Metropolitain

 

- il y a des princesses, et, ci tu n'es pas trop accable, l'etude des astres, - le ciel.

- there are princesses, and if you're not too freaked out, the study of the stars - the sky.

- Arthur Rimbaud Metropolitain:  Les Illuminations (1886)

illus: Metropolitain, 2002

The Argotist Online Interview

A. C. Evans was born in Hampton Court in 1949, and lived in South London until 1963 when he moved to Essex and co-founded the semi-legendary Neo-Surrealist Convulsionist Group in 1966. Moving back to London in 1973, he currently lives in Mortlake, near Richmond. Working in the tradition of the bizarre and the grotesque, he also considers himself a Realist. Influenced by everything on the dark-side, he is also inspired by the iconoclasm of Dada, revolutionary Surrealism and the immediacy of Pop. He regards all these as points of departure, none as a destination – we live in a post avant-garde world.

His individual author collections include The Xantras (Trombone Press), Chimaera Obscura (Phlebas Press), Dream Vortex (Tabor Press), Colour Of Dust. Poems And/Or Texts 1973-1997 (Stride), This Sepulchre (Springbeach Press) and Fractured Muse (Atlantean Publications). The poetry sequence ‘Space Opera’ was made into a digital film and shown at the onedotzero3 Festival at the ICA in 1999.

He considers creativity to be the indirect effect of irrational drives and desires; an infinite quest for self-discovery and, inevitably, an indictment of both established dogma and fashionable orthodoxy. In his extremist, author-centred, poetry and graphics he uses ambiguity, juxtaposition, irony and objective chance to question assumptions about convention, identity and reality – black humour and the absurd are his constant preoccupations.

 

JeffreySide has had poetry published in various magazines such as Poetry Salzburg Review, and on poetry web sites such as Underground Window, A Little Poetry, Poethia, Nthposition, Eratio, Pirene’s Fountain, Fieralingue, Moria, Ancient Heart, Blazevox, Lily, Big Bridge, Jacket, Textimagepoem, Apochryphaltext, 9th St. Laboratories, P. F. S. Post, Great Works, Hutt, The Dande Review, Poetry Bay and Dusie.

 

He has reviewed poetry for Jacket, Eyewear, The Colorado Review, New Hope International, Stride, Acumen and Shearsman. From 1996 to 2000 he was the deputy editor of The Argotist magazine.

 

His publications include, Carrier of the Seed, Distorted Reflections, Slimvol, Collected Poetry Reviews 2004-2013, Cyclones in High Northern Latitudes (with Jake Berry) and Outside Voices: An Email Correspondence (with Jake Berry), available as a free ebook.

 

 

JS: What are your definitions for the words ‘radical’ and ‘progressive’.

 

ACE: I would define ‘radical’ as pertaining to radix (root) – getting to the root of things. I don’t think there is a direct link between radicalism and formalism, although formal innovation might be a kind of aesthetic radicalism. I don’t think it is useful to tie radicalism to formal innovation – not all ‘radical’ works of art or poems are characterised by formal experimentation. Also the idea of ‘experimental’ or ‘revolutionary’ art is basically a nineteenth century idea – you can trace the use of the term ‘avant-garde’ back to 1825 at least, although it was popularised by Bakunin in the late 1870s. I find it ironic that one of the few artists who could claim to be a real revolutionary was Jacques-Louis David – and he was a Neo-classicist!  As it is very difficult to disconnect the ‘voice’ from a worldview (culture etc.) one has to look closely at the worldview/cultural background of the voice – how far does the worldview of the voice credit the transgressive implications of freedom-to-create? If you evade this question how 'radical' can you claim to be? To use Eliot as an example, I would define ‘The Waste Land’ as a reactionary poem, not a transgressive or ‘radical’ poem in the progressive sense, even though its poetic form might have caused some outrage. In any case none of Eliot's efforts stand comparison with the ‘radical’ Simultanism of say Cendrars' 'Trans Siberian' poem, or the works of Apollinaire. I would define ‘radical’ as pertaining to radix (root) – getting to the root of things. I don’t think there is a direct link between radicalism and formalism, although formal innovation might be a kind of aesthetic radicalism. I don’t think it is useful to tie radicalism to formal innovation – not all ‘radical’ works of art or poems are characterised by formal experimentation. Also the idea of ‘experimental’ or ‘revolutionary’ art is basically a nineteenth century idea – you can trace the use of the term ‘avant-garde’ back to 1825 at least, although it was popularised by Bakunin in the late 1870s. I find it ironic that one of the few artists who could claim to be a real revolutionary was Jacques-Louis David – and he was a Neo-classicist!  As it is very difficult to disconnect the ‘voice’ from a worldview (culture etc.) one has to look closely at the worldview/cultural background of the voice – how far does the worldview of the voice credit the transgressive implications of freedom-to-create? If you evade this question how 'radical' can you claim to be? To use Eliot as an example, I would define ‘The Waste Land’ as a reactionary poem, not a transgressive or ‘radical’ poem in the progressive sense, even though its poetic form might have caused some outrage. In any case none of Eliot's efforts stand comparison with the ‘radical’ Simultanism of say Cendrars' 'Trans Siberian' poem, or the works of Apollinaire.

In my terms 'progressive' must have something to do with freedom. Freedom of expression is closely linked to the concept of the voice – if you deny the voice, you deny the agent of 'expression'. I think that is a 'reactionary' position, not a 'progressive' position because it strikes at one of the most basic principles of freedom. There can be no freedom if there is no free agency: the only sensible definition of a free agency is a free individual. Frazer's Golden Bough was based on an evolutionary schema that postulated a 'progression' from Magic, via Religion to Science. Eliot disregarded this because of his own 'faith' position. I would suggest this points to the fact that Eliot (or the poetic voice we call 'Eliot') was actually an anti-Modernist, not a Modernist or a 'radical', unless of course you wish to think about a reactionary or conservative form of radicalism (you can – Margaret Thatcher is often called 'radical'). This example highlights an issue concerning ‘modern’ and ‘radical’. Rimbaud might be both ‘modern’ and ‘radical’ but Eliot might be ‘anti-modern’ and ‘radical’. So these terms are prone to circular interpretation! This is my observation on confusions or contradictions in general usage.

 

Incidentally, it is a commonly held view that ‘innovative poetries’ in the UK originated in the Nineteen Sixties. In this period we find the literary world separated into two, symbiotic, warring camps: ‘conservatives’ and ‘radicals’. The conservatives are ‘the establishment’, usually Encounter magazine (1953-1967), The Movement (1955), their pre-war predecessors the Georgians, or, sometimes, the more recent Confessional Poets – the Alvarez/Plath ‘suicide school’. The ‘radicals’ composed what is now known as the BPR (British Poetry Revival), called at the time the Underground, or the Children of Albion.

