New York, editorial note

Those interested will probably have discovered it by now, but during the last year one of the more prominent resources of information on historical as well as contemporary surrealism online has been Paul McRandle's Surrealist NYC blog. Starting out as a documentation of surrealist activities in New York in the 1940s, it soon broadened into contemporary international surrealist notes, and more importantly, to occasional posts from the editor's own walks, discoveries and reflections through New York (I'm waiting eagerly for more of that kind). That step was absolutely necessary, moving from giving the impression that "Surrealist New York City" is identical with the New York experienced by European refugees in the 40s, to the pertinent questions of what "Surrealist New York City" is on the whole; what aspects of the life and phenomenology of that exceptional city that could be identified as the surrealist city, the ghost structure connecting different neighborhoods, different historical anecdotes, different future anecdotes now perceived merely as distinct impressions of possibilities, according to the psychogeography of poetry rather than of discipline, habit, business, commerce, or tourism...
    The way European surrealists experienced New York in the 40s may provide interesting clues to this city of course, but native surrealists just as much, and certain other currents moving in the environment for the purpose of a nonconformist and poetic sense of experimentation, community and exploration without very strong ties to surrealism historically.
    Surrealist New York City is a city which is distinctly there but which remains to be uncovered. All good luck in this task and others to Paul McRandle and other New York surrealist comrades!

New York excursus 2

Dream 2: 
When I finally come to New York it is not at all like I have imagined it. It is just like Stockholm but somewhat bigger and with more limited options in terms of small shops.
    I am desperately looking for a Monica Zetterlund record (Swedish jazz singer), and when I finally get to the jazz section it turns out it is sorted according to composers and not performers, so maybe I could find some of her Bill Evans recordings but not anything by internationally obscure Swedish composers. Instead I look at dvds and find that there are plenty of more or less new science fiction films about alien fleets arriving in New York with allegedly diplomatic missions and ambiguous implications. All these small planes accompanying the big spaceships among the clouds over New York. That is more like a real imaginary New York.
    But I am hungry and have little money, I have indeed bought a hotdog but I didn't get any bread with it. Eventually I find a free table, just abandoned by some family who have not eaten much of their servings, so there are plenty of sausages and fries and things around, and I am thinking whether I should eat it all or not. I pour out a substantial slab of Dijon mustard on the table (I seem to be carrying Dijon with me at all times) and realise that there is still no bread.
    But I am leaving town soon, for a week-long trip a bit to the south, some localities in New Jersey I need to visit and then Philadelphia. I will have to be back in a week because I remember I have been booked for a poetry reading at an obscure New York venue at that time. And when I am packing my stuff, I suddenly remember Paul M (of surrealist nyc). I need to see him when I am in New York! Why had I forgotten? And there is no time to contact him now. Might he possibly be informed enough about what's going on on the New York poetry scene that he will see my name even though the venue is obscure and might just turn up?

Postscript:Then when I actually went to a Swedish second-hand recordshop and bought me a Zetterlund cd, it had a version of Take Five with Swedish lyrics, as "I New York"(In New York). I wouldn't really call this a coincidence, I probably listened to it as a kid and had just forgotten all about it... But then, what is a coincidence concerning New York at all? A city that has marketed itself as the cultural and economical world capital for many decades will show up everywhere. It is more a matter of seeing the layers of the city, and look for only the particular new york which is the "surrealist NYC".

Dream 3:
And this morning, I was back in New York, but couldn't find my way to a hotel. I was taking leave of my parents who were in one hotel, but as I was finishing their dishes and wanted to throw away all the tomatoes and badger hairs (from brushes) that were piled up in the sink, they said that it's only certified newyorkers who get access to a compost, just like in the case of phonebooks and libraries, only for certified newyorkers. I thought I might not need phonebooks and libraries to get around, as one of my surrealist "superpowers" were that I often find books and maps in the street, extract the information I need and then leave it for someone else to discover (utilising the particular method called "the floating library" by our friends the Kalvarium group in Malmö). But even if I do find some books in the New York street here, I still have no idea where I am, and I get completely lost when trying to move in a circle and get back to my parents' hotel. In fact I end up in what looks like an old hospital garden and the path ends blindly at a stone wall. I look over it, on the other side there is one pair of turkey vultures and one couple of humans making out, with a metro bridge and far away the sea as a backdrop.


M Forshage

Your City, part 1

- the technical aspects

Psychogeography consists of drifting-exploring and mythologisation-reenchantment, and if you will of detailed empirical studies. Mythologising your city is a basic poetic task and a task which is usually carried on spontaneously anyway, but emphatically the surrealist tradition holds a few emphases and distinctions which makes its view particular.
    Spontaneous mythologisation has two parts: One is the acknowledgment of historical charging: places of anecdotes about one's predecessors. The other is the rememberance of autobiographical charging: places of anecdotes about oneself.
    These are used by everybody, but there is a huge difference as to how selectively and sensibly they are used.
    A third mechanism, also in general use, but more sensible in its essence, is the exerting of geographical sensibleness itself: recognising places where it feels like something is going to happen, something weird or fantastic or horrible or just unknown, or might be happening if you're only looking the other way, or might have happened and is bristling with eagerness to tell about it.
    But first, let's go back to historical charging. Historical charging is dependent on documentation, and on population size, and on accumulation of madmen, intellectuals, revolutionaries, artists, philosophers etc. The general pattern (with abundant exceptions) would be that small cities often have very little of it, metropolises often have an overabundance, which may even be overwhelming and/or numbing. It is also a matter of the length of the history record itself; so that European cities have more than American cities, south European cities more than north European cities, etc. Length of documented history often goes hand in hand with age of physical artifactual elements too, and as everybody knows, as a rule of thumb old architecture more easily speaks to us than younger, and crude old city planning allows for more excitement than modern city planning. Of course, in some places this means that an "old town", a historical city center with remaining old buildings and street plan, will seem like a thick pastry with immediate atmosphere, layers of anecdotes, and often enough more like a museum than a real environment. This is the trivial level of historical charging.
    Autobiographical charging and sensibility are far less varying than historical charging between sites in terms of absolute conditions; it is of course more a question of where one has been hanging around to make some interesting experiences (of course, very often there is a sharp difference between where one spends most time and where one gets the more interesting experiences).
    Concerning both, from the surrealist viewpoint, selectivity and sensibility are crucial terms. There is no point in becoming a tourist guide. The importance of a thorough historical-geographical investigation is not in listing all the places where something as occurred as items on a list or fetishes, but making them available as suggestions of sites to look for atmospheres and connections. It is not a question of recognising places where things have happened because of the things that have happened there, only because of what objective potential of the place those anecdotes are revealing, what still unrealised parts they suggest, what local charging and what contrast to utilistic use and to surrounding areas it has. What manifest atmosphere of potentiality a place has, as revealed by its anecdotes. Thus it is about the actual spirit of the actual places. Selectivity is not primarily up to your own opinions.
    But, it must be emphasised, it is also a part of your own assuming a prehistory, placing yourself in a tradition. When you actively do that, the places that your precursors have rummaged become an integrated part of your own psychogeographical landscape. In smaller cities, there might be just one or two examples of local poets, revolutionary sects, imaginative criminals and old wizards to build on. There it seems important to investigate every such instance of odd/nonconform usage of the place and its sense of place. In larger cities, there is often the experience of an old surrealist group and perhaps some other objectively affiliated movement to assimilate, various old insurrections, romanticists, symbolists, occultists, alchemists, utopists, etc etc. There is easily lore available for a full "alternative" version of the official history. On top of this, many people with quasireligious and/or unrestrainedly nerdy interests readily allow themselves to get trapped in amazement at the simple fact that freemasonry, occultism, utopianism, various brands of christian, jewish and islamic mysticism all have played a major part in the imaginary structures of those intellectuals or rich guys who have thought out the city planning. In order not to get overwhelmed, it is important to choose particular threads that attach to the associative tentacles of one's own projects, enquiries and sensibilities. This quantitative overload then is a major problem in Paris and Prague, a bit of a problem in London and Berlin, hardly a problem in Stockholm and New York, not at all a problem in Helsinki and Leeds.
    But then there is the third aspect mentioned, that of geographical sensibility, which is the more important. Beyond the spontaneous occasional recognition of this, surrealists have developed methods of actively investigating this and also of experimentally invoking it. This is the strategy of surrealist walking, and of various games involving spatial movement. This is a vast field and a series of essays in itself.

