Arcanum Paradoxa

Ostensibly the forerunner of modern chemistry and usually considered a ‘pseudo-science’ Alchemy first emerged in Egypt during the Hellenistic period. At roughly the same time, a form of Alchemy associated with medicinal aspects of Taoism emerged in China.
The general objective of Alchemy was the creation, through transmutation, of some type of marvellous, quintessential substance, often considered a miraculous elixir, a panacea, for curing all ills, bestowing immortality or spiritual enlightenment.
Known as the art of Khemeia, Alchemy had its theoretical basis in metallurgy, Zoroastrianism, Stoic pantheism and Aristotle’s Four Element theory of matter. The first significant exponent of Alchemy was Bolos ‘Democritus’ of Mendes (circa 200BC) whose treatise, Physika et Mystica, dealt with dyeing and colouring, the creation of gems, silver, and the transmutation of metals, specifically the transmutation of lead or iron, into gold. One tenet of alchemical doctrine was that the prime matter (prima materia) or raw material of transmutation comprised the least valued, most disregarded, of all the elements. Common or ‘despised’ material, both ‘contemptible and precious’, formed the basis of The Work, the opus alchymicum.

There is a secret stone, hidden in a deep well, worthless and rejected, concealed in dung and filth... (Johann Daniel Mylius: Philosophia Reformata, 1622)

Khemeia did not flourish during the Roman era, as various Emperors, notably Diocletian, feared that the transmutation of base metals into gold would undermine economic stability. A notable exponent of the Work in later times was the mystic Zosimos of Panopolis (Akhmim) whose Hermetic Encyclopaedia (a 28 volume compilation of existing and original texts) is dated 300CE. However, as Khemeia was considered ‘pagan learning’, much ancient knowledge of the art was lost during the Christian riots in Alexandria in 400CE.
The Arabs revived interest in Khemeia in the seventh century, as part of a general fascination for Greek science and thought. In the Arabic language the word ‘Khemeia’ became ‘al-kimiya’ and it was this form of the word that became the European term ‘alchemy’.
To define Alchemy as a pseudo-scientific forerunner of modern, scientific chemistry is an oversimplification. From the earliest times Khemeia comprised a resonant, symbolic framework for imaginative speculation. This speculative aspect of the art soon overshadowed its ‘practical’ metallurgical objectives, leading to a well-deserved aura of obscurantism and uncertain interpretation.
In the period between Bolos and Zosimos, Holmyard observes, ‘alchemical speculation ran riot’ as diverse practitioners created a complex body of doctrine, ascribing symbolic meanings to the sequence of metallic colour changes, incorporating all contemporary strands of speculative thought into alchemical theory, including Egyptian magic, Greek philosophy, Gnosticism, Neo-Platonism, Babylonian astrology, Christian theology and pagan mythology.
Works of Khemeia were invariably couched in an ‘enigmatical and allusive language’ and often ascribed to semi-legendary or mythical authors such as Hermes Trismegistus, Plato, Moses, Miriam (the legendary sister of Moses), Agathodaimon, Theophrastus, Ostanes, Cleopatra and the goddess Isis. Thus, almost any contemporary, metaphysical speculation was assimilated into eclectic alchemical thinking: many sayings, stories and myths were endowed with alchemical interpretation, or incorporated into the Hermetic worldview.
By the Byzantine era Stephanos of Alexandria, a philosopher, mathematician and astronomer who flourished during the reign of the Emperor Herakleios I (610-641), had come to view Khemeia as primarily a ‘mental process’. Following F. Sherwood Taylor, E. J. Holmyard quotes Stephanos’ denigration of practical alchemy as a "burden of weariness", observing that by this time (the seventh century) alchemy had ‘very largely become a theme for rhetorical, poetical and religious compositions, and the mere physical transmutation of base metals into gold was used as symbol for man’s regeneration and transformation to a nobler and more spiritual state’.
So, well before the rise of medieval European alchemy, the tendency to regard The Work as an internalised, psychic process or phenomenon was established. Khemeia could easily be dissociated from physical chemistry and metallurgy and defined as some kind of ‘spiritual’ discipline. Now, the objective was not the transmutation of external phenomena, but the transmutation of the adept himself, and this transformative process was expressed in an obscure, introspective, mythic vocabulary of symbols and complex terminology.
In modern times a fascination with alchemy as an internalised, mental process has been continued by the Surrealists and the psychologist Carl Gustav Jung (1875-1961). During the inter-war years and roughly around the same time both Jung and the Surrealists claimed Alchemy as significant in their respective investigations:

…let us not lose sight of the fact that the idea of Surrealism aims quite simply at the total recovery of our psychic force by a means which is nothing other than the dizzying descent into ourselves, the systematic illumination of hidden places and the progressive darkening of other places, the perpetual excursion into the midst of forbidden territory… (Second Manifesto of Surrealism, 1930)

