Category: Surrealism

October 4th 1926. André Breton wanders aimlessly toward the Opéra with a newly purchased book by Trotsky under his arm. The offices and workshops are emptying out, and Breton muses to himself of the workers leaving for home ‘it was not yet these who would be ready to create the Revolution’.

Then, as he crosses an intersection, he sees a young poorly dressed woman ten feet away; she carries her head high, ‘unlike every one else on the pavement’, Breton notes; but if she has a kind of pride, she is also delicate (‘she scarcely seemed to touched the round as she walked’). There may have been, he remembers, a ‘faint smile’ on her face (better: ‘wandering across her face’); she was made up strangely, her eyes are emphasised.

She comes towards him, the young Surrealist, smiling ‘mysteriously’ and ‘somehow knowingly’. Breton is entranced; she begins to speak of her poverty and he asks himself: what was happening in her eyes? ‘What was it they reflected – some obscure distress and at the same time some luminous pride?’ She tells Breton the name she has chosen for herself: ‘Nadja, because in Russian it’s the beginning of the word hope, and because it’s only the beginning’. Then she asks Breton a question echoing the one he asked himself in the opening lines of the book: ‘Who are you?’

Who are you? Margaret Cohen’s beautiful book about Benjamin and the Surrealists, she notes of those same opening lines that they make play with a French adage ‘Dis-moi qui tu hantes et jet e dirai qui tu es’, tell me whom you haunt (in the sense of frequent) and I will tell you who you are. Breton makes it apparent that he appropriates this expression in other than its colloquial sense in the following passage (the fourth paragraph of Nadja):

I must admit that this last word [haunt] is misleading, tending to establish between certain beings and myself relations that are stranger, less avoidable, more disturbing than I intended. It says much more than it means, it makes me play while still alive the role of a ghost, evidently it alludes to what I must have ceased to be in order to be who I am.

As Cohen observes, ‘Breton goes from suggesting that haunting is related to the places and persons that one frequents to reflecting on how this dependence starts to undermine the integrity of the I itself’. But this undermining is marked in the first lines of the text and sets its problem. This is why, Cohen points out, the translation of différentiation as ‘difference’ in the following quotation is so misleading: ‘I strive, in relation to other men, to know in what my differentiation consists, if not what is responsible for it’.

Differentiation, not difference: when he asks ‘who am I?’ the answer comes: ‘a series of ghosts’. Ghosts of a self, a subject? Of course, Breton’s book is full of ghosts. But when he asks himself, ‘who am I?’ we know Breton is after something unique to himself: ‘What matters is that the particular aptitudes that I discover slowly down here distract me in no way from the search for a general aptitude, which would be my own and which is not given to me’.

What will he find? How will Breton answer his question? Will he answer it at all – or does it reverberate through every sentence of his book, a question which turns in itself, a cold whirlwind, asking with quiet insistence over and again: ‘Who?’: scarcely a question, then, but a kind of demand, and scarcely a demand for it as though it was spoken from that frightening reserve into which Nadja herself will disappear. As though the question was born out of the same madness that would claim her – or as if this were one of the question’s risks. Nadja itself – the book that bears the young woman’s name, which uses it to name (but it cannot be named) that same madness – is Breton’s answer. Nadja is a psychoanalytic session, a free association (‘I will speak of these things without pre-established order and according to the whim of the hour which lets survive whatever survives’); as such, it is also given to us, his readers, to decide what his answer to his own question might mean.

For many, Breton is too dominant; he is callously indifferent to Nadja’s incarceration, to her madness; he toys with Nadja and then discards her. He cuts a pathetic figure: the surrealist researcher, supposedly committed to the Revolution is indifferent to this impoverished young woman; the writer who would give himself to the blind play of chance cannot follow her all the way to madness. Yet there is a hint that Breton’s identity is itself unstable – that he will lose himself just as Nadja is lost. The narrator’s encounters form a series whose contiguity cannot be resolved into an underlying identity; it is as though both Breton and Nadja have coalesced from the Parisian night mist into which they will disappear; as though the book which bears her name were written in mist and will likewise disappear.

