The terrestrial cephalopod

Shroud in sloe bloom

2012-01-01T04:40:00.000-08:00

There is a woman, appropriately undressed and swept in sheets, who wakes up in the morgue. Lunar-like blue-grey light suggests it is night and there is a window. Nobody knows how it happened, there was just this mess made, and the sheets left behind, and then she seems to have resumed her life in secrecy.

Far later, after trainrides and sloe bushes, but still asleep, I am struck by the possibility that this woman in the morgue was Leonora Carrington.

one of several legs

2012-01-01T04:36:00.000-08:00

Sheila Legge, who was the "surrealist phantom" in a few photographs and live performances in 1936, remains the surrealist phantom in her elusiveness. Biographical data about her are very scarce, and when you are searching for them, you end up in more traces of others' similar and similarly futile quest than in any answers.

Sheila Legge was, according to her contemporaries, an important presence in the early English Surrealist Group in 1936. She was a good poet, she had a secret affair with René Magritte, she made her famous appearances as the surrealist phantom, and she disappeared. She came from Oxford to London, but her birthdate remains unknown just like all the details of her background and later life.

Among the false leads surrounding this absence of biographical information, a few Sheila Legges or Leggs have died in recent years (though all seem too young to be her). Sometimes there will involontarily gleam forth some perhaps surrealist humor even in her independent namesakes. The Glasgow Herald of 19/3 1988 reported that "Meningitis victim Mr Andrew Buck, 24, has been brought out of a deep coma by his neighbour's bark. Mrs Sheila Legg sat at Mr Buck's Bristol hospital bedside mimicking her two dogs as he lay unconscious for four days."

Kaleidoscope

2012-01-01T04:28:00.000-08:00

We'll be damned! Finally there is a book available about the surrealist movement, as not confined to a certain "heroic" period or a certain famous geographical distribution; but as truly internationalist and a lasting pole of regroupment, as it actually is! Is this the first time ever a comprehensive presentation of this is compiled before the eyes of the reading public?

728 pages of Miguel Perez Corrales Caleidoscopio surrealista is now available (La Página, Tenerife), and on the side of it Miguel is posting plentiful newsflashes and selected highlights of the past in his newly launched blog Surrealismo internacional.

(more detailed discussion forthcoming at the Icecrawler)

Dream Painting: Ice Tooth and Flying Meats

2011-12-18T15:10:00.000-08:00

Gabriella Novak: "Ice Tooth and Flying Meats". Aquarelle on paper
IMAGINATION HAS NO MERCY

Lecture # 2 on Atmosphere

2011-11-12T16:32:00.000-08:00

Mesozoic Assemblage Art: Giant Triassic Cephalopod

2011-10-11T12:42:00.000-07:00

News bulletins tell us that yesterday at the Geological Society of America annual meeting in Minneapolis, there was a presentation suggesting an explanation for the weirdly geometrical patterns of ichthyosaur bones at a famous site in Nevada: an unseen giant cephalopod who would arrange the scraps from its giant meals according to patterns that pleased it.

Read the abstract of the talk, or one or the other among newsflashes.

Malacological-musical anecdote

2011-09-24T08:33:00.000-07:00

Spending a stint in the US, yesterday I attended a part of the Baltimore improvisation festival High Zero – it turned out that by chance the marvellous violinist my friend Katt Hernandez, about whom I had just written (just scroll down) here, was coming over from Sweden at the same time as me and playing here while I was in the area. One of several notable musicians catching my attention this evening was bassoonist Katherine Young, squeezing a wealth of strange, atmospheric, partly unheard, noises from this unusual instrument. Then let me mention that I noticed someone in the audience hanging around with the other musicians (most people know each other at impro concerts) as somehow striking and whom they called Amy. Later studying the festival program, I realise she was one of the performers too, only not playing this particular evening. The program informed me that Katherine Young and Amy Cimini both are some kind of musical prodigies from New York City, playing in all genres and being some kind of local superstars, with Cimini also having a PhD in musicology and studying philosophy of music. This might have interesting aspects or not, but what did arouse my interest was that the two had a duo, named "Architeuthis walks on land". For non-malacologist or cephalopodophilic readers, Architeuthis is the giant squid. Thus, the terrestrial cephalopod. A sibling of this site, or just another harbinger of an upcoming invasion?

Two instances of new space

2011-09-14T11:29:00.000-07:00

A few days ago I met, and saw perform, two musicians whom I feel inclined to count among my favourite performers, and to say something about why. Both relate sound to space, in a way that makes it once again perhaps possible to say something about the nature of musical improvisation and its remarkably little analysed general relationship to inner models, automatism and atmosphere.

There is something rather uncanny about how as soon as Katt Hernandez touches the strings of her violin with her bow, a space is being instantly created, a particular cave suddenly claiming the area it happens to occupy, a hollow full of rain and flashes. We could see it as a bubble in reality, or we could regard it, considering the fact that it is framed by being triggered via the ears, as the charged void filling our cranium. It's like magic. The weird riverlet, the lit tunnel, the furry bloodstream of the tones and sounds gushing forth takes us places we'd never thought we could go. If varying the pitch of a violin note habitually makes us feel a certain dizziness, or to nervously look around for insect swarms, or have the feeling that we are seeing the air densifying, the storm brewing and the buildings start crumbling, these are still but temporary rafts to grab on to in the midst of this flow which fundamentally remains in the yet indeterminate, that which is perpetually becoming. Hers is a magic formula for opening up this space, and some of our imaginary lives are curled through its tunnels like an unusual respiratory cord through muddy waters, glowing in ore scarlet like the proverbial red thread.

Henrik Olsson sits in a circle of a few chosen objects, waiting, concentrating, and then dancing around among them, barely touching something here something there, thus making these objects sing, in an unexpected way. The way they sing and ring tends to build up an image in architectural terms. Also the liberal use of silence takes part as one of these solid building blocks. It looks like an inner model, a vision. His controlled yet organically disenveloping movements, this dancing or ritual patterns, tends to wonderfully emphasise the aspect of eroticism in musical improvisation, since what there is emerges suddenly out of the conjunction of smooth movement, touch and sound. Unafraid of waiting in silence, unafraid of clear and pure sounds, even unafraid of emerging raw harmony, his erecting this particular castle in the sky, is a conjuring act too, a poetic witch recipe at a modest oven, cooking up this strange mist that takes the shape of endless stairs, unusual angles and incredible little ornaments. Not to mention the frogs and little birds hiding in nooks, crevices and spandrels, squeaking, telling their weird anecdotes. And chaotic yet calm reflections of light and sound between these cloudwashed surfaces. Space.

So both Katt's and Henrik's are conjuring acts, directly involving space: while the one is using her bow as a wizard's staff to immediately create a new, imaginary, real space; the other takes more time to shamanistically dance through a temporarily charged space to slowly build up that new, imaginary, real space. For those who don't see what I mean by "space" here, start with "atmosphere". Any atmosphere or ambiance which is very clearly emerging from some psychic beacon (a manifestation of creativity, a thought assuming its rights, a poetic act, be it arising out of one mind or from a point of objectivity or intersubjectivity) charging the situation with something unusual and tangible, above a certain threshold where it is undeniably tangible, is a spatial manifestation of the imaginary. In some way it occupies the same spot as the ordinary space where it emerges, which can be described in euclidian coordinates, yet still it pushes this common space aside.

If both are highly trained, experienced and concentrated, (and especially Henrik emphasises that he has to move very exactly so as to pull the full sound out of his chosen percussive objects rather than just a muffled clattering), they still cannot be said to be "in control"; the purpose of training is to make that which is learnt obsolete, to be able to enter into the communion, first with this impulse, but not with the impulse because that's not primary but in a sense merely a response too, but rather with the instrument, but not with the instrument because that is just the tool in the magic process, half-assimilated half-antagonist, alien extension of the body, but perhaps rather specifically with this new imaginary space being realised in the moment, and the sea of possibilities inhabiting it?

(Of course I may have to emphasise that Katt and Henrik may not at all share my particular interpretation and thoughts. And that this is not a review of that particular performance evening at Fylkingen, which contained other highly notable elements too such as Tippi Tillvind's aggressively shapeshifting photocollage and Erik Ruin's lively space-weaving live light projections)

Mattias Forshage

The Uncanny Tardigrade

2011-08-23T10:58:00.000-07:00

On Lovecraft's birthday and Benoit's deathday on the 20:th of August, a celebration of the uncanny at The Secret Garden in Stockholm. Some pictures with readings by Jonas Enander and Mattias Forshage, and musical performance by Katt Hernandez, Johannes Bergmark and Tippi Tillvind:

Additions to the constellations of known skies

2011-06-23T02:41:00.000-07:00

A few minor updates:

The investigations in the phenomenology of the infernal machine (previously promised in an earlier post here) are posted in english and turkish (far down, keep scrolling) in the "Destruction 2011 Final report"

Webpage for International surrealist exhibition in Reading, Pennsylvania, US january 2012 is now up.

Recent surrealist meeting in Athens including among other things a discussion and exhibition on the theme of "Surrealist survival kits" was a great experience and results will be popping up in different forums.