Jung and the Surrealists (particularly Andre Breton and Max Ernst) were operating against the backdrop of a revival of interest in alchemical symbolism in France and Germany. The works of Zosimos had been translated into French and published by Berthelot and Ruelle in 1887-1888. Herbert Silberer, who proposed a connection between alchemical thought and modern psychology, had anticipated Jung’s researches.
In France the Surrealists were influenced the alchemical novels of Francois Jolivet-Castelot and the esoteric writings of Fulcanelli and Grillot de Givry. De Givry drew attention to the hermetic influences at work in the art of painters like Bosch, Bruegel, Cranach and Baldung. Initially Andre Breton saw alchemical thought as a way of re-investing poetic language with a sense of mystery: this soon evolved into a more ambitious proposition, the deployment of an ‘alchemy of language’ to transform consciousness, and by transforming consciousness, change life.
On the other hand Jung’s interest in alchemy was triggered by an ancient Taoist text called The Secret of the Golden Flower translated by Richard Wilhelm and for which he wrote a commentary in 1929. As a result of this work he was motivated to research Western Alchemy, which he subsequently defined as ‘the historical counterpart to my psychology of the unconscious’, and a bridge between Gnosticism and the modern world.
The culmination of these explorations was Jung’s attempt to correlate the ‘transpersonal’ element of his psychological paradigm with modern physics. The ultimate acausal reality or, to use the medieval term, unus mundus, forming the underlying transformative matrix of alchemical processes, can be understood, he argued, as simultaneously both psychic and material. This underlying unus mundus is both the indeterminate universe of psychic symbols and the pre-geometric, ‘implicate order’ of high-energy physics.
At the heart of Jung’s Analytical Psychology is the process of Individuation or self-becoming. Individuation is a non-linear, centralizing developmental process culminating in an enhanced synthesis of the conscious and the unconscious spheres. This synthesis also incorporates a paradoxical harmonisation of contradictory elements, a union of opposites – including, for example, the masculine and feminine principles, the animus and anima – correlating with the alchemical coniunctio as symbolised by the hermaphrodite or androgyny.
Jung felt that elucidation of the opus alchymicum would shed light on the symbolic structure of the Individuation process, because the alchemist’s hope of creating philosophical gold was only a partial illusion: ‘for the rest it corresponded to certain psychic facts that are of great importance in the psychology of the unconscious.’
If the alchemists projected the process of Individuation into the phenomena of chemical change, then the same is true for the poet who, likewise, by a synthesis of automatism and active imagination, projects the same process into the phenomena of poetic (artistic) creation. He or she initiates a transmutation of the ‘prime matter’ of language into the aesthetic ‘gold’ of poetry.
Part of this process is a sustained regression into the sphere of the unconscious (the ‘dizzying descent into ourselves’ mentioned in the Second Manifesto) during which imprints of the individual’s psychological and biological development are uncovered in symbolic form. Thus, the alchemical process, by engaging with the Individuation process, establishes a psychobiological frame of reference for both psychological development and imaginative, poetic creativity (‘inspiration’).
Alchemy, viewed from the Jungian perspective, can be seen as a quest for inner psychic unity and wholeness (actualisation) achieved through a non-rational mode of self-knowledge. However identification of poetry (or perhaps the poem itself) with the alchemical arcanum paradoxa and defining poetic inspiration in the context of a psychobiological, existential substrate, highlights a conflict with conventional ideas tending to categorise writing and/or poetry, as ‘literature’.
Academic and other definitions of poetry as ‘literature’ displace the poetic act of imaginative creation from the interior psychobiological universe to the external world of cultural-linguistic structures where the preferred paradigm is communicative. Furthermore, the current ‘postmodernist’ cultural-linguistic aesthetic model presupposes that everything depends upon language and linguistics to the extent that ‘being’ itself becomes literally indefinable in non-semiotic, extra-linguistic terms. This inevitably inhibits understanding of artistic creativity as in innate psychoactive phenomenon effectively blocking access to sources of inspiration in the indeterminate quantum vacuum of the unus mundus.
The raison d’etre of the ‘literary’ paradigm is communication. In contradistinction, the raison d’etre of the ‘alchemical-surreal’ paradigm is transformation: transformation energised by inspiration, where ‘inspiration’ is defined in terms of psychic energy. In this paradigm of transformation the Jungian valuation of symbols (distinguished from ‘signs’) as ambiguous emanations of non-linguistic or extra-linguistic or even pre-linguistic being is a key factor.
For Jung the psychic presence of symbols (including ‘archetypal’ symbols) is always experienced as ‘numinous’, a categorical term he borrowed from the Kantian-Friesian religious thinker Rudolf Otto (1869-1937). Otto was seeking to extend or deepen the epistemological scheme of his predecessor Jakob Friedrich Fries. This scheme included the notion of Ahndung, a German term which can be translated as ‘aesthetic sense’. Otto expanded the meaning of Ahndung ‘beyond the merely aesthetic’ by introducing the category of ‘numinosity’, the alleged quality of the sacred.
Otto argued that numinosity is the prime characteristic of the collective experience underlying all religions. This experience can involve a sense of overwhelming power, the mysterium tremendum. The mysterium stands as the first cause of all ‘religious awe’, and, in certain respects, if one follows Jung in the matter, accounts for the sense of power and autonomy apparently exhibited by unconscious contents and symbols.
The association of archetypal symbolism with cross-cultural mythic imagery on the one hand, and Otto’s numinosity concept on the other, was one way that Jung, through his writings and researches, endowed psychological processes such as Individuation with ‘spiritual’ qualities. Part of the attraction of Jungian psychology is his overt identification of self-becoming, or personality formation, with the model of the spiritual quest, articulated through an all-pervasive symbolism shared with the alchemical magnum opus, other mystical belief systems or even mainstream theological precepts. As Anthony Storr explains, Jung was able to do this because he identified the integrated Self with an archetypal symbol of totality identical with the underlying reality of Judaeo-Christian monotheism, the imago Dei.
If the raw material of poetry is language, the essence of poetic practice is active imagination or artistic creativity. It is inevitable that imaginative creativity, in pursuit of inspiration, will engage with that innate process of psychological integration Jung called Individuation. From this perspective the poem may appear as a by-product of the process. For the poet, as for the alchemist, the psycho-activity of inspiration arising from the process of self-becoming is the prime factor. It is this psycho-active effect which dissolves the barriers between the conscious and the unconscious, exposing the subject to the autonomous ‘power’ of symbolic otherness, enhancing creative capability.
For many this dissolution is most satisfactorily defined as an ‘archetypal’, visionary, even mystical, experience. Indeed, for some, even the most wilfully mundane or blatantly secular poems can still radiate, however feebly, an aura of the ‘numinous’, investing the text with all the fascination of an alien artefact.
Grounding poetic practice in a fundamental, psychobiological, ontological matrix de-emphasises, even dissociates, ‘pure poetry’ from the cultural-linguistic epiphenomenal ‘foreground’ superstructure of modern ‘literary’ discourse. It is also the case that, contrary to Jung’s position, pro-active engagement with the principium individuationis from an aesthetic perspective may not accord with traditional ‘religious’ paradigms of human perfectibility or divine purpose.
Thus, the alchemical process of inner purification may well amount to a Promethean affront to doctrines of redemption and predestination. Then, the poet, like the alchemist of old, may stand accused of Faustian occultism – or even the heresy of the Free Spirit, interestingly defined by Vaneigem as ‘an alchemy of individual fulfilment’. The declaration of intent in the Second Manifesto of Surrealism to attain the ‘total recovery of our psychic force’ through a ‘systematic illumination of hidden places’ and excursions into ‘forbidden territory’ must be understood in the context of Romantic metaphysical revolt in the tradition of Miltonic Satanism, Byron and Sade. It is not an affirmation of the ‘spiritual quest’, or the unio mystica described as the supreme desideratum by Jung and other exponents of perennial, pan-religious syncretism.
Furthermore Jung’s identification of the integrated Self with any ‘divine’ reality or purpose is open to question in the post-religious context that is the present evolutionary situation of society. Primordial being may exert or radiate a ‘numinous’ attraction of otherness, or the subject may experience such an inspirational effect. It does not follow that experience of this effect is experience of the ‘sacred’. This is true, even if the effect or experience can be shown to be the result of a quasi-objective incursion of, or from, the unus mundus. Only those predisposed, perhaps by cultural conditioning, to a totalising ‘religious’ reading of fundamental experiences can promote such an interpretation without fear of contradiction. Again, if the raw matter of the procedure comprises the least valued, most disregarded, of all the elements, such common or ‘despised’ material. Stuff ‘of no price or value’ (Dyas Chemica Tripartita) will also form the basis of the poet’s Work. Such poetic work is unlikely to meet with approval from the custodians of cultural probity, the proponents of canonical, high-minded artistic or literary greatness.
Is the true poet an exceptional individual?
If the answer is yes, then poetry will reflect the compulsion of such individuals to seek their own path and forge their own identity through an oracular, alchemical poetry, which, like the ancient works of Khemeia, may well appear enigmatical and allusive to the uninitiated.
Digital art: Inner Alchemy III, 2001
Arcanum Paradoxa was published by Atlantean Publishing in The Monomyth Supplement 44, January 2009
Hermetic Art Gnostic Alchemy Of The Imagination (1985) on The Alchemy WebsiteOstensibly the forerunner of modern chemistry and usually considered a ‘pseudo-science’ Alchemy first emerged in Egypt during the Hellenistic period. At roughly the same time, a form of Alchemy associated with medicinal aspects of Taoism emerged in China.
The general objective of Alchemy was the creation, through transmutation, of some type of marvellous, quintessential substance, often considered a miraculous elixir, a panacea, for curing all ills, bestowing immortality or spiritual enlightenment.
Known as the art of Khemeia, Alchemy had its theoretical basis in metallurgy, Zoroastrianism, Stoic pantheism and Aristotle’s Four Element theory of matter. The first significant exponent of Alchemy was Bolos ‘Democritus’ of Mendes (circa 200BC) whose treatise, Physika et Mystica, dealt with dyeing and colouring, the creation of gems, silver, and the transmutation of metals, specifically the transmutation of lead or iron, into gold. One tenet of alchemical doctrine was that the prime matter (prima materia) or raw material of transmutation comprised the least valued, most disregarded, of all the elements. Common or ‘despised’ material, both ‘contemptible and precious’, formed the basis of The Work, the opus alchymicum.

There is a secret stone, hidden in a deep well, worthless and rejected, concealed in dung and filth... (Johann Daniel Mylius: Philosophia Reformata, 1622)

Khemeia did not flourish during the Roman era, as various Emperors, notably Diocletian, feared that the transmutation of base metals into gold would undermine economic stability. A notable exponent of the Work in later times was the mystic Zosimos of Panopolis (Akhmim) whose Hermetic Encyclopaedia (a 28 volume compilation of existing and original texts) is dated 300CE. However, as Khemeia was considered ‘pagan learning’, much ancient knowledge of the art was lost during the Christian riots in Alexandria in 400CE.
The Arabs revived interest in Khemeia in the seventh century, as part of a general fascination for Greek science and thought. In the Arabic language the word ‘Khemeia’ became ‘al-kimiya’ and it was this form of the word that became the European term ‘alchemy’.
To define Alchemy as a pseudo-scientific forerunner of modern, scientific chemistry is an oversimplification. From the earliest times Khemeia comprised a resonant, symbolic framework for imaginative speculation. This speculative aspect of the art soon overshadowed its ‘practical’ metallurgical objectives, leading to a well-deserved aura of obscurantism and uncertain interpretation.
In the period between Bolos and Zosimos, Holmyard observes, ‘alchemical speculation ran riot’ as diverse practitioners created a complex body of doctrine, ascribing symbolic meanings to the sequence of metallic colour changes, incorporating all contemporary strands of speculative thought into alchemical theory, including Egyptian magic, Greek philosophy, Gnosticism, Neo-Platonism, Babylonian astrology, Christian theology and pagan mythology.
Works of Khemeia were invariably couched in an ‘enigmatical and allusive language’ and often ascribed to semi-legendary or mythical authors such as Hermes Trismegistus, Plato, Moses, Miriam (the legendary sister of Moses), Agathodaimon, Theophrastus, Ostanes, Cleopatra and the goddess Isis. Thus, almost any contemporary, metaphysical speculation was assimilated into eclectic alchemical thinking: many sayings, stories and myths were endowed with alchemical interpretation, or incorporated into the Hermetic worldview.
By the Byzantine era Stephanos of Alexandria, a philosopher, mathematician and astronomer who flourished during the reign of the Emperor Herakleios I (610-641), had come to view Khemeia as primarily a ‘mental process’. Following F. Sherwood Taylor, E. J. Holmyard quotes Stephanos’ denigration of practical alchemy as a "burden of weariness", observing that by this time (the seventh century) alchemy had ‘very largely become a theme for rhetorical, poetical and religious compositions, and the mere physical transmutation of base metals into gold was used as symbol for man’s regeneration and transformation to a nobler and more spiritual state’.
So, well before the rise of medieval European alchemy, the tendency to regard The Work as an internalised, psychic process or phenomenon was established. Khemeia could easily be dissociated from physical chemistry and metallurgy and defined as some kind of ‘spiritual’ discipline. Now, the objective was not the transmutation of external phenomena, but the transmutation of the adept himself, and this transformative process was expressed in an obscure, introspective, mythic vocabulary of symbols and complex terminology.
In modern times a fascination with alchemy as an internalised, mental process has been continued by the Surrealists and the psychologist Carl Gustav Jung (1875-1961). During the inter-war years and roughly around the same time both Jung and the Surrealists claimed Alchemy as significant in their respective investigations:

…let us not lose sight of the fact that the idea of Surrealism aims quite simply at the total recovery of our psychic force by a means which is nothing other than the dizzying descent into ourselves, the systematic illumination of hidden places and the progressive darkening of other places, the perpetual excursion into the midst of forbidden territory… (Second Manifesto of Surrealism, 1930)