 

Constructing timelines can be great fun – one likes to isolate those key moments or watersheds, those defining episodes or momentous years – here are some for the Sixties. 1963: the Kennedy Assassination, Wilson leader of the Labour Party, The Liverpool Scene, Writers Forum, Plath kills herself. 1966: the year of ‘swinging’ London (according to Time Magazine) and the Situationists. 1968: the May Events in Paris, the death of Duchamp, Bomb Culture.  Perhaps 1969: was a significant year – did Zabriskie Point symbolise the end of Modern architecture and the birth of Postmodernism? Of course, in the main, the ‘Sixties’ was – and, for popular ‘folk memory’, still is – a fashion statement. It was a statement defined by clothes (the Mary Quant mini-skirt, the Cecil Gee suit, the monokini and the topless dress), James Bond films, Art Nouveau posters (in the style of Mucha) and pop music – The Stones, The Who, Pink Floyd, the ‘acid dandyism’ of Jimi Hendrix.

 

JS: So this was, for you, the real impact of the Sixties not changes in literature and poetic practice?

 

ACE: Absolutely, however, fashionable Sixties culture was mainly confined to large urban centres, mainly London and Liverpool: the rest of the country, stunned by the Profumo affair, traumatised by the death of Churchill, was still in a state of denial, living in a drab, post-war cultural desert of Fifties kitsch. The various items of new legislation – the abolition of theatre censorship, for example – that helped to make the so-called ‘permissive society’ did, of course, have lasting, positive, long-term effects. At the outset it should be recognised that the BPR was a sideshow for everybody except its participants: then, as now, very few members of the general public read ‘innovative’ poetry. If the truth be known the most ‘innovative’ publications of the Sixties were in the field of prose, not poetry – for example Thomas Pynchon’s novel V (1963) or Samuel Beckett’s collection No’s Knife 1945-1966 (1967).

 

Perhaps, on our imaginary timeline, the defining moment or year for the BPR sideshow was 1965. This was the year of the Cultural Revolution in China: Maoism was to become very trendy over the next few years after Godard made La Chinoise. 1965 also saw the death of T. S. Eliot, and, coincidentally, the beginnings of an ‘anti-permissive’ backlash in the shape of the NVALA (National Viewers and Listeners Association) founded by Mary Whitehouse. The International Poetry Incarnation (at the Albert Hall), organised by the Poet’s Cooperative, was the big literary event of the year. The abiding image of the Incarnation is preserved in grainy film of the nudist buffoonery of Allen Ginsberg, semi-official envoy of the American Beat Generation. ‘Albion’ was all about the Beat Generation.

 

According to Kerouac the Beats were the generation that came of age after World War II, their aims, expressed in ‘spontaneous prose’ and vernacular, freeform poetry, were the ‘relaxation of social and sexual tensions’ and the espousal of ‘mystical detachment’. This ‘mystical detachment’ seemed to mean a fascination for Zen and, in sharp contradiction with British Pop Art, rejection of capitalist consumerism in the cause of unworldly anti-materialism. William Burroughs, a distinguished London resident of the time, and one of the few writers associated with the Beats whose work has any lasting value, dissociated himself from the mystical stuff but this went largely unnoticed. On a technical level, Burrough’s Naked Lunch (1959) far outstripped the work of his Beat contemporaries.

 

JS:  Historically what route do you see British poetry as having traversed to get to the point it is at now?

 

ACE: I suspect there is no clear historical trajectory for British poetry in the modern era, which I define as 1890 to the present. I would say that the most 'radical' innovations of the Eighteen Nineties (due to 'Symbolist' influences) were (a) the formal understanding that a poem must be short (no more epics) (b) urban themes and subjects (c) subjects from popular entertainment (e.g. Music Hall). (d) a problematic approach to religion and morality. I see the fin de siecle as the defining watershed for modern British poetry.

 

JS: I always thought points a, b, c, and d were not a result of Symbolist or Decadent influences. These points seem grounded in naturalism and realism, something that Symbolist poets would not have comfortably endorsed. The Symbolists were dedicated to pseudo-romantic notions of ‘truth’ and the ‘Ideal’; they were against plain meanings and matter-of-fact description. The points you mention are more overtly identifiable in the work of Eliot than in Symbolism per se.

 

ACE: I think this is a stereotypical, post hoc view of Symbolism – the actual poems and practices of key 'Symbolists' (e.g. Mallarmé, Verlaine, Laforgue) don't evade naturalism/realism. The godfather of 'Symbolism', Baudelaire pioneered the 'modern' urban poem of gritty realism, alienation, fetish sex, and a number of other things. His ‘Correspondences’ is a kind of mini ars poetica for later writers, but I don't think his inheritors actually referred to themselves as Symbolists at the outset. The crystallisation of Symbolism as a movement was quite a late development (circa 1886). The Symbolist concern for 'vagueness' and the ephemeral is really an inflection of Impressionism (itself a mode of realism concerned with the fleeting experiences and perceptions of everyday life) and a realisation that poetry is intra-subjective experience. This concern with interior subjectivity is very important. However, one has to realise that terms like Symbolism, Decadence, Impressionism and so on were quite fluid and not well defined at the time. Idealism (Ideism) was a sort of Neo Platonic occult doctrine about 'higher' realities, the basis for much Abstract Art (Kandinsky, Brancusi). But I don't buy the idea that the Symbolists were  'pseudo-Romantic'. Symons’ models were Huysmans, Whistler and Degas. Again, it’s just using ‘Romantic’ as a pejorative, bogey word.

 

JS: On the point of the short poem; surely, it was Edgar Allan Poe in his essay The Poetic Principle (1850) who initiated the idea of the short poem as being true poetry.  Poe believed that the important thing was for the poem to have an effect on the reader, this effect can normally only be sustained for a short period hence the longer the poem the less lasting the effect. Baudelaire was influenced by Poe and translated him into French. Poe’s influence on French poetry was therefore significant, so much so that you could say that Symbolism was essentially an American invention.

 

ACE: True! In this respect Poe must be counted an honorary Frenchman. I don't think his poetry was much appreciated in America! The modern American poetic 'canon' dates from Whitman, I would guess – not Poe, who is usually dismissed as a minor curiosity and an inconsequential poet. The English Nineties poets inherited the principle of the short form poem from Poe (partly) via the French influences – but they could read him for themselves no doubt. Poe is definitely a precursor of Symbolism (whatever we mean by the word) although his own poetry was Late Romantic. It’s an overstatement to say that Symbolism was an American invention on the strength of Poe. (Poe's poetry was translated into French by Mallarmé, while Baudelaire was known for his earlier translations of the Tales of Mystery and Imagination.) Also the short poem principle was not the only formal feature of Symbolism as a movement. Vers Libre, the Prose Poem and Open Field were all 'Symbolist' innovations before WWI.  

 

JS: What do you mean exactly by ‘naturalism’?

