ARSENAL

SURREALIST SUBVERSION SURREALIST SUBVERSION

Stephen SCHWARTZ The Garden of Eden Penelope ROSEMONT . The Origin of Species (excerpt) Joseph JABLONSKI 6 Notes on the Revolution of Witchcraft Franklin ROSEMONT 9 The Crisis of the Imagination Paul GARON 16 Journey to the Center of the Pond Patrick MULLINS 19 Poem Robert DAY 19 The Exegesis of Love 20 War Against the Pope 20 Letter to Benjamin Mendozay Amor Joseph JABLONSKI 21 Two Poems Penelope ROSEMONT 22 Where Have You Been? Malcolm de CHAZAL 22 Three Poems Peter MANTI 23 Three Poems RIKKI 24 The Double Paul GARON 25 Surrealist Occupational Index Penelope ROSEMONT 26 Revenge of the Ibis S. P. DINSMOOR 7 The Garden of Eden ¢ Lucas, Kansas) Philip LAMANTIA 32 Between the Gulfs Virgil TEOQDORESCU 33 Leninism and the Structure of the Poetic Image GelluNAUM 34 Persistence of Flames Paul GARON 35 The Illegality of Despair Philip LAMANTIA 38 Becoming Visible (poems) Etienne LERO 40 Poem Stephen SCHWARTZ 4} A Visit With Don Talayesva Joyce MANSOUR 43 Wild Glee from Elsewhere Joseph JABLONSKI 44 The Terrifying Days: A Dream Tale T-Bone SLIM 45 Selections from Unpublished Works E. F. GRANELL 46 Drawings 48 Surrealism in Martinique (1932) E. LERO, R. MENILet al. 48 Manifesto: Legitimate Defense Guy DUCORNET & RIKKI 50 The New Lotto Game Franklin ROSEMONT ol André Breton by Anna Balakian: A Review Peter MANTI etal. 55 Recently Published Works by Leon Trotsky 57 Surrealist Communications & Reviews 60 Surrealist Publications in the U.S.: 1971-73

NOTES — A New Difficulty in the Path of Psychoanalysis + Heirs to Freud + Letter to Robert Bly + Americanization + Zydeco + Surrealism in Rumania + On the Elections + “Escritura de fuego sobre el jade” + The Padilla Affair + The Self-Humiliation of the Unbelievers + On the Interpretation of Irrational Phenomena + Surrealist Precognition + Marcuse’s Epigones + Bun- uel + The Tel Quel School of Falsification + Homage to Magloire-Saint-Aude + Surrealist In- quiry + Trajectory of Voodoo.

ILLUSTRATIONS by Leonora CARRINGTON, Guy DUCORNET, E. F. GRANELL, Anton KREKULE, Conroy MADDOX, RIKKI, Franklin ROSEMONT, Jacques VACHE.

Subscriptions: $6.00 for four issues.

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Address all correspondence to: Franklin Rosemont, 3714 North Racine Avenue, Chicago, Illinois 60613.

F. R.: Buster Keaton's Smile (collage)

“Evil arises against good. It could do no less.” — Lautréamont

THE GARDEN OF EDEN

Reading André Breton I returned inexorably to two nearly identical phrases, one so contro- versial: in Nadja we are reminded of a knowl- edge of a kind ‘“‘to send men rushing into the street”; in The Second Manifesto of Surrealism “the simplest surrealist act consists of dashing into the street, revolver in hand, and firing blindly, as fast as you can pull the trigger, into the crowd .. .” For my part I cannot divorce the particular willingness manifest in these all- too-laconic emblems from the refrain of a Mex- ican revolutionary song, If they want to kill me tomorrow, then let them kill me today, or from the noted battle cry of the Cheyenne, /t’s a great day to die! Here we find expressed a rare distil- lation of the total refusal to accept life on terms other than as a being filled with light, challeng- ing a physical and moral darkness.