Conceptualising surrealist walking

Spontaneously, it makes sense to regard surrealist walking as militant investigation. I was recently invited to talk in a connection implying this consideration, even though it was, luckily, not an event of conceptual analysis but a discussion trying to suggest the points of, and invoke and examplify the process of, surrealist walking.

(Conceptually, since this is one of those places that do that: the concept of "militant investigations" as developed in Italy in the 60s by Romano Alquati and friends, is a dynamic and inspiring concept regardless of how widely one accepts currently available items in the margin as instances thereof.
 And the practice of surrealist walking is a continuingly rewarding practice which is not dependent on legitimation in political or philosophical terms to be meaningful.
 "Militant investigations" is the systematical practice of mapping everyday lives, conflicts and desires so as to reveal new patterns and new openings on a substantially empirical basis. Very often it is used to reveal real conflicts and real needs on workplaces, but just as fundamental is the organisation of everyday life. And the area of relevance benefits from being widened from the spheres of organising household labor and consumption to all aspects of everyday life.
 Conceptually: "everyday life" includes the area of play, love, sleep, dream, idling and fun, and "real needs" includes all needs of stimulation and provocation including intellectually, emotionally and poetically, and "social relationships" include all the potential unexpected encounters, love affairs, etc. Militant investigations in a wide sense are the empirical investigation of social reality and everyday life, with an aim to transform. Eleventh Feuerbach thesis, you know.
 Social reality is the sum of all social relationships, and the radical transformation of social reality equals social revolution.
 Specifically, militant investigations works in assuming that people's everyday experiences that are often disregarded as meaningless are part of meaningful patterns that reveal something which can be used in order to challenge the social order. It works by highlighting the invisible, and it works by discovering which contradictions that make sense in everyday life.)

Readers of this blog may know surrealist walking. Typically you just wander spontaneously, usually in the urban environment, alone or in a group, but trying to stick to the special kind of availability than distinguishes betweens urges of habit, laziness, cowardice or least resistance, and urges of discovery, curiousness, desire, inner necessity, and poetry. Being in a group easily provides release from certain utilistic constraints: one needs no idea of direction, and can always assume (if it is difficult not to worry) that someone else is leading. But there are also far more systematic approaches which are easily available to a single individual too, and indeed very often call for a splitting up of the group into divergent excursions and later reassembly for comparing notes. As surrealists, we typically arrange such driftings as games, focusing on a particular method of moving or of interpretation or a particular theme or sphere of association. Or a plethora of methods, and the autonomous movement of a living entity of which the individuals are merely parts.
 
Surrealist walking investigates the environment (typically the urban environment) in a transformational sense: moving as vagrancy, moving without authorisation, moving beyond utilistic transport; moving through a "sea of signs" (making oneself available to emergent patterns of meaning amidst the vast flow), through a "forest of symbols" (discovering the layering of patterns of meaning, the hiddenness of certain poles of intense meaning) , through a "succession of ambiances" (clear domains of tangibly different fields of possibilities inspiring different kinds of thoughts, actions, fantasies and interactions), through a "web of encounters" (bouncing from one intersection point between trajectories to another in a sequence that generates an adventure); demasking, opening up and generating meaning as it goes. It is indeed the successive revealing of "another city", which overlaps with the one on the official maps, but through a gestalt switch instead structured in accordance with desire and sensibility, a network of ambiances and surprises. It is about the reenchantment of lifespace. Making the city a liveable place by disenveloping the undervegetation in plain sight, and let our relationship with the place and our spatial movement be as meaning-generating as it would be.

A crucial aspect of this seems to be the "suspension of metaphysical judgment". A direct contrary to the miserabilist approach of no-nonsense "common sense" which aggressively assumes that things that coincide are necessarily random and have no connection, that things that speak to you actually spoke about something else and have nothing to tell you; surrealists tend to assume that coincidences make sense, that what you meet is relevant in connection with your present adventures and worries, that what you find is a response to what you are looking for, as a way of rebuilding a meaningful world, not as if it was all expressions of some particular fate or hidden will, not in the manner of the clinically paranoid as something that you need to obey or escape for otherwise you will get hurt, but simply as an inevitable part of life, as an expression of the ways by which meaning is generated. Messages speak, associations abound, interesting connections are preferred, doubts arise, hidden patterns emerge, insights awake, worlds in which the imagination enjoys to work claim space.