Jung and the Surrealists (particularly Andre Breton and Max Ernst) were operating against the backdrop of a revival of interest in alchemical symbolism in France and Germany. The works of Zosimos had been translated into French and published by Berthelot and Ruelle in 1887-1888. Herbert Silberer, who proposed a connection between alchemical thought and modern psychology, had anticipated Jung’s researches.
In France the Surrealists were influenced the alchemical novels of Francois Jolivet-Castelot and the esoteric writings of Fulcanelli and Grillot de Givry. De Givry drew attention to the hermetic influences at work in the art of painters like Bosch, Bruegel, Cranach and Baldung. Initially Andre Breton saw alchemical thought as a way of re-investing poetic language with a sense of mystery: this soon evolved into a more ambitious proposition, the deployment of an ‘alchemy of language’ to transform consciousness, and by transforming consciousness, change life.
On the other hand Jung’s interest in alchemy was triggered by an ancient Taoist text called The Secret of the Golden Flower translated by Richard Wilhelm and for which he wrote a commentary in 1929. As a result of this work he was motivated to research Western Alchemy, which he subsequently defined as ‘the historical counterpart to my psychology of the unconscious’, and a bridge between Gnosticism and the modern world.
The culmination of these explorations was Jung’s attempt to correlate the ‘transpersonal’ element of his psychological paradigm with modern physics. The ultimate acausal reality or, to use the medieval term, unus mundus, forming the underlying transformative matrix of alchemical processes, can be understood, he argued, as simultaneously both psychic and material. This underlying unus mundus is both the indeterminate universe of psychic symbols and the pre-geometric, ‘implicate order’ of high-energy physics.
At the heart of Jung’s Analytical Psychology is the process of Individuation or self-becoming. Individuation is a non-linear, centralizing developmental process culminating in an enhanced synthesis of the conscious and the unconscious spheres. This synthesis also incorporates a paradoxical harmonisation of contradictory elements, a union of opposites – including, for example, the masculine and feminine principles, the animus and anima – correlating with the alchemical coniunctio as symbolised by the hermaphrodite or androgyny.
Jung felt that elucidation of the opus alchymicum would shed light on the symbolic structure of the Individuation process, because the alchemist’s hope of creating philosophical gold was only a partial illusion: ‘for the rest it corresponded to certain psychic facts that are of great importance in the psychology of the unconscious.’
If the alchemists projected the process of Individuation into the phenomena of chemical change, then the same is true for the poet who, likewise, by a synthesis of automatism and active imagination, projects the same process into the phenomena of poetic (artistic) creation. He or she initiates a transmutation of the ‘prime matter’ of language into the aesthetic ‘gold’ of poetry.
Part of this process is a sustained regression into the sphere of the unconscious (the ‘dizzying descent into ourselves’ mentioned in the Second Manifesto) during which imprints of the individual’s psychological and biological development are uncovered in symbolic form. Thus, the alchemical process, by engaging with the Individuation process, establishes a psychobiological frame of reference for both psychological development and imaginative, poetic creativity (‘inspiration’).
Alchemy, viewed from the Jungian perspective, can be seen as a quest for inner psychic unity and wholeness (actualisation) achieved through a non-rational mode of self-knowledge. However identification of poetry (or perhaps the poem itself) with the alchemical arcanum paradoxa and defining poetic inspiration in the context of a psychobiological, existential substrate, highlights a conflict with conventional ideas tending to categorise writing and/or poetry, as ‘literature’.
Academic and other definitions of poetry as ‘literature’ displace the poetic act of imaginative creation from the interior psychobiological universe to the external world of cultural-linguistic structures where the preferred paradigm is communicative. Furthermore, the current ‘postmodernist’ cultural-linguistic aesthetic model presupposes that everything depends upon language and linguistics to the extent that ‘being’ itself becomes literally indefinable in non-semiotic, extra-linguistic terms. This inevitably inhibits understanding of artistic creativity as in innate psychoactive phenomenon effectively blocking access to sources of inspiration in the indeterminate quantum vacuum of the unus mundus.
The raison d’etre of the ‘literary’ paradigm is communication. In contradistinction, the raison d’etre of the ‘alchemical-surreal’ paradigm is transformation: transformation energised by inspiration, where ‘inspiration’ is defined in terms of psychic energy. In this paradigm of transformation the Jungian valuation of symbols (distinguished from ‘signs’) as ambiguous emanations of non-linguistic or extra-linguistic or even pre-linguistic being is a key factor.
For Jung the psychic presence of symbols (including ‘archetypal’ symbols) is always experienced as ‘numinous’, a categorical term he borrowed from the Kantian-Friesian religious thinker Rudolf Otto (1869-1937). Otto was seeking to extend or deepen the epistemological scheme of his predecessor Jakob Friedrich Fries. This scheme included the notion of Ahndung, a German term which can be translated as ‘aesthetic sense’. Otto expanded the meaning of Ahndung ‘beyond the merely aesthetic’ by introducing the category of ‘numinosity’, the alleged quality of the sacred.
Otto argued that numinosity is the prime characteristic of the collective experience underlying all religions. This experience can involve a sense of overwhelming power, the mysterium tremendum. The mysterium stands as the first cause of all ‘religious awe’, and, in certain respects, if one follows Jung in the matter, accounts for the sense of power and autonomy apparently exhibited by unconscious contents and symbols.
The association of archetypal symbolism with cross-cultural mythic imagery on the one hand, and Otto’s numinosity concept on the other, was one way that Jung, through his writings and researches, endowed psychological processes such as Individuation with ‘spiritual’ qualities. Part of the attraction of Jungian psychology is his overt identification of self-becoming, or personality formation, with the model of the spiritual quest, articulated through an all-pervasive symbolism shared with the alchemical magnum opus, other mystical belief systems or even mainstream theological precepts. As Anthony Storr explains, Jung was able to do this because he identified the integrated Self with an archetypal symbol of totality identical with the underlying reality of Judaeo-Christian monotheism, the imago Dei.
If the raw material of poetry is language, the essence of poetic practice is active imagination or artistic creativity. It is inevitable that imaginative creativity, in pursuit of inspiration, will engage with that innate process of psychological integration Jung called Individuation. From this perspective the poem may appear as a by-product of the process. For the poet, as for the alchemist, the psycho-activity of inspiration arising from the process of self-becoming is the prime factor. It is this psycho-active effect which dissolves the barriers between the conscious and the unconscious, exposing the subject to the autonomous ‘power’ of symbolic otherness, enhancing creative capability.
For many this dissolution is most satisfactorily defined as an ‘archetypal’, visionary, even mystical, experience. Indeed, for some, even the most wilfully mundane or blatantly secular poems can still radiate, however feebly, an aura of the ‘numinous’, investing the text with all the fascination of an alien artefact.
Grounding poetic practice in a fundamental, psychobiological, ontological matrix de-emphasises, even dissociates, ‘pure poetry’ from the cultural-linguistic epiphenomenal ‘foreground’ superstructure of modern ‘literary’ discourse. It is also the case that, contrary to Jung’s position, pro-active engagement with the principium individuationis from an aesthetic perspective may not accord with traditional ‘religious’ paradigms of human perfectibility or divine purpose.
Thus, the alchemical process of inner purification may well amount to a Promethean affront to doctrines of redemption and predestination. Then, the poet, like the alchemist of old, may stand accused of Faustian occultism – or even the heresy of the Free Spirit, interestingly defined by Vaneigem as ‘an alchemy of individual fulfilment’. The declaration of intent in the Second Manifesto of Surrealism to attain the ‘total recovery of our psychic force’ through a ‘systematic illumination of hidden places’ and excursions into ‘forbidden territory’ must be understood in the context of Romantic metaphysical revolt in the tradition of Miltonic Satanism, Byron and Sade. It is not an affirmation of the ‘spiritual quest’, or the unio mystica described as the supreme desideratum by Jung and other exponents of perennial, pan-religious syncretism.
Furthermore Jung’s identification of the integrated Self with any ‘divine’ reality or purpose is open to question in the post-religious context that is the present evolutionary situation of society. Primordial being may exert or radiate a ‘numinous’ attraction of otherness, or the subject may experience such an inspirational effect. It does not follow that experience of this effect is experience of the ‘sacred’. This is true, even if the effect or experience can be shown to be the result of a quasi-objective incursion of, or from, the unus mundus. Only those predisposed, perhaps by cultural conditioning, to a totalising ‘religious’ reading of fundamental experiences can promote such an interpretation without fear of contradiction. Again, if the raw matter of the procedure comprises the least valued, most disregarded, of all the elements, such common or ‘despised’ material. Stuff ‘of no price or value’ (Dyas Chemica Tripartita) will also form the basis of the poet’s Work. Such poetic work is unlikely to meet with approval from the custodians of cultural probity, the proponents of canonical, high-minded artistic or literary greatness.
Is the true poet an exceptional individual?
If the answer is yes, then poetry will reflect the compulsion of such individuals to seek their own path and forge their own identity through an oracular, alchemical poetry, which, like the ancient works of Khemeia, may well appear enigmatical and allusive to the uninitiated.

Arcanum Paradoxa was published by Atlantean Publishing in The Monomyth Supplement 44, January 2009
Hermetic Art Gnostic Alchemy Of The Imagination (1985) on The Alchemy Website
 

Digital art: Inner Alchemy III, 2001

Beyond The Breakthrough

Modernism or Anti-Modernism?

 

To plunge into the depths of the Abyss, to Heaven or Hell, who cares? To the bottom of the Unknown in order to find something new! – Baudelaire, 1859

 

That evocative phrase ‘the modern breakthrough’ is attributed to Scandinavian controversialist critic and exponent of cultural radicalism, Georg Brandes. Like all such tectonic shifts, however slight, the Modern Breakthrough was – and still is – somewhat divisive; expect a backlash of stereotypical reactions: panics, outrages and counter-movements. For some time it has been clear that one focus of reaction to Modernism and Modernity is the interrelationship between technology, the mass media and the arts. The period 1870-1914 is often considered the era of the Second Industrial Revolution: a time that saw the introduction of electric power, light bulbs, the telephone, aviation and the motor car, not to mention an incipient leisure class, mass circulation journalism, advertising, the beginnings of conspicuous consumption and celebrity culture.

It is self-evident that our contemporary, secularised mass media – especially media based on visual images –is inseparable from various forms of recording technology. Yet such technologies and cultural innovations find their origins in the pre-history of Modernity. One must agree with Walter Benjamin that it was the nineteenth century diorama ‘which signalled a revolution in the relationship of art to technology’. Here we can discern the first signs of an emergent historical phenomenon that, by the 1950s, would overthrow age-old aesthetic standards and compromise, or, at least, complicate, more recent ideas of ‘revolutionary’ or avant-garde Modern Art.