Yet it is within such darkness that analogy functions most freely, breaking with reductive means of cognition and submitting life to the rule of desire. Breton, in Signe Ascendant, fol- lows Pierre Reverdy in identifying analogy, “the spontaneous, extralucid, rebellious rapport which establishes itself, under certain conditions, between one thing and another,” as the most exalting form of poetic thought. In a later text’ discussing the painting of René Magritte, Bret- on calls our attention to the writings of the Ger- man-Jewish philosopher Constantin Brunner (1862-1937), whose theses on the structure of the mind deserve a wider circulation today. The greater part of Brunner’s writing? follows Spin- oza in a careful but acerbic attack on scholas- ticism “in whatever guise, be it Kantianism or Cartesianism,’”* and Brunner unfortunately does not escape the pitfall of a rigid rationalism of the variety Trotsky had in mind when he wrote of “rationalism ...a reactionary factor the mo- ment it is directed against dialectic.” Yet not- withstanding his shortcomings we are indebted to Brunner for his introduction into the evi- dence, so to speak, of a theoretical model of three mental faculties: science, a system of assimila- tion of exterior and sense-derived data; spirit, an abstract form of interior motion; and anal- ogon or fictitious thought, synthesizing spirit and science. If we project Brunner’s model into the analysis of the structure of operant thought we can, I think, only conclude that at present the analogical potential is subject to a repression in the mind, dependent upon the whole process of repression of Eros, and by which the faculty of conceptualization of objects, contingent upon language, is limited by a reduction of the field of signifiers at the individual’s disposal. This reduction may be accomplished by the imposi- tion upon the affective field of signifiers of a system of signifiers (the “micro-language’’) based on traumatic anxiety as well as upon pos- itivist logic. Thus the Excalibur of language, by which the world may be transformed, is torn from the hands of the child. It is paradigmatic of Indo-European and Chinese thought that an-

alogy has remained a secret element, often sup- pressed or distorted and refined beyond recog- nition; let me confine myself to a reaffirmation of Idries Shah’s contention‘ that the various forms assumed by analogical or fictitious thought in the dominant cultures of the world (Zen, Tao, Tantrism, Zoroastrianism, Mithra- ism, Gnosticism, Sufism, the esoteric and heret- ical doctrines of the Christian era, materialist dialectics, and surrealism) may be derived by diffusion from the extraordinary structure of liberation of expression embodied in Central Asian and Siberian shamanism, which, of course, extended itself across the Bering Strait.

May the prominence of shamanic-automatis- tic means of expression be correlated with a less- repressive system of social obligations? While such correlation would easily lend itself to an abstract schematism of method, it is instructive to examine the functioning of analogical thought in the matrices of Mayan civilization in Yuca- tan. Two forms of analogical communication are in evidence in both glyphic and alphabetic docu- ments; the first, glyphic analogy by homophony, or rebus writing, is attested by the scholarship of J. Eric S. Thompson.’ The Yucatecan dia- lects are rich in homonyms, and Thompson dis- cusses their glyphic representation with the fol- lowing examples, among others: “the word xoc or xooc in Yucatec is a name for a mythological fish. The word xoc also means to count . . . there is little reason to doubt that (in a particular con- text the glyph) xoc-fish stands for xoc-count”; further, the name Bolon-Yocte or Nine Strides is represented with the inclusion of oc (head of a dog) for oc (stride). While it may be argued that this phenomenon is merely exemplary of a homonymic process whereby several systems of writing have developed, here the birth of the symbol extends itself beyond the development of, for example, the Hebrew letter aleph from the sign for the world aleph (head of a cow), with the addition of a dimension of analogical substitution, of words ‘making love.” More ex- tensive evidence for a major role for analogical means of expression in Yucatecan thought is provided by the books of Chilam Balam, a col- lection of versions of a single Yucatecan text transcribed, secretly, in Latin characters during the immediate post-Conquest period, and still in use in certain parts of the Mayan culture area today. In the Book of Chilam Balam of Chuma- yel® we encounter several complexes of meta- phoric analogy, as follows:

“Son, where is the cenote? All are drenched by its water. There is no gravel at its bot- tom; a bow ts inserted over tts entrance. It ts the church . . . Son, where are the first- baptised ones? One has no mother, but has a bead collar and little bells. It is early yel- low corn ... Son, bring me what hooks the sky, and the hooked tooth. They are a deer and a gopher .. . Son, bring me a three-

stranded cord. I want to see it. It is an

iguana...”

While a germane issue in social analysis is the extent to which comprehension of such systems of analogy was accessible only to initiates, I be- lieve we can infer a predominance of analogy in the Mayan world-view. Further, Mayan hom- ophonic and metaphoric analogy are remarkable for their tendency to escape a rule of resem- blance and adopt a rule of pleasure. It is not entirely inconceivable that the key to untrans- lated Mayan glyphs may lie more in the realm of psychology than of pure linguistics.

Means to comprehend the functioning of a sublimated analogon in our own continuously- evolving collective mental life are provided by a multitude of sources; J think, now, of two An- glo-American precursors of the researches in the triumph of the principle of pleasure carried out under the sign of surrealism today, of whom I learned quite recently—Thomas Morton, the no- torious May Lord of early New England history, and S. P. Dinsmoor, creator of the magnificent “Cabin Home and Garden of Eden” in Lucas, Kansas. Thomas Morton is among the few wholly admirable figures in our sorry history; in 1625 this gentleman took command of a fur- trading post on the Kennebec River in Massa- chusetts, and in 1628 he was tried and banished by the Puritan authorities, charged with pro- moting ribald May revels with the natives and selling them firearms. In 1637 he published, at Amsterdam, The New-English Canaan, a truly marvelous work’ including an extended survey and defense of the customs of native Americans; an exalted lyrical evocation of the American landscape; attacks on the Plymouth bigots filled with black humor; and a series of poems of start- ling metaphoric quality. That Morton’s work is nearly unknown today can only be regarded as a consequence of deliberate suppression, for his writing is poetically the equal of Mather’s Won- ders of The Invisible World and is certainly su- perior to the grim pieties of the repulsive Brad- ford.