 

ACE: When I say Naturalism I mean specifically the Naturalist Movement associated with Zola and Huysmans, the plays of Ibsen and, in Germany, the work of Gerhart Hauptmann. It means something quite specific involving 'exposure' of difficult social truths, not a loose real-life descriptiveness or picturesque nature poetry (evocations of daffodils or mountain scenery). Naturalist Realism was considered ‘decadent’ and 'degenerate' by its opponents – because it questioned the status quo it was subversive. Decadence celebrated modernity, low life, physical sensation and the 'artificial'. In many respects quite different from Symbolism in the narrow sense, the Decadent Movement elevated technology over nature. What we call 'symbolism' is a loose bucket-term that encompasses all these things: a lineage of writers and artists influenced by Baudelaire.

 

JS: To the extent that your own poetry (whether you intend it or not) enables readers to bring meaning out of the text indicates that you have some connection with the experimental, however tenuous.

 

ACE: This 'reader' thing is political correctness. It's a truism isn't it? Of course the reader brings meaning out of the text – I bet Sappho would have agreed that her audience functioned at a level of creative engagement with her work. But then to assert that only the reader is important, removing the author from the picture altogether, is just ridiculous – it’s a kind of pseudo-democracy, a populist dodge – its just ‘gesture politics’. So far as my own poetry is concerned, I like to 'tease rather than tell' and I think poetry works primarily on an irrational level. I like the idea that the reader can identify with the poem or text on a level of emotional empathy as well as on a level of ambivalent, oblique psychic symbolism or imagery. Surreal elements of ‘objective chance’ enhance the shared nature of empathic engagement with the reader, because they can derail expectations but I don’t think this engagement is concerned with simple issues of semantic meaning. It is quite possible that a truly ‘poetic’ poem might be incomprehensible on the rational level. I certainly don't think poetry (or any art) should be didactic – if you want to deal with ‘issues’ become a journalist.

 

JS: How do you define the individual voice in poetry? Surely to insist upon one is didactic.

 

ACE: I'm not insisting on it, I'm saying you can't surgically remove the individual ('voice') from the creative process without destroying the mechanism of the creative process itself. But to define the voice is very difficult – I would be the first to agree. There are all sorts of pitfalls here. For instance when Barthes proclaimed the ‘death of the author’ in 1968 he did so on the premise that the omnipotent author was a surrogate for God. The death of the author was also the death of God. It was an act of liberation. I can certainly see his point. Without going into too much detail I would suggest that, beyond all the textual analysis and critical theory that can be directed towards a specific poem the ultimate defining characteristic of the work is the unique 'signature' (strong or weak) of the writer. The essential difference between a poem by Stevie Smith and poem by, say, W. H. Auden, is ultimately a difference of personality, irrespective of literary theory. I would say this is self-evident. It is also true of poems written by poets who tell us they deny the voice – all you hear is their voice. A poem without a voice is an impossibility (obviously a voice can be unobtrusive, boring or inconsequential, but that is beside the point). This becomes a complicated matter of psychology and philosophy (masks, multiple personality, false identity, alter-egos, selfhood and instability, automatism, fictional personalities and characters) and not a literary question at all.

 

'Expression' is coming under attack every day.... check out the PEN website. As Terry Eagleton has pointed out in one of his critiques of Postmodernism, significant transformative action – artistic creativity counts as transformative action – in the real world requires the participation of an integrated unified, human individual/subject. Postmodernism usually denies this possibility. Eliot, if he were still with us, would be quite at home with all this self-denial stuff. What would he make of all the other related fads of radical chic? These include social constructionism, reader response theory, linguistic determinism, ethical criticism, post-colonialism and eco-criticism – whatever intellectually hypertrophied school of thought the current wave of ‘radical’ poets use to advance the next generational revolt – theory as power dressing. There is major issue of identity here, all bound up with a stereotyped Anti-Romanticism (T. E. Hulme via T. S. Eliot).

 

JS: Hulme’s attack on the Romantics was based on his mistaken belief that they were not writing poetry that was particular and descriptively accurate. He thought them flowery and vague. In fact, his call for more precision in poetry was ironically the same one that Wordsworth advocated. Both Romantic and Modernist poetry have more in common than is often recognised.

 

ACE: I'm sure your description of Hulme's position is quite correct – I agree – actually I think Modernism is a development of Romanticism. You could argue that some aspects of aesthetic Postmodernism are a development of or amplification of, the idea of Romantic Irony – Byron saw a close link between Romanticism and burlesque. However the ‘modern’ or most recent form of anti-Romanticism is an authoritarian attack on the so-called ‘paradigm’ of self-expression. Yet this is not so contemporary as one might think – Orwell noticed a tendency to conflate ‘Romanticism’ with a negative interpretation of ‘individualism’ in the Thirties and Forties as well. Not much has changed since those days, unfortunately.

 

JS: Are you advocating a sort of neo-Romantic poetic aesthetic?

 

ACE: Perhaps this use of the term neo-Romantic conforms to the dictates of the anti-Romantic propaganda line. What is Romantic? I tend to find that anti-Romanticists don't really know what Romanticism is/was.

 

JS: My understanding of what Romanticism is that it is about self-expression via a stable authorial voice or ego. Keats criticised Wordsworth for his self-obsession and coined the term ‘Egotistical Sublime’ to describe it. In principle I’ve nothing against an individual voice in poetry but I think that the text is, and should be, ultimately in the control of the reader.

 

ACE: I think this is just far too narrow – Romanticism is or was (historically) a diverse, widespread phenomenon – it can include everything from the Gothic novel to science, philosophy and politics. Romanticism was a tendency or movement that affected all parts of society and all the arts. Also, I suggest that associating the idea of a ‘stable’ authorial voice or ‘ego’ with ‘self-obsession’ is unnecessarily tendentious – it sounds like a thinly disguised moral agenda. It’s like saying Romantics are/were ‘bad people’, because bad people are self-obsessed and nice people are not egotistical. This is not the Romanticism of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, it is the political correctness of the late twentieth century. Schlegel described Romantic poetry as ‘continually becoming, never complete and infinitely free’. I would affirm Romanticism, or a form of Romanticism, as a movement about freedom, revolution and transgression – the dogma against Romanticism is a dogma against change, against the ‘voice’, against the individual. Where Romanticism is for the individual, count me in!

 

JS: But don’t you find it ironic that the concept of the authorial voice disallows the reader the freedom to make of the text what he/she will? Surely, the text under such conditions becomes dictatorial. How is one to find personal significance in a text that claims itself as being only applicable to the ‘voice’ that wrote it? Surely, this leads to didacticism.