Of course a lot of this general manner of drifting and interpretative movement is codified by some of the surrealists' successors, the lettrists and situationists, and its inception into radical movements today very often as distinct post-situationist interpretations with different proportions of anarchism, poststructuralism, heterodox marxism, desire philosophy and live-role-playing in their foundations. Through this part of tradition, there is an increasing tendency to focus on the dynamics and disregard the ambiances; attentive to factors that facilitate movement in one direction or another but less likely to exert a sensibility to the places themselves and acknowledge their spirit. Such drifting is typically fuelled, and attracted or repelled by, the spirit of places but without recognising it and questioning it. Modern activists are well aware of the contradiction between free availability and imposed control over space, and sometimes may have a tendency to interpret all available signs as signs of this particular conflict (at worst seeing the landscape only as a massive bulletin board for signs of exclusion and the occasional scattered stickers with shouts for freedom). But signs of what you were already looking for are not signs in the sense of free movement and in the hope of discovering hidden patterns, it is necessary to move beyond the preconceived conflicts to see other potential conflicts arising, and especially the utopian suggestions, be they already put into practice or just feral hunches.

The conflicts in the urban environment are thus not just the ones in terms that are perhaps conventionally targetted by militant investigation (conflicts between access and exclusion, free popular use and controlled use) but also conflicts between actual use and possible use (in terms of playful, poetic, wild or utopian use) and conflicts in atmosphere and directionality which surrealist methods may perhaps be specifically useful for finding (conflicts in emerging patterns of meaning, but also conflicts in categories and implications of found objects and material association chains). The transformation invoked is both the change already implied in the investigation, rendering the environment meaningful, readable, savourable, and the direct changes of slight disturbances as well as the opening up of paths through the urban landscape, and the change suggested by conceptualising new use of places, including the various forms of exchange and alliances with other people encountered there.

MF

Demography in Australia

(dream)

What a relief that wacky Australia exists! Because, unlike in the rest of the world, Demography in Australia is a purely theoretical discipline, in which you don't have to meet the people you are counting. Which means you can work as a demographer without getting an erection! This is what I currently need, and since I am on holiday in New Zealand anyway when the job position is announced, I apply. And I am offered the position. Of course, there is the initial difficulty of getting to Australia from southernmost New Zealand at all. Since New Zealand extends further south than Tasmania into the "roaring forties", there is this massive wind from the west against you. But eventually I manage.

Next surprise: the outline of Australia has changed radically. Western Australia is all still there, but most of Eastern Australia has sunken into the sea, leaving just a cluster of land blotches with interconnecting land bridges in the south east. There is a leg stretching out from the west into a southeastern pancake, connected to Tasmania which is still there, and to a small headland shooting up a little bit to the north, but all of Queensland is gone, none of the major cities in the South and East are there, and, far more surprisingly, all the Eastern mountains are gone. How can the mountains have disappeared without a trace?

I realise I have to start doubting the plate tectonics theory; maybe there has never been a Gondwanaland! Maybe Malaise and Odhner were right in their Atlantis theory about random successive upheavals and submergings. All these landbridges, they were indeed an important element in all pre-plate-tectonic biogeographical theories. No Gondwanaland! All that we have built our knowledge on gone like so much dust! Everything is vain! Then, no doubt, I can easily spend the rest of my life as a loner in the Australian outback.

Because there are indeed no major cities here at all. I am supposed to work in a small town called Fox. It is the main city of the remaining Southeast, but really nothing more than a shitty rural smalltown. It is all flat and you can hear the wind blowing around garbage in the streets. I arrive in Fox at half past three in the afternoon, and walk into the public library which is where I will be working. Of course, in this small town everything closes at 4 pm, so I only have half an hour. Life is going to be slow here anyway, so I don't introduce myself, I may just stand and look at a bookshelf for half an hour, and then come back tomorrow and tell them who I am. Though sometime in the future, I will reinvent the song "Fox on the run"; not as a joke, but as part of my work.

Also, I don't quite know how these Australian demographics are done. I suppose it is mainly by modelling population change and entering the relevant parameters into a set of small machines that may, for all I know, be common taxicab taximeters, indeed they look like a common car stereo, but series-circuit coupled in tall racks, ticking away. If plate tectonics is wrong and Gondwanaland never existed, everything I believe in is ruined anyway. The only empirical work you are allowed in Australian demography is that you may possibly try to walk the distances that people are assumed to be have walked, like a Heyerdal. But I'm starting to get an unorthodox theory already. I have this strange feeling that the really tiny dull burrowing weevils of the genus Barypeithes are actually people, so they will have to be counted too.

MF

New York, excursus 1

I got into contact with the Surrealist NYC blog at approximately the same time I went to a film festival about New York, detailing some of the aspects of the "No Wave" film and music movement of the 70s, but also other aspects of social resistance, and even more of the general character of the city as a major exception to the rest of the United States, a weird and decadent satellite detached in space, a fenced zoo presenting a haven for the weird, troubled and mad, an analogue of what the floating island of West Berlin used to be to Germany. (But, for some reason, New York is also the place where all superheroes live and which all aliens attack.)
    So at that time, I was starting to have a series of dreams of New York. It surprised me, I had really never ever been particularly interested in the city before, at least not in my adult life.
    The first one was put to creative use by Paul McRandle at the time at Surrealist NYC.

Dream 1: 
I find it a bit disturbing that everybody is talking about New York these days. This little dreamstory after a rare night of sleep could be called "Mattias's little New York adventure" or possibly (after that Neutral Milk Hotel track) "Song against sex":

 

It is a romantic landscape but it is all grey and quite depressing
It is vast tidal mudflats, a city in the distance
Yes, probably this is New York
But I don't know and I don't care
I am not comfortable in the fully open landscape
I am standing there, with or without my sweepnet, but
There is no insect activity to see; I look at birds, mostly waders
I have to find a way to get onto the train and get into the city

It is a long trainride and I enjoy the company of a female friend
Could be some old colleague or perhaps old girlfriend of mine
But she is a very young black woman and I've never seen her before
It is just somebody's idea that we should have gotten together
In one of those experimental breeding schemes
So we're supposed to go live in a small apartment fornicating around the clock
But we pretend like we don't know; we are still friends
However the sexual aspect is tangible and at one point I snap for her nipple with my lips
At that time we are in a long dark corridor of some vast manor
A wing of a building as long as the very railroad line
And after a long walk we reach the reception
A very friendly old German female doctor greets and congratulates us
I am confused, and I am uncomfortable as it is only now that the perverse scheme seems unavoidable
And I wonder if any or both of them might be my dead grandmother having timetravelled to torment me
They are both very nice to me

And we head off to our sex prison

  
 
A series of adventures where I am escaping the breeding bed
I am leading an expedition into an English landscape, open and hilly
In a very strange light, nightly and full of contrast, yet dawn-like and fog-covered
We tread long sad dirtroads along sheep pastures, aiming for a rather steep hill
And it gets even steeper as we start climbing it, soon turning quite vertical
I know I really cannot go there with my vertigo, so I just continue slowly
Even if I have to reverse at times, and rest a lot, I never look down and it works
The biggest problem is in fact when reaching the peak or rather threshold of the top
To know at that point what is up and down; I'm afraid I'll go tumbling down some abyss believing it is horizontal ground...

