Daughter of Night

 

This is Nemesis Daughter of Nyx (Night) another early work from the CygnusX Archive. The drawing dates from 1966 and is clearly inspired by Aubrey Beardsley (1872-1898) and the large exhibition of his work organised that year by Brian Reade (1913-1989) at the Victoria & Albert Museum. In his catalogue introduction Reade wrote of Beardsley: 'he belongs with the artists of night, not with the artists of day...' . Together with Kenneth Clark (whose article in the Sunday Times Supplement was called 'Out of the Black Lake'), Brian Reade was chiefly responsible for the Beardsley Boom of 1965-1969. This figure of Nemesis, according to one authority, a personifation of 'righteous anger', is a pastiche; it combines an incongruous ancient Egyptian influence with Beardsley's 'Japonesque' manner. To this day Beardsley remains the epitome of aesthetic dandyism; his work exemplifies not only the grotesque nature of Decadence - but also its style and elegance.

'If I am not grotesque, I am nothing' - Aubrey Beardsley

Illustration: Nemesis, 1966

From The Archive

 There are a few pencil sketches from 1966 in the archive. This rough drawing of The Temptation of St Anthony is probably the earliest. No doubt this frenetic, proto-convulsive figure is really a Damned Poet struggling with his or her inner demons - the first example of a continuing theme.

Illustration: The Temptation of St Anthony, 1966

Deathmasques

 Deathmasques is a collection of early writings: a few prose poems and tales from 1970-1973. 

The prose poems comprised six pieces: 'The Poet' (1970), 'No More Beauty' (1971), 'In the Palace of The Sphinx (The Supplicant)' (1972), 'Dream of Stone' (1972), 'Into The Abyss (The Renegade)' (1972) and 'Silence' (1973).
One felt that the prose poem was a particularly Decadent form. Also included were two macabre short stories 'Mute Witness' (1972) and 'We Vampires' (1972). Other texts from this period include chunks of experimental neo-gothic or modern fantastic fiction (mainly dreadful!) and various quasi-theoretical statements relating to art projects such as Crisis of the Object and Rictus Sardonicus.
Deathmasques story 'We Vampires' appeared in the anthology Haunting Tales (2008) and 'Mute Witness' from the same collection appeared in Monomyth # 44 Issue 8.2 (2008) both from Atlantean Publishing.

Deathmasques publication 1999-2020

Deathmasques I The Poet, Headstorms Short Fiction Magazine Vol 1 Inclement Publishing, 2004
Deathmasques I The Poet, Monomyth Supplement Issue 12 Atlantean Publishing, 2004
Deathmasques I The Poet, International Times Jul 2020
Deathmasques II No More Beauty, Unhinged PJL Press, 3 Sept 1999
Deathmasques II No More Beauty, International Times Sept 2020
Deathmasques III In the Palace of the Sphinx (The Supplicant), International Times Sept 2020
Deathmasques IV Dream of Stone, Unhinged 6 Sex & Death Issue PJL Press, 2000
Deathmasques IV Dream of Stone, International Times Oct 2020
Deathmasques V The Renegade, Monomyth Supplement Issue 13 Atlantean Publishing, 2004
Deathmasques V The Renegade (Into The Abyss), International Times Oct 2020
Deathmasques VI Silence, Midnight Street 2, Immediate Direction, 2004
Deathmasques VI Silence, International Times Nov 2020

Related publications 2020

Mute Witness, International Times Nov 2020

We Vampires. International Times May 2020

Illus: Neo-Convulsive Self-Portrait 1973/2001

The Convulsionist Group

 

Could you tell me about the group you formed called The Neo-Surrealist Convulsionist Group?
It is tempting to say we were just a group of alienated teenagers…! We formed the thing around 1968 and it only lasted until around 1971 or 1972. There were about five or six participants based in Chelmsford, Essex. Other places included Colchester, Ipswich and Witham… people used to meet in coffee bars after school – we were all sixth formers doing art or literature, mainly as a way of avoiding sport. The associations continued after everyone left school and tried to get jobs. Some poetry was written and experimental prose cut-up; atonal electronic music was composed and lots of paintings and collages produced. There were occasional expeditions or ‘pilgrimages’ to ‘displaced destinations’ such as the old Hungerford Bridge, the Victoria Embankment Gardens (for the Sullivan Memorial – very ‘convulsive’), The Atlantis Bookshop, or the Dashwood Mausoleum and Hell Fire Caves at West Wycombe. But mainly there was a lot of loafing around, drinking coffee and snogging – or going to see Hammer Horror films and German Expressionist movies at the NFT. There was one exhibition at Hylands House – the exhibition was for all the school leavers but we managed to commandeer a room – as the Convulsionists were the general organisers of the show it was quite easy to get the space! We came up with the term ‘Convulsionism’ after the phrase ‘Beauty will be convulsive…’ (from Breton’s Amour Fou). I felt it implied the ‘visceral’ idea - my ideal work of art was to be a meaningless allegory generated by a kind of neurological spasm or frisson that could be transmitted to the viewer – well, if it gave me a frisson it might give you one as well. One old policy document from my archive says: "CONVULSION IS CONCERNED WITH THE BEAUTY OF PURE IMAGINATION AND FANTASY AND IS VIOLENTLY OPPOSED TO CONTRAPTON IN ANY FORM" (Convulsively Produced Notes On Convulsion, 1968). Earlier, I mentioned some key influences… I should add the Lost Generation to the list – the Francophile ‘Yellow Nineties’ Decadent poets and artists (Arthur Symons, Ernest Dowson et al) and, also, the ultra-Symbolist absurdism (as we saw it) of Laforgue and Alfred Jarry – we were quite keen on ‘Pataphysics as I recall… There was some empathy with English Pop Art, so we rather revelled in the Mass Media – Pop Music (The Doors, Brian Auger), Jazz (Indo Jazz Fusions, Duke Ellington, Charles Mingus), Science Fiction and ‘cult TV’. It was ironic that the real Surrealists disbanded in 1969 (Andre Breton died in 1966) so we settled for being Neo-Surrealists!

Illus: Convulsionist Portrait I: Within The Glass [collage/xerox & pencil],1969

from the Neon Highway Interview With Jane Marsh, 2006

Strange Journey, Strange Travellers

It is with some misgivings that I present to a sceptical audience this unlikely report obtained by dubious methods from an undisclosed source. It must be said at once that no independent evidence can be found to confirm the existence of the EOU and exhaustive research has failed to disclose any trace of a similar organisation operating at that time. Furthermore, as the substance of the report is so far-fetched, if not reprehensible, the likelihood that the cautious reader may feel it to be an example of a literary hoax must be very high. Alternatively, the less charitable will simply dismiss the entire farrago as crazy delusion masquerading as outrageous fact. Even so, it may be admitted that our anonymous redactor has deployed a not inconsiderable accumulation of telling details to bolster an otherwise flimsy survey, imparting an air of plausibility if not verisimilitude to the proceedings. Finally, I might mention the inclusion of an article ‘Gnostic Alchemy of the Imagination’ in Nox: A Magazine of the Abyss No 1 (1986) – but this, of course, proves nothing.

Dedicated to the ‘exorcism of illusion’ the Esoteric Order of the Ultrasphere (EOU) provides an intriguing footnote to the occult history of Britain in the late nineteen seventies.

Founded around 1979 by Comus Klingsor and Astrodamus Niger, the Order of the Ultrasphere appears to have been based upon an ideology of anti-mystical aesthetic nihilism. Although sharing some features with modern occultism of the Crowley-Spare-Typhonian variety, a close inspection of the ‘Ultrasphere Manuscripts’ leads to the conclusion that the philosophy of the organisation represented a return to the dark-side of the Enlightenment era.

A fixation with Sturm und Drang, anti-clericalism, libertinism and with the noir Gothic themes of the late eighteenth century ensured that the artistic practices and aesthetic ideas of Klingsor and Niger were rooted in the world of Goya and Sade. They sought to continue the dark, pessimistic tradition that links those artists, via Baudelaire and Lautreamont, with the incendiary actor-poet Antonin Artaud and some other Surrealists. Rimbaud’s Lettres du Voyant are a recurring point of reference in the manuscripts.

One must accept that the origins of the OU will remain forever shrouded in the deepest mystery. The earliest document that has survived is the first letter of a small collection of correspondence known as The Colchester Papers. Addressed to a recipient known simply as ‘NQNQ’, the letter proposes a future grimoire of ‘new demons’ with mildly ludicrous names based on typing errors (‘Ogdogon’, ‘Dawneophyte’, ‘Occultor’ and ‘Desiravle’ among others). Also, the writer (Klingsor) claims affinity with the Black Brothers (‘defectors/challengers of all belief systems – of belief systems as such’) and calls for the Grand Oeuvre (Great Work) to be aligned with the notion of self-initiation, claiming there are ‘no true gurus, teachers or spirit guides’.