This, at least, what suggests itself in the many ghost-stories which fill this book. Recall the humorous story of Monsieur Delouit, the amnesiac who asks a clerk in the hotel lobby for his room number and then, having gone to his room, jumps from the window and questions the clerk once again. Recall, too, the fugue which allows Desnos to take on Duchamp’s personality, or Eluard’s mistaking Breton for a deceased friend. Then there is the story of the thriller in which a Chinese man replicates himself thousands of times and invades New York; and the painting by Watteau in which the same couple is shown over and over. Finally, there is Nadja herself, who appears to be only one of a series of women, real and unreal (Madame de Chevreuse, Mélusine, Solange and the actress Blanche Duval, who plays her, the young woman who recites Rimbaud to him in the rain -). And what of Breton himself?

Who am I? Breton asks; shortly after, he will call himself a phantom, seeking to learn of his identity by exploring the places he haunts and the encounters which haunt him. Breton seeks himself in the ambulism which would allow him to follow a path in the world which is dictated by the subliminal desires of the phantom. Above all, these phantasies entangle him in a complex realm in which the real historical significance of, say, the sculpture of the Porte Saint-Denis and the statues of Etienne Dolet on the Place Maubert and Jean-Jacques Rousseau on the Place du Panthéon were bracketed, put out of play. As though such a bracketting permits him to see a beauty linked to their now massive uselessness (what do they commemorate? Nothing – not anymore -). This recalls Breton’s celebration of the perverse objects of the flea market and perhaps even what he writes of the Surrealists themselves …

Differentiation: is it this that is unleashed once the scuptures and objects are torn from their contexts, their worlds? Or when the Surrealists themselves, besuited young men, conservative in so many ways, practice their sleeping experiments and their seances? Or when the question, ‘Who am I?’ is allowed to reverberate without answer as Breton encounters in Nadja the one who, for a time at least, demands he forgo any attempt to answer his own question? His book will bear Nadja’s name, not that of Breton’s unnamed lover. So it is that Breton is caught out and that it is his book – even the very title of his book -, not he, who speaks the truth.

Nadja, a text which bears the name of hope, of the first part of the word hope, is marked above all by a restlessness, a wandering; here is a text which must be understood according to its own avowal to record everything. But perhaps it records too much for it is as though Breton’s phantom wrote Nadja and that what is related is the story not only of Breton’s own adventures but those of a double who wandered in his place; as though Breton was himself put out of play.

Who speaks in the automatic text, in the poem of the Surrealists? Who speaks in the most profound magnetic fields which open themselves to the automatic poet (each of us, any of us)?

One evening, just before André Breton falls asleep, he perceives a phrase which was something like: ‘there is a man cut in two by the window’; this is accompanied by ‘the faint visual image […]of a man walking cut half way up by a window perpendicular to the axis of his body’. A strange image, which Breton wants at once to use as for a poem. But as he does so, it was succeeded by a whole series of phrases which, he writes, ‘surprised me only slightly less and left me with the impression of their being so gratuitous that the control I had then exercised upon myself seemed to me illusory and all I could think of was putting an end to the interminable quarrel raging within me’.

Breton confides in his fellow surrealist Phillippe Soupault; they decide to practice the technique. A single day yields fifty pages; comparing their work, Breton and Soupault find it to be similar; the difference of the texts, Breton decides, lies in the different tempers of the men. Who speaks? Something which would say itself through any of us, were we able to open ourselves to automatism. Which would allow each of us to become a poet and liberate poetry itself from the poetic field (from the preserve of literature, of literary culture). For it is now a question of the surreal, which is to say, of existence, of life in its totality, of the total human being.

Who speaks? Guard against the interpretation that automatism excludes premeditation and conscious control; that it would be the simple flowing of a verbal tide. The Surrealist does not simply allow the pen to wander across sheets of paper; it is not a matter of mental relaxation, as if one would merely have to passively wait for the treasures of the unconscious to reveal themselves. Active consciousness has a role; great effort is required to clear the way to experience the claim of the magnetic fields. It is necessary to keep watch over the desire to create a literary work; the Surrealist experimenter must not reread what she has written – must not fall victim to the images that are conjured by the words on the page, but must remain at the edge of the writing as it pushes forward into the unknown.

Then automatism requires a new mode of interrelation between consciousness and the unconsciousness – passivity is required, but so too is activity; if the unconscious holds the initiative, consciousness is required such that its message can be transcribed. The spontaneous dynamism of the unconscious must be rendered explicit; it is not merely sleeping philosophers that we must become, but thinkers who can make a synthesis between our dreams and waking life.

