There are surrealist game playing societies out there. Some of these may be animated by academics or housewives or sensationseekers who don't have an explicit aim to change their lives as such but only to have an interesting weird pastime. Nevertheless, the dynamics of playing games are under present circumstances so much closer to the core aims of surrealism. The highlights of the gameplayers' experience itself constitute an experience of actual creativity, a glimpse of shortcircuits and inexplicable wholeness of the mind and of the senses and of experience, of a poetic vision (which art does too) plus concretely the reenchantment of everyday life, and a glimpse of another possible mode of social organisation, and its concrete contrasts and fruitful challenges visavis the current order of organisation (which art very often isn't).
But let's not forget about art. There are groups out there who focus on creative experimentation in the form of art without denying that there is something else to surrealism as well. The Phases network has been about this all the time, hasn't it? For a more tight-knittedly grouplike and ambitious example, see the current activity of CAPA, the Collective of Automatic Painting in Amsterdam. Apparently these manage to contribute substantially to surrealism through focusing on its most wellknown part. There are clearly problems with that, but it would be quite pointless to claim them illegitimate.
So what about current groups like the brazilian DeCollage (apparently already disbanded?), the swedish 4X, the chilean Derrame and the moravian StirUp? Of course there are dozens of groups and networks around with no or almost no connections with the surrealist movement and knowledge about the surrealist tradition, but the four mentioned examples are groups that take part in or substantially overlap with surrealist collaborations and appear to claim a more comprehensive relationship with surrealism - but frankly, for many of these, I personally just don't have information enough to have much of an idea of whether the other aspects of surrealism in their cases are actually repressed, or acknowledged but put in suspension, or ongoing but simply not publicised.
So, in general, but also for all the specific examples, where does the transformation occur between specialised public exposure and degradation through useful limpingly partial representation? Where does the transformation occur between the personal subject as a tool for investigation and experimentation and as a brand name for a career in the art market or elsewhere? - Obviously the latter of these questions, but in an important sense also the former, would be pointless to apply to game players... So, could there be a surrealism without this or that ingredient? Yes, obviously, but if it would be without a conception of poetry as a broad phenomenon appearing in many guises and radically applicable in everyday life, it would seem to be not surrealism. Could there be a surrealism of mere playing? Wait, how could there be a "mere playing"?
Surrealism is a hydra and its different heads keep sniffing out different secluded corners without always pointing out explicitly the coherence with where the other heads are slithering. And some people are surrealists or call themselves surrealists without ever engaging in more than a fraction of surrealism's areas of activity.
Surrealism is admittedly "a collection of methods and themes held together by a certain spirit", but only inasmuch as they have been demonstrated to interrelate by way of this spirit, by André Breton originally or by subsequent surrealist activity. Probably things have been missed, probably certain things lose their relevence over history, possibly Breton and the french surrealists, and other surrealist groups, have exercised a certain arbitrariness and subjectiveness, simply adding things they felt were important or fun for no other reasons than being important or fun?
In fact both antisurrealists and surrealists are eager to revise/update the very selection of themes. But from opposite viewpoints: antisurrealists because there are a few pieces they can bear and even appreciate if disconnected from the radical unity of the broad outlook and instead applied on some arbitrary selection of their personal favorites; surrealists because they always need to consider the possibility that especially with changing times, different local conditions, new people, there might in fact be other areas, subjects, methods and interventions that are the most relevant from the viewpoint of the surrealist perspective than has been known hitherto as such. The only ones who consider the bouquet of surrealist themes fix and intransformable are the hypocrite "friends" of surrealism: mostly the liquidationists (ex-surrealists, art people, academics and publicists) who think surrealism is sympathetic and oh so interesting in the context of interwar France rather than something adressing essential problems of the human condition (and possibly some dogmatics who think Breton was infallible, but I don't know if there are any of that kind).
But surely it must be possible to choose a particular aspect/ field and focus on that? Of course, some degree of specialisation is often unavoidable and very very useful. Lack of specialisation indeed may lead to lack of discovery and to a sense of banality. While specialisation on the other hand of course may lead to lack of grasp of totality, and the abandoning of a totalising radical perspective in favor of within-disciplinary - in one sense or another purely formal or academic - concerns.
For surrealism the problem is not that specialisation is going on, but the fact that some specialisations will be not about choosing a particular aspect to emphasise but about trying to reduce the entirety of surrealism to that aspect - and thus, to deny its breadth and heterogenous applicability - and specifically reducing it to an aspect where it has a useful function to fulfill in society and its selfunderstanding; that is, producing ideology. Of course this is typically the case with those who consider surrealism as basically art. Art you know is a typical civil career, a field of transformation of radical creative investigations into commodities, of unusual radical subjectivities into brand names (it is not only this, but it is obviously one of its more prominent functions in present society), and it is specifically the facet of activity to which surrealism is most commonly reduced and put to use in official culture in most countries. There are also those who consider it basically literature, philosophy, film, politics, that it is only about romanticism, about revolt, about imagination, about psychology, I don't know what. We also have repeated experience with the attempt of leaving art out of the equation while reducing surrealism to some kind of political philosophy: basically, the situationist deviation. Or rather: the exciting dynamic breakthrough out into the situationist desert.