In the second letter (Third Thoughts) a system of seven degrees of attainment is outlined but takes the form of an anti-image or mirror image of the traditional cabalistic scheme derived from the Golden Dawn and other mainstream societies. This mirror image of occult attainment arises from the application of the Formula of Reversion – a key concept of the Ultrasphere, just as the mirror was a key symbol. The author says: ‘Mirrors and reflections, images of the anti-verse, anti-matter, black holes…’ The term ‘anti-verse’ may refer to a literary as well as to a cosmological theme.

In another letter with the title Notes Written on Trains, Klingsor demands the construction of ‘new system of magic’ to oppose ‘the black magic of the world theocratic power elite’ who use faith as ‘a mechanism for draining the energy of the masses.’ The new magic of the Ultrasphere will be ‘materialistic, anti-abstractionist, non-mystical…the magic of the shamans v the magic of the priests.’ In this text (under the formula Reality = 0) Klingsor summarises the OU worldview thus: ‘in politics – Anarchism, in morality – Nihilism, in science Relativity, in art – Dadaism, in space – Black Holes.’ 

These documents date from 1979 (the year of The Postmodern Condition and the year the Voyager probes reached Jupiter), but in the archives of the Ultrasphere are numerous other artefacts and images, many of them of obscure date, many dated earlier than the Colchester correspondence. Colchester was often referred to by its Roman name Camulodunum and ‘NQNQ’ may be the same person listed on the membership register as Frater Camulodunumensis.

Illustration VII from a set of images titled Codex Archon (1976) carries the title ‘Ultrasphere (Apocalypse)’ there are two other images from the same year, one called ‘Archon Of The Ultrasphere (The Sacrament)’, and another called ‘Life For Art’s Sake (Initiates of the Ultrasphere)’. The first picture is a pencil drawing; the others are photomontages (collages) in the style of the Surrealists or earlier Dada artists like Hanna Hoech and John Heartfield.

The earliest reference to the mythos of the Ultrasphere in the collection is a different image, this time dating from 1975 and called The ‘Archon of Goth’, another photo-montage showing a volcanic seascape and a demonic figure identified by the artist as the ancient god Set. This quasi-mythology of Archons is clearly derived from certain interpretations of Gnosticism, while the appearance of the god Set may reflect a Typhonian influence. Elsewhere Klingsor and Niger refer to a ‘Gnostic alchemy of the imagination’.

The Ultrasphere Manuscripts comprise four sub-collections. Three collections of holograph manuscripts and a small set of typescripts (photocopied) comprising the Colchester Papers, the letters to NQNQ already mentioned. There are replies from NQNQ, but not collected here.

The three collections of hand-written holographs are numbered and titled Primary Papers of the Ultrasphere (15 documents), Supplementary Papers of the Ultrasphere (10 documents) and a final group of 8 documents called Rearguard Aesthetic. This final collection seems to comprise a set of notes for some kind of artistic manifesto – an unrealised programme for ‘Ultraspheric Art’ in conflict with both the traditional canons of high culture and the official avant-garde..

The bulk of these documents consist of hastily scrawled notes and tabulations, a very few are fragments of continuous text. Separate from the documents are a number of occult illustrations or diagrams intended to visualise various tenets and themes of the system or in some cases to operate as Liberation Symbols or pictorial fetishes. These illustrations may have been intended to form part of a larger, synthesised text or grimoire.

In the papers there is reference to another text or project, Codex Sardonicus: Existence in Theory and Practice (1976-1979), predating the Order, but which Klingsor and Niger used as a point of reference, the basis of their anti-method of ‘attainment’. This was the core of the system, usually referred to as the Axis Mundi (or ‘Axis of the Ultrasphere’) – kind of ‘world-tree’ or central, axial structure that functioned, like the well-known cabalistic diagram, as an ontological framework. But, as described, the Axis was a reversion, or inversion, of usual expectations: it was a katabasis or descent, not an ‘ascension’ model of ‘higher’ attainment. The initiate of the Ultrasphere was expected to navigate downwards, to plumb the depths of his/her own personal hell, or unconscious. The ironical collage ‘Life For Art’s Sake’ shows a group of dandified initiates in the guise of eighteenth century dilettantes in a kind of submarine art gallery full of curious works – above them, on the surface, is the Sadean universe of Terra (terror); the ‘world’ as we know it.

Considerations of space preclude detailed exposition of the theoretical occultism of the OU. A summary of the various topics covered in the Primary and Supplementary papers will, however, provide a glimpse of the range and scope of the collection.

The first three Primary Papers deal with the Paths and Keys of the Axis Mundi. The fourth paper sets out a version of the Grades of attainment. The fifth paper is a list of projects and recommended authors (Auctores Damnati) whose works form the Books of Vital Doctrine or Diamond Dogmas. All these documents date from 1979.

The titles of the rest of this set are as follows: Infinite Initiation, Psychoanalysis, Anxiety, Nihilism, Initiatory Cycle, Fiat Lurks, Magia Innaturalis, Bardo Cartography, Beyond Rebirth and Initiation: The Ultimate Myth.  Paper XI (Fiat Lurks) deals with the macro-history of initiation including such topics as the ‘collapse of tradition’, infinite self-creation and the ‘rupture of the normal’. Magia Innaturalis (Paper XII) talks of ‘radical disengagement’ and introduces various art-historical concerns because ‘cultural evolution reflects the initiatory process’, although, according to Third Thoughts, the ‘object of the exercise’ remains ‘the infinite transfiguration of the self’.

The Supplementary Papers of the Ultrasphere recapitulate similar themes and ideas. The First two Supplements return to the topic of self-initiation. Initiation I is called ‘Unio Mentalis’, Initiation II is called ‘The Sanctum of the Art’. There follow three items of continuous text dealing with blood symbolism (with reference to some quotations from Artaud), death doctrines and the theme of Atavistic Resurgence (this item blatantly assimilated from the New Sexuality of Austin Osman Spare). Another paper Bestial Atavisms attempts to interpret various Symbolist paintings as images of the atavistic phenomenon. The last four papers in this group are titled as follows: Invasion/Obsession, Great Year of Renovation (rough notes on occult macro-history), Springboard to the Aethyrs and Transmutation of the Real. The term ‘aethyrs’ implies a familiarity with Crowley’s The Vision and The Voice and, therefore the ‘angelic’ scryings or workings of Dee and Kelly.

Separate from these manuscripts is another document in a different hand headed Known Members of the Order 1979-1981. There are nine names listed, all of which are ‘magical’ pseudonyms. It should be borne in mind that the nomenclature is deliberately ‘absurd’ in the ‘pataphysical’ spirit of Alfred Jarry. These include NQNQ; Nyktikorax, the Night Raven; Chryse Planitia, Mistress of the Cathedrals; Rodrigo Terra; Imbroglio Korgasmus; Sarchasmus Caesaromagus; Citrus Zest the Whore of Babylon; Comus Klingsor (707z); Frater Retrogradior and Ponerologicus Astrodamus Niger.

It appears that these alleged members of the EOU assigned extravagant titles to each other. For instance one was known as the Purple Legate of the Third Degree Below Zero (zero is the symbol of psychic death or nirvana), another, the Supreme Pontiff d’Estrudo and yet another, Cardinal of the Oversoul (the ‘Autarch’, the ultimate level of self-transfiguration, or initiation, in the Ultrasphere).

There is also an enigmatic note referring to ‘inner plane adepts’ of special interest or importance to the Order. One, a semi-legendary figure named Curion Orphee le Deranger, was thought of as a kind of wandering ‘Cagliostro’ figure and composer of wild musical works, and the other, the very sinister Archon of Othona, was also known as ‘Lord of the Dark Face’. Othona is the old Roman name for modern Bradwell, a fort on the Saxon Shore. The Essex towns of Colchester (Camulodonum) and Chelmsford (Caesaromagus) are linked with Bradwell in a kind of psycho-geographic affinity. Unfortunately, no further explanations are given.

One is left with the notion that the OU was an attempt to formulate a kind of nihilistic counterpart to the psychedelia of the preceding decade, an eclectic ‘counter mythology of inner space’ using the Axis grade system as a framework. Primary Paper IV is a fragmentary list of the grades, ranging from Grade Double Zero (Student) through Grade Zero (Mendicant) to Supreme Pontiff (Beyond the Abyss) and Magus Maximus or Autarch. These grades or levels are restated in the fourth letter of the Colchester Papers: Kinx Om Pox (1980) where each level is associated with a key attribution. For example the Mendicant is associated with the key of Fear/Hate, The Retreatant with Disgust, the Preceptor (Purple Legate) with Cynicism and the Magus Maximus with Autarchy, the infinite transfiguration of the self. Each grade key of the Axis was represented by its own particular Sigil or Liberation Symbol and every key was linked by one of the twenty-two paths mapping out the ‘Strange Journey’ of the initiate.