Limestone quarry phantoms

2011-06-16T14:29:00.000-07:00

The surrealist group exhibition at the Nationalgalleriet, Skomakargatan 3 in Old Town, Stockholm, is at the moment of writing still open a few more days (-18/6) and among the sights to be seen there are the following:

(Some pictures from the opening are displayed at the swedish-language sister site)

Art

2011-06-16T14:23:00.000-07:00

Speaking of art, we should perhaps admit that the post at this blog of six months ago, listing sites of contemporary Swedish artists that we consider interesting for one reason or another, is being continuously updated (yet out of sight) with whomever gets in our way in a manner that results in some kind of spark. Check it out here.

Curtains of the palate

2011-06-16T14:15:00.000-07:00

The ongoing surrealist group exhibition in Stockholm marks the first collaboration between the group and the film collective Gomfilm. Some info and a small smorgasbord for the palate is to be found at www.gomfilm.com

Symbiotic Lime-Stone Quarry Phantoms

2011-06-07T14:59:00.000-07:00

– Yes my marble eyes are still working

The Surrealist group in Stockholm, with friends, invite you to their exhibition
Location: Nationalgalleriet, Skomakargatan 3 in Gamla Stan, Stockholm
Opening: Saturday June 11, 6pm to 9pm
Opening hours: June 12 – 18, 3pm t0 9pm

Paintings, drawings, collective projects, sound, scents, video sculpture and poetry readings near the place of the skull.

Book table in the gallery with publications from the 25-year history of the Surrealist Group.

Sphinx Bokförlag presents the newly republished Swedish translation of André Breton's surrealist manifestos.

Participants:

Joel Abrahamsson
Christian Andersson
John Andersson
Johannes Bergmark
Peter Bigestans
Bukalemun
Paul Cowdell
Christofer Dahlby
Jonas Enander
Kim Fagerstam
Çeren Findik
Merl Fluin
Mattias Forshage
Helgi Fridjonsson
GOMFILM
Patrick Hourihan
Riyota Kasamatsu
C M Lundberg
Robert Lindroth
Emma Lundenmark
Niklas Nenzén
Eva Kristina Olsson
Prismaginos
Sphinx Bokförlag
Theoni Tambaki
Tippi Tillvind
Ika Österblad

For full information:
http://www.surrealistgruppen.org/LimeStoneQuarryPhantoms.html
http://surrealistgruppen.org/kalkbrottsfantomer.html

Background info:
http://www.surrealistgruppen.org/experienceof.html
http://www.nationalgalleriet.just.nu/
http://sphinxforlag.se/surrealismensmanifest.htm
http://styxforlag.com/

Field characteristics of the infernal machine

2011-05-21T06:16:00.000-07:00

a collective work by the Stockholm surrealist group

executed in Yikkim 2011 exhibition in Istanbul may 2011 by Johannes Bergmark and Mattias Forshage,

(with integrated pre-cooked parts by Emma Lundenmark and Ika Österblad)

based on a long series of games, discussions and investigations in Stockholm, among CA, JA, EB, KE, JE, MF, EL, NN, IÖ, etc.

(nb the wrecking crane is not to be seen, since it was hiding on the balcony)

(detail: the route up the ladder from the bathtub)

(MF and JB playing on the machine)

Texts about the phenomenology of the infernal machine to appear elsewhere, while its metaphysics are treated in Swedish in a recent blogpost, its particular visual mechanism in the "behind the image" series to appear elsewhere...

Menu board

2011-05-21T06:12:00.000-07:00

of the bar opposite the exhibition building of Yikkim 2011 (Destruction 2011) Istanbul

(chalk drawing by Ceren Findik, Theoni Tambaki, Mattias Forshage)

Lord Peter in the City of Jackdaws

2011-05-08T12:57:00.001-07:00

Lyric sheets for a lost concept album

for John Andersson

1. Lord Peter Quits the Band

His lordship’s riding the underground
With a golden baboon sitting on his knee
And while the baboon sits and looks around
His lordship’s combing its golden hair
And singing it lullabies shiny as beer
They’re a crime-busting duo
And they’re guarding the city
And they say click-clack, click-clack, click-clack

His lordship bailed on the honeymoon
And rode the tvärbanan to Alvik and back
And sat on the platform with open flies
And a grasshopper jumped from between his thighs
Which are harder than sugar
And whimper like meadows
When he says hush-hush, hush-hush, hush-hush

His lordship’s eyeliner’s started to run
As he watches Miss Vane climb the scaffold steps
Then he stalks through the grounds of the royal estate
In a harlequin costume and naked feet
He’s packing a pistol
With red bees for bullets
And Miss Vane’s lovely throat goes snick-snack, snick-snack

2. Lord Peter Has His Secrets

Somewhere beneath the inlet
Beneath the grey horizon
He scrabbles among the reed beds
Frantically looking for his grandmother’s musical box

Its revolving dark interior
Absorbs those black dimensions
When the boys catch fire under water
And grebes dive up to break the surface of the sun

3. Track three (lost title)

He tethers his steed
By the methadone clinic
And heads into Söder
To gamble for eyes

Starts in the wet bars
Around Medborgarplatsen
Cops a feel at the bar
As he orders his port

And cuts quite a dash
With his white-painted forehead
Playing nursery poker
And chancing his arms

The planes of his face
Start to glitter like harpies
The sway of his torso
Leaves marks on the stairs

As he laughs at the pearls
And police in his boudoir
And scatters glass shards
Through his own scalding hair

And dances in fountains
Does coke in the ladies
And ejaculates chaffinches
Over his hands

Then hotwires the sculpture
Of George and the Dragon
And impresses the ladies
With his knowledge of Greek

Spends the dog-end of night
In the bell-end of labour
Wakes up in the icehouse
With scars on his back

4. Tender Raven Lullabies

Hush little raven, don’t you squeak
Daddy keeps his black tongue inside his beak

And when that black beak breaks and falls
In the night that tongue will come after us all

And if it catches you on the stair
Then mummy will love you in the rocking chair

And if it catches you under the bed
The mummy will love you with a swollen head

But if it catches you on the wing
The Little Lord Raven will speak and sing

And if he flies as he sings so fine
He’s just gonna break this spine of mine

5. The International Language of Ice

Queen of scaly creatures
Her fist becomes a cloud
Sky glitters beneath her
As all the world goes west

Chorus:
He drinks it down, he wipes his chin
Oh Peter let the darkness in

Beast of other natures
Repetitive as coal
Burials and fractures
In complementary coils

Chorus:
He drinks it down, he wipes his chin
Oh Peter let the darkness in

Cuss-words in the pantry
Discharge of a vice
Sun cream on a latchkey
The earth swallows the sea

Chorus:
He drinks it down, he wipes his chin
Oh Peter let the darkness in
He drinks it down, he wipes his chin
Oh Peter let the darkness in

6. The Man in the Blue Mask

Here it comes like an eel again
Suckling livestock to drain the fen

There’s a man waiting
In a blue mask
With a scrumping-halter
In his golden hand
And he pays off the gardener
And he’s waiting for night
And he’s cranking the juicer
In the greenhouse

There’s a man standing
On the castle grounds
And he’s wearing skis
That are made of rifles
That shoot small bells
Right into the crowd

Here it comes like an eel again
Suckling livestock to drain the fen

7. Sunrise

Peter wants to go dill-fishing
Clod-clipping, skinny-dipping
Declare war on the shamans
And ride oily steeds
Through the forest of pigs

He checks out at sunrise
King of kings, lord of flies
With hieroglyphs behind his eyes

His chauffeur puts the car into drive
Nobody lives in the woods

Pdf version available to download here.

Autobiographical nightmare

2011-05-02T08:06:00.000-07:00

Uncomfortable yet undeniably entertaining to see one's life in the mirror of a television screen, one's life in the proverbial bush of ghosts, with one's dead father sitting nearby in the sofa enjoying the show. O all the things we thought we had done, and now reduced to the inquisitive monkey making elaborate faces just to try to identify which of the characters shown in the mirror is in fact oneself-

a little game by Kalle, Mattias, Emma, Niklas and Kristoffer N

Maresfield gardens

2011-05-02T08:05:00.000-07:00

Hanging by just a little trail of the old dogs hair

and retaining the colors of a few hours sleep

far too bright and spacious

as the sordid background for a sleepy murder

with bees and pleasantries and a small murmur

all that which there was no way of having become

2011-05-02T08:03:00.000-07:00

http://destruction2011.com/

just behind the forest curtain

2011-02-21T09:24:00.000-08:00

A dream image: I was pointing to an eagle flying towards us, but it turned out to be a swan (they are just as big, of course), and then I saw that just behind a thin curtain of trees there were big Maya monsters looking at us, and behind the trees on the north side of the road there was a huge polar bear sporting a cap. My first main reflection based on all this was that huge objects in dreams tend to be 20-30 meters high, like a normal 9-storey apartment building or slightly higher than standard trees in a boreal forest that hasn't been allowed to reach old growth. If they were higher, it would be difficult to see them well when standing close...