(Somebody keeps talking about tergites (dorsal plates of abdominal segments) and we've seen them vividly, huge black plates like oven plates, roof-tile layered fluttering and clanking in the wind like an exit hole of some huge ventilation shaft, and this is supposed to be the tergites of a carrion beetle, and this particular carrion beetle also has a pair of motile cerci (anal appendages) just like an earwig; with these forceps it can pick up all kinds of objects and decide wether they are edible or maybe there is some other reason to gather them and store them in a vast anal vestibule; I see it handling pebbles that are thrown away and pieces of organic debris that are saved, and some that look more like archeological objects, old spearheads or something) 

On top of the hill there is a beautiful deep pine forest
Mosses and lichens and o so quiet
We walk around in awe, saying nothing
But I see several strange big plants scattered
In fact they look like monster plants from science fiction or horror movies
And there are hundreds of them in different developmental stages
Some have growing seedpods like the ones from "Invasion of the body snatchers"
It seems like the rest of the expedition participants just don't see them
I try to gather us all and whisper that something is wrong
In the corner of a glade I find one plant on top of which sits a mummified giant dragonfly
It lookes like a scene painted by André Masson or Max Ernst (the goube-avion!)

Again escaping the breeding bed
It is early morning and I am on the commuter train and it seems to be going the wrong way
I enjoy the landscape at this early hour, I feel a tinge of euphoria
And I hear a compelling soundtrack of 70s white funk
(whether it's Talking Heads, James Chance, or Gang of Four)
This is enough to make me abandon my original plans, whichever they were,
and go with the flow, and strangely I end up in Uppsala
And there is a new station building in Uppsala, looks very much like an airport
And it is not crowded and the morning light is really beautiful
There is a very compelling atmosphere of expectancy and that mild euphoria
It must be because it is so early, but how early?
I just can't seem to read the clock anymore
What hour is supposed to be at the straight south position of the clockface?
It is not that one, it is an hour before or after
So I may sit down at that characteristic little Gare de Nord breakfast café
and have my café double et un croissant s'il vous plait and just sit there for several hours
Looking at all these scattered early morning accomplices
Or will I go to my office, and surprise everybody with being there before them for once
and then leave for a long exploratory walk after that? Into the strange southeastern parts of Uppsala that I've seen only in my dreams?

 
Looking out the vast windows I am suddenly being dazzled by a sharp golden reflection
Tinsels and towers somewhere out in the harbor
It is a huge Turkish ship with a strangely ornamented skyline like a city
I have to walk out that pier and take a closer look
Most people are going in the other direction, it's like a migration wave
But there are a few shady elements like me struggling against the current
They may be plain harbor workers, or homeless drunks, or both
One of them calls my name; It is my old friend and office-mate Karolina
In a rubber overall and big sweater she looks like she's in the fishing business
I hug her with a desperate feeling, and the smell of her sweater is very intimate
It is not a weatherbitten iceland sweater,
it is an everyday sweater worn thin by being used as a nightgown
I don't see her very well, it's still dark in this part of the harbor
She's leading on and I'm following, we're happy to see each other but she has to keep working
But when I explain why I came out there, to see the Turkish ship, it's not there
I can see it in the distance, this long walk along floating bridges was a big detour from the main pier
I say I'm off track but I'm glad I found her and I enjoy the smell of her sweater
She pretends she didn't hear that and she keeps leading, now onto dry land
The plank path continues up a rather steep rise full of holes and bumps
And occasionally some very small houses, maybe for children or mythological dwarfs
And the rabbit holes are huge
I keep wondering whether the wooden path system permeates the whole hillside
And leads to subterranean abodes as well

 

I enter one of these houses, it's like a mountain cabin,
But it's full of people, listening to a pep-talk by a management consult,
Who keeps explaining that announcements should be made with awe, courtesy and a whole battery of pompous adjectives for the main acts, but for local support acts one should more like apologise for the philanthropy of giving the lesser gifted a chance; and when she gives an example of one of these pitiable local acts I don't quite hear what she says but I get the impression that the second half of the band name is my name.
Am I a musician? I could be.
Since she keeps repeating her message, I get a new chance to hear, and this time, even if its not the same as she said before, it was much longer and more opaquely hybridic at that time, this time she clearly says that it's "New York Forshage". What?
This gives me the impression that I'm something like a House or Techno DJ. Could I whip up a set of house or techno tracks until this evening? Possibly.
A child sitting next to me asks which ones of my big hits I am going to play. I say it's going to be all new material for the main set, and old hits only for the extras.
She looks very disappointed but I am starting to enjoy planning this performance.
Many of the others in there have funny costumes and make-up,
Some white clown faces, a lot of stylised flowers and spiral doodles.
They're talking to me about someone I don't know, and to demonstrate what she looks like, they go into the vast wardrobe of their paintings and dig up a whole series of portraits of this person.
It is actually an artist group who meet here at least once a week.
And they all keep painting, collectively and individually, while they are talking about various topics.
And they pile all their works in this wardrobe.
A surrealist group could be a bit like this, I keep thinking. I would like to be in a surrealist group that painted.
But now I have an engagement. I have to go off and make some music.
I wonder what I'm supposed to sound like.
Since the way out is through a shopping center, I stop by the record and comics store to see if there are any records by me, that I could secretly buy and get a hint from.
But a fat guy is occupying that section, and there is nowhere for me to casually stand except next to comics in Swedish translation. It's all Marvel, mostly Spiderman and X-Men as expected, but I've never seen all these editions before. There is even a special series for Spiderman's foe Sandman, absolutely not that emo twat Vertigo/DC's Sandman. In a shelf of oversized comics I suddenly see a big hardcover book that seems misplaced there: "How to draw the insect head". This is fantastic. But I had misinterpreted the price tag, it was upside down, the real price is 601 kronor, I can't afford that.