Here is a quotation from Primary Paper VI Infinite Initiation (Unio Innaturalis):

‘No one has time for politics. Nothing is psychotic. Initiation is total – infinite, the infinite totality of the cosmos in microcosm. The infinite totality of the microcosm writ large in the macrocosm. Each grade creates his own universe, his/her own myth, each grade is creator of his/her own dream…’

There is a lost poem by Comus Klingsor and an illustrative collage picture (still extant in the archive) with the title ‘Strange Journey, Strange Travellers’ – a very strange journey indeed.

Illus: Ultima II, 1979
Illus: Strange Journey, Strange Travellers, 1976

Neither Here nor There

A Memoir of Subtopia

The bizarre is not a matter of choice. It is a matter of discovery.

- Georges Franju

 In those far-off days I was living on the outskirts of South West London, in what may be defined as a kind of ‘Subtopian Landscape’. West Barnes, Motspur Park and the immediate locality (bounded to the west by Beverley Brook and The A3 Kingston Bypass; to the north by South Western main line), seemed a kind of in-between place, neither here nor there. Shannon Corner (before the flyover), with its Art Deco Odeon (Saturday Morning Pictures for local kids) functioned as a dramatic intersection and quasi-industrial focus for perturbation and random incongruities.

These are my ‘missing years’; the years when I did not know how to relate to others, years when the mundane routines and distractions of family life took priority. But my inner, subjective existence was very different.

I ‘escaped’ into all types of paraxial if solipsistic fantasies, often inspired by Hollywood – or magazines devoted to horror and science fiction films. I might dream about Natalie Wood in Gypsy. I might daydream about Ursula Andress as Honey Ryder, or I might fantasize about the sinister but doomed Sylvia Lopez as Queen Omphale in Hercules Unchained. Any one of them might be a facet of my Dark Anima, the prototype for which was a macabre photo I found in a book of the dancer Mona Inglesby in The Masque of Comus.

Yet the epicentre of my little world was, perhaps, the West Barnes Lane level crossing or, possibly, the Carter Bridge signal box on the Raynes Park to Motspur Park line (Dorking Branch) where on my way to and from school, I used to cross the tracks to reach the junction of Barnscroft and Westway Close, next to the Alliance Sports Ground.

At the eastern edge of my private domain, my very own terrain vague, was Cannon Hill Common, a historic  site associated (we liked to think) with stories of Roundheads and Cavaliers, while to the south was the quite remote destination of Motspur Park, itself bisected by the further reaches of the Brook. I tended to think, in an imprecise way, of this entire area as ‘West Barnes’. This imprecision was further compounded by a lack of official clarity: one thought of ‘living in Raynes Park’ due the proximity of the station, shops and the Rialto cinema, yet the postal address was ‘New Malden, Surrey’. On the other hand West Barnes/Motspur Park sat on a boundary between Kingston and Merton and the entire area, known until 1965 as the Merton and Morden Urban District, was obviously part of the Greater London ‘urban fringe’ where those ubiquitous red trolleybuses ran between the Fulwell Depot and Wimbledon Town Hall until as recently as 1962.

This ‘urban fringe’, this indeterminate zone of playing fields, commons, sports grounds, putting greens, rarely-used tennis courts, branch lines, risky level crossings, traffic roundabouts, empty car parks, allotments and bypass embankments; with its numerous notice boards and hoardings; with its wire fences, rows of respectable semis built in the 1930s; blocks of flats and various light industrial ‘works’ (Shannon Typewriter, Venner, Decca, Bradbury & Wilkinson, Champion Timber ) might have appeared the materialization of a kind of cultural void. To the critical observer it was an anonymous tract of anomic space lacking in distinctive character or ‘spirit of place, an interstitial ‘middle state neither town nor country’. In hindsight it seems that this ‘Subtopia’ was an incitement for the imagination; although it might also have been that the bizarre strangeness I experienced in solitary moments was not a subjective projection but more an act of discovery.

Subtopia is bizarre in itself. Most streets were named as ‘something Avenue’, or ‘so-and-so Drive’, or ‘whatnot Lane’. Some streets were called ‘Greenway’, ‘Linkway’, ‘Kingsway’ or ‘Crossways’. There were also streets with feminine names, like ‘Estella Avenue’, and there were similar ‘Avenues’ called Phyllis, Adela or Marina. There were a couple of Avenues with boy’s names like Douglas or Arthur, but I didn’t like those. Estella and Marina sounded like giggling harem girls – I visualized them clad in diaphanous veils, decked out in tinkling bracelets and chandelier earrings – ‘cheesecake’ extras in down-market Hollywood epics or even those imported Italian ‘neo-mythological’ sword-and-sandal ‘peplum’ films. These streets were deserted during the day and there were very few cars parked by the side of the road. Occasionally a little boy or girl (not at school?) might whizz by on a bike.

As I recall, the nearby Bushy Road bypass embankment was a mixture of scrub and uneven terrain, ideal for gangs of local kids to build ‘dens’ and play around with bows and arrows. There were sandy track-ways and a steep flight of concrete steps lined with poisonous laburnum; there were metal milk crates hidden in the grass and there were treacherous patches of nettles.  On this inclined embankment strange finds were made, such as discarded scaffolding poles or stacks of old newspapers and sleazy magazines (Tit-Bits, Parade, Reveille, Famous Monsters of Filmland, The Sunday People). It was noticeable that many of these disreputable publications were mutilated with numerous rips, tears, and missing pictures. In the forbidden pages of Reveille and Parade I found further inspiration for my fantasies. In my imagination famous stars like Natalie and Ursula, now competed with pin-ups known only as Donna, Vicky, Debbie or Carla. On one occasion we uncovered a cache of old 78 shellac records mostly smashed and covered in mud. One disc remained intact: ‘Lawdy Miss Clawdy’ by Elvis Presley.

The nearest recreation ground, just on the other side of the branch line, was guarded by rows of very tall poplar trees. During hot heat-haze summers, around the nearby roads, there was often the smell of melting tarmac. Local allotments were littered with shards of broken terra-cotta flower pots and small plastic windmills. Here, neat grass pathways zigzaged between tall rows of runner beans and bundles of canes. During winter snow covered the Trial Grounds of Carter’s Tested Seeds and gathered on the neo-classical semi-naked statue of Venus that graced the large, round fishpond at the driveway entrance to this imposing building dominating the area just north of the concrete road bridge with its dual carriageway. That elegant, dignified statue of Venus, with her fully-exposed, marble-white bottom, was, ‘for all the wrong reasons’, something of an attraction for many local boys, myself included.

‘Subtopia’ (‘inferior place’ from the Greek word topos) was a technical term originated by Angry Young Architect, critic and campaigner Ian Nairn in a special edition of the Architectural Revue entitled Outrage: On the Disfigurement of Town and Countryside (1955) and later in the book Counter Attack Against Subtopia (1957).

Nairn deplored the disfiguring, environmental blight of the semi-urban, quasi-suburban ‘desert’ of ‘wire, concrete roads, cozy plots and bungalows…a universal Subtopia, a mean and middle state…’ Certainly not as sinister as ‘The Wasteland’, this kind of place was simply bland and uninteresting. Lacking the seedy appeal of the inner city or the glitz and prestige of The West End, Subtopia was the epitome of postwar banality, the result of lazy town planning or the outcome of a kind of apathy where construction rules, culture and taste evaporated into vague, misty indifference. Concerns for important social issues withered away in Subtopia, a realm whose inhabitants appeared to live a charmed life, subsisting in a kind of lower middleclass coma. Even a performance by Bill Haley & His Comets on stage at the Shannon Corner Odeon failed to create more than a minor scandal: ‘Cinema Seats Ripped Up By Thugs!’ a local paper huffed. The event was soon forgotten.

Was my Subtopia more genteel than that derided by Nairn and the conservationists?

Perhaps… or perhaps not; those ‘shabby’ shop fronts and murky corner shops selling newspapers, antiquated postcards, comics, Classics Illustrated, Sherbet Fountains, Liquorish Allsorts, edible Flying Saucers, Gob-Stoppers peanut brittle and vanilla ice cream cones, seemed to hint at all kinds of perverse diversions and subterranean mysteries guaranteed to incur parental disapproval. While those odd, light industrial installations, electricity substations and pylons became a distinct subjective, spectral presence. There were also imposing buildings of unknown use with locked gates, high hedges and security patrols; there was one ‘works’, for example, that made parking meters.