 

ACE: I just don't agree with any of this – the mere existence of a 'voice' disallows nothing – the existence of the authorial presence in no way implies interpretative exclusivity of signification in the way that you say – why should it? Also, didacticism is not dependent upon the 'voice' in any way. It is a quite separate matter, I think. Propaganda is often disembodied, anonymous and impersonal. Mind you, I guess there might be conflicting views on the nature of the didactic. My ideal poem would always resist clear-cut interpretations or didactic messages. Protest poets might have a different view. What has happened since the Seventies is that theorists have replaced the iconic (‘Romantic’) personality cult of the artist with a personality cult of academic gurus, a pantheon of celebrities drawn from the post-Structuralist intelligentsia (e.g. Baudrillard, Foucault, Lyotard, Kristeva, Cixous, precursors such as Levinas, and a number of others). It is in the interests of theorists to deny the crucial role of the artist and elevate the ‘reader’ to a central position in the discourse, but it is their discourse – a discourse of academic command and control using the ‘reader’ is a propaganda ploy. I would assert that most readers relate to the ‘voices’ of their chosen authors living or dead, and this intimate, one-to-one relationship is a defining aesthetic experience for most readers most of the time.

 

JS: Do the US Beats and the British ‘Children of Albion’ poets confirm or deny the idea of an authorial voice/subject in poetry?

 

ACE: In my scheme of things I suggest the 'denial of the voice' is a characteristic of Postmodernism. Barthes' ‘Death Of The Author’ article was first published in 1968. The Poetry Incarnation was 1965 so the British Beats pre-date Barthes in this regard. Barthes himself cites the prime Symbolist Mallarme as 'the first to recognise' that language should be the prime element of a poem. Closer to home, I always quote Olson as the main US initiator – all that 'wash out the ego' malarky. However, as I observed elsewhere, the Beats seem to me to conform to the Romantic concept of the artist-poet. The decisive break was the Language Poets (c 1971) who I see as Postmodernists: they quite specifically attacked the 'workshop aesthetic of individual expression'. 1971 is usually quoted as the beginning of Postmodernism in literature. The historical origins of Postmodernism in the arts generally are confused (but that is another story I guess).

 

JS: In your writings you use phrases such as ‘defected to Americanism’, ‘literary Americanism’, and ‘like their American friends’ the tone of which may make people think that your poetic viewpoint is insular and anti-American because of political considerations. Can you expand on exactly what you mean?

 

ACE: I realise the implications of using a term like ‘Americanism’. I'm not being narrowly political here – in this context I would define Americanism as an academic trend or ethos – high-level interaction between academics and others that conforms to The Fall of Paris scenario. The idea that, after WWII, the centre of cultural innovation moved from Paris to New York. The assertion that New York in particular and the USA generally has set the pace and the agenda for innovation in the arts since 1945. I don't deny the reality of the geopolitical shift, but I feel that the situation is compromised by the rise of the global mass media – this Fall of Paris idea is another highbrow propaganda ploy. Avant-garde innovation was a nineteenth century concept. By the middle of the twentieth century the idea of the avant-garde (and Modernism as a movement) has been completely trashed and exhausted, mass-produced and commodified. Academia and critical theorists have to keep these myths going – too many jobs depend on such cultural histories. Americanism is a kind of academic Historicism. This is only indirectly related to 'hard' politics and foreign policy. In any case I am only applying this critique to poetry.

 

JS: Some of the references to the ‘Children of Albion’ in your writings suggest you see them as ‘selling out’ on the authorial voice/subject. If they did so, why was this?

 

ACE: From my frankly cynical viewpoint I would suggest it was susceptibility to academic trends. Even Jeff Nuttall ended up working for a University. I would say that the Academic Left consolidated a position based on Post-Structuralism and similar tendencies (e.g. Social Construction Epistemology) influenced by Thomas Kuhn's The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962). This book had a tremendous impact and precipitated what is known as the 'science wars'. Key themes were denial of objectivity and the idea that the individual is a 'cultural construction' not an innate entity. I don't think this mode of thinking really filtered into the 'counter-culture' until the Seventies. Having said that I might also observe that there is – at a deeper cultural level – a correlation, or a form of family resemblance, between traditional mystical ideas of self-denial, including puritan asceticism, and ‘the death of the author’ mystique as interpreted by Postmodernists. Such mystical ideas did permeate the Sixties Beat counter-culture and helped to prepare the ground… well, kind of.

 

Incidentally, if one looks among the poets of Albion and their successors for that absolute non-conformism (non-conformisme absolu) demanded by the First Surrealist Manifesto such a ‘radical’ disconnection from established norms is present only in the form of an emotional stance. It was a mere posture or, more appropriately, one might say, a poetical imposture. And even that imposture has been vitiated by the fashionable orthodoxy of Postmodern theorists. Which is why, for many years now, English poetry has been – literally – going nowhere.

(c) Jeffrey Side & A C Evans 2006

This interview first appeared in The Argotist Online

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

Messiaen And Surrealism

Olivier Messiaen in the Surrealist Context - Trans-Ideological Affinities

Surrealism is a term that has been used in connection with Olivier Messiaen (1908-1992) more than any other composer. While the term is often used in a lax way, simply allowing hack critics to denote a certain perceived ‘weirdness’ of tone, the relationship between the composer and the surrealist aesthetic is worthy, perhaps, of a brief exploration.
It must be said at the outset that, as a musician and composer, Messiaen did not participate in the Surrealist movement. During the inter-war era the leader of the Surrealists, Andre Breton (1896-1966), was – unlike the Zurich Dadaists – actually opposed to music in principle, excoriating composer-cliques such as Les Six as promoted in Paris high society by ‘fake poet’ Jean Cocteau. Furthermore, as ultra-humanist subversives and revolutionaries, the Surrealists’ militant, materialist, anti-clerical, anti-Catholic, anti-religious position would have rendered Messiaen persona non grata in their eyes. In the post war era the relationship between Surrealism and music changed, but primarily as a result of the rise of Bebop and the recognition of a fellow feeling with Afro-American black culture as enshrined in The Blues – the relationship between Surrealism and Western ‘classical’ art-music remains difficult and, in the main, uncharted territory.
The evolution of Messiaen’s development can be described as passing through three distinct periods and two distinct phases. Chronologically the Periods are (1) 1917-1936 (2) 1937-1949 and (3) 1949 to date. The first period is, naturally, a formative, early, ‘pioneering’ period. The second period a middle consolidation period, and the later third period, an era of ‘transmutation’, giving rise to works which extend the potentialities of the earlier periods to such a degree as to define a completely new phase of achievement without sacrificing continuity. In some respects, it seems that these three eras can be broadly divided into two distinct Phases of inner evolution. The first two, the ‘pioneering’ era and the ‘consolidation’ era, comprise works that may be defined as microcosmic and subjectivist, the last period comprises works of a more impersonal, macrocosmic mode.
To explain this analysis it is helpful to identify some salient works which also, by comparison with other works in other media, by different artists, may illustrate some overlaps between Messiaen’s music and Surrealism and the Surrealist ethos.

