The Vice of Surrealism
Robert Desnos:
...But none could embroider his dreams like
Desnos! He would go off into a transport, his protuberant eyes taking
on a strange light, while the account of his marvelous chimeras gushed
from his lips. There were the pursuers and the possessors; visions of
the Apocalypse and the procession of its prophets; scenes of mythical
violence filled with anguished cries; and "wizards" who now assumed the
shape of "Fantomas" (as in the serial thriller of the movies) or now
that of Nicholas Flamel, the
thirteenth-century alchemist. How like an acrobat, with the greatest of
ease, Desnos swung from one millennium to another, or from one
continent to another. (Someone in the room was taking it all down
stenographically, so that these dreams could be printed afterward.)
Whereas the dream recitals of others were mostly boring, Desnos' seemed
to come out of a real trance, and were narrated
In reality, he had no need of the mesmerist or the turning table in a
dark room, for he had other means of stimulating himself to a condition
of autohypnosis and uninhibited improvisation. A regular dosage of opium--and an audience of at least one--was all this
highly narcissistic personality required in order to function. (The
truth about his drug addiction came out some years later, in 1929, on
the occasion of a resounding public quarrel between him and his
once-beloved master, Breton, to whom he had confessed his private
vices.) For all his vices and his periodic outburts of violence, Desnos
was one of the most lovable and entertaining of men.
Life Among the Surrealists: Mathew Josephson
The Gestapo came for him on the morning of
February 22, 1994,
looking for a list of names of Resistance workers they knew Desnos had.
Loyal to the end, Robert had refused to escape, fearing Youki [Desnos's
wife] would be tortured in his place.
After being interrogated, he was sent to Compiegne. It was almost a
lark. He wrote. He was at the center of a group that met to discuss
leterature and astrology--Desnos told them he had considered reading
palms professionally. But his luck chnged, and he ended up at
Buchenwald, where he sent his last hopeful letter to Youki. From there
comes the story of Desnos moving through the ranks of a group of the
doomed awaiting the gas chamber, reading
their palms, predicting long life...
The temple entance puts on eyeliner
Olympus and paradise and forests
Like the old electric bulbs
Now poetry is sucked from a pointed tit
from these homicidal luminous breasts
From Homicidal Air
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