But what role does consciousness have? One has to allow oneself to be brought into a state of receptivity. But vigilance is also required against the temptations which befall the automatic writer. Automatism is never simply unilinear; it takes effort to maintain an attunement to the unconscious. There is the risk that attunement will tempt the writer to a kind of branching – that two or more thoughts will present themselves simultaneously such that recording becomes impossible. There is a danger in the very visibility of the poetic images which risk distracting the experimenter by their imaginative charm. Most broadly, the researcher has to resist the conditioned reflex which allows the uncontrolled élan to be brought exclusively under conscious control.

A kind of vigilance is required, then, to maintain the play of consciousness and the unconscious. To watch over their interplay. But to watch over what? Not the dialectic, but its undoing – not the overcoming of the immediate, but a tearing which opens across the surface in language. What arises? The immediate. The power to speak – yours’, mine – falls back into an origin without form, without determination. I do not speak, and nor do you.

What speaks? What is it the locus of that vigilance which keeps watch over speech? The answer to both questions is the same: that magnetic fields which quivers through our depths. Our depths? But it is as though, speaking, it turns each of us inside out, delivering us into that speech which requires that its speaker disappears as a determinate entity. Then the ‘who?’ of ‘who speaks?’ finds no answer; automatism resounds when the no one who speaks and watches is brought into contact with the human power to speak, to act.

Have you ever heard yourself speak as a master? You recognise it: it is the voice with which you berate yourself; it says: work harder, account for yourself, time is running out. It speaks in you and you hear as you speak the masterful voice which reaches to the heart of what you are. Which repeats itself such that you present yourself to the world as an orderly, responsible individual who finishes tasks on time and gets the job done. The voice of a master? Rather the voice of a slave who would make a slave of himself. But is it that simple?

Castells claims the new social movements are movements of identification. Doesn’t militancy require that vigilance, that work of autonomy such that a group can maintain itself in the demand around which it forms itself? But I wonder whether such identification doesn’t endanger another kind of relation – not work this time but what is called worklessness (Bataille, Nancy, Agamben …) Another kind of militancy (but is it a militancy?): the group that labours to keep a difference intact, a lapse in the work of identification. Why? Because work was complicit in what makes the world too boring, too serious, a world of masters and slaves …

Is this what Surrealism sought to overturn? It called for a revolution of thinking, of everyday life as much as a determined political project (campaigning against the Kif war, contributing to journals of the far Left, collaborating on intellectual work with Trotsky). The same, perhaps, in some of the groups in the Events of May 1968 (the Movement of the 22nd of March).

Two kinds of militancy: the struggle to overcome the contradiction, the public struggle to destroy the present injustice. Then a private struggle – intense communication: the life of men and women struggle to overcome the model of interpersonal relations (the friends at the rue Saint-Benoit …) (But also, somewhere else (but is it private or public?): the artwork.)

The public, the private: Surrealism holds the dream of struggling on both fronts. On the one side, the public presence, a life lived on the streets and in the cafes; on the other, the encounters between the Surrealists (and Nadja …) What holds them together? Is it possible to hold them together? The transformation required: the subordination of the voice of identification – that voice you sometimes hear in yourself speak, stern, impatient – to a kind of difference. Where it is a matter of working such that worklessness does not disappear.

Perhaps it is to this play of work and worklessness to which the work of art already attests. Now I am thinking of the peculiar forms of art which question their own conditions of possibility – the poem of the poem (Holderlin), the poem as the Open (Rilke), but then also the novel that is a search for itself (Kafka’s The Castle, Blanchot’s The One Who was Standing …) (And then, why not, films that are looking for themselves (Tarkovsky’s Mirror)). But what kind of examples are such works to any kind of militancy?

What governs the strange movement of Breton’s great prose trilogy, Nadja, Communicating Vessels and Mad Love? There is a sense of a great quest, a great movement, but to where is it going? What magnetises these peculiar texts? ‘Desire, yes, always’, Breton writes – but a desire for what?

n Mad Love, Breton writes:

Desire arranges multiple ways to express itself … the least object to which no particular symbolic role is assigned, is able to represent anything. The mind is wonderfully prompt at grasping the most tenuous relation than can exist between two objects taken at random, and poets know that they can always, without fear of being mistaken, say of one thing that it is like the other….. Whether in reality or in the dream [desire] is constrained to make the elements pass through the same network: condensation, displacement, substitutions, alterations.