Girl-friends, some from school were never far away: there was Lesley (a keen ice skater) who lived in a nice house over by the Common with its wooded copses and green swards and a football pitch. Or there was perky Babs (brother with an elaborate model railway) who lived on the quiet road called Linkway. Before Babs there was a mischievous little lady known as Pinky who lived in our flats. On school holidays I used to visit the recreation ground with Lesley, who showed me her lace-trimmed knickers one idyllic afternoon. We would sit and watch the distant main road traffic... or drift through wooded walks in an immersive frame of mind that cannot be recreated from this distant perspective.

According to Bob Kindred of the Association of Conservation Officers, Nairn’s campaign of outrage, his crotchety ‘counter attack’ against  Subtopian blight was aimed at such horrors as: concrete lamp standards, ‘Keep Left’ signs, municipal rockeries, chain link fencing, truncated trees, ‘garish’ shop-fronts, ‘pretentious and intrusive’ outdoor advertising hoardings, wires, poles, and ill-sited public utilities. ‘Many of these targets seem eerily familiar but the indignation now seems lacking‘, bemoaned Bob writing in the 1980s. ‘Has familiarity blunted our ability to see how tawdry many of our surroundings still are?’

But then, perhaps for some of us, nostalgia has superseded indignation. 

 

Words From Nowhere

INTERVIEW WITH A C EVANS

Susan A. Duxbury-Hibbert

August-November 1996


You are known as both a writer and an artist. What is the starting point for a project, the drawings or writing?
This is quite a difficult question actually…ignoring external reasons for starting something (like being asked specifically for a poem, or specifically for a drawing) and concentrating purely on the creative viewpoint, one has to recognize the different ‘dynamics’ of different forms. Prose-versus-poetry, collage-versus-drawing. What is meant by a ‘starting point’? In the final analysis a starting point may not be a conscious thing - it’s an inspirational thing. Nevertheless there is sometimes a deliberate, definite, intention to work with visual rather than verbal methods/materials or vice versa, but the origins of the intention are non-rational. A starting point may be generated by idea-level interconnections between verbal and visual output, or continuous immersion in art-literature may prepare the ground for a ‘next step’.

When did you start drawing/writing?
I have childhood memories of drawing from sometime in the mid-1950s. My father had some artistic abilities and tended to encourage me - this was real juvenilia: pictures of soldiers and airplanes or whatever. Later on, about the age of 17 (in 1966) I suddenly started to get more serious about it. The trigger was finding the work of Aubrey Beardsley - the style and general tone of his work was quite an eye-opener...then I discovered Surrealism and started making collages.
Even as a kid I was quite a bibliomaniac, so any crossovers between art and literature interested me. The fact that Surrealism was not just to do with painting was very important. As the first Surrealists were poets, not artists, the whole movement plugged into, and extended, that nineteenth century avant-garde tradition of experimental writing (Baudelaire-Rimbaud-Mallarme-Jarry). This became more and more significant to me. So I got a typewriter for my 21st birthday and started writing: initially fiction (the obligatory, abortive novel and ‘decadent’ short stories) but eventually poetry, after doing some translations of Max Ernst and Messiaen lyrics.

What inspires you to start a new project?
Perhaps inspiration is the unforeseen consequence of immersion - immersion in materials, researches, Myths, influences, precursors. Perhaps, at a deeper level, it is some sort of psychosomatic urge, the result of unfocussed psychic pressure from the unconscious, a surge of neuronal energy, a perturbation of the psychic atmosphere, which finally crystallizes in words and images.
The titles of pictures are a sort of poetry. The collage process is internalized (psycho-montage/ psycho-cut-up) as well as externalized in the traditional Surrealist Ducassian Encounter of disparate material elements. Art emerges from the (al)chemistry of the creative process, through interaction with the prime materia, the massa confusa, of unrefined unconscious matter. Works feed on each other - collages and drawings can inspire poems and poems can inspire drawings. Drawings can evolve from the collage procedure. Works emerge in cycles and spates - groups of poems are somehow related to each other, sets of drawings share the same motifs and techniques.
Sometimes, of course, an external requirement will be the pretext for a project - but the non-rational, chance aleatoric factor must always be there. If a project is to ‘work’ it must be an active element in the transformation process. All art is transformation, the perpetual, unstoppable transformation of the day-to-day in which the mundane becomes the bizarre.

What part, in your opinion, does illustration play in adding to a text?
‘In The Beginning Was The Word’ someone said. Well, don’t believe it. Pictures are primal. The image in the mind’s eye precedes utterance, or, to quote Duke Ellington: ‘There’s always a mental picture’. I think there has to be a kind of synergy - a deep affinity - between any image and the words it is used with. This affinity may not be obvious or concrete. Chance encounters between poems and pictures in the editorial process can often give rise to effective associations.
In a different context one may think of texts illustrating images rather than vice versa. For example The Cascades was a set of poems written to ‘accompany’ some pictures by Rupert Loydell and, more recently, both Martin Duxbury-Hibbert and Norman Jope have collaborated by providing texts (Between Alien Worlds and Zones of Impulse) for sets of images provided in advance of literary composition. In these cases successful!
Illustration depends upon a feeling of ‘rightness’ or integration into the finished product. Equal value resides in both text and illustrations. Textual content can be derived from the images. Literal illustration is ok for factual and instructional situations but I am more interested in these more oblique relationships between words and images.

When did you start publishing your work?
I first started publishing drawings in about 1968 as greeting cards. Then I managed to get drawings
Into various occult magazines during the mid-1970s and also a few lit. crit. articles and reviews from
1980 onwards. My first poetry publication was in Stride Magazine, and Stride published the first
collection of poetry and drawings, Exosphere, in 1984

What artists have influenced you?
The earliest artistic influences I can remember were illustrators - Mervyn Peake (The Hunting of the Snark and other books), Tenniel’s Alice illustrations, Eric Fraser and Joan Kiddell-Monroe - again, this was when I was kid. I really liked fantastic things and, in the case of Frazer and Kiddell-Monroe, hard-edged linearist things. When you’re that young you don’t think about ideas like Abstraction, you react to the imagistic qualities of what you see because that’s the way the imagination is.
Another key influence was Japanese Art. We had some volumes of drawings by Hokusai, which I was always looking at. His work is very naturalistic but it can also be very macabre and grotesque and ultra-stylish. Remembering the period 1966-1970, when I was trying to find my way is very confusing - there were so many ‘influences’.
The closest I got to contemporary fine art or gallery art was Richard Hamilton’s reconstruction of Duchamp’s Bride which he did for a big Tate retrospective around July ‘66. The irony of Duchamp’s stance and the iconoclasm of Dada were very important - an antidote to the Peace ‘n’ Luv culture! But then again I was undoubtedly sympathetic to Psychedelia and Op as well.
I still like Sixties design and art movies like Performance - the influences were an intermedia hotchpotch: Art Nouveau Symbolists like Klimt, Jan Toorop and Khnopff. I like Odilon Redon, Hieronymous Bosch, Grunewald, Durer, William Blake and Goya…Aubrey Beardsley…Alfred Kubin. Also the assemblage sculptures of Louise Nevelson. There was a piece of hers in the Tate called ‘Gold Wall’ which was a stylized structure of abstract, rectilinear box-shapes and compartments encrusted with commonplace, ‘found’ objects such as old chair legs and wooden slats. The whole thing was painted a uniform all-over gold colour. There was a clash of materials in Nevelson’s work, which greatly appealed to me at the time.
It’s necessary to identify different types of influence. There are precursors who influence by style, there are those who influence content and there are those who influence by example. There are some whose influence is a combination of all these factors. This is partly why it is difficult to discuss influences. There is also the problem of ‘originality’. I think everyone is influenced by someone, although lots of artists and writers (in this country at least) think that admitting to influences is like some sort of confession of inadequacy. This is just as complicated with literary influences as it is with artistic ones.