M Forshage

Inventing life, invading space

– Synthetisation of Life Experience

(a day in july)

Many authors claim that awake experience is coherent, continuous and unambiguous; while dream experience is discontinuous and just unrelated clusters of various possibilities. Even some friends of the dream maintain this dualism (this divorce as it is called), but preferring dream life, openended, seemingly consequence-less, free of the depressing demands from the laws of nature and pressure for plot continuity... I think this is a misunderstanding.

We have to admit that dreaming has a number of very particular mechanisms proper to it, but also that dreams will tie in with other spheres of experience, and in fact, often the fuller syntheses will be made in dream experience rather than in waking experience, because waking experience is of course still obsessed with pruning the supposedly insignificant and applying identity logic just to simplify.

Yesterday morning, half-awake I was remembering a dream, rationalising it within hypnagogic dream logic, and it turned out to be very very coherent and explain a lot of things I've been actually wondering about. It was just like in my dream about "my elusive Polish offices" that I communicated some time ago. Later in the morning, I was telling EL about it, and she noted that remembering a dream while still not quite awake often arouses memories of many other dreams, otherwise forgotten. I recognised this from my own experience. Ok, this dream element relates to this class of dreams that I used to have, this to this dream person that I have met, all things that one didn't know. When processing the dream before we are under the somewhat insensitive reign of awake rationality, it points out its connections to a wide coherent field of experiences. For all we know, they might possibly all be made up on the spot (but that would indeed be a massive mental achievement), or they might make an instant synthesis of a lot of stories of mixed status, past dreams, dreams
within dreams, possible dreams, forgotten events, possible events, etc.

I might even say it seems like this is the closest we get to an actual synthesis of life experience, an instant but gradually disenveloping interconnected multitude of stories.

There is a chapter in my novel "Konsten och dödsstjärnan" about "autobiogeography", the construction of a world for a meaningful past of oneself. Of all these different pasts that pop up, some of them can be unproblematically correlated with other events regardless of how picturesque or unbearable they seem (yes it seems I have spent a lot of time in Uppsala, yes it seems I was living in Florida, yes I was sleeping at the bus station in Bodø in northern Norway), others are not contradicted by other data even though they can't be quite remembered (they say I visited Bjursås in Dalarna when I was very small, I know I went birdwatching a lot with my friend Bo and with my friend Ola and with others though I don't remember any of this very well and I always imagine myself having been birdwatching all alone, I have notes from a weekend in a tent on an island in the archipelago in 1999 that I absolutely cannot remember), others still seem a lot more difficult to integrate in one's selfimage even though there is little to actually contradict them (did I actually have a relationship with this woman? was I really taking a lot of drugs with this guy as he claims? what was it about the Polish office?) etc.

All right, enough lecturing. This is the story that was revealed to me
yesterday morning:

All those parts of life that we are not supposed to remember. It seems there is an entire flora of previous lives, normally inaccessible. Only in the early morning one opens the doors to them.

First I unexpectedly meet a friend at a bus in Uppsala. I didn't know he had a connection to the town. I keep trying to deny I have one. I used to spend a part of my life there, and every now and then I go back to try to find new and more neutral ways of seeing it. He doesn't seem to know where he's going, and that suits me fine. We stay on the bus. The buses are uncomfortable, and mostly we can't speak to each other because the loudspeakers of the bus run an ad for the buses themselves over and over again, saying that more than 80% of the population of the city recognises the buses. Well, no big surprise, there is no other public transport here. Stupid town. I have to let others guide me so that I can get a new view of it.

But there are also other areas that seem biographically charged. This time, I had been to the dentist, in the small archipelago town Gustavsberg. I lived near there earlier, but only this morning I suspect the town was named after Gustav Meyrink, the author of Golem. It is a quick visit, and I wonder what I am to do, thrown out into the world at this early time of the day. There are vast open spaces, a rural market site, with very few people, but I go sit down at a long wooden table stretched out on a temporary lawn in the middle of a meadow. There is a big kiosk along one side of the table. I should go buy a cup of coffee and some candy. But I remain sitting there, looking at my phone, trying to remember what I'm supposed to do and when I've seen this place before. I realise there is a big west asian kiosk along the other side of the table. I should go buy a cup of turkish coffee and some baklava. But I remain sitting there, now vaguely remembering that I've been here before, with my friend Bo, birdwatcher and ambulance driver, and maybe we have been planning something for today too? I send him a text message, saying I am now on site, and he could join me or direct me elsewhere. It does not matter that I haven't seen him in ten years.

Because now it all gradually reappears. He and I used to travel widely at the time, and wherever we went he had some old friend staying in some old vicarage or rundown mansion that he wanted to pay a visit. But here, south of Gustavsberg, at a place called Beatelund near Storängsudd, just near Lämshaga where the major capitalist Peter Wallenberg, the de-facto king of this part of Stockholm, rebuilt a mansion for a school for his grandchildren and apparently wrecked an important birdwatching site (but I haven't been here since to see), here, I get a strong feeling that this is not just a story or a dream, it is in fact a memory that has been inaccessible, and that is why I have been mixing up the names Beatelund and Storängsudd already in my notes from the time, I couldn't remember that I've ever been to the mansion or big farm, Beatelund, only to the beautiful pastures on the peninsula, Storängsudd; but this is it, this is the one time I was there.

So back when Bo and I was there, it was all a bit uncanny, it felt like intruding in a real 19th century home, maybe they were ghosts, or just because they were wearing so much white cotton, it's too bright, it hurts my eyes, the priest's daughter desperately looking for someone to marry, just to get a successor at the farm. What was it that my friend had done there before? Actually I knew some of this. I remember, back in 1964. Maybe someone may object that this is before I was born, and he would have been a small child. Nevertheless, in 1964, one fine morning, Bo realised that he was in love with his housekeeper and asked her to marry him. As they could get no children (maybe they realised that already before this while living in sin) they instead conjured forth a Golem. It was named "the Space Invader" because it assumed space out of nothingness. Later this character has been reinterpreted and a video game based on the reinterpretation. The Space invader was a sad apparition, in dark rough clothes (wadmal) with a big slouch hat, roaming the beaches and killing cattle. It also managed to catch, and infect with an immortal virus, the red parrot Almara (ok, I get it, alma ara), which up to then had been a local helper spirit, like a sprite, but now instead became more of a truth-telling ghost, always fluttering around making fun of people who were getting themselves into accidents.

