Unexplained

Aquatic faunas do show up in far more places than expected. Of course, a bathroom sink is a rockpool and a rainpool is a lake. Then there are less obvious cavities. Think of a few. But there is also a certain lack of respect for distances in time. Eggs and seeds lay dormant for centuries, memory swims through subterranean channels, poems ignore whether they were written years ago or are not yet written at all.

A selection of poetry by Mattias Forshage in English is now available from Headlouse Press and Peculiar Mormyrid press via Lulu here. It is a main volume for purchase or for free download, and a dream story appendix only for purchase.

It is a tiresome geography lesson, and certain senses of survival will depend on it. Trust a nothing being.

Animals in surrealist poetry

I'd been compiling a rather massive compendium of animals in surrealism, a sketch of the surrealist bestiary if you will, for a long time (and it's now made available here). Many types of questions arrange themselves around that. Some of them gave rise to this analytical nightmare an early morning a month ago. Some people say they don't have analytical nightmares. Does that mean that they also will never get to see the rivers change directions?

BESTIARY AS SPIRITUAL REALITY

dream may 2016

For a long time I had been pursuing the stream by train

Looking out the window, composing dinners and trying to keep up distinctions

between different types of occurences of animals

in technical terms, some are simile, some are traditional emblems, only some are pure images

But isn’t everything a pure image during spring flood?

So this evening I was at the top of the big hill

An isolated dome, covered with coniferous forest, peaking at ca 500 m

It was not part of any quest

It was a fundraising party for something

The point had been to hijack the electrical system of the big abandoned sawmill

But no one wanted to DJ, the music was crappy

A klezmer band sitting on the stairs started to play in protest

I didn’t mind dancing, but I knew they would film it and post it online as ”the sucker who danced” and I will be turning my back most of the time but this epitome would prove fatal

At that point the dancefloor was intact

And I was sorting batteries to place them in the box according the the blueprint of the vast cellars

Yet another chore for which I was ill suited

Then after dark – and darkness comes early inside the coniferous forest

After dark the whole building would light up like a fire cracker (and the phrase would prove fatal)

At the very summit people were working hard where the stream turned into waterfall

Because the waterfall was an allegory of the bestiary of poetry

I thought it needed very little manipulation but some of my friends were very busy

Running around like timber loggers to keep the outlet from cluttering

Yes there are fallen trees in the stream

But if they made it all the way uphill why wouldn’t they make it over the lever

And most of the debris is not wood it is icefloes

In fact it is the dancefloor breaking up into icefloes

If we dance now it is everyone on their own floating island

And there are piles of peat towering like in a palsa bog

Where I wrestle in vain my friend Sebastian to make him stop subdividing the fragments

I’ve seen these rafters with their poles crowding the delta too often

They are the trickster ants making fun of my hypnagogic scenic views

Here come floating islands of marble shaped like map outlines of countries

And they too will make it through the narrow canal and out on the other side

Unless they took the subterranean route

Under Cromwell Road to the Natural History Museum in London

The rafters with their poles were active amidst the crowd in the tunnel there too

Could anyone say this is not futile?

Up here I see all these subcategories turn into pure images too

Even their ghosts have become fish

I will hug the waterfall

I wasn’t interested in allegory anyway

Least obvious corner

To be found in one of the least obvious corners of such a landscape
A discrete fold in space just like the back of a sofa
Whatever is behind it is inevitable
The scaly skin of a scattered herring
Raised like the wing of a grand piano
A piano being peeled like an orange
There can be nothing at the back of a sofa
Emerging spots of bare rock
This is surely the best picnic spot
Maybe it was just the screech of an owl
These are not sharp pine needles
These are not fire ants
These are not threatful dogs lurking
These are not the usual quarrels surfacing
This is maybe an island from another world
And again it is difficult to tell where the horizon is
Are those clouds or is it a threatening wall of standing water, like a frozen tidal wave, or is it just the sea in the distance and we are all slightly tilted?
We can easily make up new archipelagoes
It’s not the worst part of the job
We can even sit down and relax feeding the exotic ducks
Our hands are not bloody and the fishing nets are clean
These are friendly carpenter ants
These are the soft needles of a larch
These are splendid martens watching from the edge of the forest
These are lions and tigers and bears
Vast church organs vast fishing nets vast muddy riverplains
But the compasses we managed to bring through don’t work out here
Maybe it’s just packed dirt preventing the needle from moving
There might be other hands of the clock waiting to emerge
But painfully as it rips our flesh on its way out
Like a spring from the sofa
Geometry tilts again
This is surely the best picnic spot
Especially now that it’s so dark

Sep 26th, M Forshage

The Vagrant

JB, MF, NN, LR 8/12 - 13

Dream object / installation

* from the nose: sound of snoring *

A dream object made by Paul Cowdell, seen by NN in a dream of his.