If the formative era of mass media reached its zenith in 1905 with the opening of the Pittsburgh Nickelodeon, subsequent waves of development have proved equally momentous. Fears about the insidious manipulative power of entertainment and advertising raised by Cultural Marxists like Adorno and Horkheimer in Dialectic of Enlightenment (1947), or by more popular social commentators such as Vance Packard in The Hidden Persuaders (1957) or Christopher Booker in The Neophiliacs (1969) have been further amplified in more recent times.

 Although the shared social concerns of both Cultural Marxists and anti-modernist Cultural Conservatives resurfaced in the mid-1970s, as can be seen by the popularity of such ‘explosive’ best-sellers as The Culture of Narcissism (1979) by historian Christopher Lasch, these worries have been heightened even further since the 1980s. This is mainly caused by the emergence of global ICTs (Information and Communications Technologies: the Internet, electronic financial markets that function beyond the control of the state and so forth) and associated methodologies such as Hypertext, invented in 1965 by computer scientist Ted Nelson who also coined the term ‘Hypermedia’. Anti-modernists find the Internet particularly threatening because, for the time being at least, its global reach, speed of access and decentralised architecture denies the possibility of assimilation into traditional power structures, hence the recurring outbursts of moral panic associated with access to harmful, deviant or subversive content and paranoid fears about the perceived deleterious effects of Social Media. For disciples of Lasch and others the socio-cultural effects of global hyper-technology have amplified perennial conservative fears centred on the quasi-mythical theme of ‘lost innocence’; often defined as a continuing and specifically modern degradation of ‘spontaneous feeling’ and other emotive idealisations beloved of moral vigilantes.

The evolutionary processes of cultural change are rendered complex by infinite socio-economic variations and geographic factors. Such complexity can cause cultural ‘time lag’ and related temporal phenomena such as resurgences or revivals. For instance, due to the politics of the era, French Romanticism found acceptance in its home country much later than German or English. While the ‘Neo-Classicism’ of the eighteenth century is perceived as a revivalist phenomenon, it will be seen that, in the later part of the nineteenth century and into the twentieth century there were periodic revivals of ‘Neo-Romanticism’, in various guises, including forms of ‘Gothic’ which can be interpreted as the dark side of the Romantic movement. It has been argued that Modernism itself is, in essence, an extension of the Romantic impulse – an impulse viewed as intrinsic to the human condition.

Again, for obscure reasons, cultural tendencies can reach high points of ‘intensity’ or peak moments of heightened activity that may vary depending upon locale. The period in Europe between, say 1890 and 1914 may, for many, epitomise the apogee of ultra-Modernism. This was an era when all art forms and genres appeared to exhibit an inter-related set of crucial developments and continuities: Cubism, Futurism, ‘pure architecture’, ‘open field’ poetry, the interior monologue, Expressionist theatre, vers libre, Atonal Music, the Free Dance and Expressionist dance innovations of  Loie Fuller, Ruth St Denis, Isadora Duncan, Mary Wigman and Rudolf von Laban. To some observers it appeared that there was a clear trajectory of innovation from Canova’s ‘Three Graces’ (1817) via Manet’s ‘Olympia’ (1863) to Picasso’s ‘Les Demoiselles d'Avignon’ (1907). Having reached this evolutionary apex all subsequent developments must be characterised by a sense of diminution or of failing momentum. From such a ‘high point’ there is nowhere to go but down: Modernism, or the avant-garde inflexion of the Modernist trend, entered a long, slow, if irregular, fade-out due to natural dissipation of energy and loss of motive power.

However there is an apocalyptic slant to much talk about ‘the modern world’ and Modern Art. This ensures that almost any ‘era’ can be defined as an age of crisis, an ‘age of anxiety’, a time of the absolutely different, or an Age of the New (the New Novel, the New Drama, the New Woman) separated from the past by a vertiginous abyss. Perhaps, between the ‘Three Graces’ and ‘Les Demoiselles d'Avignon’, there is no connecting thread of continuous development at all. Perhaps the difference between the two works reveals an unbridgeable gulf in sensibility – a disconcerting black hole in the fabric of ‘culture’, one of those ‘unexpected solutions of continuity’ identified by Joseph Conrad in his prescient terrorist novel The Secret Agent (1907). Perhaps it might be the case that an underlying indeterminacy ensures that both possibilities are viable, depending upon the analytical perspective of the observer.

Roland Barthes isolated the mid-nineteenth century as the moment when a distinctively ‘modern’ tendency arose in European culture. In literature he notes a qualitative difference between the literary style (ecriture) of Balzac and that of Flaubert whose novel Madame Bovary caused controversy in 1857. For Barthes this transition in French literature from Balzac to Flaubert represents a Conradian sudden hole in space and time, une rupture essentielle. For art historians the transition from Romanticism to Realism in the works of Courbet and the theories of Champfleury may mark a similar rupture or divide in the fabric of cultural life.

Different chronological profiles can be ascribed to the historical phenomenon of Modernity.

It has been said that both the Impressionists and the Post-Impressionists are the true initiators of ‘the New’ in art. In the 1850s the caricaturist and photographer Nadar launched his Pantheon-Nader portraits of celebrated contemporaries thus, for some commentators, inaugurating a new style of celebrity culture. Nadar was also a pioneer of aerial photography. For Georg Brandes, as for Andre Breton, the point of departure, or the ‘modern breakthrough’ occurred in the 1870s, the period of the Franco-Prussian War and the heyday of the actress Sarah (the ‘divine Sarah’) Bernhardt, one of the first ‘modern’ celebrities. In 1873 it was Rimbaud who wrote in A Season in Hell that ‘one must be absolutely modern’.

Alternatively, for Victorian sage John Ruskin (Modern Painters, 1843) the authentic voice of Modernity in painting was that of Turner, a master of turbulent atmosphere, a pioneer of English Romanticism, while, for other critics ‘La Musique aux Tuileries’ (1862) by Manet may count as the first ‘truly modern’ painting because of a sense of detachment which appeared to one commentator (Sandblad) to exemplify the urban ‘realism of the flaneur’. The image also included a portrait of Baudelaire among the crowd signifying how Manet, along with Guys, quickly came to embody ‘the painter of modern life’ as expounded in the poet’s aesthetic theories.  

For historians of the theatre the modern era began with Ibsen’s plays A Doll’s House (1879) and Ghosts (1880). For cultural historian Roger Shattuck the modern era began with the death of Victor Hugo in 1885, and was actualised during la Belle Époque, between 1890 and 1914. For Shattuck the pre-eminent symbol of Modernism was the Eiffel Tower (1889) whereas, for Jacques Barzun, writing in 1943, Modernity in ‘the contemporary sense’ dated from the Armistice of 1918. For other cultural historians the high watermark of ‘the modern’ is the Roaring Twenties, the Jazz Age of Art Deco symbolised by the triumph of the moderne style at the 1925 Paris Exposition Internationale des Arts Decoratifs et Industriels Moderne.

But, by 1960, or so Barzun claimed, the term ‘Modernism’ was beginning to sound rather archaic; it was ‘beginning to acquire the tone of the past’. It is certainly the case that some emerging features of ‘postmodernism’, or Post-Modernism, can be found in both the mainstream culture and the ‘counter-culture’ of the Sixties, even though its roots can be traced back at least as far as the Cabaret Voltaire (1916). Historian Arnold Toynbee, writing in the late thirties, dated the ‘Post Modern Age’ from the schism or cultural rupture of the First World War.

It was the 1850s that saw not only the rise of Realism in both literature and painting, but also a new ‘heroism of modern life’.

This vision of ‘the new’ was exemplified both by the aesthetics and poetry of Charles Baudelaire (Les Fleurs du Mal, 1857) and by the first stirrings of modern architecture in the prefabricated glass and steel of Joseph Paxton’s Crystal Palace (1851) famously derided by anti-modernist Dostoyevsky in his Notes From Underground (1864) and elsewhere as a pagan totem (the god Baal) of bourgeois materialism. It is, perhaps fitting that one of the most sensational scientific publications of the modern age, Darwin’s On the Origin of Species, appeared in 1859 at the close of this mid-century watershed decade. Like the writings of Darwin, works by Flaubert, Courbet and Baudelaire attracted that particularly modern phenomenon – the cultural, literary or artistic scandal. It may be that the essential rupture in the edifice of ‘culture’ apparently caused by such ‘radical’ images as The Funeral at Ornans (by Courbet, 1850), or by such ‘scandalous’ poetical works as Les Fleurs du Mal or architectural outrages such as Crystal Palace helps to create a climate of moral panic. A climate that is still with us, as may be judged from the hysterical media ‘outcry’ against plays like Sarah Kane’s brutalist  ‘in yer face’ drama Blasted (1995), or the synthetic ‘fury’ directed at films such as Cronenberg’s Crash (1996). Of course this is nothing new. In the modern world, the intellectual, or the artist, or the entertainer or the subcultural outsider, may soon become a folk-devil; back in 1937 Duke Ellington found it necessary to defend ‘hot’ jazz against the accusation that it incited sex crimes among the young, while guardians of propriety railed against the salacious implications of the Shimmy or Little Egypt’s Hootchie-Kootchie.

It is also typical of this ethos of manufactured scandal that a defender of The New may, in time, become an opponent of innovation – such was the career path of John Ruskin.