S. P. Dinsmoor’s Garden of Eden, rising like a sign against the evil eye from the plains of Kansas, makes manifest the revolutionary as- pirations of Morton’s work, best expressed in terms of a disorientation by nature, and of a def- erence necessary to it. Rest assured, it is hard- ly my wish to share the sentimental bondage of “nature poets”; rather, I am forced to acknowl- edge an active role of a principle of the erotic in the languages of stones, of trees, of whole systems of signs yet obscure. Here we are faced by the marvelous communications of walls of warehouses, of wharves, of certain residences, deserted and overgrown, too rarely prey by their very design to an architectural mad love. I think of those structures that infest the Pacific Coast: in San Francisco alone the Octagonal Houses of Fourierist inspiration, the Caselli Avenue castle in whose shadow I am pleased to live, the whole of the Embarcadero; and, above all, a house in Guaymas, on the Sonora coast in Mexico, where I passed a moment or two before conferring with the hermit crabs: an old wooden house with a high, absurd keep surmounted by a balcony fit only for suicides, where an unbreakable bond

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seemed to spring up between myself and Mary. I, for one, am unable to discern any resemblance between such architectural incarnations of the darkest and brightest sides of the human mind and the dreadful styles affected on the one hand by the most desperate sectors of the bourgeoisie, on the other by a soi-disant avant-garde; for me the Doric-columned marble monstrosities erec- ted by the petty sugar or railroad magnates of California, OR the dreadful wedding-cake Stal- in-gothic prevalent in Eastern Europe and the USSR, OR Le Corbusier’s and Frank Lloyd Wright’s attacks on the human spirit, OR the Los Angeles style of office and apartment build- ing, are indistinguishable; it is a clue to the ex- tent of the anxiety that rules the bourgeoisie now that they feel called upon to sponsor intim- idation after intimidation in steel and concrete, monuments to their own sterility, in a weak at- tempt to validate their fast-disappearing power. Regretfully, too, the demolition-ball of ‘urban renewal” is not aimed at the latest atrocity from the minds of Lawrence Halprin or William Per- eira, but against one or another waterfront ware- house or Victorian walkup, overwhelmed by ges- tures of liberation. The excuse that ‘urban re- newal” eliminates only the miserable shelters of an oppressed population and exchanges for

SURREALIST INQUIRY

In spite of the fact that on Sunday people are free from the responsibility of work, for many there remains attached to that partic- ular day a peculiar air of discomfort. In 1919 Sandor Ferenczi suggested that “Sun- day neuroses” were caused, in fact, pre- cisely by the freedom from work which, by provoking an internal freedom, further en- gendered a return of the repressed; this last, Ferenczi argued, produced the displeasure so commonly associated with Sundays.

An informal inquiry on this subject among friends and acquaintances elicited the following responses:

1. Mail is not delivered on Sunday.

2. Stores are generally closed.

3. Sunday is associated with the oppres-

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sive atmosphere of early family life. For the young boy, tt is the day he can least expect to be alone with his mother, for father is home.

5. Sunday is associated with Sunday school, church and other aspects of religion.

6. Sunday is ruined by the anticipation of Monday; the week-end seems al- ready over.

Obviously Ferenczi’s observations and the foregoing suggestions barely scratch the surface. In the hope of deepening the in- vestigation of this problem, we therefore pose the question to the readers of ARSENAL:

Why is Sunday, among the days of the week, so especially intolerable?

P.G.

them light, airy, livable blocks where working men, women and their children may enjoy a measure of dignity is more than a little suspect inasmuch as few would contest the contention that prefabricated housing is a good deal more dehumanizing, with its ever-smaller rooms, than crumbling, shadowy brick and wood remnants of a past generation; it is not entirely without significance that one of the few creative expres- sions open to young people in the ghetto or bar- rio, the street gang, functions better in the latter environment than the former, and that the won- derful sublimative “crimes” that blossom in the latter (theft, arson, attacks on the police, etc.) are turned into petty forms of repressive desub- limation (wife-beating, for instance) in the for- mer. In general at least 30 years’ natural action is required to make one another residence liv- able; it is just then, of course, that the wrecking crew makes its appearance. I dream of houses built by madmen, their walls of antimatter re- vealing every secret of their inhabitants, condu- cive to every liberty like a half-deserted anony- mous hotel, more sinister than “the aura of the jungle, conceived almost as a sort of lyrical anti-

should it not embrace a synthesis of jungle and city in certain quarters of San Francisco, of Chi- cago, of Paris, of Port-au-Prince, of Cairo, of Calcutta. For, after all, what exists for us but the living dream, those streets where the child- woman grows more beautiful with every step? To comprehend her power over me (by my choice or hers) I must learn how to approach this screen she has raised between me and all I know, made translucent only by her presence, confronting me with the Watts Towers, with the Dream Palace at Hauterives, with the Garden of Eden in Lucas, Kansas.. .