But what about playing games? Compared with other ways of circumscribing surrealism to a single specialisation, surrealist games is the one facet which seems most relatively immune to hostile reductions (or fateful wellmeaning ones), since it remains obvious that it is at once an attempt to investigate aspects of a new radical sense of everyday life and an adventure for thought and the senses and with a necessary collective aspect and clearly non-commodity-producing and non-careerist. There are surrealist game playing societies out there. Some of these may be animated by academics or housewives or sensationseekers who don't have an explicit aim to change their lives as such but only to have an interesting weird pastime. Nevertheless, the dynamics of playing games are under present circumstances so much closer to the core aims of surrealism. The highlights of the gameplayers' experience itself constitute an experience of actual creativity, a glimpse of shortcircuits and inexplicable wholeness of the mind and of the senses and of experience, of a poetic vision (which art does too) plus concretely the reenchantment of everyday life, and a glimpse of another possible mode of social organisation, and its concrete contrasts and fruitful challenges visavis the current order of organisation (which art very often isn't).
But let's not forget about art. There are groups out there who focus on creative experimentation in the form of art without denying that there is something else to surrealism as well. The Phases network has been about this all the time, hasn't it? For a more tight-knittedly grouplike and ambitious example, see the current activity of CAPA, the Collective of Automatic Painting in Amsterdam. Apparently these manage to contribute substantially to surrealism through focusing on its most wellknown part. There are clearly problems with that, but it would be quite pointless to claim them illegitimate.
So what about current groups like the brazilian DeCollage (apparently already disbanded?), the swedish 4X, the chilean Derrame and the moravian StirUp? Of course there are dozens of groups and networks around with no or almost no connections with the surrealist movement and knowledge about the surrealist tradition, but the four mentioned examples are groups that take part in or substantially overlap with surrealist collaborations and appear to claim a more comprehensive relationship with surrealism - but frankly, for many of these, I personally just don't have information enough to have much of an idea of whether the other aspects of surrealism in their cases are actually repressed, or acknowledged but put in suspension, or ongoing but simply not publicised.
So, in general, but also for all the specific examples, where does the transformation occur between specialised public exposure and degradation through useful limpingly partial representation? Where does the transformation occur between the personal subject as a tool for investigation and experimentation and as a brand name for a career in the art market or elsewhere? - Obviously the latter of these questions, but in an important sense also the former, would be pointless to apply to game players... So, could there be a surrealism without this or that ingredient? Yes, obviously, but if it would be without a conception of poetry as a broad phenomenon appearing in many guises and radically applicable in everyday life, it would seem to be not surrealism. Could there be a surrealism of mere playing? Wait, how could there be a "mere playing"?
Friday, February 20, 2009
The surrealist bestiary
Ils sont des animaux...
Surrealist imagery is full of organisms, and it is quite obvious that animals make a certain type of particular sense to surrealist sensibility, for several reasons.
1) the marvellous abundancy and diversity of shapes, solutions, lifestyles, oddities, juxtapositions, exceptions in general in the animal kingdom;
2) the way very many animals are very easily subjected to empathy and experimental identifications, as well as easily interpreted as mere distorsions of whatever is human;
3) the way animals are among the everywhere available wonders of given reality, proffering poetic encounters to anyone with a poetic vigilance, especially when combined with a prelidection for walking alone and with somewhat oversensitive hearing, sight and smelling, traditional character traits shared by the poet and the naturalist;
4) the way other animals are related to ourselves but keep making other choices and arrangements, thus serving as reminders of the lack of basis for our own sense of superiority, and providing yet another field of real concrete experience supporting antihumanism;
5) the dynamic roles played by animals in traditional and popular mythologies, including various kinds of old and new folklore of various cultures, contemporary horror and quasiscientific lore, traditional hermetic imagery, etc
6) the sense in which animal diversity demonstrates the wonders possible within a scientific perspective, where pure astonishment and scientific rigor share interests, and especially so in the appreciation of the radically demystifying and antireligious dialectical-historical discipline of evolutionary biology and its fundament the darwinian theory of evolution.
But among humans, including surrealists, it is also quite obvious that some people are more interested in animals than others. And it became even clearer to me when doing a small study in the form of sweeping through my bookshelf for examples of animals in surrealist imagery. Many surrealists just love filling their works with animals and animal-like objects (Breton, Péret, Ernst, Miró, Carrington, Césaire, Lam, Molina, Gomez-Correa, Caceres, Cabanel, Morris, Le Toumelin, Camacho, Toyen, Lacomblez, Joans, Lamantia, West etc etc), some focusing on the concrete sensory experience of animals actually encountered, others on the fantastic character of various exotic animals encountered in books and films, still others on either vaguer (in terms of diagnostic characters) or just less known animalistic presences in the imagination. Others cite them less frequently but still as an important part of their coherent imagery (Desnos, Tzara, Eluard, Dominguez, Brauner, Magritte, Dalí, Mansour, Kahlo etc) - among those we obviously see a sensitivity towards the general surrealist aspects of animals but probably no particular interest. While some others cite remarkably few animals, usually in a very unspecific way ("bird" "fish" "insect" etc) and sometimes notably in a strangely nonsensuous way as if utilised as concepts or symbols rather than in their own right (Arp, Artaud, Char, Paz, Pellegrini, Chazal, Dotremont, Cobra painters) - this is sometimes bodies of work with some kind of a metaphysical focus sometimes corresponding with a lack of sensuous concretion on the whole, and sometimes bodies of work focusing on a more narrowly anthropocentric phenomenology. In a few of the classic surrealists I've seen no obvious references to animals whatsoever (Duchamp, Ray, Tanguy, Sage).
