#7 'THE POET IS WORKING'
On dreaming and seeing the world as it is and my biggest beef with the Surrealists
In July, I interviewed Marie Sarré, the Centre Pompidou’s conservation officer for modern collections. She has co-curated Beaubourg’s current Surréalisme exhibition marking the centennial celebrations of André Breton’s 1934 manifesto (see note).
She told me that Surrealism “wasn't a pictorial or artistic movement, but a collective adventure.” Despite the author Jean Schuster declaiming the end of Surrealism in a 2116-word article in Le Monde, in 1969, Sarré said lots of people question whether it ever ended at all.
At the centre of the show is Breton’s original manuscript, full of things scratched out and bits of paper stuck in. He never intended to launch a manifesto with it. He was just writing a draft of an intro to a forthcoming book of his poems, Poisson Soluble.
The impact of surrealism in art and literature cannot be overstated (I was taken aback by how most of the threads in the Pompidou show read like, or are in fact, the titles of Harry Potter books: there are dreams, chimeras, monsters, madness, metamorpheses, mythical snakes, forests that speak, labyrinths, mediums, automatic writings, hymns to the night and alchemists. One chapter is called The Philosopher’s Stone. Not sure that connection has often been highlighted?)
And yet, Sarré said that what’s interesting is that so few people have actually read what Breton wrote.
So I did. And I have so many questions.
Not least because so very many women came to play a fundamental role in the historic Surrealist groups (see below), there is the obvious objection that “the woman”, as Breton defines her, is but a muse, not an artist.
When Breton writes “The mind of the man who dreams is fully satisfied by what happens to him”, he’s being literal. He really does have only a man in mind. He puts “the woman” and “the idea” on the same disembodied level, as that which happens to the creating man, and softens his thoughts: “This idea, this woman, disturb it, they tend to make it less severe. What they do is isolate the mind for a second from its solvent and spirit it to heaven, as the beautiful precipitate it can be, that it is.”
Dude. Let me tell you something. I too — along with every woman I know — have a beautiful precipitate of a mind. (In 1988, Breton’s second wife and mother of his one child, the artist, Jacqueline Lamba, was interviewed about their relationship. “He presented me to his friends like a naiad,” she said, “because he thought it more poetic than to present me as a painter at work. He saw in me what he wanted to see, but in fact, he didn’t see me, really.”)
What I really can’t be dealing with though, is this insistence of his that seeing the world as it is is incompatible with the infinitely superior approach he’s proposing, of living eyes wide shut. Essentially, Breton doesn’t think realism and poetry can co-exist.
“When will we have sleeping logicians, sleeping philosophers?” he asks. He likens being awake to “an interference”. He finds work or effort, a bore. To have a “realistic attitude”, to his mind, is to be “hostile to any intellectual or moral advancement”. He pits St Thomas of Aquinas and Anatole France against Saint-Pol-Roux, who, he writes, “in times gone by, used to have a notice posted on the door of his manor house in Camaret, every evening before he went to sleep, which read: THE POET IS WORKING.”
Of the man (it’s still and always a man) occupied by practical necessities demanding constant attention, he says “None of his gestures will be expansive, none of his ideas generous or far-reaching.”
And of the child, his view is just as impoverished. “Children set off each day,” he writes, “without a worry in the world. Everything is near at hand, the worst material conditions are fine. The woods are white or black, one will never sleep.”
I mean. Where do we even begin?
I woke up to watch this LA-based 11-year-old, Bruno, being such a boss on the drums that Questlove — the drummer to rule them all — was breathless: “Well COTDAMN,” he typed.
Bruno posted his first drum solo cover, aged 7, in June 2020, in response to the #blacklivesmatter movement. “Our family is processing our grief and pain by creating music”, the YouTube caption says.
That’s the very definition of a child being painfully aware of the world’s terrible material conditions and striving (working hard) to make poetry stand tall in the face of everything.
I instantly think of Francis Alÿs’s ongoing collection of videos, made all around the world, of Children’s Games (read more here), the most arresting of which is #19: Haram Football:
So it’s 100 years later and I’m bringing viral social media clips to bear on a piece of archival handwriting that saw the light of day when European imperialism was in full despotic regalia. Women wouldn’t have the right to vote in France for another 20 years (in 1944); it would be 70 years before the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child (the right to relax and play, to be safe from violence; the right to an education, a sufficient standard of living and to health services) is ratified, in the 1990s.
But at the very least this historical perspective shows that, in 1924, there were a lot of people Breton wasn’t seeing. I refuse the idea that there wasn’t immense poetry and lyricism to be found, an incalculable generosity of thought and expansiveness of gesture to be felt, in all those lives.
