An André Breton Kind of Day

A portrait of André Breton by Victor Brauner.
(Click-on images to enlarge.)

"I believe in the future resolution of these two states, dream and reality, which are seemingly so contradictory, into a kind of absolute reality, a surreality."

- Quote by André Breton found here.

"Who am I? If this once I were to rely on a proverb, then perhaps everything would amount to knowing whom I 'haunt.' I must admit that this last word is misleading,tending to establish between certain beings and myself relations that are stranger, more inescapable, more disturbing than I intended. Such a word means much more than it says, makes me, still alive, play a ghostly part, evidently referring to what I must have ceased to be in order to be who I am. Hardly distorted in this sense, the word suggests that what I regard as the objective, more or less de liberate manifestations of my existence are merely the premises, within the limits of this existence, of an activity whose true extent is quite unknown to me."

- The first paragraph from Nadja, 1928, André Breton sourced here.

From left to right: Max Ernst, Leonora Carrington, Marcel Duchamp
and André Breton, New York 1942. (Source). The painting in the background:
Ernst's Le Surréalisme et la peinture (Surrealism and Painting), 1942.

"Always for the first time
Hardly do I know you by sight
You return at some hour of the night to a house at an angle to my window
A wholly imaginary house
It is there that from one second to the next
In the inviolate darkness
I anticipate once more the fascinating rift occuring
The one and only rift
In the facade and in my heart
The closer I come to you
In reality
The more the key sings at the door of the unknown room
Where you appear alone before me
At first you coalesce entirely with the brightness
The elusive angle of a curtain
It’s a field of jasmine I gazed upon at dawn on a road in the vicinity of Grasse
With the diagonal slant of its girls picking
Behind them the dark falling wing of the plants stripped bare
Before them a T-square of dazzling light
The curtain invisibly raised
In a frenzy all the flowers swarm back in
It is you at grips with that too long hour never dim enough until sleep
You as though you could be
The same except that I shall perhaps never meet you
You pretend not to know I am watching you
Marvelously I am no longer sure you know
You idleness brings tears to my eyes
A swarm of interpretations surrounds each of your gestures
It’s a honeydew hunt
There are rocking chairs on a deck there are branches that may well scratch you in the forest
There are in a shop window in the rue Notre-Dame-de-Lorette
Two lovely crossed legs caught in long stockings
Flaring out in the center of a great white clover
There is a silken ladder rolled out over the ivy
There is
By my leaning over the precipice
Of your presence and your absense in hopeless fusion
My finding the secret
Of loving you
Always for the first time"

- A poem by André Breton found here

André Breton by Marcel Duchamp, 1945.

"...Breton began to believe that our everyday encounters and chance findings are actually psychologically pre-ordained by our subconscious.

As such, found objects were direct, already existing embodiments of our inner desires, that just need to be found, in a privileged chance encounters.

To trigger these encounters, the Surrealists would visit flea markets in the hope of being ‘called’ by certain items. Because of this, and also due to the group’s interest in primitive art (which they believed was art straight from the psyche, devoid of social interpretations of norms), the Surrealists are known for having been avid collectors of all sorts of objects.
However, the concept that Dali came up with is slightly different from that of chance objects. Dali’s aim when creating Surrealist Objects was to bring objects from dreams into the real world, whereas Breton understood objects as entities which reveal one’s inner desires. We therefore see two categories of objects used by Surrealists: on the one hand, those created from dream-material, which eventually become symbolically functioning objects – as most of them are twisted enough to not really be functional anymore; and on the other hand, objects revealed through chance encounters, which eventually help the Surrealist to fulfil an existing unconscious obsession, or to complete a piece which was missing a little something."

- From Objective Chance and the Surrealist Object. The Surrealists and their relationships to found objects bring to mind Louise Nevelson and her psychic posse (via this post):

"These helpers of Louise Nevelson would get up very early in the morning. She lived in a town house in Manhattan, I believe; and they would go up and down the alleys, looking for discards. They were all kinds of individuals who were perhaps misfits in the outer world, but she believed them to be tremendously psychic. They all worked for her as her technicians, her helpers, in finding objects and wrapping them up in newspapers and paper bags, bringing them home; and then when they had all these treasures before them, they would let the objects tell them where to use them. And this came from a kind of psychic dialogue with the found object – which, I might add, was very similar to what Carl Jung taught many of his patients, to engage in with many natural things in their own experience."

Breton and some found objects... found here.

"About four o'clock that same day a very tall man was crossing the bridge that joins the separate islands. The bells, or perhaps it was the trees, struck the hour. He thought he heard the voices of his friends speaking: “The office of lazy trips is to the right,” they called to him, “and on Saturday the painter will write to you.”  The neighbors of solitude leaned forward and through the night was heard the whistling of streetlamps. The capricious house loses blood. Everybody loves a fire; when the color of the sky changes it's somebody dying. What can we hope for that would be better?"