Stephen SCHWARTZ

(1) André Breton: ‘‘Envergure de Rene Magritte’ in Le

Surréalisme et la Peinture, Paris, 1965.

(2) Constantin Brunner: "Science, Spirit, and Superstition, London, Allen & Unwin, 1968.

(3) Brunner: Ibid., page 182.

(4) Idries Shah: Oriental Magic, London, Rider, 1956.

(5) J. Eric S. Thompson: Maya Hieroglyphic Writing, Washington, Camegie Institution, 1951.

(6) Ralph L. Roys; translator: Book of Chilam Balam of Chumayel, Norman, University of Oklahoma Press, 1968. (7) Thomas Morton: The New-English Canaan, edited by

thesis to urbanism”’;®

This morning, after dispos- ing of three more skeletons that I found in my closet, I began writing the word “slip- pery” on my little finger and found that I was unable to stop until I had covered my entire hand. The door col- lapsed when I inadvertently touched it with my hair.

Along the arrows of arches the empty mirror opens and assumes the aspect of a win- dow of uncut night. A copy of reality lingers in the shad- ows of a brief building, hold- ing its newspaper upright as a protection against the heavy rain of hourglasses.

The anger of glass lions echoes the metamorphosis of eagles. I stand at the entrance of a cavern engraved with the hypnotic lightning of lumin- ous desires, whose alphabeti- cal mirages stretch endlessly into the depths. The walls awaken at the cry of a white crane, and wings of isometric amber entice me further into the eternity of this translu- cent but artificial night.

For on the surface of the apple it is just noon.

you will, I am sure, pardon me if J insist on the inadequacy of this remark- ably concise dictum of Franklin Rosemont’s acho,’

THE ORIGIN

(excerpt)

A viscous train greets me without introduction. An arm- chair beckons and, seating my- self on an impetuous sea-lion, I survey the occult laboratory wherein are prepared unique plants and animals, perhaps to be condensed to seeds or eggs, and transported to the surface to be the form and fortune of the future.

Common European Octopus (0. vul- saris). (340)

Those who were rejected by the local committee of plastic lieutenants wander about amusing themselves balancing frying pans on soda straws and playing pool with arti- chokes.

Included in their number is a delightful giraffe, shim- mering with long sable hair that reaches to his knees, who will not occur in our encircled reality because the climate of Africa forbids it. He hopes to be placed in a secluded valley

Charles Francis Adams, Jr., Boston, The Prince Society,

1883. (8) Franklin Rosemont: ‘‘On the Painting of Jorge Cam- in ARSENAL, No. 1, 1970.

F SPECIES

of the Rocky Mountains or on some high Chilean plateau. We exchange addresses and discuss the limitations involv- ing the height of ceilings in the city.

Watching the magical rites performed over a lavender caracara to reduce it to em- bryo size (necessary for it to fit comfortably into an egg) two birds of questionable spe- cies, with beaks of bronze and transparent wings of cello- phane, run in circles shriek- ing wildly and beating their wings against the innocent air.

Another creature, the aero- nautical octopus, equipped with wings resembling those of bats (thus enabling him to visit the surface world and carry away tender victims to his dwelling beneath the sea) is attired in white tie and eight white gloves; sporting slim bamboo canes in at least four of his arms, and his wings fall- ing about his shoulders like a cloak stirred by a light breeze, he balances gracefully on two arms while lecturing on ma- rine life in six languages. A most elegant gentleman, to be

sure! Penelope ROSEMONT

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drawing by Leonora CARRINGTON

Notes on The Revolution of Witchcraft

1. In tribal societies where the belief in witchcraft is constitutional, the peoples consis- tently make use of an expression such as “witchcraft is increasing,” or “the country is filthy with witches,” or some variant of the same notion. We tend logically to attribute this idea to the natural incidence of misfortunes which “superstitious natives” always interpret as resulting from malign magical influence. Psychologically, however, we could more plaus- ibly view these sayings as a projection of the constant gnawing dissatisfaction within the human breast which people always complain about but also always cling to, as if its ache were itself the germ of a future fulfillment. At any time or place—the witches are increas- ing. How could it be otherwise with man, so long as repression confronts him? Malinow- ski attributes the origin of magical beliefs to a mechanism of wish-projection or emotion extended symbolically. Desire is the key to this explanation. The witch is a dreamer en- gaged in a dream-type action. And conversely, every dreamer, every desirous person is potentially a witch.