I realise I have to get away. Wherever I go there will be stories of my journeys with Bo, and of the old lore of each that place that will be connected with either his or my life in an uncanny way. I should get back to where I live ("bo" in Swedish), if I only had a home. There is a long wait for the bus. I get to know the other people waiting, an old Iranian woman, a clumsy young hippie couple, a gay couple who live at the top floor, who walk around in sandals and have a deadly fear of bugs and birds and germs, and who told a long story about their recent holidays on nothern Öland, which were such a disaster, because as soon as the went out of the car, the ground was just sand, it was like swimming, you had to struggle to get anywhere at all. I am very relieved when the bus arrives to cut their story short. But then I seem to have had no overview of my luggage, I have to run back and forth to see which bags are mine, I dont remember, it seems a lot of this equipment are actually Bo's, a lot of cameras, maybe also lighting and sound recording equipment? Can this really all be for birdwatching, or is it his ghosthunting equipment as well? The busdriver seems relaxed about waiting for me, but I make very quick decisions about what's mine and not, and I leave everything else there on the sidewalk.

(M Forshage)

Of heaven and hell, and good life

A long dream April 2012:

I am in a hurry rushing through Western Stockholm to keep an appointment with JE, supposedly at half past five, I'm going to be late (the landscape is a hybrid of several parts of the outer city and inner suburbs of Western Stockholm; it's occipitality is supposed to be indicated by its hilliness, in fact a poor indicator). I should have taken the metro instead. I see the platform of Thorildsplan station, a lot of people are standing waiting, but all the signs are unlit. Finally a train comes, but just rushing through; the station is actually closed, but they have failed to keep eager passengers out.

South of the main street the style is more continental, small irregular streets and picturesque small stores. I am climbing a steep hill where JE's school is supposed to be on top (I remember plenty of schoolyards on tops of hills). I find him up there and it is somehow part of my mission to drag him from courting a female colleague or student.

We go on a walk with the surrealist group. We find a strange old tower, some kind of medieval museum (like the alchemical tower on the west end of the Charles bridge in Prague), but the only thing they exhibit is toy cars of iron scrap. Apparently I'm distracted and lagging behind, CA comes back to drag me along, encouraging me to come along "out on the other side" to look how NN and JE "are fooling around and making laughing-stocks out of themselves for the whole city". The "other side" thing refers to the fact we pass under a valve, a small tunnel, to come out on the seaside (like those London tube station just north of the Thames, where you get out to the riverwalk on the south side). Not very eager to see NN and JE fooling around, I still come along.

And it's actually a sensational view. It is just like a large back alley, but one which is a part of the sea, a fiord arm, but the sea isn't there just now, the tide has drawn back. It is all just like an open cave, the ground is fantastically amorphous, delving organic forms mixed together like in a surrealist painting – the colours are dusky yet obscene, it looks a bit like internal organs but nevertheless mostly like modelling clay covered with drying slime (or when excited furniture architects have gone wild with a plastic spraygun...); just like in a normal maritime scene it is all evenly seasoned with small pools, tufts of seawrack and mixed human garbage like shopping carts, old dolls and plastic containers.

It makes me wonder if maybe these dramatic tide landscapes are in fact a condition for surrealist mentality, and this is why there never could have been a surrealist group in Sweden, only in for example Norway and Galicia, because there has to be a fundamental vision of a landscape without homogenity or onedimensionality, based in the experience of the tidal coast, where one had to wade around and collect mussels and stuff as a poor child laborer, in order to be a surrealist...

So I am standing in awe, thoughts and admiration before this landscape (remember that even if grandiose it is not bigger than a larger back alley or a theatre prop); only after a while I notice NN and JE have climbed up the gushing rock- and wrackformations and are sitting squatting each in a small niche, I think they are trying to imitate birds, skuas or albatrosses, or maybe dodos. CA stands laughing next to me, he finds it unambiguous that their squatting positions proves the've gone aside for a dump and actually are sitting there each in their little cave pushing. Admittedly there are single turds to be distinguished in the richness of shapes and litter around us, and just like any "worthless place" of more or less remarkable beauty it's unavoidable that one of the most popular "uses" will be to simply dump waste of one or the other kind, which will contribute to richness of forms, and to the deep emotional ambivalence for the place... Still I am not convinced by CA:s interpretation, I think our friends look philosophical and simultaneously blank as they crouchingly look out over the little alley, indeed with the same combination of wisdom and utter lack of thinking (with a dash of cruelty) as a big bird...

Then I find a dead dog, it arouses much compassion in the other tourists, because they think it's a harmless pup, they can't see that it's on it's way transforming into a sea monster which will be a crime against its phylogenetic position, in fact it already started to demonstrate some characteristics of a sea urchin, and others of an octopus...

We should continue our walk, I'm lagging behind again, thinking I should go to the toilet in the museum in the tower first. Toilets are upstairs, but when I get there the whole floor is empty, it feels like an old bomb shelter, a homeless person's lair, but there is nothing at all there, no toilet, no furniture, just empty. Maybe it is just an obsessive thought but I think I can hear them turning the key in the door behind me; so have I finally ended up in my prison on water and bread for the rest of my life?

It is an american house where I live together with a woman and her brittle old parents. Just for fun we have hidden the telephone in a cookie jar, so when it's ringing the signal comes echoing eerily from an indeterminate place in the room: the old man can't find the phone, looks through the entire house in panic, he's losing it and going mad in the process. In the interrogations much later I said he could have ignored it, if it was important they'd probably call back on his mobile later anyway. My dead grandfather, apparently interrogation leader, soberly explains that old people do not always have cell phones.

An old girlfriend of mine comes home in the evening, I'm telling her enthusiastically that I am going to bed early because it is a very important day tomorrow. And I tell her about the closed metro station at Thorildsplan. I try to explain to her that I would prefer to sleep alone, but I do it so politely that I actually happen to suggest that we should sleep together; so I push together two plastic sofas so that they together form a big square pink plastic bathtub, and I start making the bed; it's always a little uncomfortable to sleep in bathtubs. Actually I was planning to go to bed very soon, so I go down to the kitchen and order some pancakes separately before dinner.

So it's some kind of hotel? or rather a holiday village? at least some kind of holiday resort (a bit like the main tourist building on Stora Karlsö island). In the main part of the building there is above all an art exhibition, an installation that makes no sense, but it is also the major dining hall. It's not half past five yet, long before official dinner hour, I have to go to bed, I dont know when my pancakes will be ready. And since I didn't remember to tell them it was only for me, I will probably get pancakes for the entire family, and I will have to ask for a bag to bring the rest with me – in fact I've never asked for a "doggie bag" in my entire life (I can't remember that I would ever have not finished my food) and it's going to be slightly embarrassing and quite exciting. The artist and some suspect character (the hotel manager?) are sitting talking very quietly in the middle of the installation/restaurant hidden in a labyrinth of sheets of transparent plastic. If I am the only one eating at this hour I suppose they deliver the pancakes to my room instead. I go out, and find the surrealist group again, and my brother. My brother is getting into a fight with NN about the artwork, my brother claims he understands it because he knows the artist, NN says he understands it because he knows something about art. It's just two ways of approaching the matter.