Levitandum: an exhibition by Patrick Hourihan and Kathleen Fox

Levitandum is an exhibition of work by Patrick Hourihan and Kathleen Fox, both revealing through automatic means those concealed worlds of wonder submerged in the unconscious.

 Untitled automatic drawing by Patrick Hourihan

 Untitled automatic drawing by Patrick Hourihan

Untitled automatic drawing by Patrick Hourihan

 Slow Ride At Sunrise by Kathleen Fox

 He Fly Almost by Kathleen Fox

 Iron Journey by Kathleen Fox

Patrick was born in London, UK, and is a member of SLAG.
Kathleen was born in South Africa and is a friend and associate of SLAG.

Both currently live in the UK.

The exhibition will be held at Arkitektvägen 44 in Stockholm.
Private view on Saturday 13 April, 14.00 – 18.00.
Open to the public on Sunday 14 April, 13.00 – 16.00.
Viewings thereafter by appointment: call +46 736 17 20 20.

Aphid mummy

Toad dressed up as Easter Hare

Voodoo Gong: the Apeman Walking Backwards to Hell

an exhibition of drawings, photographs and collages 
by Merl Fluin and Paul Cowdell
 

at Arkitektvägen 44, Stockholm, Sweden
Saturday 24 November, 14.00 –18.00
Sunday 25 November, 12.00 –15.00
Other times by appointment: arkitektvagen44[at]gmail.com or +46 736 17 20 20

Merl Fluin and Paul Cowdell are members of SLAG (the Surrealist London Action Group) and sometimes also of the Stockholm Surrealist Group. They are also the joint directors of the Bureau of Surrealist Ethnology. They have participated in Surrealist explorations and events internationally, including in Athens, Chicago, Istanbul, London, Prague, Reading (Pennsylvania), Santiago de Compostela and Stockholm.

The title of this exhibition was suggested through objective chance in a letter to Merl and Paul from their friend John Andersson. The images presented are all the results of investigations into automatism, dreams, objective chance, interpretive delirium and mad love.

Under a branch of acutely observant owls

Weary, trying to pass under a branch of acutely observant owls, I leaned back in horror to grab my ankles.

"Turn back!" the fattest of the birds cried, rising as to warn. But it was going nowhere, since the odd and cursed follower of my strayings had already seized it by the legs.

And as that composite beast, half light, half shadow, casually introduced himself to the dreamer´s hearing, saying: "Your posture now embodies the correctly conducted procedure of self-observation according to me, the abominable Piltdown Man", the horrified owl was screwed on to my neck while violently flapping its wings, thus propelling a bristly appearance to my soon externally materialized  ears. 

At the same time a certain dimness and immobility set in to restrict my hitherto unbounded headless vision. And as bedazzlement shortly befell the synergy of our as yet unspecialized imagination, we were one.

No longer weary, the carriage could pass under the branch and roll into the woods, to the bleating glee of cheerful comrades.

Where are they now?

/ NN

XX

/ G N

Ornaments

particles emerge, move about, are enlightened

like predator fish striking at its prey

soon to have never eaten again

dressed for a party as thieves

when sleep is poured into tall glasses

we deviate inwardly, to circulate

of the slowing down of the clapper´s pendulum motion

or why we are here, the depth of waves

we know nothing, therefore time-being never splits

we are ornaments, our task is to sit crouched

over the dead trunks of our dredged victims

being as foolish as we are unafraid of being caught

our sun rises with modification

it goes down, for something it must do

over the walls, chairs, hand shanks, beds

pregnant with stature, like the mobile continent

of nondecomposable plastic debris that is driven by

the Gulf Stream back and forth between the coasts

we set about to prowl along the roads and walls

/ NN

They passed close by me

the lovers 

and the lyrebird

sacrificed for the monster analogy

when children play with illusion

standing at the eye of soul  

in relative and mental kingdom

Temptation!      GNovak

                                       

gabriellanovak.com 

For those who will not be able to read most of the new novel by Mattias Forshage, Tesserakt eller Konsten och dödsstjärnan (Tesseract, or Art and the Deathstar) (oh, in fact there are some parts in English in it, but they wouldn't tell the main stories), we can at least give a hint about the contents by this box from the ongoing solo exhibition of MF's in Stockholm suburb Abrahamsberg, a box "Tesseract 1: the haunted house" which deals with some central themes.

Open Air Reverie

Shroud in sloe bloom

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.

MF

one of several legs

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."

MF

Kaleidoscope

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

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

Lecture # 2 on Atmosphere

Mesozoic Assemblage Art: Giant Triassic Cephalopod

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.