2. Since I find Malinowski’s thesis wholly acceptable, I also find it necessary to accept Lucy Mair’s seemingly bland conception of the witch as the stereotypical “bad neighbor.” This social anthropologist has accurately taken the measure of the witch from the per- spective of social science. The witch is an enemy of the group, a hostile, petty rebel. The aims and goals, or else the methods, of the witch are always an infringement of roles and taboos. The witch kills, disturbs the elements, obtains meat he did not have to hunt, or commands the services of zombies to tend his crops, etc. The witch in fact enjoys com- munity with a society of beings (familiars, zombies, fellow witches, ghosts, animals) within which satisfaction denied ordinary men and women is available. By acting on a premise of desire in defiance of a taboo, any magical operative becomes a witch by Mair’s defini- tion. Is this definition too broad? I think not. If we were to submit it to members of tribal societies from various quarters of the globe, I am sure that all respondents would con- firm that this is indeed the witch we have described.

3. Is not the point made that man does not necessarily wish to remain confined within human society or social humanity? The witch universally, strange clans such as the pseu- do-leopards of Sierra Leone, the werewolf, the vampire, are all examples of human beings who have entered a community too broad for ordinary social taboos to regulate. Emman- uel Le Roy Ladurie, in a study of peasant uprisings in Languedoc, reveals that witches

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were associated with the uprisings. (Michelet advances similar conclusions.) One of these rebels however, a certain Jean Grenier, was condemned to death for being, additionally— a werewolf.

In the days of Jean Grenier (the 16th century) there were many remote peasant com- munities in Europe that had not been essentially altered by Christianity, which had long since “converted” Europe. The final conversion of the continent, so it appears, was a long pacification struggle conducted against the culture and the natural religion (the Old Religion of Margaret Murray) of those rural societies that were oldest and geographic- ally well suited in terms of their self-defense. To this day the process is not total. It would be interesting to determine what relation the concentration and dispersion of such groups had to the geographical pattern of persecution in the centuries of all-out witch-hunting, 1450-1650. Did the peasant bring his archaic beliefs to the less remote villages, and later to the towns, thus precipitating a reaction on the part of the church?

4. Critics of Margaret Murray, and they include some of the leading authors in the field of European witchcraft, deny that witchcraft can be identified with a pre-Christian reli- gion of the continent. Yet these authorities would be the last to deny that survivals of pag- anism existed; indeed they still exist even in such unlikely places as Italy. What is more, it is well-known to all who have glanced at the subject that the church itself at times identified participation in any paganism as traffic with Satan, and hence witchcraft. Does this not suggest that Murray is essentially correct, even leaving aside her analysis of the specific archaeological evidence?

Lucy Mair refutes Murray by applying her empirical definition of the witch as an anti- social person acting hostilely through magic. How, she asks, can the regular devotee of a traditionally accepted cult be a witch if the witch is by definition an outsider morally and ritualistically? One can only answer that the hypothetical “Old Religion” was in fact an outlaw in the days of the witch trials. If applied from the perspective of larger historical forces, Mair’s definition includes Murray’s analysis as a specific case. Implicit in this ap- proach is the expectation that within the old, pre-Christian communities of Europe there were individuals who practiced malefic magic outside the rites and accepted mores of those societies. That is, when the “Old Religion” was the norm, there were also witches apart from it. It is highly possf®Te that the pressure of conflict with Christianity caused the devotees of the archaic religions to fall back upon their most violent traditions (witchcraft traditions?) in a defensive reflex. The peasants of Friuli, up to the 17th century, believed (in common with the Nyakyusa of Tanganyika) both in witches and in an elect corp of “defenders” who waged supernatural combat with the witches attacking their harvests. The “defenders” were simply certain neighbors whose spirits left them in their sleep. Carlo Ginzburg, a supporter of Murray, has established how the pressure of the Inquisi- tion eventually led the “defenders” (the Benandanti, ‘“Do-gooders”) to identify them- selves with the witches and confess to witchcraft. Ginzburg raises the possibility that this process of polarization went on throughout Europe. When the Inquisition finally managed to convince the populace that all that was not of Rome was of Satan, millions drew the only possible conclusions about themselves. Elements that had never been of the church were joined by some that defected from the church. Basing itself upon theology and scrip- ture, the church tried to subdue and rule a world in which the imminent, the Marvelous, was the fountainhead of all vivid experience. This is why the conflict between the church and witchcraft was to last for centuries and claim millions of lives. This is why it is pos- sible to speak of a “Revolution of Witchcraft”—the first great revolution that Europe saw. In the vast Sabbats and peasant risings, in the secret conclaves of the covens and the min- istrations of solitary witches, rebellious liberty entered the consciousness of the European masses threatening the foundations both of feudalism and theocracy. In the arsenal of this revolution were the wolf, the black cat. belladonna and the dream.