Librarians of the dungball

2011-01-30T07:34:00.001-08:00

The sister site Icecrawler/Heelwalker typically posts long theoretical works which may not be suitable to read on a computer screen or with the constraints on typographical options imposed by the blog format. Many of the writings there, and elsewhere in the general area, have now been collected in theme-based pdf anthologies, available at the new Bibliotheca onthoplanctorum pdf library at the Stockholm surrealist group site.

Romantic afterharvest

2011-01-30T07:31:00.000-08:00

Investigating romanticism is a laborious task, very much like the slow scavenging of yesterday's battlefield in the morning, looking for body parts severed in suitable sizes by the canons and bombs, to collect in one's rucksack for the evening's poorman's barbecue. (I couldn't believe he was building the bonfire naked.)

Romanticism is a hermaphrodite with huge breasts and a huge penis, with rodent foreteeth, and some difficulties walking.

Romanticism is a clay pigeon machine, spurting out clay pigeons which are breadcakes of pizza dough, covered with blood as if it was tomato sauce, but not yet with cheese, so that during their aerial trajectory they collect seeds and spores and grow a luscious vegetation or at least a decent turf of grass.

Romanticism is located at the south end of the big lake, at the edge of the fault, and the sun rarely shines. Would you like to have your sand shipped from there?

Romanticism grew as a parasite in the longing to be loved of a sweet little witch who was a christian anarchist riding a broomstick. It acts like a big snake. It knows who its enemies are but not its friends. These are the outskirts of town. Our friend the little witch is left in the middle of the lawn at dusk.

Romantics be recognised by their sloppy beards, which are completely unintentional, but far better than scurvy.

But the ones you easily identify drunk in the cellars are on their way losing it. Usually you see the beard emerge as a result of your own doubt. And you never know with all the karyatids, with the reeds by the pond, and with the scaffolding at the construction site. The women of romanticism are invisible in certain angles. Their beards will emerge only as the Cheshire cat's smile. Or through the glass coffin. You never know if you are looking in or out.

The power of romanticism was due to the fact that it was speaking Finnish at a time when only the devil knew how to speak Finnish.

Because romanticism is made up entirely of skarn minerals. All this pubescence and all this blood, all this cursing and all this lovemaking, are epiphenomena. As extenuating circumstances they are held forth by the followers. Romanticism cannot be reeled in.

MF (which one of them?)

The example of swedish romanticism

2011-01-30T05:13:00.000-08:00

Time for a new offensive against narrow rationalism?

A new text by Mattias Forshage, presenting an overview of situation, ideas, aims and poetry of the romantic movement in Sweden, starting out from the perspective of the importance it has had for the surrealist activities here – is now made available at the "Bibliotheca onthoplanctorum" pdf library. And perhaps especially in these days, taking poetry seriously remains one of the most promising banners for the resistance against utilistic-ideological call-to-order power-supporting no-nonsense narrow-rationalist blinders-reinforcing alleged Enlightenment...

(also available in a swedish version at the same address)

Summer dreaming

2011-01-17T14:48:00.000-08:00

The golden U-turn
The dog-glass bowl
The only restaurant cheek
The summer has kissed
She is the reign of the animal
She listened to me
There’s always torture
It only transpired
Then turning the wheel
Clearing conscience with
The spiral kiss
False erector she
Of the blameless life
Swollen horse soul
The hardy Winchester goal
I concur when
Targets use only chalk
Crystals insult me
She’s a sensory mean
Take your bangles off
Cos they’ll be destroyed

Theory of Flux

2011-01-07T10:16:00.000-08:00

Tough plant foods are good for the jaw musculature but may be detrimental to metaphysics.

contemporary art in sweden?

2010-12-23T09:07:00.000-08:00

We do not claim we have ever reached – and indeed we hardly ever tried to reach – some overview of swedish art, to see where the hell there might have been fresh imaginative-investigative reveries-interventions pursued in this particular sphere, this problematic sphere which to us seems more or less completely doomed and derailing-diverting as a place, but which obviously remains an area where many scattered impatient minds will go to pursue occasionally perfectly surrealist instincts, in the absence (or mere isolatedness and relative weakness) of large-scale integrative ludic-experimental-utopian projects that would frame and boost all creative compulsions in a more adequate context...

Instead we have just tried to memorise those somehow interesting artists who have crossed our path or caught our eye during the past 25 years, and often we've failed to do even that. A certain polemical lack of interest in art, simply to counter the still dominant confinement/misunderstanding of surrealism itself as being a tendency in art, has indeed usually kept our attention elsewhere.

But with a tool such as a blog, we could at least present without further commitment an imperfect list of such artists whose work at least somewhere has some such freshly disturbing aspect – or rather only of those websites (usually but not always personal ones) that may perhaps betray this (thus it is clearly not an exhaustive list of swedish artists who remain under serious or absentminded consideration whether we like their stuff, since many have little or none web presence or keep the most interesting sides secret).

This will inevitably be quite haphazard, there be old and young, schooled and raw, unknown and famous, professionals and notorious amateurs, most are brief and/or indirect acquaintances but a few are very good friends (or are our own). We will eventually turn out to be thoroughly mistaken about some of them, while we are not at all ashamed that we have missed numbers of perhaps interesting ones. Some we admire but some are just cases where we would like to emphasise or seriously suggest a perhaps not obvious surrealist aspect.

Kristina Abelli Elander

Tove Adman

Hawk Alfredson

John Andersson

Annan konst (Postfuturistiska sällskapet)

Anna-Stina Ehrenfeldt

CM Lundberg (mobile blog) (official site)

Lars-Gösta Lundberg

Linda Lysell

Petra Mandal

Valeria Montti Colque

Matti Steiger Lundmark

Natalie Sutinen

Uno Svensson

Bogdan Szyber & Carina Reich

Fredrik Söderberg

Otmar Thormann

Janie Varades Söderberg

Bo Veisland

Marcelo Videa

Kristoffer Zetterstrand

Emilie Östergren

Renaissance Fountain

2010-12-15T12:07:00.000-08:00

Verwandtschaftseinheiten:

"In the parched path
I have seen the good lizard
(one drop of crocodile)
meditating."

Lorca, from The Old Lizard

"I was sitting writing on my textbook, but the work did not progress; my thoughts were elsewhere. I turned my chair to the fire and dozed. Again the atoms were gamboling before my eyes...My mental eye, rendered more acute by the repeated visions of the kind, could now distinguish larger structures of manifold conformation; long rows sometimes more closely fitted together all twining and twisting in snake-like motion. But look! What was that? One of the snakes had seized hold of its own tail, and the form whirled mockingly before my eyes. As if by a flash of lightning I awoke..."

(Friedrich August Kekule relating (possibly cryptomnesiacally) his discovery of the chemical structure of the benzene molecule in 1864)

"It had no need of eyes, for there was nothing outside it to be seen; nor of ears, for there was nothing outside to be heard. There was no surrounding air to be breathed, nor was it in need of any organ by which to supply itself with food or to get rid of it when digested. Nothing went out from or came into it anywhere, for there was nothing. Of design it was made thus, its own waste providing its own food, acting and being acted upon entirely with and by itself, because its designer considered that a being which was sufficient unto itself would be far more excellent than one which depended upon anything."

Plato, from Timaeus, (The Construction of the World)

"This symbol appears principally among the Gnostics and is depicted as a dragon, snake or serpent biting its own tail. In the broadest sense, it is symbolic of time and the continuity of life. It sometimes bears the caption Hen to pan - 'The One, the All', as in the Codex Marcianus, for instance, of the 2nd century A.D. It has also been explained as the union between the chthonian principle as represented by the serpent and the celestial principal as signified by the bird (a synthesis which can also be applied to the dragon). Ruland contends this proves that it is a variant of the symbol for Mercury - the duplex god. In some versions of the Ouroboros, the body is half light and half dark, alluding in this way to the successive counterbalancing of opposing principls as illustrated in the Chinese Yin-Yang symbol for instance. Evola asserts that it represents the dissolution of the body, or the universal serpent which (to quote the Gnostic saying) 'passes through all things'. Poison, the viper and the universal solvent are all symbols of the undifferentiated-of the 'unchanging law' which moves through all things, linking them by a common bond. Both the dragon and the bull are symbolic antagonists of the solar hero. The Ouroboros biting its own tail is symbolic of self-fecundation, or the primitive idea of a self-sufficient Nature - a Nature, that is which, à la Nietzsche, continually returns, within a cyclic pattern, to its own beginning. There is a Venetian manuscript on alchemy which depicts the Ouroboros with its body half-black (symbolizing earth and night) and half-white (denoting heaven and light)."

Text from Project Ouroborus at the University of Minnesota

To illustrate that our size is midway between that of the Planck scale - the smallest possible size - and that of the observable universe Joel R Primack and Nancy Abrams introduce the Cosmic Ouroboros, a serpent swallowing its own tail.

