Background: In Copenhagen, I had been doing about a year of poetry readings, some with groups but most naturally as a duo with Sune Urth. In my studio he noticed the oversized poster for the Evening Of International Terror -an extravaganza Philip Newton and I had mounted in 1978 as The Baader-Meinhof Mutual Dog, which we’d formed to promote cultural terror. He asked if we could do one there. I said ok, the centerpiece is having all the poets eating and reading their works simultaneously, while at the same time the rest of the hall needs to be swarming with curious hipsters, drunken hobos, sparkling literati, innocent victims of standardized society, one-man-bands, destructing artworks, taiko drummers, opera singers, midget nuns with runaway Tourette’s, performing geeks of every variety, bank withdrawal slips and electronic bullhorns to be passed out to the audience and, finally, a herd of crazed snapping pigs released into the crowd. Oh, and you’ll go to jail. He said wow cool and committed to organizing the native poets while I was to locate a venue. A week or so later, he said everybody was excited about it, but some of his people didn’t exactly understand what it was about and they’d requested I write a baseline of the motivation, so I wrote this, starting as a historical analysis, but quickly moved on to the present and my own overview. The resulting agreement was vehement. A final note: My dear friend Klaus Habermann, a 70-year-old German psychologist, found me after reading this essay. His eyes were deadly serious. He reiterated all my points, slammed his fist on the table and roared: We must do something! I spent much of the rest of that year getting him out of bar fights.
REGARDING THE ELEMENTS
c 2007 Tristan Winter
Steamed Colleagues;
When skies come calling, I answer the door gladly. In a similar spirit, I take this opportunity to invite you to an impending disaster, a cataclysmic extravaganza of historical importance. The event is to be organized by Sune Urth and myself, and I deliberately leave mention of the details for a later time, as my immediate concern is that the political magnitude be fully understood by those of you who would align yourselves with us.
While our aims are irreducibly international, for the present we apply ourselves here to the Danish social swamp -this putrid miasma of pointlessness- this cream of cremation. We will gather to attack the false postulate of social normality and to expectorate on this freak of Bismarckian chicanery. The manifestation will be brutally beautiful. With the direct experience of a lifetime devoted to this work, I can state that the public, once flayed down to their unconscious desires (for here fear is likewise a desire), will surpass our most outrageous measures and, by default, assume full responsibility for the blowout on their own. Above all, the synaptic reformation will have lasting consequences.
Make no mistake, it is all life and death. The political vision illuminating our field is one of solar puissance and duration. For your clear understanding of the coherence, the continuity, of our intent, I limn here a historical survey of the core principles that have formed the path we take, pointing out these elements as they occur along the way.
What has always distinguished the surrealist revolutionary position was its breadth and integrity. Its perspective assumes the impossibility of segregating the psychological and political elements of either our antagonisms or our aspirations. It was Marx, after all, who, extrapolating from Smith and Ricardo, first demonstrated that money itself becomes a commodity, thus inadvertently exposing a disturbing psychological tendency. I here peel back the fronds to briefly show you the powerful root system of fetishism from which such systems grow. Of course, we know that all economic forms (ergo all poverty) are man-made phenomena, and not systems of god or nature as the insects believe. Since an economy is a human fabrication, it is formed by psychic as well as material exigencies, and is subject to human perversions -and human objections, although these latter are taboo. The chief shoots of this hybrid are greed, a total dedication to criminality and war -the most exalted phase of systemic growth.
During the growth spurt of the imperialist massacre of 1914-1918, human objections appeared in anti-colonial efforts, the Russian Revolution and, amongst the artists, confused by their inutility and livid at their exploitation for the justification of a bourgeois culture now exposed as a cover for savagery, Dadaism. From the powder-keg of Dada blasts of outrage at the obscene abuse of western civilization shot up in numerous lands, flowering scarlet in the minds of artists irrevocably disgusted by the whole bloody swindle. To compound the affront, at the close of the war, the survivors were propped up back in a simulacrum of their former positions, given a sip from the chalice of sanctified status quo ante and a wafer of amnesia, and instructed from thence on to use their heads to wipe their own asses. Their revolt was absolute and absolutely sincere.
Breton, whose humorlessness had actually made him a superb Dadaist, gradually retreated into a fascination with his own personality. But this quintessentially poetic position crystallized into an unbounded fascination with man. Starting from poetic intuition and a familiarity with Freud’s researches, he, along with others of the time, realized that a mere fraction of the mind was consciously engaged at any given moment. This laid bare the fallacy of rational structures in their entirety. Regarding all human action and interaction, the conscious direction and organization of our lives was discovered to be a myth. But what then was the great driving force as a whole? -The unconscious power directing men’s lives could be named desire. And to the artist desire is the name of freedom. Perilously though, to the rest of mankind it is above all the unchecked force of horror. To Freud it was negative in the sense that it was ultimately unfulfillable. To the artists and poets it was positive because this same infiniteness was the infiniteness of hope. Regrouping themselves around the same dado of Dada -the rejection of social norms- the poets now braced themselves to face this elemental contradiction. They proclaimed that the minuscule portion of mind mapped and cultivated was in fact merely the visible bit of a world mostly submerged in liquid passion, a contiguous landmass of gaping maws and soul-ripping peaks that formed, finally, a complete world. -Their world all along. But a world is suspended in a sky, and in that sky roar still more worlds in yet more skies, which must all be slung in a cosmos, a universe of some limitless cohesion. Thus the first taste of the unknown conjures up a renunciation of all which is not eternal.