Ruskin, who championed Turner in the 1840s, attacked Whistler’s Nocturne: Black and Gold – The Falling Rocket (1875) in 1877, much to his discredit – as readers of Whistler’s The Gentle Art of Making Enemies (1890) will no doubt agree. In an instance of Jungian enantiodroma, a champion of the ‘modern’ was transformed into a reactionary anti-modernist, who, insofar as he was unable to appreciate the new aesthetics of Impressionism or Whistler’s semi-symbolist, proto-impressionist, semi-abstractionist technique, soon appeared ridiculously ‘Victorian’ and ‘out of touch’. On the other hand Whistler’s notion that ‘painting was the poetry of sight’ and that subject matter has ‘nothing to do with harmony of sound or colour’ sounds prophetic, confirming his aesthetic radicalism. In 1859 Whistler moved from Paris to London and began to put into practice the ‘realism of the flaneur’ with a series of images depicting life on the Thames Docklands, including ‘Black Lion Wharf ‘and ‘Rotherhithe’, and a key painting in the genre entitled ‘Wapping’ (1864). Even before the Ruskin affair, these urban modernist subjects (the ‘profound and intricate poetry of a vast capital’ to quote a review in Le Boulevard by Baudelaire himself) attracted much negative reaction from guardians of propriety apparently scandalised by depictions of Social Evil and moral degradation. A similar outcry greeted the painting ‘On The Thames’ (1876) by society painter James Tissot showing a (presumably) promiscuous threesome lounging in a boat depicted with exact realism but which was condemned as a scene of questionable virtue when first exhibited. One more recent critic noted, however, that Tissot had managed to penetrate beyond the fashions of his era and seduce the viewer with the ‘ambivalence of modernity’. The same might also be said of Whistler’s images of Docklands life.

The seeds of this cultural shift in values have always been part of the Modern project. They have been present from the earliest days of the Proto-Modern into the Nineteenth Century. This was period that saw alarming new descriptions of the human condition – derived not only from Darwin, but also from Marx, Nietzsche, Freud and sociologists such as Durkheim and Weber or, even earlier, from Hutton’s Theory of The Earth – exert a drastic influence on the socio-cultural climate. These new doctrines heralded a new culture, a culture ‘with no visible means of support’, no foundations and no centre; a culture that rejects the hegemony of any particular perspective, a culture without a ‘moral compass’. According to Durkheim, in a statement that sounds very similar to principles developed by Freud, ‘social life should be explained not by the conceptions of those who participate in it, but by profound causes which escape consciousness…’

This is the nightmare of the anti-modernists, of all those socio-political elements who, after the seismic shock of the proclamation of the Goddess of Reason (1793), metamorphosed from advocates of the counter-Reformation into counter-revolutionaries. Opponents would stigmatise the counter-revolution as anti-progressive and reactionary, but the anti-modernists – as defenders of the old order and the strong state, as opponents of mob rule and the machine age, as promoters of monarchic restoration, as ‘ultras’ or theocrates – would take up their position on the moral high ground. This wave of anti-modernism was represented in Victorian England by cultural commentators, those revered ‘sages’ or ‘prophets’, such as Thomas Carlyle and Matthew Arnold, who expended considerable effort trying to reconcile the horrors of the machine age with traditional moral precepts of the good and the beautiful and with notions of the just society.

In 1829 Pope Leo XII had forbidden vaccination against small pox; by 1864 the Vatican had consolidated its view on Modernism, and, in the Encyclical Quanta Cura (‘The Syllabus of Errors’), denounce all those features of the modern world to which it was implacably opposed. These included Socialism, Pantheism, Rationalism, Natural Ethics, Modern Liberalism and other matters of concern or threat to the hierarchy. The pontiff assured the faithful that he would never ‘reconcile himself to, and agree with, progress, liberalism and modern civilisation.’ By 1910, two years after Adolf Loos, one of the pioneers of Pure Architecture, had, in a semi-satirical article, condemned all ornamentation as crime, Pope Pius X required all new priests to take an oath against Modernism, the Sacrorum Antistitum. This oath remained in place until 1967 and still defines the Anti-Modernist worldview of the priesthood even today.

Alongside this ‘official’ Anti-Modernism flourished the occult underground. This was a subculture that overlapped both ‘the fantastic’ and artistic bohemia. From Swedenborg (via Blake) to Theosophy (via Mondrian), occultism influenced the course of Modern Art in a subterranean way. The nineteenth century Occult Revival started in the Year of Revolutions (1848) with the Spiritualist ‘rappings’ at Hydesville in the USA. Subsequently this neo-spiritual, occult tendency manifest a number of developmental peaks, from the writings of Eliphas Levi in the late 1850s to the founding of the SPR (Society for Psychical Research) in 1882 and the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn (1888). In France the Rose-Croix Kabbalstique (1888) of Guaita and Peledan was founded at the same time. Occult ideas such as universal analogy, the hidden geometry of reality, the meaning of symbols, initiation, the astral plane, the Hermetic androgyny and the mediumistic dictation of spirit writing, permeated the avant-garde on various levels, providing an impetus for the development of Abstract Painting (Hilma af Klint) and, via Strindberg, artistic techniques of ‘automatism’.

If the revival of Hermetic philosophies and magical societies is interpreted as ‘flight from reason’ or a rejection of contemporary life, then the Occult Revival may be viewed as anti-modernist backlash tendency (as in the case of W. B. Yeats). However many occultists (following the example of Levi) sought to reconcile Science and Religion and, by developing heretical strands of unorthodox thought, occupied an intermediate position between establishment anti-modernist reaction and radical, anarchic, pro-modernist trends (as in the case of Rimbaud). In the nineteen twenties the Surrealists sought to detach various aspects of occult thinking from traditional interpretations and quasi-mystical accretions in the pursuit of a revolutionary aesthetic of chance, automatism, mad love and ‘the marvellous’ as predicted by the progenitor of poetic urban modernism: The life of our city is rich in poetic and marvellous subjects. We are enveloped and steeped as though in an atmosphere of the marvellous; but we do not notice it… - Baudelaire
 
Select Bibliography

Barthes, Roland, Writing Degree Zero, Hill and Wang, 2012
Barzun, Jacques, Classic, Romantic and Modern, University of Chicago, 1961
Baudelaire, Charles, The Complete Verse, Anvil Press, 1986
Baudelaire, Charles, The Painter of Modern Life and Other Essays. Phaidon Press, 2006
Benjamin, Walter, The Work Of Art in The Age of Mechanical Reproduction (1936), in Blackwell, 1993
Breton, Andre, Manifestos of Surrealism, University of Michigan, 2007
Conrad, Joseph, The Secret Agent, Oxford University Press, 2004
Dostoyevsky, Fyodor, Notes from Underground, Penguin Books, 2009
Harrison, Charles/Wood, Paul, Art in Theory 1900-1999, Blackwell, 1993
Koval, Anne, Whistler in His Time, Tate Gallery, 1994
Lasch, Christopher, The Culture of Narcissism: American Life in an Age of Diminishing Expectations, Abacus, 1980
Sassen, Saskia, A Sociology of Globalization, W. W. Norton, 2007
Shattuck, Roger, The Banquet Years The Origins of The Avant Garde in France 1885 to WW1, Random House 1968

Illus: Waveform Fantasy, 2001 

 

Enter The Heart

 

Enter the heart – but you did – a varied, more confused display.

No formal charges of air piracy can be made – no formal charge.

RANDOM 1 RANDOM 2 RANDOM 3 CAUTION ENTER THE HEART

Boys on motorbikes don helmets.

North north-west of the saltworks – caution.

Caution – going, going, gone – can’t see far.

Darkness visible. Motormen blame snow. Waste threatens.

Representations deny all possibilities – remember.

RANDOM 1 RANDOM 2 RANDOM 3

Made for guidance. Encourage suffering masses.

Unconscious censor job what we need interrupt weather reports – hollow tactics – alarm:

DEAD BOY LEFT OF FRAME

Psychoblock 4.

Ten minutes search – increase volume.

INCREASE VOLUME INCREASE VOLUME

No cold rush of air, no human activity. Report back – report back.

RANDOM 1 RANDOM 2 RANDOM 3

No. Duties divided – dead boy left of frame – what.

Possibly within days.

Circular opening –enter the heart exit from the brain.

No human activity – mother superior nightmare easy listening synthesis.

Representations at Geneva ignore all other possibilities trauma vocabulary visionary justice perhaps there will be memoirs perhaps there are visionary

RANDOM RANDOM RANDOM

don helmets don helmets left of frame – DEAD BOY – deny deny deny.

Unconscious censor job planning a move two cars crash head on dangerously low nurses report unhelpful suggestions transglobal expeditions north north west what – enter the heart exit the brain.

Illus: Psycho Block III, 2001

 

Hyperdrive Experience

Pop-up productions

Metropolis Paradise

High speed, high level transit systems

Man on high wire mimics the human condition

Flick on the lights

Reduce radar signature

Are we ready?

London calling from outer space.

Turn on the telly for a drama with a baying mob of rioters

And a bunch of shouty Northern slags ‘avin’ a right go’

At the Sloppy South where everything is cushy not like ‘ere

And all that stuff

Looking for serenity?

Phone ‘em up ask: what’s the story?

Are we ready?

Light up the radar

This is Metropolis Paradise where the fun never stops

You’ve seen it on the telly

Like this bimbo presents the weather

And – I couldn’t take my eyes off you,

You high level twister

You flower of my youth,

You sassy starlet.

You’re a hyperdrive experience,

You’re a sign of the times,

In this time of signs,

In this electronic paradise.

illus: Hyperdrive Experience, 2005

Space Opera An Interview With A C Evans

Space Opera, eight linked poems employing Science Fiction imagery, contains willed ironies reflective of the element of ambiguity so inherent to the works of the writer concerned, ‘hermetic artist’ A. C. Evans.

Neogaea – New Earth – as a term summons up hopeful visions by association, while Space Opera calls upon the reader to expect epic, even glorious, space adventure. Yet, in fact, the sections cumulatively ‘tell a story’, insofar as clear and sequential narrative can be drawn from the image data projected by these pieces (even the use of the word ‘poem’ is rendered ambiguous by Evans’ own preference for the term ‘texts’) not of hope or wonder but of flawed personnel with fractured motivation bedeviled by fragmented data and encountering, finally, only failure of ‘a great attempt’.