5. While I have emphasized the rebellious nature of the witch and her friends I do not want to convey a one-dimensional impression. The witch is not merely a social rebel, any more than she is merely the devotee of a pre-Christian fertility cult. Rather I would in- sist that at the apex of this complex of tribal, rural occultism we must always recognize the mythic features of a figure whom many students have been nervous about, to the extent of wishing to banish her altogether, ie. the wondrous, flying, night-witch. Despite the church and the Satanists, it is the night-witch herself, not the pact with the devil and the inversion of Christian symbolism, that is the alpha and omega of witchcraft.

The traditions of African and Oceanic tribes widely echo the European belief in a hag (at times a beautiful one) who entertains a court of weird familiars and flies through

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the night to Sabbats and evil works. In these societies it is woman who is placed in the center of malign occult responsibility. In Europe she is identified with night, as Baroja points out, citing Diana and Hecate. Woman, in the early mythology of the continent, needed no male devil’s aid to be herself in her element, to be, that is, the center of an erotic mystery in the heaven of night—the moon. Woman in her sexual transport does float and fly out of herself, just as the witch who anoints herself with an hallucinogenic oint- ment swoons and flies to the Sabbat. Woman flies, man wishes to fly. In some parts of Africa all women are suspect of witchcraft simply by virtue of their sex. Woman is also the cook, therefore the experimental herbalist. If Satan was king of this world, it was al- together fitting that he should have a bride who epitomized the greatest female prowess. But she was his mate—not his abject slave.

It is clear that the fabled night-witch is the poetic heart of witch beliefs, the fertile soil out of which the myth had of necessity to grow. Magic flight and metamorphosis re- move witchcraft to the realm of the other. There desire takes leave of its senses and dom- inates the mind. Lacking any roots in this surreal ground, modern Satanism and Old Re- ligion revivalism are wretched shells indeed—as various popular accounts on the pulp stands demonstrate.

6. If we reflect upon the tendencies that witchcraft and surrealism have in common we will realize that there is a continuity of human love for the material and animal worlds and a continuing desire to wed essences and experiences radiating from these viewpoints. This “animism” is more a social system than a metaphysic. The desirable society is per- haps one in which things and animals have a function which somehow relieves the pres- sure of man against man. Perhaps man will some day again learn to embrace the physical world as his fetish and the animal world as his totem.

Joseph JABLONSKI

A SHORT BIBLIOGRAPHY

In recent years the idea of witchcraft has been spat upon so repeatedly by commercially inspired authors and publicity- inspired cult-faddists that one would reasonably expect it to be bavond any kind of redemption. However, the persistence of witchcraft in its tribal and rural settings in many parts of the world, combined with the serious attention of social sci- entists, has made it possible to address this phenomena on its proper level, while at the same time appreciating the dismal “‘witcheraft fad’’ to a certain extent as its umperfect emanation. Fhe ‘*proper level’’ referred to is that of a symptomatol- ogy of the universal disease of desire as it is embodied in myth, magic and oracular knowledge; and in addition to this, a particular kind of revolt, since it is impossible to dissociate witchcraft from revolt. While this proposition owes a great deal to the anthropological literature on witchcraft, it owes at least as much to the surrealist revelation of the centrality of poetic mechanisms within the expressive and behavioral life of man insofar as these take an ‘‘irrational’’ form.

The following works are among the best of those available that bear a scientific relationship to the subject. Witchcraft and Sorcery, ed. by Max Marwick, Penguin, 1970. European Witchcraft, ed. By . W. Monter, John Wiley, 1969. Witchcraft, by Lucy Mair, McGraw-Hill, 1969. Satanism and Witchcraft, by Jules Michelet, Citadel, 1969. Sorcerers of Dobu, by R. F. Fortune, Dutton, 1963. Witeheraft In Tudor and Stuart England, by A. D. J. Macfarlane, Harper Torchbooks, 1970.

he World Of The Witches, by Julio Caro Baroja, Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1964. The Witch-Cult In Western Europe, M. A. Murray, Clarendon Press, 1921. The God Of The Witches, M. A. Murray, Oxford, 1970. Magic, Witchcraft, and Curing, ed. by John Middleton, Natural History Press, 1967. Magic, Science and Religion, Bronistaw Malinowski, Doubleday, 1954.