Indeed, animals always run the risk of being utlised as mere nonsensuous symbols (as in religious imagery including hermeticism, including Artaud) or as mere words or shapes without particular meaning in careless automatism (cf Arp with his limited set of word-matter elements, but also for example Franklin Rosemont, whose poems and collages abound with interchangeable animals).
If those latter directions are dismissed as not truly concerned with animals, we could make a temporary distinction between a few fundamental modes of animal fantasy; which I will call animalistic, zoological and field vigilance. The animalistic one is the one focusing on empathy with, alienation and horror before, and fantasies of transformations into, different lifeforms and particularly their wildness, freedom, fierceness, lack of reason - this type of fantasy often targets animals at hand (domestic mammals) or animals representing wildness in popular fantasy (very often the mammals of the african savannah). The other type, which I call zoological, is the more exotistic type of fantasy focusing on diversity of life forms, often covering the strangest possible kinds of animals and the most remote faunas, typically including the sea, the tropical rainforests and the "hidden worlds" of Australia, Madagascar etc. And finally as a third type of fantasy we may regard the simple field vigilance which makes anybody who is outdoors observe remarkable forms and behaviors in the animals surrounding us, of which birds and insects are usually the most conspicuous but all kinds of animals (whose geographical range, habitat choice, diurnal and annual rhythm and behavioral patterns the poet overlaps) may occur as strange encounters.
Much of surrealism's zoological iconography rests solidly on that of Lautréamont and of Lewis Carroll, and to a lesser extent on HP Lovecraft and hermetic philosophy, while also zoologists like Haeckel, Fabre, Darwin, Wallace, Lamarck, Buffon, Say, Linnaeus, Kinsey etc and visionary zoological amateurs such as Strindberg, Maeterlinck, Toussenel, Zötl, Dürer, Bosch etc have inspired many surrealists. Few active surrealists have been professional zoologists themselves (but many have been amateur naturalists) - it seems like the only surrealist dealing with a broad perspective of contemporary zoology (beside myself) has been Desmond Morris; at core a mammalologist and a popular scientist. But many surrealists have been, and are, active amateur naturalists, notably as birdwatchers (Barbaro, Camacho, Cowdell, Digby, Forshage, Hérold, Lamantia etc) or as entomologists (Buñuel, Caillois, Forshage, Starr, Tunnard). Other zoologists with notable and sometimes close relations to the surrealists have included Tom Harrisson, Jean Painlevé and Laurent Schwartz.
A few exposées of surrealist animals have been made before. Kurt Seligmann made a famous collage of "Les animaux surréalistes" reprinted in the Dictionnaire abrégée de Surréalisme 1938, Breton listed a certain number of animals as mythologically important for surrealism during the 40s, Ted Joans compiled a list of surrealist animals in his magazine Dies und Das 1984. All of these listed a small number of animals of particular totemic/mythological value within surrealism, and did not consider the width of the animal kingdom.
It should also be noted that a study such as this cannot give justice to those surrealist painters who invent a lot of animals (Ernst, Brauner, Lam, Carrington, le Toumelin, Morris, Miró, as well as the few animals of Matta, and those - if animals they are - of Tanguy) which are not obvious how to name or classify.
Provisionary conclusions:
it is the classical fierce animals, the classical damned/ evil/ dark animals, the near animals, the classical poetic animals, the hermetic animals and the famous wondrous/ exceptional/ fantastic animals, which most frequently occur in surrealism. Many of surrealism's totem animals clearly belong to several of these categories.
The few most common animals of all in surrealist imagery I'd like to divide into a general and a specific category. The general ones are those very common in human thinking, human language, human life in general, popular image and/or all kinds of poetry. The use surrealism has made of them may be particular but is not quite distinct from popular use. I was in fact a bit surprised to see that the animal perhaps most frequent in surrealism on the whole was the horse, which has never been acknowledged as something totemic for surrealism (but perhaps for a few of its pictorial artists specifically). Other such common animals common in surrealism are corals, snails, butterflies, elephants, lions, cats, wolves, eagles, parrots, owls and nightingales. The more specific ones are the elective affinities, the chosen totems, the selected oddities put to particular use within surrealism. Of those, the most common ones are the octopus, the mantis, the hippocampus, the salamander, the platypus, the anteater, the black swan and the ibis (several others are traditionally recognised as surrealist totems but just not as widespread).
A list of other animals that are frequent in surrealist imagery could include: jellyfish, mussle, centipede, lobster, spider, scorpion, dragonfly, locust, scarab, glowworm, fly, starfish, sea urchin, shark, moray, turtle, kangaroo, sloth, mole, bat, lemur, dog, polar bear, donkey, rhinoceros, pig, deer, giraffe, chamaeleon, iguana, boa, cobra, crocodile, dinosaur, peacock, pelican, cormorant, pigeon, nightjar, bird of paradise, raven, etc etc.
Those occasionally singled out, or still unused but with a big potential according to the parameters discussed, will make up a huge set and include more or less most animals, and the list where I've been collecting such information for this minor study has some 600 different animals. Its voluminous and eternally unfinished nature makes it perhaps less suitable for public view.