Early Period: 1917-1936
From the beginning Messiaen’s music derived from two modes of thought: a personal, subjectivist mode exemplified by the Preludes (1929) for solo piano, “etiolate mood-pictures still sunk in the prison of the self” to quote Malcolm Troop, and an hieratic, theological mode epitomised by the organ work Le Banquet Celeste (1926) or, even more starkly, by L’Apparition de l’Eglise Eternelle (1932). The Preludes recall and extend several works by Messiaen’s predecessor Claude Debussy (piano preludes like Voiles and La Cathedrale Engloutie (1910) or orchestral works such as Danse Sacree et Danse Profane from 1903). The label Impressionist has served to obscure the fact that Debussy was closely associated with the proto-Surrealist ethos of the fin de siecle French Symbolists, showing deep affinities with poets such as Baudelaire and Mallarme, themselves recognised as precursors of the Surrealist spirit. The piano Preludes of both composers seem like musical renditions of Redon’s lithographs. Messiaen’s 'Les Sons Impalpable du Reve' inhabits the same oneiric sphere as Redon’s pictures like the painting 'Yeux Clos' (1890) or the two lithograph series entitled Dans le Reve (1879) and Songes (1891)
The iconoclastic, Absurdism of late ultra-Symbolist Pataphysics (Alfred Jarry) and the abrasive nihilism of Dada have worked to obscure the roots of French Surrealism in the world of nineteenth century Symbolism. The Surrealists themselves always tended to emphasise their preference for the Symbolist tradition of poetic anarchism and revolt (Lautreamont, Rimbaud), rather than that of subjective, interior exploration. Despite clear parallels, the work of Odilon Redon (1840-1916) was not seen as proto-Surrealist. Nevertheless from the present historic vantage point it is obvious that there is a line of continuity from the pre-Freudian world of Symbolist painting to the post-Freudian spirit of Surrealist endeavour. This is despite the fact that the neo-conservative religiosity espoused by many Symbolists would be seen as hopelessly retrograde from the Surrealist perspective. In fact both Claude Debussy (1862-1918) and, later, Olivier Messiaen inhabited the same pre-Surrealist cultural landscape of the Symbolist fin de siecle.
Another artist of the fin de siecle whose works seem to emanate from a similar domain to that traversed by Messiaen in his first pioneering period is the Belgian Fernand Khnopff (1858-1921). Pictures such as 'I Lock My Door Upon Myself' (1891) which project an atmosphere of spiritual isolation and psychic dissociation, or the remarkable 'Geste d’Offrande' (an image of an immobile figure frozen in ritual pose) encapsulate the muted mysticism of Messiaen’s theological mode. Messiaen’s title Les Offrandes Oubliees (1930) may not be a deliberate allusion to Khnopff - but it looks as if it should be.
Other works of Messiaen in similar vein include Diptyque (1929), Nativite du Seigneur (1935), L’Ascension (1933) and the impressive, archetypal L’Apparation de L’Eglise Eternelle. The monumentality of the latter work looks forward to the glacial peaks of Et Exspecto Resurrectionem Mortuorum (1964) and, no doubt unintentionally, demonstrates non-rational elective affinities with Gaudi’s unfinished Templo de la Sagrada Familia begun in 1883. The parabolic spires and delirious, sensual detail of Gaudi’s idiosyncratic Art Nouveau Barcelona cathedral could be an architectural premonition of Messiaen’s musical style; like Messiaen, Antoni Gaudi y Cornet (1852-1926) demonstrated, in his creative work, a phenomenological affinity with Surrealism without being, in the formal sense, Surrealist. Like his Catalan compatriot Dali, Gaudi represented an aesthetic phenomenon resistant to the apparent constraints of subsequent Surrealist ideology. Also, like Messiaen, Gaudi produced works of extreme, heretical individuality at variance, in a way, with the professed orthodoxy of belief both artists attributed to themselves. It was as though Religion provided an incitement for the imagination – an operative fiction.
Le Banquet Celeste was Messiaen’s first public work, an organ piece of unresolved dissonance and subversive stasis first performed in 1928 (the year of Breton’s Nadja, Bunuel and Dali’s film Un Chien Andalou and Aragon’s Traite du Style) four years after the publication of the Premier Manifeste (1924). Had any of the Surrealist avant garde, immersed in experiments with collage, automatism, word-scrambling and the Ducassian Encounter, attended the Paris performance of this piece they might have detected, despite the wilfully archaic façade, some signs of a sensibility attuned to the auditory equivalent of Convulsive Beauty, explosive-fixed and erotic-veiled. However the differences would also have been obvious. Messiaen was clearly establishing a traditional theological basis for his work; the Surrealists were fixated upon the chance incursions of the quotidian marvellous. These were ideologically irreconcilable positions, even though Messiaen was drawn to a ‘surrealist’ use of language. In his case this stemmed from rejection of the arid neo-classical formulations practised by middle-of-the road artists of the day, rather than the Dada experiments of Tzara, Huelsenbeck and Schwitters or, in France, of Breton and Soupault (Les Champs Magnetiques, 1920).
Messiaen’s formative, pioneering period corresponds to the proto-Surrealist movements of the previous fin de siecle generation. The reason for this is the bipolar modality of Messiaen’s creative thought, the complementary desires to penetrate the inner recesses of experience and the ‘mystical’ or theological imperative. Both tropisms tended to unleash unpredictable and powerful forces, finding expression in Messiaen’s unique, violent and monumental musical sound-forms. This musical language cannot be constrained by the Catholic theological framework espoused by the composer and can, therefore, be categorised as a manifestation of sur-reality in music, despite problematic personal, historical and cultural complications.

Middle Period: 1937-1949
The evolutionary difference between the works of Messiaen’s second period and his first is a difference in ‘depth’, not in a qualitative sense, but in a progressive sense: Messiaen’s musical explorations took him ‘deeper’, as it were, into the hinterland of his chosen terrain. In some the respects the works of his second period are more extreme, or appear so. The delicate, subjective mode of the piano preludes is overtaken by a series of works that are the most overtly surrealistic of the composer’s output.
Firstly there are the Poemes Pour Mi (1936) and secondly, Chants de Terre et de Ciel (1938), two song-cycles influenced by the translucent verse of Pierre Reverdy (hailed by Andre Breton as a precursor), set to piano music which complements rather than accompanies the words. This music echoes and cascades amid the metallic membranes on an inner cosmos where landscapes metamorphose into female bodies, like Pavel Tchelitchews’ painting 'Fata Morgana' (1940). Harawi, Chant d’Amour et de Mort (the title of a third song-cycle) marks a further, distinctive evolution of sensibility. It is the first part of a trilogy, the other two parts being the Turangalila-Symphonie (1948) and Cinq Rechants (1948). In Harawi (1945) the fluidity of the imagery and the unearthly pianism of the music combine to produce one of the most sensational and ‘surreal’ works of our age. The protagonist Piroutcha, a Peruvian incarnation of Wagner’s Isolde, participates with her lover in an extraordinary ritual dance amid atoms, rainbows, giant staircases, sacred birds and exploding galaxies of onomatopoeic utterances. The whole scenario is set in a vertiginous abyss where the moment of love-death is prolonged into an infinite star-less night:

Dans le noir, colombe vert,
Dans le noir, perle limpide
Dans le noir, mon fruit de ciel…

