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

Where The Vanished City Stood

Then where the vanished city stood, towering

Above the Plain of Knives, we saw a shimmering

Transformation. The mist-shrouded desert land

Shuddered and quaked in delirious agony, summoning

Ancient, fearful terrors from beyond the wall,

Beyond the limitations of human thought or wonder;

Obscene, gigantic, disintegrating, multidimensional

Fleshless avatars of torment – such unnatural

Emblazoned monsters from an abyss of unknown malice.

illus: Edge Of Creation (2002)

Second Highway I

..it is needful to trace a parallel road in the air, a second highway...

– Huysmans 

We are dispossessed, we are trapped in enchantment; it is called Normality. REVOLT?

DISENGAGEMENT & REPOSSESSION: THE EXORCISM OF THE NORMAL 

Attack is the best form of defence: all inherited categories of existence and society must be dissolved by the ultimate weapon: THE IMAGINATION. Will, generated by hate and disgust, is not enough, but fused with the creative matrix of the imagination it is invincible. ‘With a shudder, we cross what the occultists call dangerous territory’ – Andre Breton: Manifesto of Surrealism (1924) in Breton (1972) p40 

Repossess your mind/transform yourself. You are reality: you are the past and the future. 

AGAINST MYSTICISM 

Assert the sovereign necessity of self-creation against the self-annihilation of mysticism in all its form. Do not depart from this sacred mission: the destruction of worship.

Worship is the ultimate de-humanization of yourself. The fight against mysticism must be relentless; after it has been crushed ceaseless vigilance will be required to ensure the impotence of belief in all its forms: orthodox, esoteric, spiritual, political: the Nirvana Syndrome, the Curse Program Virus (Burroughs), the EP or the Emotional Plague (Reich). 

Repudiate all Platonic and NeoPlatonic doctrines, which seek to colonize the unconscious and even the symbol. Remain implacably against all magic and religion with elevated spiritual objectives, against all mystical dogmas of unification with others, with god, with society or Das Volk. Repudiate all metaphysical absolutes, meanings and purposes, all so-called ‘divine’ or ‘natural’ laws and interventions of ‘grace’. We must bring about the TOTAL DESTRUCTION OF WORSHIP, even self-worship. 

RADICAL DISENGAGEMENT 

The origin of Guerrilla Poetics:

‘Our troops operate in the area of dream and myth under guerrilla conditions. This area is our cover...The enemy is a noncreative parasite.’ - William Burroughs, First Recordings  

Radical disengagement is the exorcism of the Normal, of Maya, of the evil enchantment – the world of ultimate illusion created by the black magic of the world power monopolies. Against Plato the fascist, against the denigration of reality as a reflection of a supra-sensible world that is only a moral fiction.

Dissociation of perception/creative vertigo, protoplasmic reversion, atavistic resurgence. Arthur Machen, H P Lovecraft (Cosmic Horror), Austin Spare. Breakthrough in plane, ‘outside the circles of time’ (Grant). Neo-shamanism. Urban alchemy. 

Objective Dissociation

Clinical dissection on all parties, cults, religions and beliefs. 

Clinical dissection of the mind.

Clinical dissection of yourself, the elimination of all parasitic accretions of thought, all Pavlovian worship-responses: behavioral conditioning that accepts the Nirvana Syndrome.

De-politicization will lead to total de-sacralization: Nothing is sacred: You have only just begun to exist!

Cultural Subversion: the Grotesque, Uncertainty and the Absurd

Continue the battles of our sacred ancestors who began to undermine the bastions of perception: 

Nihilism

Nihilism stands at the door: whence comes this uncanniest of all guests? – Nietzsche: Toward an Outline: The Will To Power 1 (1885-1886)  

Irony

Sterne, Baudelaire, Laforgue, Beckett, Warhol

The heroism of modern life, dandyism, bitterness; your heart laid bare. 

Objectivity

Poe (Ratiocination), Huysmans (Supernatural Realism), Duchamp.

Huysmans: ‘But it was likewise needful to sink a well-shaft into the soul’ 

Black Humour

Swift, Gay, Burroughs, Beckett, Breton. 

‘Where shall we find such another Set of practical Philosophers, who to man are above the fear of death?’ (John Gay, The Beggar’s Opera, Act II, Scene I, 1728)  

Beckett: ‘No, I regret nothing, all I regret is having been born, dying is such a long tiresome business I always found’ (From an Abandoned Work, 1957) 

Guignol

Alfred Jarry: ‘Please yourself, Pere Ubu but you’ll find yourself in the soup.’ 

The Grotesque &The Bizarre

‘If I am not grotesque I am nothing’ – Aubrey Beardsley.

‘The grotesque deepens life’s outward appearance to the point where it ceases to appear merely natural’ – Vsevolod E. Meyerhold 

‘Dandies deck themselves out and stroll among the charnel-houses’ – Artaud. The Theatre and The Plague, a lecture given at the Sorbonne on April 6^th, 1933 

Gothic Horror: La Danse Macabre of Guyot Marchant, Bosch, Sade, Maturin, Hoffmann (‘we have come to find this Olympia quite uncanny; we would like to have nothing to do with her...’), Poe. Matthew ‘Monk’ Lewis.... Et cetera, et cetera.

Fantastic hybrids, the clash of incompatible elements and the Ducassian Encounter. Dreams, superstition, madness, extremes, fantastic dislocations, chimaeras. The Disquieting Muses, Melmoth stands at the door (‘…and his features underwent a short but horrible convulsion.’). 

