More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
“One overhears many reactions to surrealist art, but the most pathetic of all is from those who ask, ‘What am I supposed to see and feel from this?’ In other words, ‘What does papa say I may think and feel about this?’ ” GRACE PAILTHORPE, “On the Importance of Fantasy Life”
She rose. She hurled into the air above the soldiers, arced up, seeming to pause, falling at last through the invisible boundary between the ninth and tenth arrondissements. She landed hard on the Surrealist side of the street.
The manif
Main à plume.
In reference to the verse by Rimbaud (“La main à plume vaut la main à charrue”, “the writer’s hand is as important as the hand that guides the plough”), Historically La Main à Plume was the name for a surrealist collective and the clandestine review they published in occupied Paris from 1941 to 1944
The German pilot flies straight at the vivid flowers, as if smitten, plant-drunk.
The ninth was too completely made of recalcitrant art for anyone to take. It would shelter no one but the partisans of that art—the Surrealist stay-behinds, soldiers of the unconscious. Main à plume.
the simplest act of Surrealism is to fire randomly into a crowd?”
Breton
“ ‘We refuse to flee poetry for reality,’ ” he said. “ ‘But we refuse to flee reality for poetry.’ ” The men and women blinked at him. “ ‘No one should say our actions are superfluous,’ ” Thibaut recited. “ ‘If they do, we’ll say the superfluous supposes the necessary.’ ”
the words of Jean-François Chabrun, speaking for the franc-tireurs, Surrealist irregulars,
They taught him to conduct what they called disponibilité, to be a receiver. To tap objective chance.
Availability
In the post-blast miasma, all Parisians grew invisible organs that flex in the presence of the marvelous. Thibaut’s are strong.
The Main à plume owed them, not obedience, but a kind of fealty: this was hardly the hoped-for insurrection, but these were Surrealist glimmers, these manifs. They were convulsively beautiful, and they were arrived.
The poets and artists and philosophers, resistance activists, secret scouts and troublemakers, had become, as they must, soldiers.
The Surrealists despised his calling, and he them for their militant atheism, but everyone knew it helped to have a priest perform certain absurdities of his trade if it was demons you had to fight. “Why?” Thibaut asked Élise when they left again. “Why do you think it does work? It’s not as if any of this stuff is true.” “Maybe devils love ritual as much as people do,” she said.
Robert Alesch.
Catholic priest, Nazi collaborator, died 1949
hadal cities,
Deepest region of the ocean, e.g., the Marijuana Trench
They’re manifs.” Living images. Images of demons, and of their victim. And not even sentient like most of the art come alive in New Paris, but looping.
the names Chabrun, Patin, Dotrement.
“Jack Parsons.”
American rocket engineer and occultist
The old man wears a larva on his head. Some limb-long bright caterpillar, gripping an outsized leaf. It wriggles and the leaf-hat flutters, hedgerow chic.
grandfather,” he had said, “was Rabbi Loew. You know Rabbi Loew, Jack? From Prague. He made a giant clay man and figured out how to bring him to life to keep the Jews safe. You know what that made him? The first applied mathematician.”
Between the trajectories of rocket falls, rainbow-shapes and gravity, between his imaginings of the screamings across the sky that he would send the Nazis, Parsons, with exhausting care and thoroughness, developed an arithmetic of invocation, an algebra of ritual. A witching plan.
Gravity’s Rainbow