So what about literary influences?
So far as literature is concerned I would have to mention the French tradition: Baudelaire, Mallarme and Antonin Artaud as a major influence in various ways, also Huysmans and Andre Breton. My Pre-formative reading was Science Fiction (mainly British), Fantasy, Horror (particularly Poe and Lovecraft) and all sorts of myths and legends. This established a continuing involvement with ‘popular’ genres that continues to the present.
As I said I’m a compulsive bibliomaniac and read all the time. It all goes into the creative process. The American Beats had quite an impact. Beat style was so un-English, so un-literary, or so it seamed at the time. I remember reading Ginsberg’s ‘Howl’ and Burroughs’ Nova Express and being instantly converted to a more ‘modern’ attitude to writing.
Thinking back to the same period I would name the following ‘literary’ influences: Arthur Machen, Lermontov, Thomas Pynchon (especially), De Quincey, Alfred Jarry (Faustrol), Robert Graves (The White Goddess), De Sade, Gerard de Nerval, Boris Vian, Angela Carter, J.G Ballard, Nabokov (Ada), Barth (The Sotweed Factor), Borges, and Jean Genet.
There were various non-fiction/critical works that were significant I think. For example, Jung’s writing on Alchemy, The Romantic Agony, Marie Bonaparte’s psychoanalytic study of Poe, Masters and Houston’s Psychedelic Art, Robert Greer Cohn’s book on Mallarme, Hans Bellmer’s Anatomie de L‘Image, Colin Wilson’s The Outsider, The Tibetan Book of the Dead, and Opium and the Romantic Imagination by Althea Hayter. A later influence was Samuel Beckett. His work, particularly the short prose and the novels (the Trilogy and How It Is) is a landmark in the imagination. Absolutely no one can afford to ignore Beckett. A combination of factors (including the influence of Austin Spare) induced me to read a lot of occult literature - but that’s another story....

Do you exhibit/ sell your artwork?
I participated in an exhibition called Cross Section in Chelmsford 1968 - but that was a one-off. I’ve never seen myself as a gallery artist or involved in the art market - it just isn’t my scene really. I see ‘originals’ as ‘masters’ for reproduction rather than traditional fine art artifacts. I’m not really geared up to do commissions and things like that. As I said - not really my scene.

What is your method of working?
Steve Sneyd has observed that the poetic act is like trying to snapshot the fragmentary immediacy of the brain’s workings and compared his methodology to ‘a trapped animal’s gnawing of it’s own leg....’. In a sense he is right about this. It is difficult to cultivate the self-awareness and objectivity needed to comment on the methodology of the creative process beyond surface characteristics.
In writing I was influenced by the minimalism of Poe who criticized the viability of the long poem - I don’t write long poems in the sense that Spenser’s Faerie Queene, or Paradise Lost are long poems. So minimalism, even miniaturism, is intrinsic to my method in many respects. Also the Postmodernist blurring of boundaries, perhaps inspired by Borges idea of 'ficciones' - cerebral, laconic, hermetic, labyrinthine, enigmatic - these are often some of the qualities I look for in a sphere where the essential differences between poetry and prose are unclear.
The poetic methodology is most elusive, Often I find myself working with a surreal psycho-montage of wordflow, sometimes incorporating ‘found words’ or cut-ups or phrases that simply emerge from the unconscious (Words from Nowhere). I regard many of my ‘poems’ as borderland texts, neither prose nor poetry. There is a narcissistic ‘working up’ of drafts and an element of faction where quasi-autobiographical or historical research material merges with pure fantasy. I reject traditional prosody as the technique of a dead era.

What about drawing methods? How do you go about obtaining the final image? Do you have a clear idea at the outset, or do you do many variations?
Drawing methods are varied. Often I will work from a store of sketches and notes for visual ideas, which I keep. These are usually pencil sketches but can be ink drawings and doodles as well. Sometimes a drawing can be spontaneous and committed to paper right away. Sketches may be quite expressionistic and unformed to begin with but then go through a number of different of versions and stylisations.
Areas of detail in Rapidograph drawings are done directly onto the final drawing in most cases. These are usually detailed areas of stippling and fine-point decoration, a sort of amalgam of Moreau’s encrustation, Beardsley’s stipple technique, Seurat-like textures and Ernstian decalcomania-like textures. This sort of work can be very time consuming. In many cases compositions are derived from pre-existing collages. Sometimes I use ‘found images’ derived from, say, newspaper photographs or magazines. Sometimes there is a pre-existing mental image and it’s like taking a snapshot. In many drawings there is a deliberate use of ‘negative space’ in the composition - space derived from the chance lines of the pen or pencil.

How necessary is it to you that you are published & ‘known’? Would you continue to write/draw if you had no public outlet?
I am reminded of a section in Colin Wilson’s The Outsider - he was quoting T. E. Lawrence (Wilson saw Lawrence as an archetypal ‘outsider’ figure) who said that a craving for the power of self-expression was the most decisive driving force in his life. This craving is the only antidote to the nihilism of our age. Without this craving for self-expression there is nothing, literally, Nothing.
Artistic creativity is the way to achieve maximum self-expression. This is an end in itself but the craving is capable of transformation – self-expression becomes individuation, individuation becomes self-initiation. An infinite process of self-initiation, a sort of Aesthetic Gnosticism perhaps. In this context publication is irrelevant. On the other hand creative editorializing can become part of The Work. Working with Stride and Memes and other magazines has lead to unforeseen creative activity through interaction, publication itself becoming part of a wider transformation process.

Do you conceive of a contemporary context, or do you feel you are working in isolation?
Well, I do conceive of a contemporary context - I also feel I’m quite isolated in what I do as well! I’ve always been interested in what you might call cultural history - the evolution of aesthetic and religious ideas, so this sense of history helps me to try to define my own contemporary context.
On the other hand my interaction with immediate contemporaries is rather limited these days and I find a lot of SP type poetry and stuff rather alienating. It’s always difficult to name names but, if pressed, I might cite Steve Sneyd, Robert Shepherd, lain Sinclair, Norman Jope, Rupert Loydell and Martin Duxbury-Hibbert as current writers who may overlap with some of my own concerns.
My original sense of contemporary context was shaped by a sort of ‘post-everything’ feeling. It seemed to me that the transition from Surrealism to Postmodernism via Pop, Situationism, Psychedelia, Neo-Dada and Op from 1966-1971 was the beginning of some sort of end - an End with a capital ‘E’, in fact. As Hassan said about Postmodernism: it ‘dramatizes its lack of faith in art even as it produces new works.’
The truth is that, in this era of ‘post-everything’ and loss of faith, one didn’t really look among one’s own generation for a contemporary context. Except, perhaps, in semi-commercial fantasy art, Psychedelia and satire (Roger Dean, Bruce Pennington, Wes Wilson, Michael English, Scarfe, Steadman), one looked to the survivors of the avant garde who were still with us. In the visual arts this meant Duchamp, Chirico, Ernst, Bellmer, Leonor Fini, Matta, Burra and Francis Bacon. I think my graphic style was very influenced by Bellmer - he must be one of the greatest draughtsmen of the twentieth century. In literature there was Andre Breton, Borges, Ballard, Angela Carter, David Gascoyne, Beckett and William Burroughs. One was conscious that they were all still around producing new works. They were the contemporary context for me.
Yet, throughout the period the sense of an ending was exacerbated by the deaths of nearly all these major figures. Breton died in 1966 around the same time as the last major International Surrealist Exhibition (‘Absolute Divergence’). He was followed by Duchamp in 1968, Bellmer in 1975, Ernst and Burra in 1976, Chirico in 1978 and, finally, J. L. Borges in 1986. By the time you got to 1976 we were into the ‘break up of Britain’, The Winter of Discontent and the New Dark Age of the ‘Enterprise Culture’…one tried to build on the previous era.


Illustration: One Gothic Night, 2000

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

Space Opera

GENESIS OF THE MECHANOMORPHS
A Space Opera Memoir

Space Opera was written over a period between 1984 and 1985.
The bulk of the sequence was written between April 4 and April 25, 1985. This comprised four of the seven prose poems, in the following order (1) ‘This Report Follows’ (4 April, 1985), (2) ‘The Neon Fly-By’ (5 April, 1985), (3) ‘Discovered This Other Report’ (14 April, 1985) and (4) the title poem, ‘Space Opera’ (25 April, 1985). These four sections comprised the ‘core’ of the Space Opera story. They had been preceded by ‘The First Report From Neogaea’ (Space Opera 1) written in isolation the previous month (26 March, 1985). This ‘First Report’ provided the immediate stimulus for the cycle, which was then crystallised in April. The final poem in the sequence ‘Anathema (We Are All Survivors)’ was written in May 1985. The introductory ‘prelude’ called ‘Gaze of the Medusa’ was written in 1986 for the Serendipity Caper publication of the complete sequence.
However, the ‘First Report’ referred back to an earlier poem with the title ‘Neogaea’ written in 1984 and included in a loose, evolving series of other poems, sketches and drafts with the overall title Ethos Mythos. The semi-Lovecraftian title Ethos Mythos was at that stage a provisional ‘working title’ finally carried over as a catch all label for a group of poems written (or finished) between 1984/5 and 1986. This group of poems was eventually included in the Stride collection Colour of Dust (1999), and has no direct relation to Space Opera. The 1984 poem ‘Neogaea’ with its disintegrating typography provided the initial inspiration for the eventual saga of the planet Neogaea and its weird satellite moon Neon. It was, initially, an exercise in visual typography, inspired by numerous Cubo-Futurist and/or Dada-Surrealist examples and also by the typographic style of e.e. cummings. An early draft of the poem in conventional blank verse quasi-stanza form was given the title ‘A Report From Neogaea (Necrophoresis)’. The term catagenesis in the final stanza refers to both regressive evolution and a process of cracking and organic breakdown in geology. It was probably this imagery that triggered the idea of the visual typographic ‘breakdown’ depicted in subsequent drafts.

