Unfinished Works

"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

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

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

Yes the marble eyes

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

/ NN

The Drowned and the Inevitable

- 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

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

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

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

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.