Condensation, displacement, substitutions, alterations: Breton is drawing, of course, upon Freud.

It was his technique of allowing his patients to free associate which drew Freud towards the phenomenon of dreaming. For it was to their dreams that such patients returned. Freud began to see them as symptoms which were capable of an interpretation which would uncover their true significance by clarifying the associative links which led to them. The ‘manifest’ dream – the way it is remembered and recounted by the patient – conceals the true meaning of the dream because of the self-censoring desires of the superego. For Freud, it was necessary to understand what he called the dreamwork, that is, the way in which the ostensible contents of the dream attests to the play of latent desires, in a kind of thinking-desiring.

Such latent thoughts can be divided into prelogical ways of thinking – condensation, displacement, plastic representation and a rational, logical component: secondary revision. Here, condensation should be understood as the combination of latent dream thoughts into a single manifest element and displacement as the way in which, in the dream, the apparently innocuous detail can become highly significant and the apparently significant event is treated casually (more formally: there is a transfer of cathexis – interest, investment and affect – from one content to another). Thirdly, there is plastic representation (this is perhaps what Breton means by substitution) through which important people in the patient’s life are represented by a stock of common symbols (the king = the father, etc.) The latent content manifest in prelogical thought is retrospectively ordered by secondary revision, through which the patient, under the guidance of the censoring superego, is able to construct a narrative out of the material of the dream.

The shared goal of psychoanalysis and Surrealism is to show the play of latent desire not just in dreams, but in fantasy, parapraxes, myths, symptoms – and then to surprise it and catch it unawares.

Recall Breton’s account of his visit, with Giacometti, to a curiosity shop. Breton tells us he was obsessed with the phrase, cendrier de Cendrillon, the ashtray of Cinderella. He encounters a spoon, which, for some reason, he feels is linked to the ashtray of the phrase. This seems to link, for him, to the symbol of the shoe, the slipper of Cinderella. A series of associations is produced: ‘slipper-spoon-penis-perfect mold for this penis’; thus, according to Breton, the mystery announced in the phrase le cendrier de Cendrillon is solved: the series spoon-shoes-slipper, the search for the foot that fits, is about a desire for love. Now recall the analysis of Dora’s mother’s jewel case – Freud insists, to cut a long story short, that ‘The box … like the reticule and the jewel case was once again only a substitute for the shell of Venus, for the female genitals’. The correspondence between Breton and Freud is clear. For Breton, desire opens a path through the world; it is a matter of attending to the signs of this desire. For Freud, the neurotic patient might be cured if those signs are understood in terms of the latent content to which they bear witness.

The paths of Freudian psychoanalysis and Surrealism diverge in their respective methods of research. Freud is a man of science, Breton a poet; Freud separates unconscious desire from reality, and Breton seeks to bring together desire and the real, claiming our conception of the real is produced by our desire. ‘Desire, yes, always’: everything in Breton is magnetised by a desire for the surreal, understood as a revolution of desire and the real (they cannot be thought apart from one another). This is what drew Breton and his friends towards communism just as it made Surrealism forever incompatible with the French Communist Party.

Still, I can’t help but remember the way how, after the Interpretation of Dreams, Freud presents symbolism as on a par to the Kantian categories, innately and universally organising experience according to shared unconscious fantasies. Why didn’t this bring Freud closer to the Surrealist desire for the great revolution, the great liberation of desire? With fascism on the rise and the second world war looming, Freud despaired of the liberatory force of desire. It is hard not to share that despair and to regard Surrealism as a period of joyous adolescence, a dream which had to vanish in the realities of an absolute war.

Giacometti, the former Surrealist, did not want his work included in the Surrealist exhibition of 1947. He commemorated the dead women and children of the Shoah in a sculpture called ‘Night’. A woman strides, hands splayed, across a sarcophagus. Could it have been shown alongside the works of the Surrealists? I don’t know the answer. But, strangely, in the same year, Bataille, against whom Breton directed such a fearsome invective in the second Surrealist Manifesto, wrote several articles celebrating Surrealism. ‘The great Surrealism is beginning’, he wrote. Why? What was left in Surrealism to begin? A liberation of desire? But look at where desire could lead! But perhaps it is still a matter of thinking and affirming desire, even as it appears to lend itself to its own denial. To understand why it might be brought to deny its play, and how that play might play anew. Desire, yes, always.