Publication
The Stride Publications illustrated booklet Space Opera (1997) was preceded by publication in editions of Stride Magazine. ‘The First Report From Neogaea’ appeared in Stride 21 (Summer 1985). It was printed on green paper and accompanied by some related illustrations. These comprised the drawings ‘Life on Neogaea’ (1985) and ‘Social Symbioses on Neogaea’ also known as ‘Styx Insect III’ (1985), and two sections from the simultaneous collage-poem sequence Contact Zero (1985-1985).
Three edited sections from Space Opera appeared in a double issue of the US magazine Fantasy Commentator Vol. III, Nos. 3 & 4, issues 47 & 48, Fall 1995, edited by A Langley Searles, with an interview by Steve Sneyd. A version of this interview subsequently appeared in the Space Opera booklet under the title ‘Visions By Association’. The three sections from the sequence in Fantasy Commentator were ‘Gaze of the Medusa’, ‘The Neon Fly-By’ and ‘Discovered This Other Report’.
The complete Space Opera sequence was published in a special edition of Stride Magazine called The Serendipity Caper (Stride 24/25) in Summer (July) 1986. The sequence had a special title page using the drawing ‘The Neo Nova’ (also used as illustration without the title in the booklet) and was preceded by the complete version of Contact Zero. The now-redundant title Ethos Mythos still appears at the foot of the page for some of the poems from the sequence. Some phrases and lines in Space Opera link directly with Contact Zero, for example ‘gaze of the Medusa’, ‘chimaera obscura’, ‘I denounce everything: that is enough’ and ‘the membrane intercepts…’ A case of osmotic interchange confirming that the two were written in parallel and roughly about the same time.

Centre of Gravity – The Video
In February 1999 the London based digital filmmakers partnership OS2 expressed interest in using the published Space Opera text as the basis for a video film. Following discussions with Stride work started and progressed during February-April 1999. The final 6m.30s digital video production, referred to as the ‘onedotzero presentation version’, was based on parts 1-4 of the published sequence and called Centre of Gravity. It was hoped to produce a longer version incorporating parts 5-7 but this proved incompatible with the OS2 production schedule. However, the finished fragment, which includes many lines of animated original text used to overlay sequences of found footage and hi-tech diagrammatic graphics, together with an evocative soundscape of fractured effects and narrative by Firefox, successfully depicts the ‘technological breakdown of communications on board a deep space mission’.
Centre of Gravity was shown as part of wow + flutter 99, the ‘contemporary motion graphics and digital effects’ segment of the onedotzero3 digital moving image festival (in association with Film Four) held at the ICA, London between April 30-May 9, 1999. The Centre of Gravity screening took place at the ICA on May 6 and according to a press release was also shown at the SVC window (Wardour Street) and the soho_inc film festival the same year. Wow + flutter 99 films were subsequently screened at NFT2 in a Digital Underground strand on 10 August 1999.

Artwork of the Mythos and other Associations
The video title ‘Centre of Gravity’ is derived from a drawing of the same name dating from 1984. This ‘Centre of Gravity’ was incorporated into the promotional artwork for a 1985 Stride audiocassette music compilation (Step 50 in the Stride series) using the title of the original drawing.
The compilation included tracks from bands such as Face in the Crowd, Pacific 231 and Celestial Orgy, among others. The drawing itself featured as the cover art of the accompanying booklet and even on a promotional T-shirt. The inlay card for the Centre of Gravity cassette used another drawing entitled ‘The Way Of All Flesh I The Crypt’ (1981) from a graphic series with the general title Resident Aliens. ‘The Crypt’ drawing was rendered in a kind of techno-gothic style that pointed forward to the macabre SF ethos of Space Opera, as did various other drawings from this period. The ramshackle silhouette with its battered wheel and trailing wires in the ‘Centre of Gravity ‘illustration pays homage to Duchamp’s Bicycle Wheel readymade via the kinetic constructions of Jean Tinguely (particularly La Tour, 1960) many of which at been displayed at a Tate Gallery exhibition in 1982. These ‘mechanomorphs’ (the name probably a distant echo of Picabia’s dessins mechaniques) surfaced in a number of drawings included in a series called Satanic Planets (1984-1985) containing many images linked, in one way or another, to the Space Opera sequence.
The mechanomorphs became identified as the inhabitants of Neogaea, the planet of astroscarps described in the original 1984 poem with its disintegrating typography. From one perspective it is fair to say that the main sequence of prose poems written from March to May 1985 were based on, or inspired by, the Satanic Planets mechanomorph drawings and the general atmosphere of the graphic series. Of the seven illustrations in the 1997 Space Opera booklet only two (‘The Scene of the Crime’ and ‘Worker Display Arena’) are new to that publication. The others had all appeared elsewhere: in Stride Magazine (editions 21 and 23) and, as already noted, in the Centre of Gravity cassette artwork. Some were published in two sets of postcards (published separately by Stride in 1985) which also included the drawings ‘Satanic Planets’ and ‘Metacropolis’ (first published in Stride 17/18 double issue, 1984), both sharing an oblique relationship with the Space Opera mythos.
The poem ‘Metacropolis’ occurs in the collection Hidden Limbo (1978) published in Colour of Dust, and, together with the small collage ‘Another Stargate (The Eye of Time)’ dated 1970, may provide the earliest intimations of the imagery of the Space Opera cycle. A small drawing ‘Stargate Variation I (The Eye Of Time)’, from 1994 but based on the 1970 collage appeared in Monomyth Issues 24 & 36 in 2004 and 2005. The phrase ‘the eye of time’ occurs in ‘The Neon Fly-By’.
In ‘Discovered This Other Report’ (Space Opera 4) is the line ‘We escaped the decaying orbit.’ This is an overt reference to the drawing ‘Decaying Orbits’ (1985) from the Satanic Planets collection. This image appeared in the 1985 Stride poetry booklet Decaying Orbits (Step 84 in the Stride series) and has been published elsewhere, including the occult-zine Nox 7 (1990) and The Grail Anthology (2004), from Atlantean Publishing. The image ‘Decaying Orbits’ with its supermassive centre of attraction and in ‘mechanomorph’ style fragmented spacecraft is a symbolic, if oblique, resume of the entire Space Opera story.

Brief Points
The phrase ‘satellite gone’ in ‘Gaze of the Medusa’ is a line from a Lou Reed song.
The 1970 collage ‘Another Stargate (The Eye of Time)’ was subsequently incorporated into a series of Xerox-based repromontage images Another Stargate/Another Room (1987). A sub-set of this series, with poems by Rupert Loydell, was included in Chain Lightning (1989) a project from Apparitions Press. The image ‘The Eye Of Time’ provided the basis for a short poem with the title ‘Some Other Star’.
The French mathematician, who gave his name to the Roche Limit, Edouard Roche (1820-1883) was a real historical figure, known for his work in celestial mechanics.
Glendenning (‘old G’ the Exosociobiologist) is a fictional character. His expedition to Neogaea is situated in the remote past in relation to the ‘present’ action of Space Opera.
The names ‘Cassegrain’, ‘Herschelian’, ‘Coude’ and ‘Schmidtt’ refer to astronomical telescopes and their lenses.
Much of the jargon in Space Opera, such as ‘trophic eggs’, ‘ergatomorphs’, ‘psychogenic symbioses’ and so on was derived from the book Sociobiology: The Abridged Edition (1980) by Edward O Wilson, particularly the description of insect societies and behaviour.