Henry Napartuk

Tomas Urbina, Francisco Villa, Emiliano Zapata

The Crisis of the Imagination

I. ABSOLUTE DIVERGENCE

What can be smashed should be smashed. What withstands the blow is fit_to survive. What flies into pieces is rubbish. In any case, strike out right and left; no harm can come

of it. —Dmitry PISAREV

Is it not deplorable that those who were com- pelled as children to memorize that there are 365 days in the year, forget so easily, from one moment to the next, that there are also 365 nights? But what a pitiable circumvention, this forgetting, as if the morning’s headlines did not comprise, more or less degradedly it is true, at least agonized reflections of the imaginative energy everyone unleashes every night in the form of dreams. Look at these headlines spelling out the crimes, infamies, massacres, calamities, earthquakes, shipwrecks, suicides and hazardous voyages to the north pole, to the peaks of un- conquered mountains, to the moon. Is not the latent content unmistakable and irrefutable? Are not men and women trying desperately to tell themselves something of the appalling jeop- ardy of life today, and the crying need to trans- form the world, to rebuild everything from scratch?

I take it as beyond argument, in spite of the fact that everyone avoids thinking about it, much less discussing it openly, that the flagrant con- tradiction between dream-life and waking-life

remains the pivot of the misery of the human condition. Everyone knows there are always beasts larger than life breaking loose from their cages; that undiscovered continents continue to blossom forth at one’s fingertips; that the mar- velous, in short, is an imperishable and inex- haustible well. Yet the ignominious farce of life, with its homilies on cradles and graves, the incessant stammering of the stock exchange and the intolerable omnipotence of the alarm clock, goes on day after day. Who can deny that sur- realism was ushered into the world precisely to discredit and to smash this dismal, monotonous procession of cowardice, hypocrisy, evasion and venality? I know very well how wildly uto- pian, how silly, how incredibly childish, the sur- realist project inevitably seems to those who, having proceeded ceaselessly throughout their lives from one set of prefabricated renunciations to another, are finally concerned exclusively with their little place in the sun, their ridiculous position in the world. Currently only a very small minority manifests its total disdain for the paltry joys auctioned off by the racketeers in charge of “reality.” The fact remains that seri- ous discussion is impossible with anyone else. Little by little this minority is growing, its self-confidence expanding. On the street corners, in the factories, in the poolhalls, in the truck- stops, in barracks, in prisons and even in schools, a few lone individuals refuse to say yes to the

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existing state of affairs; a few lone individuals raise insolent questions and ruthless challenges: Above all, they see what everyone else prefers not to see. To them alone could surrealism have any true meaning; with them alone is it possible for us to speak freely, unburdened by the usual morbid concessions. Sooner or later these few will be more; I am even convinced that some day the world will be theirs. But meanwhile all the cynicism in the universe could not efface a single drop of the marvelous. Childish? ‘“‘The storms of youth precede brilliant days,” said Lautréa- mont. There is still every reason to await great things—I am not even joking—from a handful of irreconcilable recalcitrants who continue to fling in the face of bourgeois law and order mes- sages of thoroughgoing demoralization, insults, blasphemies, imprecations and threats, and who do not conceal the fact that they are out to make life as miserable as possible for everyone who pretends to be satisfied with things as they are. I admit that the means at our disposal are severely limited—for the moment. And at least until this situation is corrected—until surreal- ism, that is, attains some measure of executive efficacity—it will remain impossible to expect anything emancipatory or beautiful except from violence.

If ever it was necessary to speak out for com- plete nonconformism, total insubordination, the necessity of atheism, revolutionary intolerance, systematic sabotage, treason, armed insurrec- tion, and to lash out in all directions with abso- lutely modern fury against all and everything that restricts the quest for freedom and true life, it is here and now. Make no mistake: As far as surrealism is concerned, the whole stink- ing parade of patriotism, the flag, private prop- erty, God and everything having to do with religion, cops, the family, government, civiliza- tion, the “moral value” of work, etc., provides nothing more than objects of derision, targets for spit. Refusing to relinquish the unsparing rigor and incorruptible extremism that alone ensure the advance of thought and action, sur- realism today recognizes not only its basic orien- tation but also its entire spirit in the principle of absolute divergence originally elaborated by Charles Fourier, which is the necessary comple- tion of Marx’s call for “merciless criticism of everything in existence.” A profound and lyrical radicalization of Cartesian doubt, absolute di- vergence makes short work of every ‘eternal value” of civilization, every justification of hu- man misery. ‘The surest means of making use- ful discoveries,” according to Fourier, is “to diverge in every way from the paths followed by the uncertain sciences . . . to remain in constant opposition to these sciences.” By “uncertain sciences” Fourier intended particularly the pre- vailing forms of the manifestation of bourgeois ideology. The specifically revolutionary char- acter of our own struggle against bourgeois ide- ology in all its forms should suffice to clear us of the absurd charge that our interest in the theo- ries of Fourier somehow mitigates our funda- mental adherence to dialectical materialism or our solidarity with the cause of the proletariat. Only proletarian revolution is capable of safe- guarding human freedom, which remains the

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prime motive of surrealist action. Debate on this point, in fact, is no longer permissible. What must be emphasized, however, is not the com- patibility of surrealism and Marxism but rather their reciprocity. To dream the revolution is to desire it all the more, by night as well as by day. Surrealist activity and research supplement, deepen, reinforce the theory which guides the self-emancipation of the workers, and vice versa. Any “Marxist” today who fails to take into ac- count the surrealist contributions—and converse- ly, anyone who pretends that surrealism today can ignore the struggles of the working class at the point of production—is clearly an imbecile, an impostor, or both.