The novelist, with a few deft strokes, begins to construct a world. Recall the lines from Dostoevsky:

The small room into which the young man was shown was covered with yellow wallpaper: there were geraniums in the windows, which were covered with muslin curtains; the setting sun cast a harsh light over the entire setting…. There was nothing special about the room. The furniture, of yellow wood, was all very old. A sofa with a tall back turned down, an oval table opposite the sofa, a dressing table and a mirror set against the pierglass, some chairs along the walls, two or three etchings of no value portraying some German girls with birds in their hands – such were the furnishings. (Crime and Punishment)

Quoting these lines in the first Surrealist Manifesto, Breton complains:

I am in no mood to admit that the mind is interested in occupying itself with such matters, even fleetingly. It may be argued that this school-boy description has its place, and that at this juncture of the book the author has his reasons for burdening me. Nevertheless he is wasting his time, for I refuse to go into his room.

Breton refuses, but others have been tempted. We relate the words we read to our own experience, rendering them concrete. It seems churlish to claim that this concretion is a sham: after all, this is just a novel, and we know, as readers, how a novel works. But then Breton wants art to be more than a matter of entertainment or even edification. This is why he claims the descriptions in the novel are vacuous: ‘they are nothing but so many superimposed images taken from some stock catalogue, which the author utilizes more and more whenever he chooses; he seizes the opportunity to slip me his postcards, he tries to make me agree with him about the clichés’.

Clichés? But it is this accumulation of details which permits the versimilitude of the novel – it becomes tangible, concrete, we accompany the characters in the journeys across St. Petersberg. And doesn’t Breton provide us with details about Paris in his Nadja? Ah, but these details form a secret network; they are signs and indications of a meeting to come; his whole book centres itself around an encounter which we are to understand was quite real. The language of Nadja becomes a system of indications; the descriptions of this text are magnetised by an encounter which makes them more than clichés, and the text itself more than an attempt to provide a simulacrum of reality.

The surreal is surreal in the book Nadja, in this mesh of text. And the surreal is more than real, or it is the more-than-real in the real, the surfeit of experience to which the novel cannot answer. Then the text Nadja is not a representation of an event, but it is also an event as it gives itself to be experienced. To read, now, is not only to be referred to the time and place at which Breton encountered Nadja, but to the relay of words and signs and indications which comprise this text, pointing to one another, celebrating one another and elevating themselves into a sky like a blazing constellation.

The sky of Nadja is not the sky of the novel, or even art. The surrealist would overcome art through art; it is experience that matters – just as it is this experience that the novel fails. You could say that the novel subordinates itself to the reduplication of the world and the demands of the world, and the work of the surrealist to the shattering of the world. But doesn’t this mean, too, the shattering of language? Perhaps; but it cannot be a question of leaving language behind: Breton writes that language was given to human beings so that we could make surrealist use of it. Exit the servility of language, then, through the surrealist redeployment of language; exit the art of culture and edification through surrealist art. But where does it lead, this exodus? Reading the novel, we concretize what we read by relating back to our experience. If the novel reflects our world, then we travel, in the novel, through our world. But with the surrealist work? What concretizes itself then in our reading? There is nothing in the surrealist we can relate to for as long as we do not relinquish our servility. And if that servility is destroyed? Then the world will come alive with fireworks.

What does it mean when Breton and the Surrealists invoke the total human being ? It is linked, for them, to a certain power of language (nor a power over language …) They do not indicate, then, the one who can delimit, the Adam who first speaks and thereby separates himself from the things he would name, winning an abstract power over them. Instead, it is the one for whom this power is not possible – who speaks or writes without power and first of all without power over language. Is this Hegel’s slave – the one who has lost the struggle for her life and labours now at the behest of the master? But the slave has the consolation of work – of a struggle which will eventually free her and free the world. And the powerless speaker, the writer without power? Suffering: the inability to work, to struggle to the level at which something could be achieved.

Blanchot: ‘What threatens art, expression, and the affirmation of culture in the West? Suffering’. Levinas writes somewhere that to enjoy art is indecent – it is like feasting in the midst of a famine. But then Levinas wrote Proper Names, in which he celebrates those artworks which do deign to spread themselves before us like a feast. And doesn’t Blanchot show us a certain modern work of art is linked to a suffering born of an attraction without respite which takes the form of painting or literature – to what one might call the work? Suffering? But it is also a kind of joy, too – and perhaps one that is linked with what Breton would call the total human being.