In Rencontres Avec Olivier Messiaen (1961) by Antoine Golea the composer says that a picture by the English Surrealist Roland Penrose called 'The Invisible Isle' (1936), also known as 'Seeing is Believing', inspired the section of Harawi entitled Amour Oiseau d’Etoile. The picture depicts the blond head of a beautiful young woman suspended upside down over an island city; her neck penetrates the low-lying cloud entering into planetary space above. From the bottom of the picture, extending upwards, are two hands in a gesture of yearning. Messiaen has said that this picture encapsulates the whole of Harawi.
The incantatory language of Harawi and Cinq Rechants is perhaps the most remarkable element in Messiaen’s ‘surrealism’. On the one hand it links him with a pre-surrealist tradition of linguistic experimentation, stretching back to Edgar Allan Poe. On the other hand it shows how close he was, coincidentally or otherwise, to contemporaneous Surrealist poetics – particularly the work of Antonin Artaud (1896-1948), who was to die the year of Cinq Rechants. Although utterly apart philosophically, there is a trans-ideological affinity between Artaud and Messiaen, particularly the Messiaen of Harawi with its pre-Columbian mise en scene and cosmic-mythical scenario. There is an extremism in the work of both Artaud and Messiaen which discloses a universe of ritualistic ‘cruelty’ and depends, in part, on the creation of personalised hermetic languages based on dextrous collages of Eastern and Western elements. Artaud, in his dramaturgic researches, helped push Surrealist thought away from Western models, towards non-European themes and obsessions. This was, in some ways, an extension of the exoticism that attracted Debussy to the Balinese gamelan. Artaud saw in the stylised formalism of Balinese dance a way of rejuvenating the staid formalisms of Western theatre.
Messiaen’s linguistic usage evolved into a hybrid of French, Hindi and personal images encapsulated in names like Viviane, Ysault, Meduse and Orphee, all protagonists of Symbolist inner dramas, immortalised in paintings by, for example, Jean Delville and Gustave Moreau. Messiaen wrote glossolalia utterances such as

Ahi! O Mapa nama mapa nama lila, tchil…

or

Mayoma kalimolimo mayoma kalimolimo
t k tk t k t k…

These chants bear a strong generic resemblance to the archetypal poetic idiolect of Artaud’s semi-legendary ‘lost’ book Letura d’Eprahi Talli Tetr Fendi Photia O Fotre Indi (1934):

Calipa

Ke loc tispera

Kalispera

Enoctimi…

born in part, as was Harawi, out of a fascination for the myths and codices of Pre-Columbian America.
The trilogy is the high point of Messiaen’s para-surrealist output. It also highlights those aspects that set him apart from the Paris Surrealist Group of the inter-war period. His dissociation from politico-revolutionary concerns, the orthodox religious basis for his mysticism, his naïve association of earthly and heavenly love that is apparently at the opposite pole to Breton’s ‘mad love’ or amour fou. Messiaen’s explanations of his sublimated eroticism are most unconvincing when decked out in regressive, saccharine Catholic rhetoric.
Second period works comprise some of Messiaen’s best known pieces such as Quatuor Pour la Fin du Temps (1941), Les Corps Glorieux (1939), Visions de l’Amen (1943) and Vingt Regards sur l’Enfant Jesus (1944). In all cases the convulsive beauty of the works themselves it at odds with the manifest orthodox religious ideological ground-base underpinning the composer’s speculative thinking. It might appear that, like Gerard de Nerval and J-K. Huysmans before him, Messiaen pushed beyond the limits of conventional theology into the borderlands of the heretical and occult; the only parallel for his synaesthesia colour-theory, for instance, is to be found in the works of Russian composer Alexander Scriabin (1871-1915), an overt Theosophist. The numerological method he incorporated into his compositional technique can only be regarded as an example of occultism in music, assertions to the contrary notwithstanding. Again, there are precedents in the pre-surrealist world of the Symbolists: Baudelaire and Rimbaud’s Alchimie du Verbe. With these works Messiaen attempted to resolve the underlying dualism implicit in his creative thought. He was at the limits of charted experience, and the music, particularly the piano music, reflected this, gaining in intensity and violence on every level from the cataclysmic to the insidious.

Later Period: 1949 to date
The works that followed these during the third Period from 1949 onwards are generally monumental, concerned with the outer gulfs and vastness of space or the vertiginous escarpments of glaciers. There are few works dealing with the inner life of the subjective individual. Like Mallarme with his revolutionary poem Un Coup de Des, Messiaen ventured into The Abyss. In this phase there is, however, one key figure with who Messiaen can be compared: arch-Dadaist and Surrealist Max Ernst (1891-1976). It is intriguing that between these two crucial figures there are a number of points of rapport.
During the late 1930s Max Ernst developed a distinctive form of visionary painting using the ‘decalcomania’ technique. Ernst continued this style into the 1940s with paintings like 'Europe After The Rain '(1942) and 'The Eye of Silence' (1944). Decalcomania is strongly identified with Ernst, although its discovery is usually attributed to Oscar Dominguez. Similar colouristic effects can be found, in prototype form, in some canvases by Odilon Redon and Gustave Moreau and the technique was also used extensively by Leonor Fini (1918-1996). Many of her paintings from the 1960s seem to emanate from the same creative universe as the music Messiaen was composing during the immediate post-war period. For example works such as 'The Dormant Water' (1962), 'A Breathing Shadow' (1962), 'Sleep In a Garden '(1962), 'The Trough of Night' (1963) and 'The Long Sleep of Flowers' (1964) are almost exactly comparable to the soundscapes of Harawi and Turangalila. Decalcomania involves the use of colour figurations embedded in wet paint applied according to the laws of Objective Chance. The result is an eroded surface where decoration assumes an autonomous role, just as Messiaen exploited the effects of apoggiaturas and added notes. Ernst’s painting 'The Stolen Mirror' (1941) featured a ziggurat-dotted landscape strongly reminiscent of the mythical Peruvian setting of Harawi.
It is true that the works of Max Ernst are imbued with a corrosive black humour, blasphemy and cosmic irony quite alien to Messiaen’s conscious intentions. A typical example would be 'The AntiPope' (1942) which expresses an almost Satanic sensibility completely at odds with Messiaen’s joyful ecstasies. Yet nevertheless the static highly textured effect of the music finds a correlation here, as does the collage-like juxtaposition of ‘soundblocks’ in works like Et Exspecto Resurrectionem Mortuorum, which are intrinsically apocalyptic rather than Surrealist. Furthermore, in a series of Ernst pictures entitled, among others, 'The Nymph Echo' (1937), 'Nature at Dawn' (1938) and 'Joie de Vivre' (1936) the viewer is confronted with strangely Messiaen-esque visions: giant bird-headed creatures lurking amid luscious, fantastic blossoms and grotesque vegetation comprised of huge, leathery leaves. The vast dimensions of these alien worlds somehow prefigure the cosmic landscapes of the Catalogue d’Oiseaux (1958); crystalline evocations of magical, hyper-real bird-life; bizarre avian deities, monuments to the birds. Messiaen’s later works such as Et Exspecto, Livre d’Orgue (1951) and La Transfiguration (1969) conjure up towering auditory edifices and vast canyons of sound. Mexican step-pyramids, echoing glaciers, vaults of stained glass, forests like giant cathedrals, bird-familiars – these are all the auditory counterparts of Ernst’s ‘great forests’ and ‘entire cities’. They are the auditory equivalents of the awesome geological landscapes and boundless spatial gulfs depicted in paintings like 'Mundus est Fabula', (1959) 'A Swarm of Bees in the Palace of Justice' (1960), 'Inspired Hill' (1950), 'The Twentieth Century' (1955) and 'The Sky Marries The Earth' (1964).
A shared fascination for avian life links Max Ernst and Olivier Messiaen. Ernst created innumerable bird-monuments. His birds are stylised, linear shapes, as depicted in 'Chaste Joseph' (1928) or 'The Interior of Sight' (1929). They are counterparts, in a visual medium, to the stylisation of birdsong achieved by Olivier Messiaen in numerous musical works. For both artists these supernal birds are more than a fixation, and their simultaneous appearance in the works to two great masters of the twentieth century cannot be merely coincidental – there is a link between Messiaen and the Surrealists, but that link is non-rational. Its existence reveals a creative imperative that transcends ideological, even theological differences.