Variable star V838 Monocerotis, photo by NASA

"The crocodile, which emerges silently and mysteriously from the waters of the lakes and river, could be likened to the primeval mound and was thus believed to embody the elemental powers of creation. Although a treacherous creature, it was considered a benefactor of the land, analogous to the Nile itself whose threatening floodwaters nonetheless ensured the perpetuity of life. Herodotus (writing in the fifth century BC) tells of our traditional belief in the elemental power of this beast and its ability to transform human beings into something approaching the divine:

'When anyone, be he Egyptian or stranger, is known to have been carted off by a crocodile or drowned by the river itself, such a one must by all means be embalmed and tended as fairly as may be and buried in a sacred coffin by the townsmen of the place where he is cast up; nor may his kinfolk or his friends touch him, but his body is deemed something more than human, and is handled and buried by the priests of the Nile themselves.'"

from introduction to Krokodilopolis (Per Sebek)

"How does the little crocodile
Improve his shining tail,
And pour the waters of the Nile
On every golden scale!
How cheerfully he seems to grin,
How neatly spreads his claws,
And welcomes little fishes in
With gently smiling jaws!"

from Lewis Carroll's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland

"I have often," said Smee, "noticed your strange dread of crocodiles."
"Not of crocodiles," Hook corrected him, "but of that one crocodile." He lowered his voice. "It liked my arm so much, Smee, that it has followed me ever since, from sea to sea and from land to land, licking its lips for the rest of me."
"In a way," said Smee, "it's sort of a compliment."
"I want no such compliments," Hook barked petulantly. "I want Peter Pan, who first gave the brute its taste for me."
He sat down on a large mushroom, and now there was a quiver in his voice. "Smee," he said huskily, "that crocodile would have had me before this, but by a lucky chance it swallowed a clock which goes tick tick inside it, and so before it can reach me I hear the tick and bolt." He laughed, but in a hollow way.
"Some day," said Smee, "the clock will run down, and then he'll get you."
Hook wetted his dry lips. "Ay," he said, "that's the fear that haunts me."

from Peter Pan, by James M. Barrie

"In the Orphic tradition, "Time" was personified as one of the main protagonists of creation. The folk-etymological identification of Cronus with "Chronos" then allowed for an attractive metaphorical explanation of Cronus’ cannibalism: the story symbolically signified the way time "eats" or takes away all things it has earlier produced. /.../
Probably drawing on earlier Phoenician creation stories, the Orphics also envisioned "Time" in the form of a cosmic serpent winding itself around the universe. When the first astronomers began to model the universe as a sphere rotating on an axis, this serpent was linked with the outer circumference of the cosmos or with the ecliptic band. The ancient Near Eastern image of the ouroboros or tail-biting serpent, which had existed long before in Egypt, was then used to represent this cosmic serpent wound around the earth."

from Myth as Metaphor by Rens Van der Sluijs

"And when we fell together

all our flesh was like a veil

That I had to draw aside

to see the serpent eat its tail."

Leonard Cohen, from Last Year's Man

Unfinished Works

2010-11-24T08:42:00.000-08:00

"Sometimes it may happen that a speculative artist may, by his own eccentricity, think out for himself some new method in Alchemy, be the consequence anything or nothing. He need do nought in order to reduce something into nothing, and again bring back something out of nothing. Yet this proverb of the incredulous is not wholly false. Destruction perfects that which is good; for the good cannot appear on account of that which conceals it. The good is least good whilst it is thus concealed. The concealment must be removed that so the good may be able freely to appear in its own brightness. For example, the mountain, the sand, the earth, or the stone in which a metal has grown is such a concealment. Each one of the visible metals is a concealment of the other six metals."

Paracelsus - Coelum philosophorum

Paddling towards siren shores.

Collecting the yeast of urns from distant star-beaches.

Hurry love.

Not now, I am evaporating.

Famine! Famine!

Searching for warty toads at the bottom of the waters that flooded the summit in spring-time.

Getting out of the oyster bed (before the page).

Taking the dead end of metaphor.

LOG:

I have made numerous pencil sketches that were abandoned before their ideas were outlined in their entirety or had grown to a full motive. On a whim I transferred some of these unfinished sketches more or less randomly from white papers to papers with structured backgrounds.

During this process it often happened that the "unfinishedness" as by magic was drastically removed from the visual appearance. Forms took up my hints and began to tell a story, or started to break down the motive. The ones showed here became alive to me. But since the sketches neither were properly "finished" according to my original thought nor deterred totally from what was vaguely intended to be there, I played around with the idea of expressing the process of transformation in terms of a "negation of the negation", or akin to how psychoanalysis manages to outline the structure of the unconscious by projecting the ideas of lack and desire upon it.

Because from this dialectic an agreeable analogy seem to present itself. Namely that the transformation of the images come to display features of the original "non-element" at another level of meaning. (From the Paracelsus quote, I even constructed the phrase "unconcealing the incomplete features" for the process, thereby alluding both to how the matter embedding the metal ores is removed and to the sense of precognition which is involved in creation.)

The new level of meaning referred to remains, I would think, qualitatively percieved as the artist´s familliar sense of animistic euphoria, as when the work suddenly becomes alive and other. But the further implication of this change is that the artist´s dethronement or removal is actually suggested, since the suspicion that "thought is flowing forth directly from material reality" begin to make its glorious claim. This gets me back to why the drawings were abandoned to begin with: it can often be very tedious to have do all the thinking, planning and manual labour for oneself.

/NN

2010-11-06T06:04:00.000-07:00

Now available is Josie Malinowski's book West of Pure Evil (Oyster Moon) (available through Lulu and strongly recommended). There is no such a thing as an octopodiphilic sect and Josie Malinowski is not its high priestess. In order not to try to metonymically characterise the book through an allegedly representative quote of its quantitatively dominant sinister tales (o what a storyteller) and perverse nursery rhymes, we'll cite a seemingly traditionally surrealist poem:

A few years of the wasteland

She wouldn’t testify to the homicide but she did categorise my fish:

The ephemeral fish, a-wandering through the desert plains,

bleating like lost souls trying to find meaning in food.

‘If he has some, I’m having a canvas-bag full of horse shit’ one

announced,

and in agreement another leapt up and smacked a boy on the buttocks.

The boy stared on in pure bewilderment.

His mother, seeing the cacophony of evil brewing beneath the smiles

of merchant’s pimpled faces,

hauled his ruddy backside up and threw him in his cage

(shared with pet marsupials).

A trumpet sounded and the race began.

Thirty thousand eggs jumped on the backs of cockerels

and whipped them till a thick layer of cockroach skins

plastered the floor and made for poor footing.

Disappointed, three men clad in Hawaiian shirts took out their machetes

and started lopping off limbs at random.

The third, the cruellest and most arbitrary,

started with his own foot to show how serious he was,

and not more than three decades later the area known as Legland

was a haven for the more daring tourists

or those with a penchant for absolute schadenfreude:

pleasure at seeing one’s companion’s arm lopped off

as she holds out a peseta to a starving child.

The moon shone down orange on a beaten up tramp enjoying the

spectacle quietly

from a disused army bunker where he stored jars of blood

and nail clippings to sell to scientists for a small sum;

he was saving to buy a razor blade to slit his wrists

and jump into the nearby lake where they said paradise awaited those

who gave up their earthly bodies to it.

Having achieved his goal several weeks later the tramp,

far from the paradise he craved, was raised up on a dais on the sand,

pulled along by snakes driven by fire and fury,

destined to spin forever in a cloudy night.

It was 3 ‘o’ clock.

A haggard child crawled by on its belly calling ‘slaughter! slaughter!’

After this, nothing else was known – except that a few greasy slabs of

horse meat

were seen with a priest, fuelling the next great scandal,

which I’ll tell you about after supper.

Ant hill chewing on a fence + Gravel in a pit

2010-10-12T09:21:00.000-07:00

A sound and an object found in the same area during a walk in Stockholm 2010-07-09.

Yes the marble eyes

2010-10-06T10:00:00.000-07:00

here the corner unfolds

for the horsemen in the narrower chamber

your glass jars

fish in gathered hands

for the mountain that yields to

the whole body's obsession

and the relics that raise their eyes

into sand

the stifling bushes in the room

yet still in the spine

the silent hanger, the pearls

translated by EL & Merl Fluin

My Marble Eyes are Still Working

2010-09-26T06:01:00.000-07:00

/ NN

The Drowned and the Inevitable

2010-09-18T04:06:00.000-07:00

- Automatic horror movie soliloquy

Casual newsbreaks. Entities in waiting. Legitimacy calls. Crackdown. As if.

Dreams are about something. Casualties add up to it. Schools of fish being herded by the stars. Wait for daybreak. Do not touch the stones. Do not add water. Remove the bad tissue and do not follow the sparkles scuttling along. You have no idea. Do you want to talk about it?

When I was a small baby last week, there was a bad neighbor with good shoes. We had no idea what to sing, and it attracted a colony of guillemots. Crabs were sticking to nightmares, fieldtrips gathered in other lunchbags, and none of us ever went to school again. That's how I remember it. It might be just a story to you.