Surrealism today, far more than in the past, is surrounded by forces inimical to its develop- ment; every action undertaken by us brings us into direct or indirect confrontation with those who would like nothing so much as for us to call a halt. There are still those, for example, who are disturbed to find us constantly overstepping the conventional boundaries of art or poetry and defending the organization of factory com- mittees and a workers’ militia; that is, there are those who wish to confine surrealism to the boundaries of bourgeois culture, to concede it a corner in the Museum of Modern Art and a page or two in the textbooks. But there are also those—some of whom even pretend to be Marx- ists—who would prefer that we abandon the sur- realist project as such, so that we could devote our energies exclusively to socialist propaganda and political organization. To these “classical” critics must be added a third category, which is today more and more numerous: the ideologists of pseudo-surrealism (or “post-surrealism”), representing a development comparable to the appearance of revisionism and Stalinism in the workers’ movement. United by essentially the same reactionary fear, the same conservatism, the same skeptical bad faith,all these critics lose sight of the specific historical mission of surreal- ism. For such critics, poetry, freedom and love are mere words. Such critics have forgotten, if they ever knew, that in the struggle for con- sciousness, as Hegel says, ‘The process of bring- ing all this out involves a twofold action—action on the part of the other and action on the part of itself .. . But in this there is implicated also the second kind of action, self-activity; for the former implies that it risks its own life. The rela- tion of both self-consciousnesses is in this way so constituted that they prove themselves and each other through a life-and-death struggle. They must enter into this struggle, for they must bring their certainty of themselves, the certainty of being for themselves, to the level of objective truth... And itis solely by risking life that free- dom is obtained; only thus is it tried and proved that the essential nature of self-consciousness is not bare existence, is not the merely immediate form in which it at first makes its appearance, is not its mere absorption in the expanse of life.”

Disinclined as I am to engage in exegetical exercises, I wish to emphasize here, for the sake of elementary clarity, that too much of what passes for surrealism today is merely rotten meat with a false label. Countless swine through- out the world are building entire careers, all

rights reserved, on a line or two lifted from the works of Breton or Péret, just as Duchamp’s discoveries of 1912-23 are repackaged, at enor- mous profits, in the sickening “idioms” of the current “art market.” Such putrescent intrigues are not surrealism, however, but only its worst caricatures. Those who confuse their paltry am- bitions, their literary indigestion, their day-to- day trepidations or the shabby products of their impotence with the surrealist crisis of conscious- ness can only continue to slobber from one wretched and inexcusable absurdity to the next.

When we use the word surrealism we intend above all an adventure, the supreme adventure, which may be undertaken only at the risk of everything that gets in its way. We have nothing to discuss with those who use this word to signify anything less. The word itself, in any case, is hardly the decisive issue. What is essential is to devise — from scratch — a system of ‘‘challenges and provocations,” as invoked in the Second Manifesto, ‘‘to keep the public panting in expec- tation at the gate” — that is: to secure the PRO- FOUND AND VERITABLE OCCULTATION OF SURREALISM. Everything everywhere awaits its true invention.

It is not for us to succumb to a “tradition,” even a pretended “surrealist” tradition; it is not for us to permit ourselves to fall to pieces before “great works” that are indeed great but which today are shoved down too many throats by too many reactionary scoundrels whose every grim- ace and every gesture make it perfectly clear that these works have to be completely renewed and followed through all the way to the end.

The defense of the marvelous, like the strug- gle for freedom, admits but one watchword: STOP AT NOTHING. “Those who make rev- olutions half way,” said Saint-Just, ‘merely dig their own graves.”

And thus I hope it will be understood that the well-known reproaches brought to bear against us by enemies and critics of every description— that we are nihilistic, conspiratorial, irrespon- sible, narcissistic, authoritarian and crazy; that we are purists, dogmatists, animators of tem- pests in teapots, consumed by the thirst for ven- geance, addicted to invective, driven by compul- sions to excommunicate, to polemicize, to scan- dalize, to fly into rages, to disrupt, to denounce, to destroy—for us, these are not even reproaches. Similarly, it is a matter of little importance if this or that transient associate or fellow traveler