just behind the forest curtain

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

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

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

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

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

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

contemporary art in sweden?

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)

Nina Bondeson

Christofer Dahlby

Edvard Derkert

Diabolik

Anna-Stina Ehrenfeldt

Markus Ekeblad

Leif Elggren

4X

Alan Friis

Gomfilm

Maria Hagelby

Joakim Hansén

Jens Hedin

Inuti

Martin Jacobson

Lisa Jonasson

Kolbeinn Karlsson

Rose-Marie Klintman

Jenny Källman

Monica Lehn-Domnick

Lars Lerin

Maria Lilja

Per-Ivar Lindekrantz

CM Lundberg (mobile blog) (official site)

Lars-Gösta Lundberg

Linda Lysell

Petra Mandal

Valeria Montti Colque

Iwo Myrin

Mia Mäkilä

Nationalgalleriet

Nicole Natri

Niklas Nenzén

Johan Nobell

Gabriella Novak

Åsa Nylén

Ulf Rahmberg

Gerald Steffe

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

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

"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.