I return to my living quarters. This time the apartment is not directly in the corridor, instead the doors in the corridor open towards a big porch facing the forest edge where all private quarters are in the form of small cottages. And the pancakes have arrived. What pancakes! They cover the ground, they fill the entire space between the porch and the cottage. Each pancake (rolled) is big like a log, and I have got at least twenty of them (difficult to say because it seems my neighbor has ordered some too). This is food for a whole polar expedition. It is incredibly beautiful. What does it matter that the pancakes are lying directly onto the ground, it is a fresh forest landscape, there are just twigs, leaves and needles, it's not like that formless and dirty tidal landscape, in which you would not want to eat food straight from the ground. I'm sitting looking at the pancake landscape for some time. The pancakes are glittering, their patterns of moon landscape and the interference in the transition between individual rolls where they are lying pressed against each other, it is so beautiful and at the same time so profound. They are sorted in rows according to filling. Strawberry jam seems to dominate, but some are more golden in colour, I tear of an endpiece to taste, as small as I can, a little piece the size of a grilled chicken – it is full of apple sauce and it's trickling with syrup, and the taste is exquisite.

Later I am walking on a country road in a dull autumn landscape (looking entirely like southeastern parts of Swedish province Sörmland), realising it is a long way back to Thorildsplan. Some cars pass, yes indeed during the long and actionpacked way here it happened a couple of times that people stopped their cars because they found it suspect to see someone walking and thus offered a ride, just as a social control measure masked into "plain decency" – as usual in the countryside. So maybe I should actually hitchhike back. If I can do it without raising too much attention.

I have to turn across an open ruderal field with tiny sharp edges, probably a small household quarry turned into a parkinglot turned into a junkyard. There I meet an american family, I am a bit nervous that they would find me strange and report me to the police. But I can keep a superficial conversation going in the american manner, yes I can. But as we go through the sparse grass someone bumps into an old hay bale, and under it there are a lot of beetles. I even find a bolboceratid (horned fungus dorbeetle), fantastic! And since we are in eastern US it cannot be the single north european species Odonteus armiger. I get very excited and demonstrate the creature's horns for the ladies; who react with alarm and disgust. Ok, maybe I lost my chance to interact smoothly and unsuspiciously there...

 Gotska Sandön

Røst (in the foreground)

Interpretation:

Ok this maybe contributes to atopos theory, to clarifying material factors in the geopolitical distribution of surrealism, to the analogy between beetles and horses (which IÖ also dreamt about in response), and provided an elegant one-sentence-shortstory. "Just for fun we have hidden the telephone in a cookie jar, so when it's ringing the signal comes echoing eerily from an indeterminate place in the room: the old man can't find the phone, looks through the entire house in panic, he's losing it and going mad in the process."

But the major point I see myself is the two surrealist landscapes, and their relationship based on primitive dualism: back and front, hell and heaven, anus and genus.

Maybe I should say that I recently reread the great recent Marvel comics miniseries where Dead Girl and Dr Strange do a teamup heading down into the deepest regions of hell to fight a band of dead villains (lead by "the Pitiful One") who found a way to take revenge on the living. Dead Girl and Dr Strange get romantically involved, and Dr Strange cures his painful hemorrhoids. In this story the anal morphology of hell is emphasised, and the bad smell is frequently mentioned.

Thus it is not difficult to see the fiord arm/ back alley as hell/ anus. As it's obviously among other things an alley in London (declared by more than one author to be "hell on earth" and likened to a rectum) and being "on the other side" as CA emphasised. There is a lot about crapping and turds. The morphology of the place is gushing, thronged, endless, surrealist, even the dog cadavers are transformed and transgress their conditions.

Equally beautiful and surrealist but in quite another tone is the pancake landscape. Being in a forest edge is significant, as is my association to the Baltic island Stora Karlsö. In fact, in my associations, Karlsö is just a more biographically recent available standin for Gotska Sandön, a more isolated island, just a little flat sand area in the middle of the Baltic, which more than one author has likened to a pancake. So have I, even though I've been interpreting Gotska Sandön as the more domestic variety of Røst, the outermost island in the Lofoten chain of northern Norway, which is also one of these flat, pancake-like islands, but with a quite labyrinthic outline, like a maze or a failed pancake, I did describe it as a pancake in a novel, and there and elsewhere I have attached hopes to it as the "dream landscape on earth", a sort of utopia in the middle of the Norwegian Sea. Now of these three islands it is in fact only Gotska Sandön which has coniferous forest, but the forest in the dream is probably a generalised forest representing the dream landscape as such, the forest as well as the isolated island is simply a privileged dream place. The origin of the particular conjunction of the forest and the pancakes was the anecdotal conclusion from my recent experience of calling in sick from all meetings an entire weekend on the verge of collapse - by cancelling all appointments I finally had an occasion – o so long wished for – to 1) take a walk in the forest and 2) make pancakes. Especially in its imbecil simplicity it becomes a rather beautiful image of good life (eudaimonia). And in contrast to the unambiguously anal character of the fiord bowel, the sexual symbolism of the pancake landscape is interesting. If we shouldn't refrain from picturesque clinical details we can acknowledge how the the hairyness of twigs and needles do not stand in the way for the exquisite pancake taste as a cunnilingal fantasy. Yet still the rolled pancake is hermaphroditic in its sexual symbolism (it is obviously a log, and at the same time a soft juicy nexus of folds) and may transgress simple sexual dualism already there? By being "contradictorily" genital it is nevertheless reinforcedly genital and non-anal, yet still it foremostly contrasts something celestial and utopian against the infernal and dystopian in the bowel fiord alley.

But also, once again, that the two landscapes are equally beautiful. But I recall now that it was only the tidal inferno that was called surrealist already within the dream... pancake heaven was perhaps more dreamy, more romantic, certainly surrealist but less specifically surrealist? Is this just the old fundamental aesthetical question from Milton onwards? Why did Swedenborg become such a bore, and who gave a shit about heaven when there was hell to sing about? Already as romantics and hegelians and even more as surrealists we would already initially dismiss the sterile choice between the two poles in a given dualism? Both do indeed seem equally productive, and the contrast between them more like forcing a blunt logical structure onto two actually autonomous fields, like one between earth and air in bachelardian terms? Not the least to point out that aerialness is still a material category and nothing "pure", mental, cerebral or abstract; and it is obviously here in the heavenly world that one focuses on banal earthly pleasures like good sleep, being in a pair, exquisite food, jam and sex. Yes indeed. Just not take sides. "It's just two ways of approaching the matter."