Postscript: The First Audible Diamond
After the Second World War, in 1946, Andre Breton revised his approach to the problem of music and Surrealism. Acknowledging deep connections between poetry and song he called for a ‘reunification’ of hearing to accompany the revolutionary programme of the Surrealist reunification of sight. In an article for the magazine Modern Music entitled 'Silence is Golden', reprinted in What is Surrealism? (1978), he wrote:

…for the first audible diamond to be obtained, it is evident that the fusion of the two elements - music and poetry - could only be accomplished at a very high emotional temperature. And it seems to me that it is in the expression of the passion of love that both music and poetry are most likely to reach this supreme point of incandescence.

If the most crucial feature of the Surreal marvellous is Convulsive Beauty then, even before Breton wrote these words, that unique form of beauty had already found its first, essential musical expression - in Messiaen’s Harawi of 1945 and many previous pieces composed during the heyday of the Paris Surrealist Group.

Bibliographic Addenda

The first version of this essay accompanied a Messiaen Discography compiled for a Professional Examination in October 1972. The essay was first published in the magazine BRIO (Volume 11, No 2, Autumn, 1974) with Part II of the Discography, the most comprehensive survey of Messiaen’s work then available in English. The Discography also included numerous literary references to help illuminate the provenance of Messiaen’s compositions. The following references are related exclusively to this essay and include a number of items omitted from the first version:

Artaud, Antonin. Artaud Anthology. City Lights Books. San Francisco. 1965.
Artaud, Antonin. Letter to Peter Watson. Link Magazine [Artaud Special Issue]. Spring 1969.
Breton, Andre. Manifestos of Surrealism. University of Michigan. Ann Arbor 1972.
Breton, Andre. What is Surrealism? Selected Writings. Pluto Press. London. 1978.
Ernst, Max. Beyond Painting. Wittenborn, Schultz, Inc. New York. 1948.
Golea, Antoine. Rencontres Avec Olivier Messiaen. Julliard. Paris. 1961.
Jelinski, Constantin. Leonor Fini. La Guilde du Livre et Clairefontaine. Lausanne. 1972.
Masini, Lara Vinca. Gaudi. Hamlyn. London. 1970.
Redon, Odilon. The Graphic Works of Odilon Redon. Dover Publications. New York. 1969.
Troup, Malcolm. Messiaen and the Modern Mind [Thesis]. University of York. 1967.
Troup, Malcolm. Regard sur Olivier Messiaen. Composer 37. Autumn/Winter, 1970-71

Illustration: Angel For The End Of Time, 1972

Always Bizarre

THE AESTHETIC TRANSFORMATION OF PERCEPTION

The aesthetic transformation of perception is closely linked to the purification and transmutation of language: the alchimie du verbe of which Rimbaud and the Surrealists spoke.

The transformation of perception arises from the disclosure of the Essential, the revelation of the Quintessence, and from the elimination of all inessentials, all deadly serious prosaic elements.

Cautionary tales? Not today, thank you. Weighty Issues? Oh yeah? Huge Challenges? You must be joking. The revolution? Oh, I say! The People? Oh ha ha. Devotional tracts? Give us a break.

It is this ‘alchemical’ or Hermetic theory of poetic language and aesthetic image, to which Mallarme was alluding when he referred to the task of giving ‘a purer meaning to the words of the tribe’ and which lay behind Baju’s desire to re-designate the Decadents as the ‘Quintessents’. In this sense the poet can become a shamanistic custodian of the modern – or the traditions which comprise the modern, for traditions enshrine ways of seeing the world and, contrary to popular belief, are never static, mutating in response to deep-running, impersonal, evolutionary currents. In this sense the ‘visionary’ role of the poet, uniquely attuned to these mutations, is not metaphorical – he, or she, may become the instrument of change – change, through transformation of perception.

In his seminal Lettres du Voyant Rimbaud defined the visionary role of the poet of the future as ‘the supreme savant’, the initiator of universal transmutation, the harbinger of a new era in human evolution, un multiplicateur de progres.

 

The poet would define the amount of the unknown awakening in the universal soul in his own time. He would produce more than the formulation of his thought or the measurement of his march towards progress.

 

Poetry, like all art, should be founded on a special vision of the world, a different way of seeing, even a new reality principle. To a degree any artist will transgress accepted ideas of normality, if only by presenting familiar objects and situations in an unusual way. Poetry is bound to conflict with consensus opinion because the special vision will incorporate the negative as well as the positive; it will be an indictment as well as an affirmation. As Sartre once said ‘literature is, in essence, heresy’. When an artist – a poet, a novelist, a composer, or an artist in any medium – adopts a different way of seeing the world he or she has taken the first step towards total idiosyncratic vision attained through various stages of initiation. This ‘initiation’ or rite of passage will involve a state known as ‘the dark night of the soul’ in which enhanced awareness of ‘supernal’ perfection, the Ideal, or, to use Mallarme’s phrase, ‘the dream in its ideal nakedness’, leads to a similarly enhanced awareness of human, existential imperfection and a breakdown of the mystified and petrified realities of the everyday social world. For Baudelaire awareness of human or worldly imperfection was called spleen, for the alchemists it was the Nigredo or ‘blackening’. Celine used the term noircissement to identify the same state of mind – a night-world of horror, viciousness, pain and dread. It is this ‘core of horror’ which, since the eighteenth century, has given rise to a current of militant pessimism in modern art and literature, represented by the works of Sade , Baudelaire, Lautréamont, Nietzsche, Jarry, Artaud, Genet, Burroughs and Beckett, among others. Here one may think of that ‘nocturnal language’ of which Anais Nin once spoke regarding the writings of Anna Kavan – that lexicon of dreams and alienation.