Mattias Forshage
Surrealist imagery is full of organisms, and it is quite obvious that animals make a certain type of particular sense to surrealist sensibility, for several reasons.
1) the marvellous abundancy and diversity of shapes, solutions, lifestyles, oddities, juxtapositions, exceptions in general in the animal kingdom;
2) the way very many animals are very easily subjected to empathy and experimental identifications, as well as easily interpreted as mere distorsions of whatever is human;
3) the way animals are among the everywhere available wonders of given reality, proffering poetic encounters to anyone with a poetic vigilance, especially when combined with a prelidection for walking alone and with somewhat oversensitive hearing, sight and smelling, traditional character traits shared by the poet and the naturalist;
4) the way other animals are related to ourselves but keep making other choices and arrangements, thus serving as reminders of the lack of basis for our own sense of superiority, and providing yet another field of real concrete experience supporting antihumanism;
5) the dynamic roles played by animals in traditional and popular mythologies, including various kinds of old and new folklore of various cultures, contemporary horror and quasiscientific lore, traditional hermetic imagery, etc
6) the sense in which animal diversity demonstrates the wonders possible within a scientific perspective, where pure astonishment and scientific rigor share interests, and especially so in the appreciation of the radically demystifying and antireligious dialectical-historical discipline of evolutionary biology and its fundament the darwinian theory of evolution.
But among humans, including surrealists, it is also quite obvious that some people are more interested in animals than others. And it became even clearer to me when doing a small study in the form of sweeping through my bookshelf for examples of animals in surrealist imagery. Many surrealists just love filling their works with animals and animal-like objects (Breton, Péret, Ernst, Miró, Carrington, Césaire, Lam, Molina, Gomez-Correa, Caceres, Cabanel, Morris, Le Toumelin, Camacho, Toyen, Lacomblez, Joans, Lamantia, West etc etc), some focusing on the concrete sensory experience of animals actually encountered, others on the fantastic character of various exotic animals encountered in books and films, still others on either vaguer (in terms of diagnostic characters) or just less known animalistic presences in the imagination. Others cite them less frequently but still as an important part of their coherent imagery (Desnos, Tzara, Eluard, Dominguez, Brauner, Magritte, Dalí, Mansour, Kahlo etc) - among those we obviously see a sensitivity towards the general surrealist aspects of animals but probably no particular interest. While some others cite remarkably few animals, usually in a very unspecific way ("bird" "fish" "insect" etc) and sometimes notably in a strangely nonsensuous way as if utilised as concepts or symbols rather than in their own right (Arp, Artaud, Char, Paz, Pellegrini, Chazal, Dotremont, Cobra painters) - this is sometimes bodies of work with some kind of a metaphysical focus sometimes corresponding with a lack of sensuous concretion on the whole, and sometimes bodies of work focusing on a more narrowly anthropocentric phenomenology. In a few of the classic surrealists I've seen no obvious references to animals whatsoever (Duchamp, Ray, Tanguy, Sage).
Indeed, animals always run the risk of being utlised as mere nonsensuous symbols (as in religious imagery including hermeticism, including Artaud) or as mere words or shapes without particular meaning in careless automatism (cf Arp with his limited set of word-matter elements, but also for example Franklin Rosemont, whose poems and collages abound with interchangeable animals).
If those latter directions are dismissed as not truly concerned with animals, we could make a temporary distinction between a few fundamental modes of animal fantasy; which I will call animalistic, zoological and field vigilance. The animalistic one is the one focusing on empathy with, alienation and horror before, and fantasies of transformations into, different lifeforms and particularly their wildness, freedom, fierceness, lack of reason - this type of fantasy often targets animals at hand (domestic mammals) or animals representing wildness in popular fantasy (very often the mammals of the african savannah). The other type, which I call zoological, is the more exotistic type of fantasy focusing on diversity of life forms, often covering the strangest possible kinds of animals and the most remote faunas, typically including the sea, the tropical rainforests and the "hidden worlds" of Australia, Madagascar etc. And finally as a third type of fantasy we may regard the simple field vigilance which makes anybody who is outdoors observe remarkable forms and behaviors in the animals surrounding us, of which birds and insects are usually the most conspicuous but all kinds of animals (whose geographical range, habitat choice, diurnal and annual rhythm and behavioral patterns the poet overlaps) may occur as strange encounters.
Much of surrealism's zoological iconography rests solidly on that of Lautréamont and of Lewis Carroll, and to a lesser extent on HP Lovecraft and hermetic philosophy, while also zoologists like Haeckel, Fabre, Darwin, Wallace, Lamarck, Buffon, Say, Linnaeus, Kinsey etc and visionary zoological amateurs such as Strindberg, Maeterlinck, Toussenel, Zötl, Dürer, Bosch etc have inspired many surrealists. Few active surrealists have been professional zoologists themselves (but many have been amateur naturalists) - it seems like the only surrealist dealing with a broad perspective of contemporary zoology (beside myself) has been Desmond Morris; at core a mammalologist and a popular scientist. But many surrealists have been, and are, active amateur naturalists, notably as birdwatchers (Barbaro, Camacho, Cowdell, Digby, Forshage, Hérold, Lamantia etc) or as entomologists (Buñuel, Caillois, Forshage, Starr, Tunnard). Other zoologists with notable and sometimes close relations to the surrealists have included Tom Harrisson, Jean Painlevé and Laurent Schwartz.