This ‘great attempt’ – to explore the massive outer space planet Neogaea and its alien-inhabited satellite Neon, where strange non-human ‘cathedrals’ dominate a bizarre landscape (which is told in the Space Opera itself, and also affects a prior but unrelated Evans piece, ‘Contact Zero’), relates to many illustrations, and continues as an ‘undertow’ or concealed reference point in some of his more recent work – should have been a notable landmark in the development of speculative poetry in Britain.

That this was not so is a function, I suspect, partly of the difficulty of the work, a density of form, and demands on reader concentration more familiar in the ‘cutting edge’ areas of American speculative poetry of the time. It is also, perhaps, a result of the actual place of publication. The sequence appeared not in a genre outlet (though, as an aside, attempts by other writers at experimental work in UK genre outlets at about the same time also met little response), but in a more ‘mainstream’ group of publications, namely issues of Rupert Loydell’s little magazine Stride and related booklets from the same editor’s press: Stride Publications.

As the passage of time gives the perspective to appreciate more easily the importance of the achievement represented by Space Opera, and as a growing number of genre readers develop a capacity to attempt the appreciation of work which combines SF iconography with experiments in communicative form, therefore there is a value in returning to the sequence.

In an interview with Stride’s editor in Spring 1985, published in Stride 20, A. C. Evans gave considerable insight into his sources, inspirations, and methodology; but this interview had concentrated heavily on his artwork, rather than his poetry, and at no point in time overtly touched on the use of Science Fiction or speculative themes and imagery. I felt an interview directed to clarifying these areas would be of value, particularly in terms of contexting the powerful Space Opera sequence.

I began by asking about the use by the writer of the term ‘texts’ for this and other written work.

A. C. Evans: I use the term to distance myself from traditional verse writing. I actually prefer the phrase ‘poems and/or texts’ – so referring to the material as ‘prose-poems’ or just ‘poems’ is not a problem at all.

A related group of questions followed, aiming to elicit the roots of Evans’ use of Science Fiction material, and its meaning to his writing.

Steve Sneyd: How do you see your work in relation to Speculative poetry as a whole – do you see a connection? Are you influenced by others, and if so, who?

A.C. Evans: Regrettably, I am not in touch with Speculative, or Science Fiction, poetry in the UK (although I guess I should be!), so I can’t identify any influences in this context. My only formal connection with the Speculative scene was the appearance of a couple of drawings in the American magazine Velocities (1983), which is definitely “a magazine of speculative poetry”. Influences do surface of course, but they are external to current small press SF. Quite a complex area this, but if asked I would cite J. G. Ballard and Olaf Stapledon (crucial). American influences would be William Burroughs (inescapable) and H.P. Lovecraft, and possibly Harlan Ellison. But the SF influence generally is non-specific, culled from mass media SF and SF/Fantasy art, etc. etc.

Are you someone who has come to these forms/topics via an interest in Science Fiction?

Science Fiction has always been part of the cultural landscape (for me), so SF topics were a natural element in the ‘symbolic repertoire’. I have no real intention of being an SF writer – SF is just a component of the mass media environment we inhabit. I’m using SF as raw material, in fact, so I’m not really working from within the genre – this accentuates the alienation-distancing effect I hope to project. The details of the SF scenario I use probably derive from the mass media SF I mentioned: Dr. Who, Star Trek, or 1960s TV plays such as Collin Kapp’s ‘Lambda 1’; also the films of Andrei Tarkovsky – Solaris and Stalker, and the use of SF in David Bowie’s music (‘Space Oddity’, Ziggy Stardust, Aladdin Sane and Diamond Dogs) which gave a new slant to things circa 1972.

The use I make of SF material? I use the idea of endless voyages through multi-dimensional space(s) as some kind of metaphor for an underlying theme of voidness (that is, ideas of outer limits, alienation, non-communication, and angst). SF-type ideas fit in with this – or seem to. After all, where are the (scientific) outer limits? High Energy Physics and Cosmology enter in – so some of this comes out like SF, but actually derived from Cosmology – e.g. Black Hole Singularities. This endless voyage thing is archetypal: look at Jung and Coleridge.

It also overlaps with a ‘symbolic repertoire’ of ‘occult themes’, such as the astral plane. I should also note a continuity with other more traditional sources, particularly Apocalyptic/Millenarian visionary materials – hence angels and cathedrals all mixed up with Starfleet Command in Space Opera.

Do you see yourself as part of the SF/Speculative poetry world?

As I said, I’m not ‘in touch’ enough to be part of the Speculative scene – but having said that, I’m not against being classified in this way.

Your very experimental approach is almost unique in this century, certainly within this area of genre poetry in the 80s. What reaction have you found from editors to this kind of material?

I have only worked with a small number of editors who’ve been very supportive – particularly the editors of Stride and Memes. My feeling is that the material we are discussing runs counter to the anecdotal/humanistic mould of most small press straight ‘poetry-verse’, so one regards blank reactions as understandable, given the overtly hermetic and inaccessible style of the pieces themselves. Getting down to the cutting edge inevitably means getting into an area where rational communication starts to break down, and I expect editors not to relate to this sort of thing – although I haven’t submitted poems to pure SF editors, ever, so have no idea how they would react.

Was the Space Opera sequence conceived as a whole?

Yes, although ‘Neogaea’ (Space Opera 5) was actually written first, in 1984. The other parts were derived from it some months later. ‘Space Opera (The First Report)’ was published in Stride 21. I think ‘Gaze Of The Medusa’ was especially written for The Serendipity Caper anthology, as a sort of introduction to the sequence.

Does any other work relate to the sequence?

It was linked to ‘Contact Zero’, which also appeared in The Serendipity Caper, and initially in Stride 19. The Space Opera texts also stimulated a number of drawings such as ‘Centre Of Gravity’ from 1984; and ‘Life On Neogaea’, ‘Angel With Raiding Party’, ‘Styx Insect’, ‘The NeoNova’, ‘Destination Tomorrow’, and others, from 1985.

Have you written other Science Fiction texts?

There are SF-type poems in both of my Stride booklets (Exosphere and Decaying Orbits) – such as ‘Metacropolis’ – which are not part of the Neogaea complex.

Finally, could you explain what you were trying to achieve with the Space Opera sequence, the extent to which you think you achieved your aims, and, perhaps, a few words on how it – the sequence – relates to your body of work as a whole?

It’s easier to answer the last part of the question first. Space Opera fits into a range of discursive prose texts subverted by surreal and aleatoric elements. The Xantras (1992) is a more recent example. It was an attempt to see how ‘far out’ (or in) you can get without being too abstract (I don’t really believe in pure abstraction) or too conceptual. Also, as we’ve said, the sequence relates to graphics like Contact Zero (not in this volume) and a number of line drawings (some of which are in this volume): I like to think there’s a non-rational continuum in my work in all media – unexpected links connecting things in half-hidden patterns. pathways to the outer limits.

I tried to achieve a fusion of ‘genre’ thematics with an ‘experimental’ prose style in order to, as it were, get the genre aspects into another gear - it was a clash of disparate elements – a populist space opera scenario filtered through a linguistic style derived from a more refined ‘arty’ ethos. But technical, aesthetic considerations are only part of the equation. There’s an entertainment factor as well. So if the reader finds the sequence dull then I’ve failed in my objective of translating the reader into another sphere. I wouldn’t want to change or revise any of the sequence – so I guess I feel I achieved my aims. Only the readers can say if Space Opera works for them.

(c) Steve Sneyd, 1995

Several Sonnets

Stephane Mallarme

Several Sonnets 1883-1887

I

When the shadow menaces with its fatal law
A particular old Dream, desire and evil of my vertebrae,
Afflicted at dying beneath funereal ceilings
It folds within me its indubitable wing.

Luxury, o hall of ebony where, to seduce a king
Ceremonial garlands writhe in death,
You are nothing but mendacious hubris uttered by shadows
In the eyes of a hermit dazzled by his faith.

Yes, I know that in the distances of this night, The Earth
Emits a giant flare extraordinary mystery
Beneath the hideous centuries that darken it the less.

Space like unto itself whether it expands or contracts
Unfurls in this boredom vile fires for witnesses
That a festive star has illuminated its genius

II

The virgin, the everlasting and beautiful today
Will it shatter for us with a drunken wing beat
The hard, forgotten lake haunted beneath frost
By the transparent glacier of flights not taken!

A swan of previous times recalls it is he who
Magnificent but hopeless surrenders himself
For not having sung the place of living
When sterile winter’s ennui gleamed.

All his neck will shake off that white agony
By space inflicted on the bird which negates,
But not the horror of plumage ensnared on the ground.

Phantom assigned here by his pure light,
He is paralysed in a cold dream of disdain
Assumed in useless exile The Swan.

III

Victoriously fled the beautiful suicide
Firebrand of glory, spume of blood, gold, storm!
Oh laugh if down there a purple spreads
To cover royally my absent tomb.

What! Of this flare not even a gleam
Remains, it is midnight, in the shadow celebrating us
Except that a head’s presumptive treasure
Tumbles its nonchalant caress without a torch

Yours as always the delight! Yours
Yes alone retaining from dissolved skies
A residue of puerile triumph rimmed

With light as you lay it on the cushions
Like the war-helmet of a girl-empress
From which to depict you cascade roses.

