Notes
toward a Rigorous Interpretation of Surrealist Occultation
From Arsenal:
Surrealist Subversion, #3, 1976
Only in the moral certitude
of vanquishing what resists the restoration of a blazing crown to
a headless voice at the rites of permanent transgression and at the
demarcation of the elected sacral site, where starlight is made to
trace the initial human footprints, shall we witness the supersession
of the habitual apparatus set up by external administration. Meanwhile,
there remains the ongoing, permanent necessity of criticizing as well
the pernicious other-side of the conformist coin constituting the
many pseudo-revolts, cultural dispersals and mystification proliferating
these days at a rate proportional to their assimilation and recuperation
by the general administration. The spirit that may be permanently
invoked and instigated is one of partisan affinities whose
shields and arsenals are forged from invariable principles of liberating
expression to be realized entirely on their own terms, and whose movement
in the field against the superstructural obstacles must continue to
be one of implacable distance and distancing, to
appear as magically tempting as the Medusa, impenetrable as an interplanetary
Behemoth and as resoundingly hostile to recuperation as any original
violation of language.
*
Of labyrinths there are none
more formidable, it seems to me, than those which ensorcell
while extending like those "waves of snakes" whose variations
multiply as one reads a mile of ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs - mazes
that bewitch, I say, at the seemingly inverted pyramid whose apex
reaches the heart as the sinuous path of seduction unravels, variably
slow and quick, in the mind of love, in the psychic atmosphere,
that is, of one who would grasp the dialectic interstices of a
moment and eternity, each transcending the other, the horizon
a steady fluidic flame, the constant quivering of desire, the "volatile"
going-over to the "fixed" chambers about to dissolve
into materialized secrets, a winged sphinx dilating whose extremities
become blazing words! Actions, being-in-becoming, are explosively
recognized as intrinsic to the language of "the traditional
sciences," the gesture which is transmutation; that
is, a "heightening" of immanent powers, forces and structures.
(This perspective coincidentally is worth borrowing as an "occult
lever" and set afloat in that area surrealism is privileged
to reveal: "a wave of dreams," the "perfect moment"
of the Marvelous and toward Breton's "…of the mind in
neutral gear…").
*
When I think of the lofty (and loftily researched)
findings of the great philosopher Hegel as to the nature of poetic
logic, its unity encompassing all the directions of human thought,
and I am reminded of a few of us who have begun to practice what
amounts to a collective restoration of the powers of poetic unity
and as we appear, historically together intervening on the plane
of American "culture" with all the chips stacked against
us, situated against the monstrous shadow of "the new
poetry" and another obscurantism of the students of those moribund
minds that the false vanguards alleged to displace, I know that
only armed with the living perspectives of surrealism, incarnated
in Arsenal, am I permitted to make distinctions, draw up
a relentless criticism and inveigh against those crimes now being
committed against the human spirit by mystifiers, fabricators of
confusion, and all our detractors, in the certainty that my comrades
and I shall not fail to be heard over and beyond, if even below,
the current babble and noise of the sickening purveyors of literary
and aesthetic darkness.
*
What is proposed ultimately and permanently:
the Promethean gesture, the gesture that supersedes the cultural
commodity, "the author," "the artist," "the
poet," and dialectically subsumes these vain and masochistic
inventions of our elders, the obnoxious enemies of desire and human
freedom, who are parasitically ranged around and within us. In this
pursuit we continue Rimbaud's program of the seer, who listens
for the unheard-of, that is, the absolute becoming of what we are
yet not free from, what we have yet to conquer, to supersede, namely
this "tyrant" of cultural habituation, the sniveling dog
of heritages, and deeper, the chattel-slave of atavism: the repressive
patriarchal family structure. With Rimbaud, we must conceive of
the Great Adventure as going ahead of action; we "steal fire,"
fire which is alchemically, psychologically, metabolically, erotically,
the sole source, origin, lever, pivot - the libidinal principle
itself. It is from the transformations of libido that desire
takes wing and the cultural producer and product are essentially
transcended for a phoenix-like rebirth of what shall become, of
what shall be. Herein rest the secret correspondences,
by immanent revelation, of our most profound "self" and
all others; herein I discern surrealism as an organism transcending
the aggregates of which it is composed; here I witness the full
flowering of each individual personality by a permanent annihilation
of the interior slavocracy, the becoming of that resolution; by
mediations of psychical exaltations and unconditional inspiration,
of the Hegelian master-slave contradiction. Otherwise I risk the
mediocrity of being but another "artist" or "poet"
producing what shall not bear in its secret core - but only "secret":
for those who have not known the power of self-transcending desire
- the flower of fire Prometheus sublimates out of his desire of
desire, that is, SUBLIMES from the libidinal fire transformed by
psychical powers, the highest source of conscious desire to unleash
the buried treasures, so that we may pass back and forth, masters
of consuming and persevering fire!
Let us not forget that the Promethean pathways
are uniquely vital as opposed to the programs of saints,
contemplatives, artists, anti-artists, philosophers, and anti-philosophers,
merely outdistanced categories for those who insist on
the priorities of the mad lover of freedom, the masterless master
and the poetic criminal!
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