Unlike Lautreamont and a very few others who faced this howling expanse alone, the seminal surrealist group mustered their hope and their indignation into a collective expeditionary force which systematically reconnoitered and tested the new territories with a sincerity bordering on idiocy. But this was a divine idiocy, peppered with visions as bright and magnificent as anything in history, and convulsed with a lethal humor -itself a forbidden paradise- of the genesis of Jarry, Apollinaire and maddog Dada.
Meanwhile, back on the surface -the braggart islands of civilization- surrealism of necessity went from revelation to action. If the logic which rationalized the unbearable human condition was the product of retarded mentation, then a complete transformation of society was justified and morally imperative. They settled their own positions first. Since all mankind had been dehumanized to an exchange value, art had similarly lost its autonomy and was forced to serve as a -sometimes sacred- whore. Retaining their mental activity, they refused to produce art for the social order that by exploitation and betrayal had robbed them of all dignity. These artists then downed tools, wildcatted, and went on ostentatious strike. Those creators despising their concubinage, who yet owned the keys to the psyche, took a unified position straight out of Lysistrata. No strike fund existed but their arcane knowledge and their insistence on the fundamental right to hope.
In their constant rearguard battles with the established world, inevitably fought with each advance into the new lands, they blasted apart portals, windows and massive rusted gates of stultified aprioris, including the scientific approach itself, insisting on the validity of a purely poetic methodology. It could not be otherwise, for the basis of their values lay in the shadowlands which art alone had surveyed for centuries. Indeed, the realms of dream and reality seem contradictory only when viewed from the peephole of reality, and not at all necessarily the other way around. Art then again became a weapon to expose people to their inner selves. But, by this point, it had already become apparent that surrealism is scarcely a matter of creation; if it lives, it is lived.
By the thirties the commingling fangs of fascism and conventional reaction clearly endangered all they had done and stood for, and, primarily to prove their sincerity in actively working towards a finer life, the explorers briefly aligned themselves with the French Communist Party. The Party then contracting under the Stalinist decimation of the Third International, the surrealists withdrew their adherence, arguing with steadfast purity of purpose against the very unrevolutionary limitations of a revolution constructed of limits. In fact, the surrealist political scope exceeded any positive political program on offer. Being fundamentally a revolutionary state of mind, surrealism encompassed the social revolution as an integral part of the total ideal. Events were to prove the comprehensiveness of their stance, and an elevated survey proves their dedication all along.
Historically, morally, there never was a break. Dada was nothing other than the unchaining of the unconscious and a mode of total revolution, of actively changing man’s destiny, both internal and external. The continuity is clear from the ferocity of the German Dadaists to the Spartacist uprising and the subsequent manhunts; an uninterrupted cord leads likewise from Tzara in Zurich’s Cabaret Voltaire, 1916, to Tzara -and other Dadaists and surrealists –poets!– marked and risking their lives in the French Resistance. Consider Desnos in Buchenwald. Or dead in Theresienstadt.
After the Second World War the chalice and wafers again made the rounds. New flags were greeted like fresh women. And, like a punk song co-opted into a TV jingle for shoes, surrealism was distilled into a homeopathic inoculation and distributed throughout the very capitalist system it abominated, a style, a commercial gimmick, at best debated amongst imbeciles as an aesthetic question. Yet the world order continued to be juddered by seizures as the inevitable result of its own inadmissible contradictions and internal pressures, and the wars -those fervid antibodies of the grand man-made monster- never ceased to boil forth to this day, until now the meaningless clang of money being coined and the attendant squelch of humanity being stomped to marmalade has become deafening.
So we now face a far more enormous and rampant juggernaut. The splendid conception has so surpassed its original parameters that mankind has been divorced completely from the world, and is at present an irrelevant force of either self-abasement or slaughter. Our first response? In incessant peril of our very existence from that class dancing atop the machine of sheer destruction, and daily abused by the otherwise unemployable anthropoids in political office, we must never for a moment hesitate to maul those who mock the mind. Claws and courage both swell with danger. Nor, in the present maelstrom, may we ever neglect to oppose those well-funded hypocrites fueling the current fascist mutiny against the overall imperialist apportionment in the name of religion. -Enchanting the children with tales of some corpse and its boss.