The last time I saw that wooden statue, I couldn't refrain from yelling at it. And for all that time, not a single cloud darkened the sky. A goose with two heads. A fairytale with a long fermented tail. Agony will please us. Just get on with the chores. No one will see these droplets. We will all be able to sleep sweetly.

Being told that there is an answer to that pain. We didn't expect anyone to emerge from the woods so soon. There was a fine mist, that's all. Looking down from the treetops. Not knowing. It is a craven bridge and it is running high. A fit of cramps and it all crumbles. It is all just a particular kind of bird. I have no wish to remain alone here. We wouldn't be anything but similar ghosts in this shade. Matter has a fragrance of lemon and seafood. We are encircled by scrapings.

Crabs running down the trunks. Please open this particular door.

Biting splenic flexure

2010-06-26T02:36:00.001-07:00

Some lockjawed angel who breathes through a tube
found a baby in a limekiln just a hand’s span from Sodom.

All the mums and dads and grans and uncles
clamoured to know how the trick was done.

Trip wires, rabbits or geomancy
or the insertion of eels into intimate combat,

little fangs biting the slackjawed angel
whose pelvis was crushed beneath the wheels of the sun.

John Andersson: There's a nightly rainbow

2010-06-16T12:32:00.000-07:00

John Andersson:

There's a nightly rainbow

(from Lucifer, 2000)

I.

In her brown whale eye

I see the corners pack off

Through the whirling world

Through the articles

II.

There's a nightly rainbow

A few can see

And by it's end

lies a golden farm

In the farm there's a man

Trembling in a web

Hold up your lantern

He's completely dry

Lift up his hand

From the table dust

And read the words

Written on a case

III.

In the sky shines a moon

Radiating bloomy ways

I can see no bone to pick

Nothing in the wind

1980

The text above was lifted from the recently updated digital poetry archive of the surrealist group of Stockholm. The image at the top by J A is titled ”John Andersson ser på valar”.

Book launch, Saturday 12th June

2010-05-27T06:40:00.000-07:00

BOOK LAUNCH & POETRY READING
Saturday 12th June
3pm
Izzy Young Folklore Centrum
Wollmar Yxkullsgatan 2
Stockholm

EMMA LUNDENMARK
Organica Fläktrum
published by Styx

MERL FLUIN
The Reality Binge Trick
published by Head Louse Press

HYDROLITH COLLECTIVE
Hydrolith: Surrealist Research & Investigations
published by Oyster Moon Press

Sparky

2010-05-03T08:59:00.000-07:00

The sparky man! Yes, he's so sparky. He's positively crackling. You know what I heard? There was this one time when he was supposed to be telling the children all about inorganic chemistry. I don't know why, it was something to do with the weather or the alignment of limbs or the dog star or whatever. Anyway, apparently he went all the way to the captain's quarters to steal the charts, right, because he didn't really know anything about inorganic chemistry but he knew that the captain had hidden a crib sheet inside one of the sea charts. But he stole the wrong charts and when he opened them up all this sticky stuff started pouring out! Imagine! It was all on his clothes and everything, LOL! That's not the point, though, anyway, the point is that he didn't have the right charts, and all the children were waiting, and all the mums and dads were there, and some of the mums were pushing pushchairs, you know, with big heaps of shiny tin cans piled up in the pushchair seats, with all the labels taken off. So you had to open the can to find out what was in it. So he started waffling and making things up, talking about tripods and bunsen burners and how the earth was at the centre of the sun, just whatever, and while he was talking he was sort of shuffling over to the pushchairs, and then he started rummaging around amongst the cans, still talking about magma and the universe and the galactic ice storm that had conjured all the stars into the Milky Way like ice crystals conjured into trees, and he kept on rummaging until he pulled out this one tin can that was all kind of blown out at the sides. I mean whatever was in there, meat or fish or whatever, I don't know, but that can was so old or had got so overheated from the sun or whatnot that whatever was in there must have been RANK and all the gas was trying to get out from inside the can and it was all blown up like a pregnant sea horse. And he slipped that can into his jacket pocket, still talking about iron ore and Sumatra and the boiling sulphur springs on the moon, and slipped off his jacket as if he was suddenly too hot, sweaty, needed to cool off, and then suddenly, WHAM, spinning his jacket round above his head, with that tin can still in the pocket, and spun it round and round and let go so that it flew off up into the sky, and then it fell back down and hit the blackboard at the front of the room, and the tin can exploded and the jacket caught fire and thousands and thousands of scorpions poured out and started running around everywhere. That's what I heard, anyway, from Nicola's mum, and her boyfriend's dad was there and saw it with his own eyes. And that's why the call him the sparky man, because he loves lightning so much that he has a big burn mark right down one side of his chest.

Forensic taxonomy

2010-03-31T15:57:00.000-07:00

Crops shattering
as if downright nevertheless, in a tumbleweed scenario forgetting whom to benefit, and as if it was in those pages in those sullen despair of dictation fortnights subtle countermeasures not in such an open scenery - look don't look there might not be someone there to reproach you, and you might simmer starlings for the weight of your inanimate bloodshed, and intimidating maggots, though not of madness shed and not of simplemindedness ordered around to the tablecloth and its ultimate corner in the serrated latitudes,
none there to supervise, mortuary gamewise sampled, teaspoon of solicitude, dropped into this marble as if by coarse-ground sector schematics, I had never alotted fairways this scrambled crayfish and laughter housewise, forcefully reproaching the guidelines and crumbling the sacks of necessities hidden in a candlestick,
not knowing how thereby the life of scallops and their shallow tendrils approach the intimacy of gathered nestlings,
not at all, not a single bloodshed to this fortunate essay of lost moments and cough syrup,
had we only been fastened by this atrocity or another and seen or not seen voracity take another direction in history-

(in the comprehensive program of automatism exercises, somebody had suggested writing an automatic text drunk.)

(Byssus threads which might illustrate the "tendrils of scallops")

Cutlery ethnology

2010-03-21T02:39:00.000-07:00

Dream suggestion: Some groups of people have developed the skills of eating using four or five chopsticks in their left hand, which resembles a bird's nest or more specifically imitates "Aristotle's lantern" (the chewing apparatus of sea urchins). They themselves prefer to liken it to the beak of a squid, which it does not resemble. It is however remarkably apt for both crushing and peeling shrimp.

Tree geometry

2010-03-20T03:17:00.000-07:00

As if non-seeing promises would have benefitted from such doubts and dashes and the skies were nothing but illustrious, clear and wasted, and there would have been nothing to carry on, except in modern snowflakes, or the carcasses of beloved machines, and no seven wholehearted ash-carriers climbing the strange ladders; it might all have been a pathway to hinterlands of sycomore barriers as well; water could not be carried there, stones would assume other meanings, neighbors offered their necks and turtles went mad; as did we all but fell asleep and spilled our effort in the grand bathtub of inertia.

(english-language automatic text saturday morning; such exercises are not often seen here but now part of a collective project; what if we were to continuously post such inconclusive outbursts and really populate the desert in a dalinian sense, o noise and vanity)

Polytheism of the Imagination

2010-03-12T07:20:00.000-08:00

Some Local Deities

Some local Deities, painting by Niklas Nenzén

So she walked on the burning before she took her shoulder's narrow road, a lone chameleon and what she wore on her head. A basket of sticks bent by the wind. And eternity was just one of those ordinary thin cloud streaks.

No one saw who attacked whom either. With only a bark of surprise and a rotten smell, like the return of discarded fruit. For they had succeeded.

It was not even a real party, just a frequent meeting which everyone, for once, could attend. And they had just begun to move slowly, towards the evening. Even though those in the city thought otherwise, they would meet them at night.

/ Emma Lundenmark

The First Sighting of the Lone Chameleon

Polytheists of the imagination are known for trying to support and give in to the temptation to perform heathen rituals in honor of gods of which we know nothing more than we can imagine.

You've Lost That Lovin' Feelin'

2010-02-25T12:06:00.000-08:00

Jacques Rigaut on his anchor-clef draisine, wearing a brick suit "to endure the heat".

The drawing above represents a dream-interpretation of the following actual form, which was seen in a photo of a café interior, and which was interpreted as a seahorse (by me) and as Krazy Kat (by JB):

Foto: Peter Bigestans

The dream-idea seems to retain the seahorseness as well as incorporate the brick-theme of K.K.

/Niklas Nenzén

Satan´s Apple: Mythollywood Re-Revisited

2010-02-08T11:14:00.000-08:00

About one year ago the surrealist group of Stockholm engaged themselves briefly in a dicussion about one´s mythological apprehension of characters from the realm of popular cinema.

A survey, a text, some scanty response and examplifications were produced, but since then not much has happened and the project has inadvertently been put to rest.

For my part, one of the examples from this discussion was later epitomized visually and will be presented here, along with the mythological interpretation.

/ NN

Satan´s Apple

Clint Eastwood's early western movies predestined him for incarnating the archetype of The Hanged Man in cinema; someone who by capitulating to the cyclical processes has attained a calm, wise and vacuous personality, fit for the audience´s inflated projections.