The work? But to what does this refer? Not to the painting or the book that the artist accomplishes – not that, but rather to the demand which the creation of the particular work fails to annul. Begin again, begin over again and never will you have taken one step toward what cannot be yours. Never but you must try to step, even if this is a step (pas) that is not (pas) a step, but a movement in place – and not even that, not even movement (unless it is a movement which cancels movement, the opposite of a leap). Futility, repetition, failure. The modern work of art (Beckett, say, or Cezanne …) accepts futility. Failure is its destiny, or its non-destiny (for it is going nowhere …) Failure is its anxiety, its suffering, but it is also its joy (I will try and substantiate these remarks another day).

What is culture to the modern work? Everything it is necessary to refuse. This does not need to be said again. But to refuse in the name of what? Surrealism called it ‘total man’: the total human being, but here understood in terms of an automatic movement of language, an automatism without origin or limit, an infinite welling forth that cannot be stabilised or reduced. It is this which literary culture – the prestige of the novel, the fame of the author, the salon and the gallery – was too frightened to admit: the secret heart of every work is already eroded from within. This is why, for them, the novels which appear and keep appearing have nothing to do with the worklessness to which the work of art tends. Plot, characters, the omniscient narrator: all of this reveals, for the Surrealist, only a narrative complacency, the great satisfaction of the world with itself. But automatism is already beyond culture and beyond the world.

But there is a danger in linking automatism to failure. To claim that the book or the painting fails the work is to indulge in a kind of nostalgia for success measured in terms of the same literary and painterly values Surrealism would leave behind. The future is announced in a collective work – in an automatism which prevents the delimitation which keeps each of us separate from one another and from the world. Automatism is the principle of a new human being and a new society. But the future is not what will arrive in the course of things. Surrealism looks towards an event which cannot arrive unless the world is transformed – not negated, but suspended, separated from itself, interrupting the relationship through which we are bound to the world and to one another.

The total human being? The one who is given to a movement of writing without power no longer bound to the humanism of culture. For isn’t humanism, as Blanchot writes, ‘the idea that man must naturally recognise himself in his works and is never separate from himself’?

‘Language has been given to man so he may make surrealist use of it.’

Surrealism is the faith that language might permit the great overcoming of the antimonies and contradictions which prevent us from realizing our total existence. All difficulties will be resolved; this new language we speak will attain what language always struggled to be (the places of struggle? Lautréamont’s Maldoror, Rimbaud’s Illuminations, Blake’s The Marriage of Heaven and Earth …). And what does it want? To attain itself as thinking itself and not a means of thinking, to attain the truth of immediacy, of immediate life and not its mediation. Language will no longer be an instrument through which the human being might realize its freedom: automatic poetry is freedom, not freedom incarnated, but freedom absolute – freedom acting and manifesting itself. My freedom does pass through words, it is realized in them; I discover, through writing, a relation to myself without intermediary. Whence the surrealist attack on the hackneyed notion of individual talent, on the artwork as hallowed cultural object, on the great museums and galleries of our culture. For it is an equality that is issue; we are equal with respect to the gift of automatism.

Surrealist poetry is a poetry of freedom, of spontaneity, of automatism. How then to understand the Surrealists’ avowal of Marxism, of communism? How to understand the poetry that would give itself in service of the revolution? Because to write freely is also to take responsibility for what freedom is not; it is to brace oneself against the conditions of society, to flash against the darkness of our present condition – to flash, and, in this flashing, to expose the cracks and interstices, the great contradictions in the present state of society.

The Surrealist knows that the problems that we take to be important are only a function of the contradictions implicit in our society; it is only after the revolution that one can begin to understand what freedom might mean. Freedom will be grasped negatively until it is grasped no longer freedom from oppression, from exploitation. And on the day after the revolution? Ah, but that is the day from which automatic poetry is written. It calls us on the pages we read and write. It is bound to the affirmation of a freedom to come; it is already there, ahead of us. Inspired, automatic writing is also critical; if it appears uncommitted this is only because it is belongs to another order of commitment, because it burns like a star which has consumed everything but itself; it is total, absolute.

Human possibility, human capacity – are these words appropriate for a poetry which reaches us from the future and calls us towards an unimaginable equality? Perhaps it is better to write of what is humanly impossible, or what at least reaches us from the day which arrives on the other side of time.