And what of the billions who have not commandeered an office or limousine? The mass of humanity who awake in the familial prison, whose monstrous cell mates enact and perpetuate the myriad cheap aberrational behaviors cast in the crucible of their helpless unawareness; funneled through schools to be ministered by taxidermists then sent out into the system, reeling like the dazed victims of a collision they are, to scour the streets for some fetish called money which is necessary to collect other fetishes in this grand brothel of fetishes? Like the oppressors they worship, they operate on the premise that the five or ten per cent of mind they do grapple with is the human sum. To see them haranguing, despairing and violating with such confidence while all the while being wiggled about by cables knitted through the unacknowledged edifices of the unknown is always a huge belly laugh and nearly worth the price of the show. I say nearly. We are nonetheless obliged to plaster them with tomatoes, if only to brighten their outlook.
Change life, said Rimbaud, and the brave ones who followed said both change the world and change consciousness. After all, my friends, ninety per cent of the universe is dark matter. Gaze piercingly beyond the limits of reason in fashion and contemplate the other side of the mirror. The logic held up to us, when examined, turns out to be a logic of varying degrees of rancor, and even that is scarred by those panicked homunculi who claw the patina in self-loathing, shattering what life we were able to discern in that mesmerizing glass. It is for us to affirm the eternal unity of contradictions and not bow our minds to the order of men who can count no higher than the number of sticks they carry to club us with. Mendacity has become the sole accepted reality and it requires an unswerving surrealist base to entertain the truth in one’s own home. Understand that you will get no veracity from men who know virtually nothing of their own selves. You can expect no congruity, no integrity, from those who are only intermittently jolted into facing their own driving forces.
You will find no redemption in simple art, notoriety or desperate recreations. The temptation to settle for an evil peace is seductive. Don’t be lulled by a beer, a dance, some noise, clamping your eyes shut and jerking to the whamming inanities sold to you as being the the vanguard of the modern spirit. Stand firm and you will see the insult of a nation of pigs and puny swindlers who only survive by the abstention of thought, like an odious child demonstrating the same asinine card trick over and over. Yours is part of a larger social construct which exists solely by keeping us apart, by maintaining a world wherein everyone is reduced to skulking around muttering this place ain’t big enough for the both of us (mostly to themselves). Just as a nation’s army exists, ultimately, for use against its own populace, all social order survives by devoting its every moment to the shattering of the individual psyche and disabling that soul’s inherent mechanisms; to prevent and pervert those functions with the aim of precluding the union of individuals, above all in that highest sphere of hope and truth: love.
In the very first instance the fight is for an ethics of perception. -Discernment in its purest sense. Then, from this point, I assure you, the war will be one of constant engagement against the calculated creation of a false collective unconscious. The mere use of language does not distinguish man from the animals; symbols, tokens and fetishes do. When communication is abstracted and leaves a lasting record in whatever medium (and these media multiply particularly in consumerist culture, being themselves both merchandise and tools of forming basic modes of thought), it becomes open to misuse. Over generations the assertions and modalities of the preceding dominant cultures are accepted -assimilated- by the mass mind as experience.
Our goal cannot be other than the harmonization of those two dreadful antinomies: man and the world. Here then is our revolutionary breadth and our permanence. Existence must become the perpetual liberation of the unconscious in concord with the cosmological conscious and the unconscious of the others around us, all observing itself consciously. We have no aesthetic, but a phenomenology capable of releasing a resonant, fearsome Art.
And so we see, once again, freedom. We have no property beyond our minds. We have no countries beyond our spirits, and we have no laws except what is written in flames in our hearts. If we pay for this freedom with our lives, as we will, those fleeting hours will have been dedicated to the lives of all.
We are by definition a guerrilla operation, but with a universal goal. In hortation I point out to you but two examples of the heroes of our coming force. From the swirling dusts of America comes looming the poet and blues shouter, Philip Newton, Field Marshal of the Baader-Meinhof Mutual Dog. Friends, here is the man with Apocalypse in his veins. I extend my hand across the ancient ocean to he who will once again work beside me after so many years. And when, here in Scandinavia, these bifurcated pustules, cheering as they hurtle to oblivion, see a sudden blinding flash on the tracks, that will be the Phantom Switchman -Sune Urth- our golden Schinderhannes. Sune is rallying fighters such as yourselves under the banner of Brand Central, Danish wing.
It is for us, who comprehend the existence of language and imagery, to stake our lives each tumbling moment in defense of these wild nebulae, to unite the skies of day and night and roar with fury at every assault on this one world of actual freedom. Our battle cry, friends: at all times, supreme lucidity. -The most delirious lucidity. We must discern, transcend and transmute everything, so that humanity, consciously charting its own awesome mystery, can devote itself to limitless flight.
Love or death. And not one step back.
Tristan Winter
President, Occidental Bureau of Surrealist Research
Minister of Defenestration, Baader-Meinhof Mutual Dog