A few exposées of surrealist animals have been made before. Kurt Seligmann made a famous collage of "Les animaux surréalistes" reprinted in the Dictionnaire abrégée de Surréalisme 1938, Breton listed a certain number of animals as mythologically important for surrealism during the 40s, Ted Joans compiled a list of surrealist animals in his magazine Dies und Das 1984. All of these listed a small number of animals of particular totemic/mythological value within surrealism, and did not consider the width of the animal kingdom.
It should also be noted that a study such as this cannot give justice to those surrealist painters who invent a lot of animals (Ernst, Brauner, Lam, Carrington, le Toumelin, Morris, Miró, as well as the few animals of Matta, and those - if animals they are - of Tanguy) which are not obvious how to name or classify.
Provisionary conclusions:
it is the classical fierce animals, the classical damned/ evil/ dark animals, the near animals, the classical poetic animals, the hermetic animals and the famous wondrous/ exceptional/ fantastic animals, which most frequently occur in surrealism. Many of surrealism's totem animals clearly belong to several of these categories.
The few most common animals of all in surrealist imagery I'd like to divide into a general and a specific category. The general ones are those very common in human thinking, human language, human life in general, popular image and/or all kinds of poetry. The use surrealism has made of them may be particular but is not quite distinct from popular use. I was in fact a bit surprised to see that the animal perhaps most frequent in surrealism on the whole was the horse, which has never been acknowledged as something totemic for surrealism (but perhaps for a few of its pictorial artists specifically). Other such common animals common in surrealism are corals, snails, butterflies, elephants, lions, cats, wolves, eagles, parrots, owls and nightingales. The more specific ones are the elective affinities, the chosen totems, the selected oddities put to particular use within surrealism. Of those, the most common ones are the octopus, the mantis, the hippocampus, the salamander, the platypus, the anteater, the black swan and the ibis (several others are traditionally recognised as surrealist totems but just not as widespread).
A list of other animals that are frequent in surrealist imagery could include: jellyfish, mussle, centipede, lobster, spider, scorpion, dragonfly, locust, scarab, glowworm, fly, starfish, sea urchin, shark, moray, turtle, kangaroo, sloth, mole, bat, lemur, dog, polar bear, donkey, rhinoceros, pig, deer, giraffe, chamaeleon, iguana, boa, cobra, crocodile, dinosaur, peacock, pelican, cormorant, pigeon, nightjar, bird of paradise, raven, etc etc.
Those occasionally singled out, or still unused but with a big potential according to the parameters discussed, will make up a huge set and include more or less most animals, and the list where I've been collecting such information for this minor study has some 600 different animals. Its voluminous and eternally unfinished nature makes it perhaps less suitable for public view.
Mattias Forshage
ethics
Unused polemic
Surrealism is well-known to be a movement focusing on moral questions, most easily seen in its insistence on strategic as well as spontaneous refusal, abstentionism, rupture and excommunication visavis conformism and its agents and the demands of the public sphere, but more generally at heart of the very project as this concerns an experimental search for ways of facing the demands raised by the notions of generalised poetry and therefore of a revision of all human relations.
There is something rather unique about surrealist ethics, and that it is that it is rigorous and yet dynamic; because it is uncompromising, poetic, collective and discoursive; meaning that it is as radical as possible based on a dialogic assessment of the possibilities and demands of poetry applied in everyday situation (or I should say poetry and its supporting disciplines love, freedom and imagination). It can be extremely harsh because it puts faith in collective morality, and therefore may sanction individual deviation (Note: sanction primarily by excommunication which is the most relevant and strongest form of sanction available in an anarchic community based on collectivity.) whenever such deviation puts an absolute faith in individual reasoning as opposed to collective, and in the already known opinions and preferences as opposed to the unknown (such as in boneheaded egoism, daliism, mere eccentricism, etc), or in the letter as opposed to the spirit (such as in dogmatism and retrospectivism - pastoureauism, resigning 60 year old manifestoes, or writing a catechism), simply because such individualism and dogmatism is always a breach of solidarity with the unknown and therefore being antipoetic. It is therefore necessarily collective but still individually applicable, but it is always a question of an enquiry into the possibilities of situations via different individuals' individual and often intuitive assessment of the particular possibilities of refusal, departure, creative manifestation in particular situations.
(This is of course all opposed to ethic practice in artistic currents and in the cultural sphere in general which is nothing but careeristic ultrapragmatism (sometimes with a more or less arbitrarily chosen question of engagement for public image purposes), and to both the activist ethics of duty and selfsacrifice under the instrumental agenda, and the ultraradical ethics of for example situationism, mostly just competitively striving for formulating the most radical critique possible in a vein of absoute negation which has no immediate practical implementation at all and therefore leads to intellectual selfrighteousness, ordinary activism or mere inactivity.)
Surrealism is well-known to be a movement focusing on moral questions, most easily seen in its insistence on strategic as well as spontaneous refusal, abstentionism, rupture and excommunication visavis conformism and its agents and the demands of the public sphere, but more generally at heart of the very project as this concerns an experimental search for ways of facing the demands raised by the notions of generalised poetry and therefore of a revision of all human relations.