The multi media Centre of Gravity Collection (2010) is listed in the Poetry Library catalogue

Space Opera Publication History, 1985-1997

Space Opera I The First Report From Neogaea, Stride 21, 1985
Space Opera (Prelude) Gaze Of The Medusa , Stride 24/25 The Serendipity Caper, 1986
Space Opera I The First Report From Neogaea, Stride 24/25 The Serendipity Caper, 1986
Space Opera II This Report Follows, Stride 24/25 The Serendipity Caper, 1986
Space Opera III The Neon Flyby, Stride 24/25 The Serendipity Caper, 1986
Space Opera IV Discovered This Other Report, Stride 24/25 The Serendipity Caper, 1986
Space Opera V Neogaea, Stride 24/25 The Serendipity Caper, 1986
Space Opera VI Space Opera, Stride 24/25 The Serendipity Caper, 1986
Space Opera VII Anathema (We Are All Survivors), Stride 24/25 The Serendipity Caper, 1986
Space Opera (Prelude) Gaze Of The Medusa , Fantasy Commentator Vol III, 3/4, Nos. 47/48, Fall 1995
Space Opera III The Neon Flyby, Fantasy Commentator Vol III, 3/4, Nos. 47/48, Fall 1995
Space Opera IV Discovered This Other Report, Fantasy Commentator Vol III 3/4, Nos 47/48, Fall 1995
Space Opera (Prelude) Gaze Of The Medusa , Space Opera, Stride Publications, 1997
Space Opera I The First Report From Neogaea, Space Opera, Stride Publications, 1997
Space Opera II This Report Follows, Space Opera, Stride Publications, 1997
Space Opera III The Neon Flyby, Space Opera, Stride Publications, 1997
Space Opera IV Discovered This Other Report, Space Opera, Stride Publications, 1997
Space Opera V Neogaea, Space Opera, Stride Publications, 1997
Space Opera VI Space Opera, Space Opera, Stride Publications, 1997
Space Opera VII Anathema (We Are All Survivors), Space Opera, Stride Publications, 1997

Related Artwork – Publication History 1984-2008

Metacropolis, Stride 17/18 Autumn 1984, Stride Publications, 1984
Satanic Planets, Stride 17/18 Autumn 1984, Stride Publications, 1984
Centre Of Gravity, Centre Of Gravity C60 (Step 50) [booklet] cover art, Stride Publications, 1985
Centre Of Gravity, Centre Of Gravity C60 (Step 50) [postcard], Stride Publications, 1985
The Way Of All Flesh I The Crypt, Centre Of Gravity C60 (Step 50) [inlay card], Stride Publications, 1985
Decaying Orbits, Decaying Orbits (Step 84), Stride Publications, 1985
The Question, Decaying Orbits (Step 84), Stride Publications, 1985
Contact Zero 4 Flesh Eating Beasts, Stride 21 Summer 1985, Stride Publications, 1985
Contact Zero 5 The Rattlesnake Pit Organ, Stride 21 Summer 1985, Stride Publications, 1985
Life On Neogaea, Stride 21 Summer 1985, Stride Publications, 1985
Styx Insect III (Social Symbioses On Neogaea), Stride 21 Summer 1985, Stride Publications, 1985
Life On Neogaea, Stride Postcards [bronze], Stride Publications, 1985
Styx Insect III (Social Symbioses On Neogaea), Stride Postcards, Stride Publications, 1985
Metacropolis, Stride Postcards, Stride Publications, 1985
Satanic Planets, Stride Postcards, Stride Publications, 1985
Angel With Raiding Party, Stride 23 Spring 1986, Stride Publications, 1986
The Cathedral Of The Damned, Stride 23 Spring 1986, Stride Publications, 1986
The Question, Stride 23 Spring 1986, Stride Publications, 1986
Contact Zero (Complete), Stride 24/25 The Serendipity Caper Summer 1986, Stride Publications, 1986
The Neo Nova, Stride 24/25 The Serendipity Caper Summer 1986, Stride Publications, 1986
Satanic Planets, Formaos Vol 1 No 5 March 1987, Sothis Publishing, 1987
Styx Insect III (Social Symbioses On Neogaea), Nox, Vol 1 No 4 Issue 4 Mar 1987, Disrupters Press. 1987
Another Stargate/Another Room, Chain Lightning, Apparitions Press, 1989
Decaying Orbits, Nox, Vol 2 No 3 Issue 7 Jan 1990, Disrupters Press, 1990
Angel With Raiding Party, Chimaera Obscura, Phlebas, 1992
The Cathedral Of The Damned, Chimaera Obscura, Phlebas, 1992
Angel With Raiding Party, Space Opera, Stride Publications, 1997
Centre Of Gravity, Space Opera, Stride Publications, 1997
Life On Neogaea, Space Opera, Stride Publications, 1997
Scene Of The Crime, Space Opera, Stride Publications, 1997
The Neo Nova, Space Opera, Stride Publications, 1997
The Question, Space Opera, Stride Publications, 1997
Worker Display Arena, Space Opera, Stride Publications, 1997
Life On Neogaea, Space Opera [cover art], Stride Publications, 1997
The Elastic Mirror, Death's Door, Springbeach Press, 1999
Satanic Planets, Cold Print, Feb 2001
Decaying Orbits, The Grail Anthology, Atlantean Publishing, 2004
Stargate Variation I (The Eye Of Time), Monomyth Vol 4.1 No 26 Issue 28 2004, Atlantean Publishing, 2004
Stargate Variation I (The Eye Of Time), Monomyth Vol 5.4 No 34 Issue 36 2005, Atlantean Publishing, 2005
Astroscarp III, Midnight Street, Issue 9, May/June 2007, Immediate Direction, 2007
The Colossus Of Neon, Old Rossum's Book Of Practical Robots, Atlantean Publishing, 2008

Selected References

Bruinsma, Max, Exploding Cinema. Rotterdam Film Course, Sandberg Institute, 1999
Denyer, Trevor (ed.) Midnight Street, Issue 9, May/June 2007, Immediate Direction, 2007
Evans, A C, Decaying Orbits, Stride Publications, 1985
Evans, A C, Chimaera Obscura, The Phlebas Press, 1992
Evans, A C, Space Opera, Stride Publications, 1997
Evans, A C, Colour of Dust, Stride Publications, 1999
Hanson, Matt/ Walter, Shane R J, onedotzero3, Film Four/ICA, 1999
Jebb, Keith, A C Evans Space Opera/A C Evans Dream Vortex, PQR, 1998
Kopaska-Merkel, David C, Space Opera, Dreams and Nightmares, 1997
Loydell, Rupert M (ed.) Stride 17/18, Autumn, 1984
Loydell, Rupert M (ed.) Stride 21, Summer, 1985
Loydell, Rupert M (ed.) Stride 23, Spring, 1986
Loydell, Rupert M (ed.) Stride 24/25, The Serendipity Caper: An Anthology of Prose, Summer, 1986
Marsh, Jane, Jane Marsh Interviews the Poet A C Evans, Neon Highway 13, 2008
Ratcliffe, John (ed.) Cold Print, Feb 2001
Ross, Sian (ed.), Death’s Door, Springbeach Press, 1999
Ryan, Paul A (ed.), Formaos Vol 1 No 5 March 1987, Sothis Publishing, 1987
Sennitt, Stephen (ed.), Nox, Vol 1 No 4 Issue 4 Mar 1987, Disrupters Press, 1987
Sennett, Stephen (ed.), Nox, Vol 2 No 3 Issue 7 Jan 1990, Disrupters Press, 1990
Sneyd, Steve, A C Evans SF Poetry Sequence Space Opera, Data Dump 104, 2006
Sneyd, Steve, A C Evans Space Opera poem sequence, Data Dump 43, 1999
Sneyd, Steve, Flights From The Iron Moon, The Hilltop Press, 1995
Sneyd, Steve, Space Opera: An Interview with A C Evans, Fantasy Commentator Vol VIII, 3/4 Nos, 47/ 48, Fall, 1995
Sneyd, Steve, Space Opera, Data Dump 25, 1998
Sneyd, Steve, Term Speculative Poetry has more definitions, perhaps…, Data Dump 128, 2008
Tyrer, D-J (ed.), The Grail Anthology, Atlantean Publishing, 2004
Tyrer, D-J (ed.), Monomyth Vol 4.1 No 26 Issue 28 2004, Atlantean Publishing, 2004
Tyrer, D-J (ed.), Monomyth Vol 5.4 No 34 Issue 36 2005, Atlantean Publishing, 2005
Tyrer, D-J (ed.), Old Rossum’s Book of Practical Robots, Atlantean Publishing, 2008
Various Contributors, Chain Lightning, Apparitions Press, 1989
Wilson, Edward O, Sociobiology: The Abridged Edition, Belknap Press, 1980
Zine Kat , Space Opera by A C Evans, Dragon's Breath 46/47, 1998

Convulsion Revisited

It might be the case that the idea of Convulsion as a guiding principle arose during a rambling discussion triggered by a short, passing reference to the topic in Patrick Waldberg’s book Surrealism (1965). There may be those who recall taking part in such a discussion in 1967 and who may even remember the very place in Chelmsford where we met – a coffee bar in Duke Street opposite the Civic Centre and Public Library – the last time I looked it was still there. There may also be some who, even today, might recall how, in a crowded, smoky hostelry next to the railway station, the more formal notion of a BCI (Bureau of Convulsive Inquiries, or was it Investigations?) was mooted. Some might claim that such a thing actually existed – on paper at least.
And yet I recall most vividly that it was, in fact, in Villiers Street, near Charing Cross, in a restaurant long since vanished (there was shadowy corner lined with fake books) that the suggestion of a Convulsionist Group was proposed for the very first time. I only wish I could remember the name of the place, but I expect it was a Golden Egg, as the interior decor was elaborate and colourful. We can all agree, I think, that Convulsionism emerged in 1967 for the simple reason that the poem ‘Birth of Convulsion’ dates from that year and no earlier testimonials survive: for a very few the Summer of Love was also the Summer of Convulsion.
It was late afternoon when, walking towards Villiers Street, through the Victoria Embankment Gardens, I came across that embodiment of the Convulsive Aesthetic, or one sharply defined facet of such an aesthetic: the Sullivan Memorial by W. Goscombe John. It was ‘the mourning girl’; an allegory of music grieving for a dead composer that, at that epiphanic moment, caused a veritable frisson of the imagination. This mild shock evoked in turn a quotation from Rider Haggard’s She, which I am very sure read as follows:

…with a convulsive movement that somehow gave the impression of a despairing energy, the woman rose to her feet and cast the dark cloak from her.