I leave you with the classicist and all-round wonder that is Anne Carson, with whom I’ve been stuck, now, for months, writing about poets making extraordinary work with their whole beings firmly unblinking: finding expansive ways to write about what’s exactly, impossibly, all around them.
In Economy of the Unlost, Carson does this side-by-side reading of the 6th Greek poet Simonides and the Romanian-French poet and Holocaust survivor Paul Celan. She’s discussing Celan’s enduring use of the German language, “the language of his mother but also the language of those who murdered his mother.”
She writes: “In order to write poetry at all, [Celan] had to develop an outside relationship with a language he had once been inside. […] Surely the Nazis brought more death to the language than anyone else in its history. For Celan to keep on in German despite this fact became the task of a lifetime.”
She describes how he would make compound words to find a way through this, referencing specifically the poem, Sprachgitter — Language Mesh, which includes these lines that, every time I read them, I want to draw what I see:
Slanted, in the iron socket the smouldering splinter. By its light-sense You guess the soul. (Were I like you. Were you like me. Stand we not under one tradewind? We are strangers.) The pavingstones. On them, tight by each other, the two heartgrey pools: two mouthsfull of silence.
Carson highlights the alienation from language and from other people that this poem suggests. I love the way the literary critic Michael Wood ends another piece (in the London Review of Books) on Celan and this poem with something like hope:
“Celan himself says that at this point in his career (it was 1957) ‘the difficulty of all speaking (to one another) and at the same time the structure of that speaking is what counts’.
‘We are strangers’, the short poem called ‘Sprachgitter’ asserts. We are ‘mouthfuls of silence’ even when we speak, especially when we speak. But there is that light between the bars, and there is that guess. If we start as modestly, as unfiguratively, as possible, we may after all get somewhere, find some snowy connection between ourselves and others.”
“We may after all get somewhere”, I like that. We might just find connection. We need to keep trying. Speaking. Making. Writing. Being poetry, with whatever is our medium (woodworking, making music, drawing a bird every day). With our eyes — and our hearts — wide, wide open.
Notes
Beaubourg is the nickname for the Centre Pompidou, in Paris (which is about to get a hair cut, I mean, a refurb by French studio Moreau Kusunoki Architectes and Mexican practice Frida Escobedo Studio, which I’m excited about) isn’t of course the only place throwing a party. Every gallery/art centre and its owner is going all-out for the 100th anniversary of Surrealism:
Galerie Poggi in Paris has exhibited Surrealist furniture (I wrote about that too).
The Hepworth Wakefield in Wakefield is about to do Surrealist landscapes.
The Henry Moore institute in Leeds is focusing on The Traumatic Surreal.
Liss Llewelyn (who I’ve written about here and always love to visit, virtually) has an online show of British Surrealists.
James Barron Art recently highlighted the surrealist underpinnings of US painter Janet Sobel’s Ukrainian folk-art inspired abstract expressionism.
The Fonds Hélène & Édouard Leclerc pour la Culture in Landerneau is highlighting, among others, the Surreal facet of French photography giant Henri Cartier-Bresson.
Lévy Gorvy Dayan will herald the arrival of Frieze Art Fair in London with a show titled Enchanted Alchemies, featuring some fabulous artists including Ithell Colquhoun (who will have a solo show at Tate St. Ives in 2025); Leonora Carrington (currently at Newlands House in Petworth); Bharti Kher (whose current Yorkshire Sculpture Park exhibition I wrote about here); Linder (set to have her first London retrospective at the Hayward in 2025); and Julia Isídrez (currently in the Arsenale show at the Venice Biennale.) IT IS ENDLESS.
World of Echo
Ezra Collective - Streets Is Calling (feat. M.anifest & Moonchild Sanelly)
Fousheé, Do you have a soul? — so dreamy
Debbie, Feeling of love — the song I can’t stop singing
Yusef Lateef, Love Theme From Spartacus
Marnie Stern, Believing is seeing
Pull up a memory
I saw my friend Gino on Sunday who said that these newsletters were me just being so me. Which, when you’re writing into a void, is a reassurance of sorts. At least I’m being real. Please be real back <3.
Let’s go for a walk
I miss Arthur, my godson, who is now stateside and won’t be turning up with carrots in his pockets for about a year. He has been doing some good walking in a straight line tho. Mine are, compared to France last month, massively underwhelming and also less straight than Arthur’s, a hazard of urban geography more than walker’s willpower:
Deo Kato, on the other hand, is now well into the EU leg of his absolutely awesome project to run from Cape Town to London, and people are joining him. Go cheer him on. The man deserves all the medals right now.
I’m trying! Really interesting reading, but I’ve much to learn. 🤗