- From Les Champs magnétiques (The Magnetic Fields), 1920, André Breton, found here. As for the other Magnetic Fields, try here.

***

What's an André Breton kind of day? Well, let me put it this way, don't drive large vehicles or operate heavy machinery.

The Language of Birds & the Alchemy of Love: The Music Box

Still Life With Music Box - digital - © 2016, DS

Note: The original image posted here has been replaced with the most current version.

(Click on any image this post to enlarge.)

"At the beginning there was only Chaos, Night, dark Erebus, and deep Tartarus. Earth, the air and heaven had no existence. Firstly, blackwinged Night laid a germless egg in the bosom of the infinite deeps of Erebus, and from this, after the revolution of long ages, sprang the graceful Eros with his glittering golden wings, swift as the whirlwinds of the tempest. He mated in deep Tartarus with dark Chaos, winged like himself, and thus hatched forth our race, which was the first to see the light. That of the Immortals did not exist until Eros had brought together all the ingredients of the world, and from their marriage Heaven, Ocean, Earth and the imperishable race of blessed gods sprang into being. Thus our origin is very much older than that of the dwellers in Olympus. We are the offspring of Eros; there are a thousand proofs to show it. We have wings and we lend assistance to lovers."

- Excerpt from "The Birds,"  a comedy by the Greek playwright Aristophanes, 414 BC, found here.


"... This thought leads to another, which takes us into unexplored and perhaps unexplorable regions of Greek religious history. The chief claim made in Pithetaerus's preposterous speech to the Birds is, after all, partly true. The Birds were objects of worship to the Minoans and the early inhabitants of Greece before Zeus and his Olympian commando descended upon the peninsula. Birds were not gods; Pithetaerus does not quite say they were. Yet the bird perched on the sacred Double Axe or the pillar-tree was the Numen of the axe or the tree. The Minoans believed, as Nilson says, that the gods - or, to put it more exactly, the divine power - appeared in the form of birds. Again, the most important and wide-spread method of communication with the divine power was by augury. The birds knew the weather; they knew when good luck or bad was to be expected; they gave clear warning of the future to those who could read their messages. Could they have known what was coming so well unless indeed it was partly they who made it come? "

- Gilbert Murray from the introduction to his translation of Aristophanes' "The Birds," 1950.


"Sometimes mythological birds create more than the physical world. Cultures in northern Europe and Asia credited birds with establishing their social orders, especially kingships. A golden-winged eagle was said to have put the first Mongol emperor on his throne. The Japanese believed that sacred birds guided their second emperor in conquering his enemies before the founding of his dynasty. The Magyar people claimed that a giant eagle, falcon, or hawk had led their first king into Hungary, where he founded their nation. The Magyars looked upon this bird as their mythical ancestor...

Many myths have linked birds to the arrival of life or death. With their power of flight, these winged creatures were seen as carriers or symbols of the human soul, or as the soul itself, flying heavenward after a person died. A bird may represent both the soul of the dead and a deity at the same time. Some cultures have associated birds with birth, claiming that a person’s soul arrived on earth in bird form."

-  From Mantrik Garudika's  Bird Figures in Mythology.

"Select characters in medieval Icelandic literature are able to comprehend the language of birds. Ranging from Sigurðr’s tasting the blood of the dragon Fáfnir to Óðinn’s daily dialogue with the ravens Huginn and Muninn, numerous sources will be examined from a comparative perspective. Birds consistently offer important information to individuals associated with kingship and wisdom. The wide chronological and geographical range of this motif will be explored as well as the fascinating theoretical questions regarding why birds are nature’s purveyors of wisdom. With their capacity to fly and sing, birds universally hold a special place in human experience as symbols of transcendence and numinous knowledge; Old Norse tradition reflects this reality."

- Timothy Bourns, from his introduction to The Language of Birds in Old Norse Tradition. (.pdf)

The Hindu God Garuda. For a list of other avian humanoids, try here.

The Language of the Birds

Technically, the Language of the Birds - as it was often described in folk tales and myths in general - literally referred to what anyone might assume it did: the way birds communicate. And, to be able to understand this language endowed one with special powers, knowledge and abilities. As time went on, however, the phrase took on more occult implications. in medieval France it became the secret "Green Language" of the Freemasons and Knights Templar - la langue des oiseaux - and was possibly also utilized by the Troubadours (or Trouvères). During the Renaissance, there were apparently a number of musical languages inspired by birdsong, although at least a few of these were probably composed of simple signals in ways similar to those used by the indigenous peoples of the Americas and elsewhere.

When I first began using the phrase "the Language of the Birds" to describe my own understanding of mysticism, I had almost no formal knowledge of the phrase's history; I had initially found it in reference to a Sufi text, and was attracted to it in a poetic sense. After all, the phrase has a nice resonance to it.  Eventually, however, I began to equate it with language of the higher consciousness, specifically that of the creative muse and its role in automatism. At the same time, I began to intuit there was a transdimensional aspect to it, which I referred to as "the memory of sound". That is, while there is the physicality of sound and its effect on our senses, there are also immaterial, subliminal codes embedded in sound which effect us both emotionally and spiritually in ways that are not currently understood. In this sense, music is, in fact, magic.