IV

Raised high her pure nails dedicate their onyx
Anguish, this midnight upholds her lampadophore
And many vesperal dreams burned by the Pheonix
Are Never gathered in any cinerary amphora

On the tables, in the empty salon: nul ptyx
Abolished trinket of sonorous emptyness
(For The Master has gone gathering tears in The Styx
With this solitary object that bestows honour on The Void)

But near a vacant north window, a gold
Expires complementing perhaps the décor
Of unicorns kicking fire towards a nixie,

She, defunct, naked in the mirror, while
In the abyss bordered by the frame, are fixed
So soon, the scintillations of The Seven Stars.

translated by AC 1996-1999

Sonnet IV, the first truly hermetic poem by Stephane Mallarme,  is also known as the 'Sonnet en X' (first version 1866)

Find out more here

Illustration: Dream Space, 2001

Only To Slowly Fade

The Threepenny Opera was an ‘occasional’ work claiming an anti-establishment leftist agenda that, to tell the truth, never convinced anybody at the time – on the other hand it has been correctly observed that the implications of its form have not been fully digested, even today. The cynical tone of the songs and the cavalier disregard for highbrow/lowbrow distinctions permeating the work as a whole opened up a new approach to the theatre that proved problematic for subsequent generations. Few are prepared to admit that, in 1928 at the Theatre am Schiffbauerdamm, ‘serious’ art music and opera died an inglorious death. Artistic forms and modalities have a mortal inner life, they evolve through time – they follow a hyperbolic evolutionary curve, reaching a peak of development, only to slowly fade as they are superseded by other diversions. The political spasms of the twentieth century, together with the rise of the mass media, still obscure the passing of nineteenth century aesthetic categories, including the avant-garde and the seriously experimental – the radicalism of the Second Vienna School notwithstanding.
The Munich Opera House was destroyed in October 1943, prompting Richard Strauss to draft several bars of music ‘in mourning’. Listening to the final work, Metamorphosen, one senses not just the horror of those ‘dark days’ but also, in its tenuous echoes of Tristan and ‘Eroica’, an act of mourning for the end of an entire phase of European musical sensibility.

Published in The Supplement Issue 26 Jan 2006

Illustration: Montage II Only To Slowly Fade, 2006

Take Another Look

Remember that any art that is not therapy or entertainment is propaganda.

Illustration: The Experts Tested Our Pulsar, 2005

When The Lights Go Out

Implicit in the idea of ‘archetypes’ is the possibility of ambivalence, the bipolarity of light and dark – also, there is the possibility of mortality, for archetypal influences can wax and wane or ebb and flow, like tidal forces, like everything in nature. If the world is an imperfect place, then the archetypes are correspondingly imperfect (natural): it is unrealistic to assume, like Plato, when he devised his scheme of ‘ideas’, that the archetypal world is a transcendent sphere of ultimate, supreme perfection. It is necessary to criticise this Platonic delusion, crucial to expose this mystique of ‘perfection’ and purity. But, even in a secular society, there will be a reluctance to deconstruct any proposition of this kind because humanity is so desperate to escape the curse of endurance. Any straw in the wind, any ‘insight’ confirming the universe we know as ‘fallen’, or a pale reflection of a better, happier place beyond suffering and degeneration, becomes more precious than holy writ and believed even more tenaciously.
The shadows on the wall of our cosy, little cave are our own ‘ideas’ – shallow and superficial intellectual speculations, ideological snares and distractions, nothing more – we are the sole occupants. When the cave is blocked by an avalanche, what then? What happens when the lights go out?

Published in Monomyth Supplement Issue 20 2005

Illustration: Evil Shadows, 2001

Phantoms Dissolving in Time

Notes For A Preface to Colour Of Dust


1. NOTES ON EARLY INFLUENCES 1966-1969

Where to begin...?
A starting point may be: Aestheticism...
Its intensity of experience, its ‘hard gem-like flame’...
Decadence and Style - the independence of the word (Havelock Ellis and Paul Bourget), ‘self-consciousness, a restless curiosity in research, an over-subtilizing refinement upon refinement...’ (Arthur Symons). The short lyric – ‘I hold that a long poem does not exist’ (Edgar Allan Poe, The Poetic Principle): Poe’s aestheticism as the origin of minimalism in poetry.
Nature – ‘To say to a painter that Nature may be taken as she is, is to say to the player that he may sit on the piano.’ (Whistler’s Ten O’clock).
Ideas of the fin-de-siecle – modernity, transience, impressionism, The Tragic Generation:
Davidson, Johnson, Dowson, Beardsley, Enoch Somas, Oscar Wilde, Ronald Firbank…
The Occult – W. B. Yeats & The Golden Dawn...The Master Therion...
Precursors – Blake, Coleridge, De Quincey, Swinburne... Japonisme... France... ‘If I spend my future life reading Baudelaire in a cafe I shall be leading a more natural life than if take to hedger’s work or plant cacao in the mud swamps’ (Oscar Wilde, 1897).

...from Symbolism to Surrealism...
The Hermetic sonnets of Gerard de Nerval (‘El Desdichado’) and the fusion of dream and waking (Aurelia).
The great innovators: Baudelaire and Mallarme....
Baudelairian themes: correspondences (occultism), le neant vaste, the voracious irony, the city, l’ennui, the whip of pleasure, The Heroism of Modern Life, the Cytherean gibbet, dandyism, cosmic aestheticism, the obscure and the uncertain... ‘I am enthroned in the azure like a sphinx beyond all understanding...’ ('La Beaute'). Baudelaire’s visionary landscapes prefigure Max Ernst and Yves Tanguy... Baudelaire and ‘absolute incompatibility’ (Charles du Bos).
Poetry without God... ‘after I found nothingness I found beauty...’ (Mallarme). The hermetic mysteries of Herodiade, Igitur, 'Prose Pour Des Esseintes' and The Sonnet on X. 'Un Coup de Des' and the radical displacement of The Word. The demon of analogy.
J-K Huysmans – Naturalism – Decadence – Occultism – Catholicism... a fate worse than death.
Rimbaud and Lautreamont – the poetry of revolt and dissociation, the Alchemy of the Word.
Laforgue and Jarry – towards the Absurd (Pataphysics), Dada and Pop.
Then, Surrealism...
Surrealist ideas: the poetic image, l’amour fou, intuition as gnosis, objective chance, automatism, the occult under the poetic angle, urban psycho-geography (Aragon), Psychoanalysis, black humour, picto-poetry, inspiration to order (collage, frottage), convulsive beauty, convulsive identity (Ernst), the crisis of the object, Open Realism, the mythology of the modern. But can there still be art after Duchamp’s Fountain?

1966: Still at School
We were ‘into’ all of this around 1966, and I was still at CTHS (Chelmsford Technical High School). So was this the Sixties...? Well, sort of... I remember the big Beardsley exhibition at the V&A (May l966), the death of Andre Breton... seeing Der Golem at the NFT’s Romantic Agony season… visiting The Hellfire Caves, The Indica Gallery, Better Books basement, and reading impenetrable articles on AutoDestructivism in Art and Artists or Studio International. After school we sat in Snow’s Coffee Bar opposite the library or the Wimpy Bar near the station… we listened to The Doors and The Beach Boys... we liked Osiris Visions Posters, silver fashion (the Rabanne metal dress), Op Art carpets, Biba retro style, Allen Jones fetish furniture, Bridget Riley’s monochromes… we thought The Beatles were rubbish (I still do)... one of my mates was into John Mayall. In 1967 I read Frank Harris’ Oscar Wilde on a family holiday to Grange-Over-Sands, Cumbria. In October 1968 there was another big exhibition at the V&A, The Mackintosh Centenary Exhibition. Then there was Les Salons de la Rose-Croix at the Piccadilly Gallery. I saw the Six Days War on TV.
I was doing lots of drawings and paintings but not much writing. By 1969 I was doing collages because we were all Surrealists – despite the fact that Jean Schuster had just officially disbanded the movement on February 8th of that year (we didn’t know that).
Then I was gobsmacked by Nova Express – do you have to be American to write like this?

1970: First Writings
In 1970, I was given my first typewriter, an Olivetti Olympia Portable from Low’s Business Machines... and that was it! My first writings were moody, decadent, gothic prose poems. Poe-esque short stories and semi-surreal autobiography, inspired in part by Boris Vian. I got bogged down in a sprawling horror novel called Debris – not all these early texts have survived and most are unprintable. What was I reading? Thomas Pynchon, Angela Carter, J. G. Ballard, Jorge Luis Borges, Jean Genet and Cohn Wilson’s The Outsider. Apart from Boroughs and the Beats (we all read Ginsberg’s 'Howl') the other big influence was Artaud. Through Artaud I discovered the poetry of pain and abandoned ‘literature’ for what I called ‘the sub-textual’ – the border-world between writing and graphic sigils: hieroglyphs, ideograms, calligraphic automata, nonsense poetry (via Carroll, Dada and Kurt Schwitters), glossolalia, fictional languages... the deconstruction of discourse, the open fields of strophic fragmentation, nameless things and thingless names.

Marginalia, 1973
As I remember, those first ‘pure’ poetic texts (grouped here under the title Marginalia) were noted down on a train one evening as I was commuting from Brentford, where I worked, to Witham where I still lived. Undoubtedly ‘Refracted’ and ‘Express Train Interior’ were ‘surrealizations’ of immediate experience – I still think of that girl with the photocopy face. I liked these pieces because, somehow, they seemed transparent. They were, to my mind, ‘un-literary’. What they were not was more important than what they were... I wanted to avoid emotional profundities – they weren’t realistic hut they weren’t abstract either. I wanted something stripped bare, stripped down; words on a page like slivers of glass...
There had been, I think, I minor breakthrough. The catalyst had been translation.
For some reason I had started translating a few poems by Max Ernst taken from his 1970 collection Ecritures. Sept Microbes (1953), Cinq Poemes (1958) and Cap Capricorne (1965). Ernst was a painter-poet like Blake and Hans Arp. His poetry was a continuum with his paintings and graphics. Titles of paintings became titles of poems and vice-versa. There was a Carrollian fantasy, a sense of the absurd and a feeling of vast spaces in his short, enigmatic, texts. At the same time I also translated the lyrics of Messiaen’s song-cycle Harawi (1945) which were similarly erotic, hieratic, mythic, cosmic and full of strange, alien wordforms: Kahipapas, mahipapas/pia pia pia doundou tchil. I immersed myself in the similarities I detected between, for example, the invented language Artaud used in his later texts, and the quasi-Quechua onomatopoeic sound-poetry of Harawi; or, between the visual and aural correspondences in Messiaen’s music and Ernst’s imagery (birds, crystalline textures, monumental ‘blocks’ of sound-colour)… I found analogies between the decalcomania paintings of Leonor Fini, the encrustations of Gaudi’s Sagrada Familia and the Turangalila-Symphonie.
I typed up all these poems and translations on the Olympia Portable, holed-up in my bedroom away from the summer sun, eyes itching with hay-fever, the downstairs filled with the heavy scent of bearded irises. My father, a keen gardener, loved these irises and grew them in large numbers. I developed a fascination for their ornate, fleshy forms and ‘pubic’ beards. ‘Silence: a cascade of irises/ an obdurate totem.’ (‘Silence’, 1975).