There is something rather unique about surrealist ethics, and that it is that it is rigorous and yet dynamic; because it is uncompromising, poetic, collective and discoursive; meaning that it is as radical as possible based on a dialogic assessment of the possibilities and demands of poetry applied in everyday situation (or I should say poetry and its supporting disciplines love, freedom and imagination). It can be extremely harsh because it puts faith in collective morality, and therefore may sanction individual deviation (Note: sanction primarily by excommunication which is the most relevant and strongest form of sanction available in an anarchic community based on collectivity.) whenever such deviation puts an absolute faith in individual reasoning as opposed to collective, and in the already known opinions and preferences as opposed to the unknown (such as in boneheaded egoism, daliism, mere eccentricism, etc), or in the letter as opposed to the spirit (such as in dogmatism and retrospectivism - pastoureauism, resigning 60 year old manifestoes, or writing a catechism), simply because such individualism and dogmatism is always a breach of solidarity with the unknown and therefore being antipoetic. It is therefore necessarily collective but still individually applicable, but it is always a question of an enquiry into the possibilities of situations via different individuals' individual and often intuitive assessment of the particular possibilities of refusal, departure, creative manifestation in particular situations.
(This is of course all opposed to ethic practice in artistic currents and in the cultural sphere in general which is nothing but careeristic ultrapragmatism (sometimes with a more or less arbitrarily chosen question of engagement for public image purposes), and to both the activist ethics of duty and selfsacrifice under the instrumental agenda, and the ultraradical ethics of for example situationism, mostly just competitively striving for formulating the most radical critique possible in a vein of absoute negation which has no immediate practical implementation at all and therefore leads to intellectual selfrighteousness, ordinary activism or mere inactivity.)
Wednesday, December 24, 2008
the out there
There is something going on there. Which we want to take part in. Something independent, ragingly chaotic still supremely ordered, something which simply does not await legitimation. With a combination of elusiveness, shapeshifting and omnipresence, it is indeed even difficult to adress it: many of us tries to escape those difficulties by choosing examples and talking about getting out "in the streets" or "in the forest", others talk about "nature" or "wilderness", some matter-of-factly of "outdoors" and recently some about "exteriority".
Due to illness I've spent a series of days indoors, just after I got in the mail two publications which I contributed to and which happened to coincide in time; one surrealist anthology about "the crisis of exteriority" (I don't know what this crisis is and I'm not sure what the editors (Eric Bragg, Eugenio Castro and Bruno Jacobs) mean by exteriority in the first place, my contribution was an old text about worthless places, serving as a background for their more advanced theories) and one literary journal with a "nature" theme (the editor (Jonas Ellerström) even cited my initial whining about the vagueness and problematical character of the theme, and while agreeing with my concerns, he refrained from sharing them by suggesting it to be consciously a vague catchphrase roughly corresponding to the more concrete category of "outdoors").
(Quick note: What is nature? Nature obviously means at least three related but different things; 1) nature as the "ways of the universe", the allencompassing fundamental patterns, 2) nature as the given "raw world" as opposed to culture, both outside and inside ourselves, which works in accordance with a spontaneous order, and 3) nature as the natural environments and biological systems inhabiting it, imagined independent from the human sphere but attractive for us to visit. In different languages, "nature" and its equivalents may be more strongly associated with one or the other, but the ambiguity is usually there, and the sinister gliding between descriptive and normative meanings of the "natural". Ah, I remember, and I can't decide if proudly or ashamedly, how the Stockholm surrealist group tried to hold a taped "round-table-discussion" about "nature" ten years ago and I pretty much obstructed the discussion by demanding to know what the others were talking about.)
The problem is that it is really not a problem. Dualisms may be spontaneous figures of human reason, but the point with them is to get a quick overview of the field in order to proceed to understand the constellation of transgressions and mutuality. All those dualisms of inner-outer, self-others, subjective-objective, culture-nature, artificial-ecological, civilisation-wilderness, have some basic phenomenological reality and are acceptable as provisional tools. The history of western thinking has seen the development of arguments of the impossibility of holding on to them in some stricter sense; in biology, psychoanalysis, marxism, structuralism, dialectics, etc etc; and it seems like those holding on them as basic division at any price are openly reactionary efforts like fascism and some unsophisticated applications of formal logics, or regressive such as unsophisticated applications of philosophical phenomenology or structuralism. So let's just repeat: the domain of the self is not homogenous-unitarian, not sharply delineated from other beings or the external environment, and the human sphere cannot be separated from the rest of the world, indeed human culture (just like other species' cultures) is indeed in a fundamental sense but one mere aspect of our biology, one which has in turn reshaped the planet in our small- and largescale interactions. Both the others and nature are certainly not just out there but in here just as much, and nothing out there has remained untouched.
There are two small points I have to make as a biologist, that the concepts of wilderness and ecological balance are highly dubious empirically and rather corresponds to certain people's projectional fantasies.