It was natural that I then recalled the famous passage from Against Nature where Huysmans decibes Salome's gesture in Gustave Moreau's watercolour The Apparation:

with a gesture of horror, Salome tries to thrust away the terrifying vision which holds her nailed to the spot, balanced on the tips of her toes, her eyes dilated, her right hand clawing convulsively at her throat..


By word association I next recalled an amusing anecdote recounted in a book on Art Nouveau by John Russell Taylor which recorded how, when Burne-Jones admitted that he wished he had seen Blake’s Behemoth as a teenager, a friend exclaimed "My dear, you would have been carried off in convulsions!"
Obsessed with Decadence, I felt the sensual ‘wave-line’ of Art Nouveau, the frisson a l’unison of the ‘Cantique de Saint Jean,’ and certain details of Beardsley’s Salome drawings exemplified the notion of a Convulsive force in a manner that complimented Breton’s eloge du cristal, or Dali’s ‘The Phenomenon of Ecsasty’. Eine linie ist eine Kraft (‘a line is a force’) wrote Henry van de Velde in some forgotten artistic treatise published in the fin de siecle era. Here, I thought, was a kind of continuity, linking the ‘magnetic force’ of Rider Haggard’s awesome Queen of Kor with the Surrealist principle of Convulsive Beauty via the sinuous, ectoplasmic wave forms of Art Nouveau and the galvanic posture of an allegory of music as sculpted for the memorial before me. It was the birth of Convulsion from an allegory of music.
There were others that evening who, because they despised Dali, and for other reasons, argued that Ernst's ‘The Eye of Silence’ (currently on the cover of Ballard’s The Crystal World) and ‘The Robing of the Bride’ epitomised the true spirit of present day Convulsion in art. Together with the ‘secret festivals’ of Leonor Fini and the multiple perspectives of the ‘unconscious anatomy’ described by Hans Bellmer, it was, in the final analysis, Max Ernst who was the guiding light on our quest to become cartographers of 'inner space'. Notwithstanding the still-living presence of Elizabeth Siddal, who seemed, for at least one of us, a more than fleeting presence, Gothic Convulsion in art was exemplified by Rossetti’s absolutely uncanny ‘How They Met Themselves’ (his ‘bogey picture’) while some, even more ambitious, claimed Crivelli, Goya and even Leonardo (think of his crumbling, oracular wall), as precursors.
Yet another asserted the importance of the echoing spaces and voids depicted in Messiaen’s Et Exspecto Resurrectionem Mortuorum (this, despite the anti-clericalism of Convulsion), or the tortured, Expressionist sprechstimme of Pierrot Lunaire, to show that Convulsion pervades the universe of music. Convulsion in music certainly existed, it was said, despite the intentions of composers who were, as we knew, often behind the times. Of course the ‘Liebestod’ from Tristan was always cited in such conversations together with some works by Varese and Bartok, while on other occasions, it was permissible to assert that ‘classical’ music (whatever that was) was no longer ‘it’. Quite rightly, to ‘get Convulsion now’, you should listen to ‘Rocket 69’ by Connie Allen, or The Doors’ ‘Horse Latitudes’/ ‘Moonlight Drive’/ ‘People Are Strange’ – well the whole album actually. Jimi Hendrix and his Experience was certainly Convulsive among the ladies, so were Tropicalia, Brian Auger and anything by Charles Mingus, but especially ‘Ysabel’s Table Dance’ from Tijuana Moods.
Above all, I thought of Wifredo Lam’s hieratic and sinister Altar for La Chevelure de Falmer exhibited in 1947 but not illustrated in Waldberg’s book, and certain images from a television programme called The Debussy Film (1965). It was an unquestioned axiom of dogma, a basic tenet of theory, that every utterance and written word by Antonin Artaud was ‘intrinsically Convulsive’ and ditto Marcel Duchamp. The same was true of every move and gesture by Conrad Veidt in the (‘totally Convulsive’) role of Cesare the Somnambulist or, more obscurely, as the eponymous student in The Student of Prague.
But of course, wishing, for obvious reasons, to elevate some film star or super-model to iconic status, most of us, inspired by The Phantom Of Sex Appeal, undoubtedly defined Convulsive Beauty in the context of ‘the internal (or, sometimes, ‘infernal’) feminine’. Candidates for this iconic role would include Charlotte Rampling for her portrayal of the doomed Elizabeth Thallman in Visconti’s The Damned (1968) or – very seriously – Fenella Fielding; and not just for her appearance as Valeria Watt in Carry On Screaming (1966). There was a positive mania for this kind of nomination with candidates ranging from Louise Brooks to Elsa Lanchester, Veronica Lake, Barbara Steele, Verushka, Jean Shrimpton, (not Twiggy) and Catherine Deneuve. One image, of the model Donyale Luna in Qui etes-vous Polly Maggoo?, became the ultimate icon, although a ‘Convulsive moment’ from Fortunata’s dance (Magali Noel in Fellini Satyricon) was also a close contender. At that time I had not seen a film called The Flesh and the Fiends or, without hesitation, I would have added the names of Billie Whitelaw to the list.
From very different perspectives there were other modes of Convulsion, including Lyrical Convulsion which was a style of ultra-decadent ‘Yellow Nineties’ poetry influenced by the naturalism of Arthur Symons, and Hermetic Convulsion requiring a knowledge of Alchemy but exclusively ‘under the poetic angle’. There were Convulsive Objects (instamatic cameras, cash machines, dictaphones, car stereos, audiocassette players), and Convulsive Places and Buildings (The Hellfire Caves, Museum Street, Centre Point, The Post Office Tower, Liverpool Street Station and Hungerford Bridge among others). Macabre Convulsion drew inspiration from Mervyn Peake's Fuschia Groan, Edgar Allan Poe and Maturin’s Melmoth the Wanderer, while Absurd Convulsion was definitely both Pataphysical (Faustroll, Ubu Roi) and contemporary – as in the ‘Convulsively funny’ dinner party from Carry On Up the Khyber (1968). Radio 1 was definitely not Convulsive at all, and neither was The Liverpool Scene. The Gernreich topless dress was Convulsive but Post-Painterly Abstraction was not – well, not usually. William Burroughs was ‘in’ but Jack Kerouac was ‘out’… and what about Union Jack sunglasses, and all those sort of things? Well, no, not particularly, even though floral or Op Art ties were sometimes worn to Convulsive parties or gatherings at Le Macabre, a coffee house in Meard Street, or the sordid wine-cellar of Dirty Dicks on Bishopsgate. While writing practice was often 'under guerrilla conditions' (cut-ups inspired by Nova Express), the ideal Convulsive fashion style avoided blue jeans and aspired to attain an Essex Exi-gangster look, via Warhol and the Velvet Underground.

An amalgam of Surrealism and Decadence with an element of the Mod-Pop axis mixed with pure fantasy, Convulsionism valued the imagination and automatism above everything – the ideal Convulsive 'moment' is always inadvertent. In their book Surrealism: Permanent Revelation (1970) Cardinal & Short said correctly:

Surrealism has established its own ‘aesthetics’ by defining beauty in terms of a purely affective response to phenomena.

That this ‘excitation of the nerves’ as Angela Carter defined the concept sometime later, was in fact an extension into the mid-twentieth century of the Decadent idea of the frisson nouveau or crise de nerfs was the clever but not necessarily original basis for the Convulsionist aesthetic. It was an aesthetic that flourished obscurely during the era known by some as 'that decade of convulsion', but, more specifically, The Swinging Sixties, and which, in the long term, I suspect influenced no one but myself.

Illustration: Cantique de St Jean, 1968