Beneath the actor´s mask he may additionally touch something imbecile beyond good and evil, since his role characters - much like his fellow-hanged-man Odin in Norse mythology - often seem to strike their enemies with the impersonal zealousness and precision of a discretely working natural force rather than as a human avenger or as a character with the usual heroic motivations.

Furthermore, I think that this mysterious non-human element goes hand in hand with his morphological appearance, which could be described as lying somewhere between root crop and old wood (a derivative relative of his is the ironic comics super-hero Flaming Carrot, whose name and character even further juxtaposes the very same traits).

So, what is individualized in Clint Eastwood´s figure in this image I´d call - and here I borrow a phrase from the speculative sphere of natural philosophy - something like "the impacts of vegetal intelligence on human life." Part human, part plant he is depicted here as the both mythologically and medicinally complex Mandragora officinarum.

Sacho The Suburban Cephalopod

2010-01-04T18:42:00.001-08:00

Sacho The Suburban Cephalopod (Huvudfoting) - As seen in a dream, by Niklas Nenzén

Cephalopod dreaming

2010-01-04T12:05:00.000-08:00

The terrestrial cephalopod editor has duly participated in the world's joy concerning the video and newspiece finally confirming that octopuses use tools. But this is not a newsblog and nobody needs further proof of cephalopod intelligence. What we would like to know more about specifically on the other hand is what cephalopods dream. Our contributor Ika asked yesterday whether there was a connection between this blog and research about cuttlefish dreaming. Yes I am sure there is only we knew nothing about it. A informative text on animal dreaming can be read here.

If somebody has some advanced empathic or chance method of imagining cuttlefish dreams, or just want to ascribe some of their own dreams to cuttlefish, please add them as comments here or email them to biographed dot poet at gmail dot com.

Untitled

2009-12-02T05:18:00.000-08:00

now coming rainlike under the sea
now arcing skywards, whetted with fire
fire on a thread to measure gravity’s zero
my teeth in your holster
your skinned holster
and all those lightning oaths turned into ravens

Joyce Mansour with her dog before the war

2009-10-26T03:39:00.000-07:00

It was during the surrealist game festival 2007, actually the first morning of the festival, 16/7 2007. I was playing the old Mass-Observation game "dominant image of the day" with myself (just make sure to choose for every day what has been the strongest image that has presented itself to you during that day). The dream brought up another well-known surrealist game, "Before...after" (where two pictures are put next to each other, more or less randomly selected, and interpreted as being one picture of the before and one of the after)

"I open an album of pictures arranged as in the game "Before...after", possibly by Sasha Vlad. One spread has two portraits of Joyce Mansour. The "before" is a well-known image sometimes reproduced in books. But the "after" I have never seen; Joyce Mansour as a teenager (fairhaired, surprisingly), sitting in a rattan chair, comfortably but with a defiant air, dressed in a toga, with a small dog (terrier?) in her lap, attentively but seemingly critically looking to the left, towards what for some reason must be a theatre performance. I don't know why this image is so incredibly beautiful."

(Comment: I half-remember some joker once made a popsong based on a supposedly atmospheric picture of "René and Georgette Magritte with their dog after the war". Now who wouldn't want to make at least a song based on this picture?)

During the following weeks I remember and seek out several different images of Joyce Mansour. While not at all being the two images in the dream, and probably not looking like them at all, I find the idea of having two other images stand in for them satisfactory: the first would be Gilles Ehrmann's portrait of Mansour, the second a "hommage to Joyce Mansour" by our friend Rik Lina. Before and after.

Before and after

2009-10-26T03:35:00.000-07:00

Gilles Ehrmann: Portrait of Joyce Mansour
Rik Lina: Hommage to Joyce Mansour

The chair about the sound - Makrabet

2009-10-26T03:33:00.000-07:00

(excerpts)

/.../

should we fine roll o fine

on our toes but

the sound is flowing

should we eat o fine

polish the ladder

polish the soil

eat the soil

dragonblood between the eyes

/.../

the institute for asphalt

and concrete

metal

and noise injuries

pink creeping magma

one mummified with the seriousness

nobody comes up to you

one mummified with wings

like red papers stain the air

before the butterfly

reaches for you

makrabet inschase

/.../

balcony under under

force syrup through the trunk mine

hands on the back just memories

of the sweat and others

birds the frame dung

the tree does not fend itself the sun

heaves itself

erso emno

chia so neytala

diàsa

yerkotha

nya peta

closer onto it

a wheelchair with her dog

she is travelling over lakes

the forest has a folded

paper under itself

and not even that

only loosely coherent

pleasures and shards

there is the bread the people

the suspension

sheep eating on site

places against time

like every new time knows

about lips

you have the sound in your mouth

close to the floor

the sound the mouth

smile as the street

teeth eyes

your mouth wants

nails in apartment windows

smile that the street

knows about eyes

was flying in the dream tonight

was lying in the dream flowing like

life

night

sees ones image

in pouring rain

giggles your hands

builds the city lips

makes thinner voices holes

Emma Lundenmark

(transl MF)

Vagrant's notes

2009-10-18T04:28:00.000-07:00

THREE POEMS FROM Lösdrivaren #1 (2000) TRANSLATED

The green shoulder

Having made death itself scream

Is cut short with a sign

Looks down at its chair

The hands are taking the life of

A ball-played head of ice

All around the disaster

Appetite for breath

Snake tongue

Breaths along the body

Features

Either ever seen them

not there right there

no warmth in that very body at the time

no ward in that very smoke

The doubt of iron

of sorrow and adrenalin

or menstruation blood

Old image

old cleft features

old deeply cleft features

You warm wind,

throwing evil threads

in my unrest hung loose.

The silence that circumvents the whispers of lullabies

in our silent costumes.

Prevent the eye take the wet faces,

hiding the fragrance in the moisture of my mouth.

The child's eye eats itself into each nile of skin.

Uprising of the blobs

2009-10-10T04:24:00.000-07:00

http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2009/10/091008-giant-sea-mucus-blobs.html

An essay about Joyce Mansour

2009-10-07T03:57:00.000-07:00

An ordinary dream

I have been invited to a pub event in the museum attic, but I can't seem to get ready for it.

(Already within the dream, I connect the process of getting ready for the pub event with finalising a postface for a swedish edition of Joyce Mansour's Julius Caesar which I am doing these days. But I remarkably fail to connect it with larger projects that I am also supposed to be finalising.)

So I am walking around in the exhibit, they have already called for closing, I am eager to help, to shut the lights off, but I am not leaving, I am walking around there obsessively reading the exhibit signs in order both to proofread them and to extract information for my Mansour essay, over and over again, in the dark. In the darkness I am bumping into things, and in the dark I can only imagine how it would look to visitors if I would start suddenly bleeding profusely from the bruises.

A female security guard is working hard to get me out, and she keeps turning the lights back on, going on about the statistical correlation between darkness and flashers, so in order to eradicate flashing, a program is now implemented of zero tolerance against darkness, all streets, squares and parks should from now on be lit during the dark hours, and all public buildings too, and once they find a technical solution to it, so will the forests. In spite of my repetitive-obstructive obsession, I have nothing to counter this overly depressing tirade with, and so I allow her to push me out.

But then just outside the exhibition hall several friends of mine are sitting, having coffee and obviously also resisting the pub call. The only thing I need to do before I can finally go there is to change my clothes. So I undress, but I am completely unable to get dressed again. It is not embarrassing to expose myself naked, but it certainly is to display such inability. I keep walking around the pile of clothes cursing and trying, cursing and trying, but nothing happens except that after a few rounds I notice blood is dripping on the floor. I shouldn't be menstruating since I'm not female. My friend Jonas helps me out, he impersonates me and offers an excuse "Oh, I must have cut myself on my bike on the way here". As he is dressed (in a ridiculous biking outfit) the problem seems solved, and I can relax, sitting back and watching the long stream of danse macabre up to the attic.