The Language of the Birds (& the Memory of Sound): Automatism

Wings of Light - oil on canvas - 1984, Roberto Matta

"Fulcanelli's main point, the key to unraveling the larger mystery of alchemy and the cathedrals, lies in an understanding of what he calls the "phonetic law" of the "spoken cabala," or the "Language of the Birds."

"What unsuspected marvels we should find, if we knew how to dissect words, to strip them of their barks and liberate the spirit, the divine light, which is within," Fulcanelli writes. He claims that in our day this is the natural language of the outsiders, the outlaws and heretics at the fringes of society.

It was also the "green language" of the Freemasons ("All the Initiates expressed themselves in cant," Fulcanelli reminds us) who built the art gothique of the cathedrals. Ultimately the "art cot," or the "art of light," is derived from the Language of the Birds, which seems to be a sort of Ur-language taught by both Jesus and the ancients. It is also mentioned in the Sufi text, entitled "The Conference of the Birds," by Attar the Chemist."

- excerpt from Reading the Green Language of Light  by Vincent Bridges

"Whilst some artists emphasised automatism’s role in discovering hidden aspects of the artist’s psyche, others, such as Roberto Matta, valued it as a means for uncovering hidden aspects of objects and for the exploration of what lies beyond the confines of the visible world. Its optical image is just one aspect of the existence of an object. Galaxies, crystals and living matter go through processes of creation, existence and destruction. They exist in time, change with the passage of time and can be observed from multiple perspectives. Conventionally, however, they are only depicted at a fixed point in their history, from a single point in space and, inevitably, with a palette limited to colours which reflect light of a visible wavelength.

To his attempts to use automatism to give form to those things which cannot be seen except as an inner vision, Matta gave the name ‘psychological morphology’, a phrase Colquhoun used to describe her paintings of the 1940s.  For the painters involved in this theorising – primarily Matta, Esteban Frances and Gordon Onslow-Ford – the possibilities were, literally, endless; ‘It is a Hell-Paradise where all is possible’ wrote Onslow-Ford. He continued; ‘The details of the farthest star can be as apparent as those of your hand.  Objects can be extended in time so that the metamorphosis from caterpillar to butterfly can be observed at a glance."

- excerpt from Richard Shillitoe's excellent online article: Occult Surrealist: Ithell Colquhoun and automatism

"We are still living under the rule of logic, that, of course, is what I am driving at. But in our day, logical procedures are only applicable in solving problems of secondary interest. The absolute rationalism still in fashion only allows us to consider facts directly related to our own experience. The aims of logic, in contrast, escape us. Pointless to add that our very experience finds itself limited. It paces about in a cage from which it is more and more difficult to free it. It leans, it too, on immediate utility, and is guarded by common sense. Under the flag of civilisation, accompanied by the pretext of progress, we have managed to banish from the spirit everything that might rightly or wrongly be termed superstition, fancy, forbidding any kind of research into the truth which does not conform to accepted practice. It was by pure chance, it seems, that a part of our mental world, and to my mind the most important, with which we pretended to be no longer concerned, was recently brought back to light."

- excerpt from Andre Breton's 1924 Surrealist Manifesto

***

M'onde - oil on canvas - 1989, Roberto Matta

(Continuing where I left off), have you ever come across a particular scene (via a movie or some other form of entertainment)... which goes something like this: a man is walking down a city street shouting oaths to an invisible entity, and the passersby think he's mad... deranged,* but, in reality, the invisible entity actually exists - the man really is communicating with someone or something - and the passersby are merely missing the overall picture (?). If it isn't already, it ought to be the standard metaphor for all creatures "paranormal". Ghosts, aliens, fairies, Yeti, whatever. Some of us see them, some of us don't. The ones who do are immediately labeled delusional... while the ones who don't - for the most part - file their nails and sit complacently on their sofas, in the safety of a bedroom or living room or media room, watching bogus "reality" shows on whatever pixelated screens they possess. But, meanwhile, there's an elephant in that room. Or, maybe a bird. A wild bird which has flown into the room and has begun plummeting against the walls in panic and desperation. And, because no one knows quite what to do - and the program is over anyway - they wander into another room and close the door.

End of metaphor.

Artists, on the other hand, stay in that room... with the elephant... with the bird... with no pixelated screens to distract them. That is, unless they're a certain breed of digital artist, but, at this point, the screen is blank, apart from maybe a shadow of a large ear, or dim trails from a flapping wing, or the bright glints of light on a splintered beak. Images from the unconscious are hard to pin down. They're anomalies in a different language... poetry in unspoken words. You might say, (re: quote above) an unspoken cabala, the true language of the birds... and, invisible birds, at that.