It is of some historical significance that this nihilistic vision is closely linked to the emergence of new stylistic trends. Most of the authors and poets in this current of development contributed to a revolution in syntax and to the deconstruction of traditional conventions. Barriers between fact and fiction, between spoken and written language, between poetry and prose, have been dismantled in order to express a vision of transmutation – in order to effect a transmutation. This disruption of syntax, literary form, musical tonality and pictorial representation is symptomatic of the dissociation and psychic dislocation brought about by the first stage of initiation. For many it has become a metaphor of cultural collapse, of the rejection of the telos, of the atomization of the world – a break-down, not a break-through.

In addition to the ultra-nhilist vision there is a second way of seeing which, like the first, was derived mainly from Baudelaire: modernity.

Many of Baudelaire’s followers regarded themselves as more modern than their contemporaries, despite their frequent denunciations of modern beliefs. Although they loathed modern society, they admired modern technol­ogy because they regarded the artificial as superior to the natural. This was reinforced by an adherence to Naturalism, a concentration on the depiction of ‘slices’ of modern (urban) life, a challenge to the taboo of ‘morality’. This Naturalism complemented a need to cultivate intensity despite all social limitations: indulgence in perversity could be masked as Naturalistic research or ‘field work’. For Huysmans, the most powerful of the Naturalist writers, such methods offered some way of coming to terms with the otherwise banal exigencies of everyday life. His transition from Naturalism to Decadence, from Downstream to Against Nature, represented a need to augment dry Naturalistic description with some ‘deeper’ more acute vision, even though his subsequent transition from Decadence to Catholicism, from Against Nature to La Cathedrale, represented a retreat into a comfort zone of ‘faith’. The traumatic identity crisis caused by the arrival of modernity; the erosion of hitherto established cultural norms, the feelings of isolation, of powerlessness and meaningless self-estrangement, can often lead to a resurgence of, or relapse into, religion (the ‘flight into faith’). This is a circumstance which can apply to both the individual (such as Huysmans in this case) and to the collectivity as a whole.

In most of his critical writings from 1845 Baudelaire, inspired by Poe and Gautier, advocated the theory of ‘the heroism of modern life’. He argued that the artist must oppose the false charm of nostalgia by extracting the essence of beauty from the everyday world – to look for the ‘classic’ in the remote was an error. In her discussion of his aesthetics in her biography of Baudelaire Enid Starkie wrote: ‘Thus all forms of modernity were capable and worthy of becoming classic, and if they did not do so the fault lay with the artist and not with his age.’ The implication of this view, its implicit relativism, and the doubt it casts on orthodox definitions of the real, renders ‘the heroism of modern life’ a disruptive, perhaps magical, idea.

From the alchemical perspective, if the essent­ial beauty of the everyday is equated with the philosopher’s stone, Baudelaire’s theory corresponds to the ancient Hermetic doctrine that the ultimate substance must be distilled from a despised and neglected prima materia. Thus, Rimbaud and Verlaine, in London in 1873, sought the marvelous and the fantastic in immediate urban images, in ‘modern-Babylonian’ architecture, in The City, in station hotels, in the docks and great iron railway bridges.

This potent urban psycho-geography prefigures the Surrealist poet Aragon, who in 1924, wrote of those other places, ‘sites... not yet inhabited by a divinity’, but where a ‘profound religion is very gradually taking shape’ as though surreality precipitates ‘like acid-gnawed metal at the bottom of a glass’. For the Surrealists these privileged locations were in Paris: the Pont des Suicides at the Buttes-Chaumont, the Porte Saint-Denis, the Tour Saint-Jacques, or the vanished Passage de l’Opera. For us London may take the aspect of a modern Babylon, of a ‘concrete jungle’, redolent with psychic portents and hermetic symbols. Like St Giles High Street, Hungerford Bridge has always possessed features associated with Gateways to Otherness, where – to use Questing jargon – the ‘veil between this world and the next is particularly thin’.

As the filmmaker Georges Franju once remarked ‘Doesn’t this mean that poetry is in reality… and that it is less a question of expressing it than of not preventing it from showing itself?’ And so the poet becomes a shaman of multiple dimensions, creating the classic from the mundane, distilling the essential from the inessential, revealing ‘heroic’, interpenetrating parallel realities, or, to use Franju’s terminology, to allow the insolite (unusual) to emerge beside or in-between the interstices of the accepted Real.

But, in order to experience, or even portray the ‘heroism’ of modernity the poet must unlearn preconditioned responses and engage in a critical, initiatory process of dissociation. August Weidmann has shown how this process of ‘dissociation of sensibility’ was a key tenet of Romanticism and fundamental to modern conceptions of art. The Romantics however, tried to gain access to a ‘primordial vision’, whereas it can now be understood that deviation from conventional perceptual norms is, in fact, a way of transmuting the world around us.

In his struggle to apprehend Poe’s ‘supernal beauty’ filtering fitfully through profane sensory mechanisms, the poet uses his or her art to deconstruct, or dismantle, a preconditioned worldview.  Under­standing of ecstasy, or The Ideal, generates a blackening, or noircissement, as the horror of existence overwhelms the subject with disgust, inducing a hellish night-world experience. However, this dissociation brings a more fantastic, if not more positive, vision – the everyday world loses its narrow, constricted frame of limitation and becomes, thankfully, bizarre.

The artist-poet, through an aloofness or detachment, fleetingly attained in reaction to the disgust provoked by the Nigredo or unregenerate night-world state, perceives that, divorced from everyday functions or assoc­iations, ordinary situations, objects, even people, may take on a surreal perspective as words and images function as ‘so many springboards for the mind’ (Andre Breton). They acquire an ephemeral, but nevertheless quintessential, glamour, or enchant­ment of absolute Beauty. But, it will be seen that this ‘absolute’ Beauty, this ‘threshold aestheticism’, is a coniunctio oppositorum, a union of opposites in the Hermetic sense. It contains not only the essential ‘gold’ of supernal beauty, but also a fearful purity of supernal horror – it is not only Naturalistic, but anti-Naturalistic – it is not only soothing but a force which consumes with a unique intensity: it is ‘subversive of perception and understanding’. It is not only sublime; it is also of The Abyss. It is not some transcendental enlightenment, but more a much sought-for diversion from the banality of the mundane or even ‘the appearance of the image of liberation’ to cite Marcuse.

It partakes of both elegance and the grotesque. “If I am not grotesque,” said Aubrey Beardsley, that most perfect example of the aesthetic sensibility, “I am nothing”.

Beauty, said Baudelaire, is always bizarre.

A revised version of an article first published in Chaos International No 15 March 1993

Hermetic Art Gnostic Alchemy of The Imagination (1985) on The Alchemy Website

Illustration: Aethyr of Le Voyant, 1979