That virgin aspect of nature is fantasised by all kinds of primitivists, be they of pacifist or aggressive leanings. Often this is based on mere ignorance, on having no idea to what extent human land use has shaped and differentiated the natural habitats of the world for centuries. It's probably only in recent times that human impact has become, facilitated by technical deveopment but even more necessitated by demands of the economical system, largescale homogenizing enough to be severely detrimental for biological diversity. Most open lands were indeed created by human husbandry (except in very dry or very cold climates) and most natural-looking forests are shaped by some level of human harvesting of wood, animal forage, game, and other resources. The few places that could be regarded as entirely "wild", the few most inaccessible forests, the glacial landscapes, large parts of the deserts, the thundra and the oceans, are part in global circulation and therefore in complex interactions with human outtake, reshaping and littering elsewhere (littering both in terms of spreading both major junk and small civilisation souvernirs, pollution and overnourishment in general). The "wilderness" hailed in the typically american brand of primitivism (which is very significant for some of the religious and utopian movements populating north america in earlier centuries, as well as for certain ecologists and even some of the surrealists in modern times) has indeed been demonstrated to fulfill the function of an ideological construct denying the extent to which the "virginal" north american landscape was indeed shaped by the land use of the native peoples. In fact, much of nature conservation in north america is still only about keeping people out, resting on the same fundamental misanthropy idealising fantasies of a "natural way" in the absence of humans, which is one of the reasons this particular american primitivism is often characterised as "ecofascism". (Let's just be clear here: misanthropy in itself is not necessarily fascist at all, though most of its political implementations are.)
And then for the harmony of "ecological balance", putting in quasiscientific terms this fantasy of the soundness of the state of things in the absence of man. Any stability in nature is in fact a dynamical equilibrium of competing forces; what we see is there because it is the contemporary constellation of each population's "evolutionary stable strategies" visavis each other and other parts of their environment. It will occasionally go off in dynamic developments, sometimes triggered by human involvment and sometimes other factors. Not too often though, if it was highly unstable it simply wouldn't be there for us to see; but as biological systems it cannot be static. Such a sense of dynamic aposteriori order is probably one of the few useful concepts of order anyway. What would it be else? Entropy of course, the only conceivable universal order, when everything moves out of reach for everything else so that nothing should ever happen anymore... But then, on a fundamental level, biological life is specifically a uniquely powerful system of combatting entropy, both on the smallest scale (sorting substances by means of metabolism) and on the largest scales (reshaping the global environments by means of actions of populations, and thereby creating history). And then there is the neurotic sense of order; the denial of everything but the few things in control.
And here, as it lies at heart of the concept of nature, we shouldn't consider ourselves too good to repeating the analogies between the mental and geographical aspects here; the sheltering obsession is similar in so-called rational thinking and in housing. Proclaim a little space reserved for the well-known and controllable; in one area "sound reason" or closed rationalism, in the other indoors or home. Sheltering a fraction of space is not just the political and moral fall of grace that Rousseau was talking about, it also creates a uniquely predictable environment. The space is filled with familiar objects only, with familiar people only or with no other people at all, temperature, light, humidity, any exchange between in and out is regulated, everything regarded as "nature" is kept out.
This creates the sphere of outdoors as something to project desires on simply because it obeys the normal workings of reality: it is where the wind blows, where other species live, where strangers go, and where unexpected encounters occur; the domain of freedom. And at some points we will need to distinguish between the often maddeningly banal, repetitive and petty concerns structuring the larger parts of our social structures and the inspiringly banal, repetitive and petty concerns which seem to dictate the lifes of other lifeforms and their interactions, and which indeed seems to speak directly to us when we visit so-called natural environments. In both types of environments, the point is to make oneself available to the flow of regularities and irregularities which has things to teach us, challenge us and bathe us in the concrete sensory perceptions of all that which is images of freedom and reality - Which is perhaps, perhaps, another appearance form of the same domain of flow that opens up from a point which phenomenologically seems to reside within us whenever we open up ourselves to poetry, through automatism, alchemical labor, falling in love, disorder in the senses, aggressive inspiration, seances and rituals, or whatever. Is it?
MF
(to be continued)
(among other things by a serious attempt to grasp the concept of exteriority of the exteriority surrealists)
Due to illness I've spent a series of days indoors, just after I got in the mail two publications which I contributed to and which happened to coincide in time; one surrealist anthology about "the crisis of exteriority" (I don't know what this crisis is and I'm not sure what the editors (Eric Bragg, Eugenio Castro and Bruno Jacobs) mean by exteriority in the first place, my contribution was an old text about worthless places, serving as a background for their more advanced theories) and one literary journal with a "nature" theme (the editor (Jonas Ellerström) even cited my initial whining about the vagueness and problematical character of the theme, and while agreeing with my concerns, he refrained from sharing them by suggesting it to be consciously a vague catchphrase roughly corresponding to the more concrete category of "outdoors").
(Quick note: What is nature? Nature obviously means at least three related but different things; 1) nature as the "ways of the universe", the allencompassing fundamental patterns, 2) nature as the given "raw world" as opposed to culture, both outside and inside ourselves, which works in accordance with a spontaneous order, and 3) nature as the natural environments and biological systems inhabiting it, imagined independent from the human sphere but attractive for us to visit. In different languages, "nature" and its equivalents may be more strongly associated with one or the other, but the ambiguity is usually there, and the sinister gliding between descriptive and normative meanings of the "natural". Ah, I remember, and I can't decide if proudly or ashamedly, how the Stockholm surrealist group tried to hold a taped "round-table-discussion" about "nature" ten years ago and I pretty much obstructed the discussion by demanding to know what the others were talking about.)