MF

NEW CONTRIBUTION TO THE SCIENCE OF ESCHATOLOGY

2009-09-17T10:45:00.001-07:00

(dream 1 August 2008)

The rest of life consists of two long days
In the end we all gather on the great beach
But the road there is a long slope down through the nocturnal landscape
Pine groves and lawns but nowhere water
A young black man walks beside me and he kisses me
Then unfortunately I have to ask myself about my own gender
I look like a bad girl in page hairstyle with a handbag and large earrings
But I am assembled of several layers, several linings
They are all of foam rubber with a fruit for the journey in each
Like thin slices of meat dusty from flour
I am full of extra pockets look I open my particular zipper
Pulling forth a sandwich package a banana an eggwatch

The rest of life consists of two ridiculously long days which one might get through
First one has to pave way through the crowd on this square
The overcrowded square in this medieval city
A fleamarket where everybody is selling out their last belongings
Poor old people each with a heart-rending story to tell
I will not find my way through all these people
The night comes and now it is only the guards who keep bumping into me
They who walk around and shout out the time to keep the ghosts away
No one keeps me away barefoot in the dirt
For when I will awake the first day
I will ask myself what lies on my chest between rustling layers
Between one and the other layer of plastic film and danish pastry dough
It is not a heart it is elliptical stonehard fruit-tasting
But also such a bloodstone may surprise when it unfolds antennae and legs
It is a cockroach in this overall which is the only thing that keeps me alive
I am rustling as dry leaves as bark as cave paintings

When I finally will reach the beach
It lies in the middle of the village and no water is in sight
I will lay down and friendly hands will take off my clothes
Almost a whole crowd of diggers, bathing ladies and children
Amused by my sex and my hairy chest and they cover me with sand
Around the contours of my body they put down trees and watchtowers
Giraffes wander there grazing, martens hunt in the trees
Is this what our grand business idea has come to
When all the prostitutes of the city were to be hired as winter hiking guides
Fooling people along on extremely dangerous polar walks along the rocks
But we knew nothing about their regular prices
Why had we made these vain plans for reforming the city in the first place
There seems to be no way of even getting from the square to the beach

Exhausted I lay down in a sleeping alcove around the corner from the square spring
Seeing this little cockroach come alive
Rise from the street dust whip with its antennae and take to the wings
Straight towards me and I see it so clearly and I can wave it away with my hand
And it returns towards me in exactly the same trajectory and I can smash it away
And it returns towards me in exactly the same trajectory and it becomes an endless pingpong game
I am upset how mechanically it is determined by key stimuli
That it can neither give up nor vary its onslaught
If the source of smell remains still and the light remains the same the road should remain the same
And the sun has not moved in the sky
We can play this absurd pingpong for the rest of the day
I get fed up and quit and see the cockroach coming ever closer
It cannot be seen and it cannot be felt
It must have landed in my face why is it so light
I dig in my eyes and in all corners of my face it cannot be felt
I do not dare rise up anymore not unfold my wings

In the beginning of these two days I awake and everything is silent
At the edge of the amphitheater stand two female shapes of light
Glowing outlines of white, no surface, no structure
They look like fencers and they are not my siblings
They do not have red hair and they do not carry weapons
When asked they say they are the two scraps from the hearth
Now what do they mean the core melt has it all gone under
No no they giggle they are just carrying the last glowing embers from the old world
Which will be embedded in sand will be told a goodnight story and then devoured as icecream

Mattias Forshage

TESSERACT 1

2009-09-17T10:43:00.000-07:00

for Beatriz Hausner

Hundreds of threatful birds roosting on this ledge,
overlooking that small space where again just something might happen
as in a waterfall (that kind of dynamic isomorphism)
and as if that space was really small (and simultaneously much larger)
So the birds, which were once carefully stuffed,
in accordance with all secrets of the trade,
still move, flapping their wings, pointing their beaks,
providing ambiguous but distinct oracle messages
It is a very warm day
with droplets like beads on the underside
This bed is a railway bridge
This clump of trees is the nearctic region
Someone strangely beautiful is walking down the stairs
It will not get dark
That longhorn beetle on that milkweed plant
That heap of sharpedged stones those piles of bones
Someone robed in the noise of the waterfall will not show up on surveillance cameras
And I might gently push some of these birds aside to collect the beetles thriving in their dirty background
This island is a snapper turtle
This armadillo shape is this particular summer heat
A staircase which does not lead anywhere
Sand dunes threatening to intrude
Nothing will happen on this particular sidewalk
It is after all a mere waterfall
And will thus retain its shape

Mattias Forshage

TESSERACT 2

2009-09-17T10:42:00.000-07:00

Introduction to a novel (short version)

Failing, upon awakening, to recall name, place, occupation, relations etc
a stain of new geometry with new epistemological problems grew as mercury,
a privileged position to start asking questions

(An amoeba is nothing but a morphology, the particular morphology of not having a determined bodyshape, and of walking and eating by throwing out pseudopodia, constantly changing)

But here it seems we are walking like battleships through ontological layers
tearing them to fleshy pieces, or more likely not, as we pass,
layered much like danish pastry but most of them not immediately accessible
if not by stretching out as a ghost
and then the very boundaries between layers may facilitate such fast transportation
reducing friction to almost nothing
(If history is perpetually bifurcating, geometry might be too)

So that is why I have to invent such an elaborated character gallery
love's labor in a straitjacket
employ as help sciences dream geography, general methodology, pansexual phenomenology and poetic epistemology,
rejuvenate art and the death star
to reinvent friction and reinvent awakening-

Mattias Forshage

2009-09-17T10:39:00.000-07:00

Tessa Farmer

TESSERACT 3

2009-09-17T10:37:00.000-07:00

for Tessa Farmer

Hundreds of threatful birds roosting on this ledge
remaining calm while I gently push some aside to collect the beetles thriving in their dirty laundry
But everybody knows that the natural history exhibits come alive at night
secret dawns of the museums
Most have seen at least some time vaguely their dancing their anthropomorphic gestures their suspicious dialogues
the embers of their reawakening like clouds in the long dark blue shadows of museum nights
that indoors sky of stars and its glaciers
naked feet of sparkling wine and cold marble
Many but far from all have seen their great pain
their glass panes shutter their dry throats cough and scream
whirls of bloody threads in sawdust jerking fish
But this pain might not be due to their obvious material bondage
because they might have a large freedom of motion in an adjacent dimension
and their geometrical or natural-like posing may be a rather irrelevant geometrical joke,
not like a round of battleships but rather like an arranged chess problem
a handful of minute forests radially growing
tentacles of unknown fungi the comfort of horror knowledge spilt on the floor
There might be dozens of other reasons for this pain
such as being chased and tormented by small demons human embryos
It might not even be pain at all

Mattias Forshage

Wings

2009-09-17T10:28:00.000-07:00

(into the open field)

threads strengthening the gauze of the skin

she’s floating on air

silently carefully tightly

white strands of hair against a bed

so time leans

against a floor

the mere shadows we are

barely touching

the seam

-

come closer

this mask

one dead
from a dream

leaving gravel

in a wind towards a meadow

reflected by the window

glass against a tree

running over naked bed

she is slowly singing
for your mouth

-

wonder how silently a fur can fall

bite the feet in place
silently

train through
the houses

and the group stood ready

to stumble through the shadows

wedge those eyes in place

wait while gravel

is rushing forth

Emma Lundenmark
(translation MF)

the surrealist group of stockholm investigating an atopos

2009-09-17T10:24:00.000-07:00

by Niklas Nenzén

MY ELUSIVE POLISH OFFICES

2009-09-17T10:23:00.000-07:00

For Anna & Johannes Bergmark

It all begins with this vague chorus, a happy pop song heard at a distance when falling asleep or waking up, a happy pop song with perhaps some weird discordant intervals and phrasings, a creepingly madly happy pop song. It appears to try to compel me to do things. Mostly I resist, not because of mental strength but simply because I’m busy anyway. It seems not to be in the lyrics. If I work hard to hear the words, they don’t make sense. It’s not english or swedish, and it doesn’t seem to be played backwards either, the sounds aren’t right. It sounds more slavic, it could be russian, or polish, but it doesn’t seem to have the right structure. It could be polish played backwards.

I have been looking into the geography of the places you seem to keep returning to in dreams, which very often produce an instant feeling of recognition and belonging together with a sense of déjà vu, so that you know you have kept returning there even if there is no earlier accounts of the fact. Quite the opposite then is the type of places which only vague external evidence link you to, they bring about no memories and only the vaguest most uncanny sensations of recognition, it seems like you have been there a lot and had very good reasons to deny it completely, all too completely.

There is a particular file of bibliographical raw data that I keep leafing through on a regular basis to look for some references or just to get some casual suggestions or advanced chance ideas. Occasionally, in that file, a sheet of paper turns up, in my own handwriting, in polish. I know no polish. So I don’t know what it says. I look up and hope the paper will not be there when I look down again, but it’s not that easy. The sheet remains. It has no heading, appears to be a paper snatched by chance from a long report, a long abstract, or a long set of excerpts. And it remains there. I don’t think it is the same sheet every time, probably not, but I can’t know that. It has occurred to me I should show it to someone who knows polish (a lot of people do that, at least if they are from Poland), but I can never find the sheet again. Something came inbetween. It only disappears when your mind isn’t set on it

Vague inner voices keep scolding me. Haha, you’re not supposed to remember that! It’s all from your time in Poland of course! It’s all from the history of the polish office, which doesn’t exist! No one is allowed to talk about the polish office. We thought that all had been finally arranged. Some erased years here, some erased years there.

I can’t really tell whether these voices came out of that vague chorus, or if they were just the instant rhetoric shape of the banal conspiration fantasies triggered.

Obviously there are forgotten identities, forgotten periods in life. That’s not very controversial, is it? It’s just difficult to prove. It’s kind of epistemologically paradoxical. I seem to remember, for example, my short life as a writer, my short life as a boyfriend, my short life as an american, but of course I can’t list the ones I can’t remember.