2. LOOKING AT COLOUR OF DUST

Glancing through Colour of Dust I can see various contrasts or tensions. At the level of theme
and content a tension between fantasy and realism, or the fantastic and the naturalistic. On the plane of language (poetic diction) there is a complementary tension between the hieratic and the vernacular. On the level of strophic form there is a contrast between open-field ‘scatter’ and dense compacted stanzas.
The fantastic mode includes: (1) visionary-apocalyptic pieces (‘A Demon Speaks’, ‘Life of Glass’, ‘Phobos’, ‘The Shadow Guide’, ‘The Borderlands of the World’, ‘The Crystal Snake Book’); (2) cosmological visions (The Xantras, ‘Black Hole Binary’, ‘Nil Revolution’, ‘Nebula’, ‘Externity’, ‘AL the Core of the Sun’); (3) genre pieces like the Horror Poems of The Black Mask, ‘Vampfires’ ahd ‘Cyclonic Patterns’ or Science Fiction Poems (‘Crashdive’, ‘Metacropolis’, ‘Freezing Fog’); (4) occult poems which appropriate esoteric ideas and symbols: ‘Void Mysterium’ (mystery religions), ‘Candlemas’ and ‘Gargoyle Emanations’ (ritual magic), ‘Dawn Chorus’ and ‘Black Moon Gateway’ (alchemy); ‘Chronique Scandaleuse’ and ‘Virgin Pages’ (re-incarnation/transmigration); (5) others, like manna, ‘Urspasm’, ‘Beyond the White Wall’ and ‘The Vision of Morgan Le Pay’ seek inspiration from ancient myths, legends and The Books of the Dead.
In sharp contrast to these visions and fantasies there is a large group of ‘realist’ poems -essays in urban naturalism and subjective impressionism, sometimes incorporating fragments of overheard conversations (‘They found something wrong with my brain patterns, Jack” – ‘Cascade VI’), often using a style of slangy, vernacular, street jargon: ‘No Drama’, ‘Human Wallpaper’, ‘Some Charisma’, ‘Hovering Stress’, Neon Aeon, ‘Stranger Here Myself’ and ‘Stunning Sunbirds’ – dead broken fool stroll on (‘Dodgy Electrics’). Some realist poems adopt a more clinical Camera Eye, documentary approach, for instance: ‘Time Slips’, ‘Somewhere in England’, ‘Edge City’, ‘Could be Anywhere’, ‘Vignette’, ‘Denim Yoof Type’ and ‘Artschool Blonde Type’. ‘Viewed Through Crystal’ refers to the multifaceted insect eye denoting a dispassionate interest in fleeting grotesque moments: scruffy youth pukes up a cod burger (‘Viewed Through Crystal II’).
Other modes of content: there are a few inter-media pieces, poems which relate directly to collages and drawings. This group would include ‘The Anti-Virgin’, ‘Silence’, ‘Black Light’ and ‘Dawn Chorus’.
There are some poems dedicated to poetic and artistic heroes such as Mallarme (‘Onyx Master’), Artaud (‘Cosmetic Surgery’), William Burroughs (‘The Man You’ve Been Waiting For’), Max Ernst (‘Enchanter’) Leonor Fini (‘Crystal Express’) and Andre Breton (‘Eyes’). Finally, there is a large group of personal-introspective-existential poems devoted to a corrosive nihilism: ‘What Sort of Game’, ‘Edited Skylights’, ‘Dirt Aria’, ‘No Date’, ‘The White Earth’, ‘Let There be Night’, ‘Melt’, ‘Effluent Landscape’, ‘More and More’, ‘There Was No Horizon’, ‘Thinking Of, ‘Concrete Cancer’, ‘Walking Wounded’...as Baudelaire said, ‘this life is a hospital...’. Let’s drown it in acid.

NOTES ON FORM

A multi-dimensional metamorphosis – like the anomalous formations extruded from the surface of Solaris. Basic oscillations between solidity (the prose-poems) and insubstantiality (condensed ‘minimalist’ strophes); between The Open and The Closed, between structure and de-construction, between the linear and the non-linear, between predetermination and chance.
The density of the prose-poems (The Xantras, Neon Aeon, ‘Stranger Here Myself, ‘Then Nowhere’, ‘The Vision of Morgan Le Fay’) edges towards conventional narrative. But non-linear techniques cut across narrative: collage, montage, cut-up. De-stabilize the expected, derail convention, open-up the supernatural, many-faceted, plurality of the convulsive self. Identity will be convulsive (Max Ernst). All anachronisms welcome.
The spectrum of the Open-Closed. At one pole open-field, alloeostrophic, scatter poems annexing negative space (‘Only Kiss’, ‘Still Far Figure’, ‘Transit and Culmination’, ‘Scatter Zone’, ‘The Face of Fear’, ‘Splintered Avatar’ and others). At the antithetical pole, condensed, minimalist quantum poems like ‘Imagine’, ‘Askance’, ‘Shade’, ‘Perhaps Ravens’, ‘Withdraw Into Silence’ and ‘Impossible Games’.
So far The Xanths is a one-off, a conceptualist conundrum – it has to do with the magic number seven.

CUT-UP POEMS

The ‘time’ poems are Cut-Ups, using found phrases and the now traditional techniques of
‘inspiration to order’: ‘The Entranceway of Unrecognised Time’, ‘The Sickness of Time’, ‘Filigree Paintings Explode’, ‘The System’. All linked to the picto-poem ‘Contact Zero’ (see The Serendipity Caper). Enter The Colourless Peruvian Bishop and The Flesh Eating Beasts. Some poems are like old photographs: pristine monochrome images of childhood memories cut-up and folded-in - strange origami shapes of Juliet Greco in The Elusive Rose Rouge (‘Subtitled for the Incredulous’), distant sound of Doris Day singing ‘Move Over Darling’, catatonic couples slow-dancing to ‘Strangers in the Night’… Other Cut-Ups include ‘Issue 63’, ‘Chapter 6 (Autobiography)’ and (of course) ‘The Man (You’ve Been Waiting For)’. ‘Chapter 6’ might be autobiographical, then again it might not –eventually ‘inspiration to order’ becomes internalized – psycho-collage, psycho-frottage, psycho-cut-up...t hose ‘caffeine-driven psycho-montages’ (‘Now You See It Now You Don’t).

CONVULSIVE IDENTITY

The poem ‘Desecration’ is a judicious warning -just because a text includes personal pronouns does not mean that it is autobiographical. There are overt autobiographical elements in Colour of Dust (‘The Talisman’, ‘The Bloody Image’, for example). But these rare instances and (for the most part clearly signaled). Some poems read rather like self-portraits, for instance, ‘Nil Revolution’, ‘The Invariant Speed of Light’, ‘Fearful Other’, ‘Mirror Picture’ (a photograph of ‘me’ taking a photo of ‘you’, or is it ‘me’?), ‘Moi’, ‘Like the Dark Side of the Moon’, ‘Ashen Light’ and others. Am I The Gryllus’? Am I The Most Beautiful Monster? At this point, poetry, with a cruel spotlight, heightens the problem of identity. Personas: Self images not images of The Self. I is ‘another’ declared Rimbaud. Perhaps because poetry is alchemy, an art of transmutation, the ‘I’ evolves continually - here today, gone tomorrow, now you see it, now you don’t. In a draft epilogue Baudelaire wrote ‘From all things I have extracted the quintessence. The filth you gave me I have turned to gold.’ Poetry changes the ‘base’ material, the prima materia of The Art. And the base matter is the poet him-her-self (or selves).
Writing about Max Ernst’s concept of Convulsive Identity, Pere Gimferrer said ‘like external reality, we ourselves are dissociated and disintegrated: we are the space at an intersection, a confrontation.’ This is the space of Convulsive Identity. But perhaps this is the ‘space’ of the mutating self, the diverse, multifaceted intersections of the secret, evolving, ‘me and/or you,’ present at every simultaneous here-and/or-now of the immediate, infinite, multiverse of the conscious-unconscious, indeterminate subject-object.
So the author of Colour of Dust is/was/will be Inanna, Morgana, Old Scarfe, Anthea
Heartnul, Nykticorax the Demiurge, The Contortionist, Saint Anthony, Veronica Lurk, The
Scolopendra, Xezbeth, Astrid Hainault The Pet City Squeegee Menace, the ghost of Gerard de
Nerval, The Raven, The Bride, The Hanged Man, and the numerous quasi-autonomous ‘I’ figures and
sub-personalities scattered throughout these pages, slipping through negative space – but, then again –perhaps he-she-it is just The Camera Eye, observing, with cold, inhuman, insect, detachment, a kaleidoscopic spectacle of transient, diverting phenomena – images, feelings, moods, ideas –

trajectories of transformation, phantoms dissolving in time.

Illustration: The Mutant Spectre, 2001