The Black Labyrinth: Noircissement and Cruelty 

Cruelty and Spectacle: ‘Out of these peculiarities, mysteries, contradictions and traits, we ought to be able to construct the essential features of a disease which saps the anatomy and life...we can deduce the dark, ultimate action of a spectacle...’ (Artaud: Theatre And The Plague)

Beyond nausea: ‘…this black labyrinth which lies, like a filthy copy of our daylight streets, far below their surface’ (Ostrovsky: Celine And His Vision, 1967) 

Politico-religious blasphemy, visceral expressionism:

Bacon, Grunewald, Goya, Lautreamont, Rimbaud: le Voyant, the radical derangement of the senses. Bacon, Burroughs (cut-up/fold-in). 

Ridicule and Corrosive Satire

Byron, Swift, Fuseli, Ensor, Goya, Jarry, Grosz.

Parody and burlesque. ‘The chief end I propose to myself… is to vex the world rather than divert it’ – Jonathan Swift: Letter to Alexander Pope, 29 September 1725. 

The Uncertainty Principle

I quote from Robert G. Cohn: 

Here we have reached the peak of Igitur’s effort via the absurde, i.e. paradox. In a final attempt to put a halt to the regress he has violently compressed the last-generated opposites by accepting a kind of compromise of madness (later folie utile), i.e. the last consciousness (willed- unwilled), and this is the absurde, or the mensonge (phenom­enon as fiction), and the realite dementie. Mallarme Igitur (1981)  

Or, to put it another way:

In the midst of the word he was trying to say,

In the midst of his laughter and glee,

He had softly and suddenly vanished away­

For the Snark was a Boojum, you see. 

Lewis Carroll. The Hunting of The Snark (1876) 

Uncertainty, Anxiety, Chance, Nonsense: post-determinism supersedes those old bogies: God, Heaven and Papal infallibility. For ‘snark’ read ‘quark’ throughout. The void of non-signification. El Manisero. 

TOTAL REPOSSESSION (NORMAL AND COUNTERNORMAL) 

Repossession of The Body

Re-integration with psychosomatic energy processes via psychophysical aesthetics and visceral expressionism. Austin Osman Spare: New Sexuality; Arthur Rimbaud: Nouvelle Amour; Andre Breton: Amour Fou, Hans Bellmer: The Unconscious Anatomy: L’Anatomie de l’Image, 1957. Fechner/Henry: Psychophysics. Decadence and Dissociation: hypersensitivity, perversity, reversion, very strange flowers. Subtextual automata, deathmasques,

Overthrow of Biological Tyranny. Neurological awareness and ‘unconscious scanning’ (Bacon). 

DESTROY          

·        indiscriminate conception

·        servility of parenthood

·        menstrual bondage

·        the Madonna syndrome

·        sexual normality

·        enforced ageing

·        the spiritual tyranny of death by the afterlife monopolies of the churches of the earth. 

Recovery of Cult-Power

Repossession of the Hieratic: dissolution and control of all so-called religious activities (the ‘mind-forged manacles’ of William Blake).

‘The Iguana girl spoke in her cool remote voice: “All religions are magical systems competing with other systems.”’ William S Burroughs. Cities of The Red Night (1981)

Recovery of symbols and fetishes; the power of ritual, of dramatic spectacle and mythic dramas in public and private life. Christians cannot monopolize the sign of the cross; socialists and communists have no special claim over the colour RED.

Requisition the manipulative techniques of politics and the sermon: restore them to the service of self-creation. You have only just begun to exist. Can you cope with Subtopia? Those things in fields? 

Hermeticism:  The Liberation of The Symbol 

Mallarme: patience, ALCHEMY, vocation, the void, transformation. Des pas sur la Neige.

The Crisis of the Object, the snowbound landscape. The season of the witch.

Death to all archetypes fossilized by centuries of vampirism by the churches of the earth. 

Reclaim the imagination!

Be incomprehensible!

Counternormality 

‘God – or myself – created all possible worlds, they coexist, but men can hardly glimpse even one.’              

Jarry: Ceasar-Antichrist (1895) 

Countermyths. Transfiguration of the personality. Melodrama, mime, double-entendre, Dada-cabaret, high and low fashion, urban blues. 

Ballard’s Crash. Modern myths and urban legends: close encounters with Unidentified Flying Objects. Nova Express. The Infernal Desire Machines. 

INFINITE INITIATION/CREATIVE PARANOIA 

Manipulate images in a synaesthetic illumination of hermetic analogy, inhabit the bodies of animals, converse with inanimate objects; incarnate the absurd in the light of the image. Personal magic, sigilization, nostalgia, modernity, involuntary memory. Surrealism: psychic automatism and the Automatic Muse. Charisma: Max Ernst, Marcel Duchamp, Federico Fellini, Ziggy Stardust. Prose libre. Midi-Minuit Fantastique…frisson of nude vampires in the films of Jean Rollin. Underground movies, Chinese Checkers, Chappaqua… Maya Deren, the Haunted Screen…the sinister somnambulist 

‘I treated my crab-lice with saltwater and seaweed, but a lot of nits must have survived’ – Samuel Beckett, The End, 1954

Winterbourne & Mortlake, 20-31 May, 1982

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

Demogorgon

Meet Demogorgon. Grotesque art is the antithesis of austere high culture: it is an art of unresolved conflict, abnormal ambivalence, polymorphic morphology, the macabre and the bizarre. The grotesque arises at the confluence of the absurd and the burlesque, black humour, caricature, hybridization and irony.

Illus: Demogorgon (The Mixologist), 2007