If I work really hard to imagine a polish office, it usually starts with something from a 60s or early 70s film, with the bright colors, sorrowless disorientation and compulsory clumsiness appropriate to it. But that’s just a cliché. There is some kind of popular image of a perpetual 70s going on in large parts of eastern Europe. Doubting this image, it turns out that this office is just the secret pathway to the real office, behind the coats in the cloakroom. The real office is in black and white, very strict. Young men in strict suits, smoking pipes; serious women who never look up. Rather silent, but the sound of running water can be discerned. Perhaps it is the potted plants singing. It doesn’t seem to be a purely bureaucratic business going on, there are numerous references to production and there seems to be scientific and technological expertise around. Chemical-technical? Again the banal conspiration fantasies take over, and I am violently thrown out into the street.

Under assault by scolding voices again. No, it’s not a pun about “polish orifices”. What would polish orifices be? According to some absurd racist jokes which were popular in the 60s, it’s probably the armpits. I must ask some ethnologist if those polish jokes were translations of american polish jokes, or just superficially tidied jew jokes, or both. But the armpits are not orifices! And if another saying comes to mind, the classic swedish homophobic “Bättre en rövare i Polen än en polare i röven” (Better a robber in Poland than a pal in the ass), this actually associates Poland to the anus only by contrast and not by identification. Yes it would seem that the notion of Poland would rest on polarity. Something about the polarity switch in the major branch of organisms we belong to, the deuterostomes, where the primeval mouth switched to anus and vice versa? So, have I managed to escape any difficult insights yet?

The polish branch was set up by emissaries from several nearby countries, including Sweden, repeatedly over the last decades but always only working for three years in succession before getting closed down and all traces wiped away. But after a while this business was getting rationalised, and all of the furniture and equipment was just stowed away inbetween. Papers were starting to vanish. Something had to be done. No, I’m just making this up, but perhaps this is one method of reconstructing the truth in the absence of others?

In fact, I always wanted to be the polish nation banner. The lower half of the body covered in blood, the upper half entirely blank.

And I did learn a few words in polish in secondary school, when I was in love with a polish girl, who knew almost no swedish. I wrote her long love letters in swedish anyway, I thought throwing in one or two polish words on each page might help keeping her interest up enough to glance through the whole letters. In school, I always offered her Donald Duck fruit drops. For her sake, I did hang out a lot with the polish gang in the school. But the others were all much more talkative. But no one ever tried to talk me out of this absurd courtship. At least not that I remember.

The polish words I sometimes got from someone else in the polish gang, but even more often from my little german-polish dictionary, small, cubic, bright red. One of my favorite books. Remarkably similar, in fact, to the world’s most comprehensive anthology of surrealist poetry, the german surrealist anthology Das surrealistische Gedicht. I tried and tried, but mysteriously failed for twenty years to order this book from the publishers. Probably I already had the width of surrealist poetry in the german-polish dictionary. But now that I recently succeeded in ordering the book, perhaps I killed that myth? So then I have to write this story to tie up the sack?

No, I got specific instructions that I had to write this story, and that it had to be in english, I think it was the only instruction from that vague chorus that I couldn’t resist obeying.

Waking up entirely, the chorus is twisted into something recognisable. It is an Olivia Tremor Control song, suggesting “Where we are – in the blink of an eye, you get several meanings” (“A peculiar noise called ‘train director’”). What? Hey! No! I didn’t get any meaning out of this!

M Forshage

Nicolas Flamel's journeys

2009-09-17T10:20:00.000-07:00

When the gas giants turn opaque, the tree happens to be cleft by a tree

When the dusk illuminates that which has been invisible, the clothes awake on the clothes-line humming

When Nicholas Flamel came to the Israeli court, then the story ended too.

When the mole meets Paracelsus, the fox rubs its skin off in the sand

When the folkfield lies freely before our eyes, old coins are found in the chrysalis

When Nicholas Flamel came to the Israeli court, they were baptized after the seven dwarves.

When instinct differentiates itself, one sees how blue it is

When the amoeba pulls itself in the wrong direction, Jupiter's ring becomes its cap

When Nicholas Flamel came to the Israeli court, the penguins came out of the water.

Mattias Forshage, Emma Lundenmark, Niklas Nenzén

(contributing to an international game, we chose to develop a collective poem answer to the dreamt question posed whatever happened when Nicolas Flamel came to the Israeli court)

ARCHIPELAGIC GHOST SOUND NIGHTS

2009-09-17T10:17:00.000-07:00

night wanderer careful stains of quails
count the wolf dens and the fire dams
for in such a den the evidence is amassing
where skeleton parts are twitched humans steaming sandy beaches visited by forgotten icefloes
of lost feet ghost paths swan cadavers in the rotting wrackbeds
nightscripture winnowing snipes in the air

(may night at the tank shooting range of the archipelago island Utö, 1994)
Mattias Forshage

Elusiveness of belgian surrealists and slyness of octopuses

2009-09-17T10:09:00.000-07:00

Tetraptych

1. A DRINK AND A LAUGH

28 March 2009

Yesterday evening, rather late, I was working over the messageboard with the international editors, significantly joining a general cry for the need of a drink and a laugh, after haven ridden out a conflict in the editorial group. I had also been referring to that book about belgian surrealism, and one of the last things I did before leaving work, late, was to desperately look for Xavier Canonne's email address, in order to ask him about several things in his book, including about the apparently longstanding connections between Hainaut surrealism and wallonian nationalism, which he acknowledges but does not discuss critically. I couldn't find a personal email address to Canonne, only an info address for his work at the wallonian museum of photography.

Still thinking about that "drink and a laugh", I decided to at least have a beer on my own at the central station on my way home (I never do that). When I was paying for it, a guy behind the counter was asking "So what the hell is a walloon?". He wasn't asking me but I couldn't resist answering. "It's a person from Wallonia, the francophone part of Belgium" The guy got a strange look on his face, surprised and somehow guilty, stammering "Excuse me, I didn't know, I assure you, I really didn't know".

It took me some time to remember that it vaguely related to that "octopus novella" which was building up a couple of months before.

2. WAYS TO FIND BELGIAN SURREALISTS

- a dreamt recipe

7 nov 2008

Belgian surrealists are not easy to spot. Their preference for the

shadows necessitates very particular preparations. Strangely enough,

it all is, or should be, connected with sexual arousal. But not in a

causal way, but rather in accordance with some vaguely leibnizian

scheme of predestinated harmony, the same historical factors which

will manifest the belgian surrealists will also cause sexual arousal

in those looking for them, without the two actually having any real

connection.

It is of crucial importance to have a decent lab. As the process takes

a couple of days, it is crucial to find a lab where people would be

religious or lazy so they won't come in to work over the weekend. Then

it is just a matter of staying behind when everybody leaves friday

afternoon. Search through the women's toilets and collect all used

tampons that could possibly be found. Empty them into an aquarium and

allow their free development. It is, or will become, a bit smelly, but

it is necessary to endure this, since this is the only thing which

will create seahorses from spontaneous generation. It will also create

the rest of the environment of the aquarium, the water, the plants

etc. The seahorses will peacefully swim around in there. By this they

will attract the attention of a secret octopus, who will sneak into

the lab, eat the hippocampi and then assume some elaborate disguise

and await monday morning, since the feast will have made it fat and

clumsy enough to be unable to sneak out in the same serpentinous way

it came in. This disguised octopus is the erotic very ideal for the

belgian surrealists, who will soon converge in the city and find ways

to enter the lab.

3. As a response to my communicating that dream, Jonas Enander immediately sent me a photograph of a beautiful octopus picture hanging outside his room at McMurdo base, Antarctica, which indeed looks like an illustration of the scene where the octopus has entered the tampon-seahorse aquarium.

4. A second response to my communicating that dream, Eric Bragg shared this news clip:

Otto the octopus wreaks havoc

(from the UK's Daily Telegraph - 30/10/08)

An octopus has caused havoc in his aquarium by performing juggling tricks using his fellow occupants, smashing rocks against the glass and turning off the power by shortcircuiting a lamp.

Staff believe that the octopus called Otto had been annoyed by the bright light shining into his aquarium and had discovered he could extinguish it by climbing onto the rim of his tank and squirting a jet of water in its direction.

The short-circuit had baffled electricians as well as staff at the Sea Star Aquarium in Coburg, Germany, who decided to take shifts sleeping on the floor to find out what caused the mysterious blackouts.

A spokesman said: "It was a serious matter because it shorted the electricity supply to the whole aquarium that threatened the lives of the other animals when water pumps ceased to work.

"It was on the third night that we found out that the octopus Otto was responsible for the chaos.

"We knew that he was bored as the aquarium is closed for winter, and at two feet, seven inches Otto had discovered he was big enough to swing onto the edge of his tank and shoot out a the 2000 Watt spot light above him with a carefully directed jet of water."

Director Elfriede Kummer who witnessed the act said: "We've put the light a bit higher now so he shouldn't be able to reach it. But Otto is constantly craving for attention and always comes up with new stunts so we have realised we will have to keep more careful eye on him - and also perhaps give him a few more toys to play with.

"Once we saw him juggling the hermit crabs in his tank, another time he threw stones against the glass damaging it. And from time to time he completely re-arranges his tank to make it suit his own taste better - much to the distress of his fellow tank inhabitants."