The problem is that it is really not a problem. Dualisms may be spontaneous figures of human reason, but the point with them is to get a quick overview of the field in order to proceed to understand the constellation of transgressions and mutuality. All those dualisms of inner-outer, self-others, subjective-objective, culture-nature, artificial-ecological, civilisation-wilderness, have some basic phenomenological reality and are acceptable as provisional tools. The history of western thinking has seen the development of arguments of the impossibility of holding on to them in some stricter sense; in biology, psychoanalysis, marxism, structuralism, dialectics, etc etc; and it seems like those holding on them as basic division at any price are openly reactionary efforts like fascism and some unsophisticated applications of formal logics, or regressive such as unsophisticated applications of philosophical phenomenology or structuralism. So let's just repeat: the domain of the self is not homogenous-unitarian, not sharply delineated from other beings or the external environment, and the human sphere cannot be separated from the rest of the world, indeed human culture (just like other species' cultures) is indeed in a fundamental sense but one mere aspect of our biology, one which has in turn reshaped the planet in our small- and largescale interactions. Both the others and nature are certainly not just out there but in here just as much, and nothing out there has remained untouched.
There are two small points I have to make as a biologist, that the concepts of wilderness and ecological balance are highly dubious empirically and rather corresponds to certain people's projectional fantasies.
That virgin aspect of nature is fantasised by all kinds of primitivists, be they of pacifist or aggressive leanings. Often this is based on mere ignorance, on having no idea to what extent human land use has shaped and differentiated the natural habitats of the world for centuries. It's probably only in recent times that human impact has become, facilitated by technical deveopment but even more necessitated by demands of the economical system, largescale homogenizing enough to be severely detrimental for biological diversity. Most open lands were indeed created by human husbandry (except in very dry or very cold climates) and most natural-looking forests are shaped by some level of human harvesting of wood, animal forage, game, and other resources. The few places that could be regarded as entirely "wild", the few most inaccessible forests, the glacial landscapes, large parts of the deserts, the thundra and the oceans, are part in global circulation and therefore in complex interactions with human outtake, reshaping and littering elsewhere (littering both in terms of spreading both major junk and small civilisation souvernirs, pollution and overnourishment in general). The "wilderness" hailed in the typically american brand of primitivism (which is very significant for some of the religious and utopian movements populating north america in earlier centuries, as well as for certain ecologists and even some of the surrealists in modern times) has indeed been demonstrated to fulfill the function of an ideological construct denying the extent to which the "virginal" north american landscape was indeed shaped by the land use of the native peoples. In fact, much of nature conservation in north america is still only about keeping people out, resting on the same fundamental misanthropy idealising fantasies of a "natural way" in the absence of humans, which is one of the reasons this particular american primitivism is often characterised as "ecofascism". (Let's just be clear here: misanthropy in itself is not necessarily fascist at all, though most of its political implementations are.)
And then for the harmony of "ecological balance", putting in quasiscientific terms this fantasy of the soundness of the state of things in the absence of man. Any stability in nature is in fact a dynamical equilibrium of competing forces; what we see is there because it is the contemporary constellation of each population's "evolutionary stable strategies" visavis each other and other parts of their environment. It will occasionally go off in dynamic developments, sometimes triggered by human involvment and sometimes other factors. Not too often though, if it was highly unstable it simply wouldn't be there for us to see; but as biological systems it cannot be static. Such a sense of dynamic aposteriori order is probably one of the few useful concepts of order anyway. What would it be else? Entropy of course, the only conceivable universal order, when everything moves out of reach for everything else so that nothing should ever happen anymore... But then, on a fundamental level, biological life is specifically a uniquely powerful system of combatting entropy, both on the smallest scale (sorting substances by means of metabolism) and on the largest scales (reshaping the global environments by means of actions of populations, and thereby creating history). And then there is the neurotic sense of order; the denial of everything but the few things in control.
And here, as it lies at heart of the concept of nature, we shouldn't consider ourselves too good to repeating the analogies between the mental and geographical aspects here; the sheltering obsession is similar in so-called rational thinking and in housing. Proclaim a little space reserved for the well-known and controllable; in one area "sound reason" or closed rationalism, in the other indoors or home. Sheltering a fraction of space is not just the political and moral fall of grace that Rousseau was talking about, it also creates a uniquely predictable environment. The space is filled with familiar objects only, with familiar people only or with no other people at all, temperature, light, humidity, any exchange between in and out is regulated, everything regarded as "nature" is kept out.
This creates the sphere of outdoors as something to project desires on simply because it obeys the normal workings of reality: it is where the wind blows, where other species live, where strangers go, and where unexpected encounters occur; the domain of freedom. And at some points we will need to distinguish between the often maddeningly banal, repetitive and petty concerns structuring the larger parts of our social structures and the inspiringly banal, repetitive and petty concerns which seem to dictate the lifes of other lifeforms and their interactions, and which indeed seems to speak directly to us when we visit so-called natural environments. In both types of environments, the point is to make oneself available to the flow of regularities and irregularities which has things to teach us, challenge us and bathe us in the concrete sensory perceptions of all that which is images of freedom and reality - Which is perhaps, perhaps, another appearance form of the same domain of flow that opens up from a point which phenomenologically seems to reside within us whenever we open up ourselves to poetry, through automatism, alchemical labor, falling in love, disorder in the senses, aggressive inspiration, seances and rituals, or whatever. Is it?
MF
(to be continued)
(among other things by a serious attempt to grasp the concept of exteriority of the exteriority surrealists)
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
