Surrealisme
Surréalisme
The very days and nights of Montparnasse
must have felt mythic to those who lived them
in that small gap between two wars,
painters and poets trying to further chance
and let repressed desires associate freely,
willing dreams flood each instant of waking life.
Well, they succeeded, those half-mad men fascinated
with mystery, melancholy and fear, for now
we are all morphing fools, consuming
instantaneous transformation, the bizarre
juxtapositions that come from any newspaper
or from channel-surfing, a part of everyday life.
Like them we ask more of reality than reality can sustain;
and like them we go below, sur the surface, and stoke
the furnace of existence until it blazes ever more
vividly, each day destroying more and more of the old dream
of an ordered life. This quest began with Freud,
as much does that’s made us so self-conscious
we sometimes find ourselves unbearable. We are like
tightrope walkers emerging out of a maelstrom,
the rope tethered God knows where.
Here’s a matador whose hands are sharks biting the air
as the dust of conquest settles; a printing press
with tentacles reaching out to implant propaganda
in the masses. Contingency, indecision, displacement
in image after image; a disembodied hand pierced
by an arrow, a Corinthian column that’s become
a human torso, its head a bulbous syringe. Coat hangers tumble
from a tower, become hanger-gulls that flap off
toward distant mountains. Amoebae carry flags.
Here’s a seaside city of dice, a light bulb emerging from
a bottle of light. We see it again and again in commercials,
the poured liquid that takes shape and drives away,
the violin that elongates into a rocket, this art that’s taken
hold until few can imagine permanence or integrity
in anything. We expect invasion, penetration,
possession of one state by another, one entity of another,
the fluid flux of things mutating, multiplying, dissolving,
so clearly before us now, it is what we see.
From: Brave Disguises
Univ. of Pittsburgh Press, 2002