Mattias Forshage

Dream geography

Some of the theoretical foundations of presently ongoing studies in dream geography by the Cormorant Council, and often presented long time ago at the cormorant council blog in swedish only, if openly at all; are now available in a neat pdf in english at the Bibliotheca onthoplanctorum.

a tale of a few cities

Just having returned from Wien (Vienna) I am somewhat enchanted by the surrealist possibilities of that city. With surrealism's perspectives on urbanism (note for exemple one or another sketch previously posted here), "the surrealist possibilities of a city" is not just the case of differentiated personal sensibility towards the spirit of the place. It is that to some extent, but it is also concretely manifested in the degree of condensation and contrast, spatial and social heterogenity, signs of expectation, overlayering, dynamism of spatial phenomenology, and overall ambiance. Of course, pursuing a collective surrealist activity is fundamentally about revealing the surrealist qualities of your immidiate environment; any surrealist grouping will enhance and make explicit the process of disenveloping the surrealist sense of the city they are in. So this is not quite what I am talking about here. I am talking about which places will offer a temporary visitor the most distinct signs and ambiances suggesting this particular sense of possibilities. In this sense, my personal favorite candidates for surrealist cities in Europe are Wien, Berlin, Budapest and Helsinki. Of course they are cities that appeal to me personally, but I do think that they all have a specific objective sense of suggesting hidden possibilities that is central to surrealist urbanism.

And I have to contrast this against the perpetually cited surrealist aspects of Paris, Paris which many people consider as the Capital of Surrealism mainly because surrealism originated there and it has for long times been an important organisational center. Of course, if you live in Paris, and Paris is where you take your daily and nightly strolls, your drinks with friends, your intoxicated trajectories, your everyday conflicts and wonders, you will necessarily see and disclose surrealist aspects out of that psychophysical environment.

But it is another thing for visitors. Many people come to Paris to experience a surrealist city. Indeed, most neighborhoods in Paris do carry a load of anecdotes in surrealist historiography and mythology. There are memories of Breton's walks with Nadja, of the surrealist group's interventions and experiments for many decades, there are all kinds of souvenirs of things integrated into surrealist mythology such as the rich traditions of alchemy, of late 19th century occultism, of early 20th century popular culture, of dada, lettrism, situationism, pataphysics, etc; there are souvenirs of the french revolution, of the Paris commune, of May 68, etc. Not only did these things actually occur right there, but they have also been commemorated, giving names to streets and squares, cafés and statues, etc. The shops, galleries and museums are full of actual references to our chosen heroes. Placenames will be easy to associate with titles of well-known works, and the poetic aura of these names will be lying near at hand since, for us outsiders, so much of the french we know is primarily associated with this poetry and these works rather than with any everyday use. Anywhere you go, if you find a square with a remarkable ambiance, you will very often learn that André Breton already mentioned it in a poem, and if you see a strange gargoyle, you will very often learn that Man Ray or Brassaï already photographed it. The place is so abundantly colonised with anecdotes, with reified pieces of history, and then on top of that seasoned with an overflow of empty references, that it is far more a museum of surrealism than a surrealist city. It gives rise to a feeling that there is nothing to discover, it's all written out for you. It might be possibly to indulge in this, in some cases of recently arrived enthusiastic young surrealists who are happy to see traces of real surrealism recognised as real in the official world and the physical environment, and who will anyway just use them not as pillars in a lithified tradition but as glowing suggestions and hints that make stepping-stones in their own appropriation of surrealism as a shared and personal mythology – for those people, traditional surrealist Paris might still make sense. And of course anyone who is attentive could eventually make some original observations revising or adding to the already almost map-filling color-coding of surrealism-codified corners of Paris. But most of those who hail surrealist Paris are external surrealismophiles (academic, arty, or fellow travellers) who will find this abundance of references to surrealism o so blissful, and whose appreciation of such references might stand in exact proportion to their own inability to discover the surrealist aspects of things for themselves. Preferring the pre-labelled surrealist city before having to exercise any imagination and enterprise any investigation of ones own. Often a certain surrealismophilia of that tinge will prove to be nothing but culture-loving nostalgic francophilia in general, nicely arranging the facets of classic modernism into the big history of western society's art, with a certain predilection for the picturesquely radical and romantic - which is all clearly the opposite of the thorough radical departure and nonconformism central in surrealism itself. But worse for us, it will also be the form in which many of our most eager sympathisers will be happy to consider and consume surrealism as something titillating and even deeply felt – but only not dependent on ones own creative, demanding and risky participation and reinvention.

If we go back to my personal quartet of suggested surrealist cities, Wien, Berlin, Budapest and Helsinki, it is striking that neither of them has ever had a proper surrealist group in spite of a rich presence of avantgarde and radical movements in general. It is also, perhaps, notable that they all lie east of a line dividing Europe in halves. (And indeed, if we would extrapolate from this crude geographical division, we could try to count in Bucuresti, Praha, Brno, Bratislava, Beograd and Athina in this eastern axis, most of which have had a strong (brief or enduring) surrealist presence historically, and one of which (Praha) is indeed often cited as emblematic for surrealist urbanism along with Paris. I don't know. The only place of these that I've visited – so far – is Bucuresti, and I certainly don't mind recognising a particular surrealist potential of that city. And what would become of the western axis? it would also include London and Bruxelles, which are another two of surrealism's historical capitals, which most people would agree are largely boring cities, as well as Madrid, Barcelona and Lisboa, about which there are probably very conflicting views available. But no, I do not want to make a big issue out of these axises, it was just a simple thought experiment.)

I would just like to advocate discovering surrealist aspects of cities rather than consuming surrealist aspects of cities. (And I dream of eventually becoming a satellite member of surrealist groups of these four cities so as to be able to explore these surrealist aspects of the cities more substantially than a casual visitor may.)

M Forshage

Direct perception

One of these negative sleep epiphanies; this time connected with awakening and nausea.

On my way home in the evening I eat a sandwich with an old date (*). It tastes stale but not really bad.

In the middle of the night I awake and think of the sandwich in my stomach. I am not really feeling sick, but I feel the place of the sandwich in my stomach, and my nervous system is slightly stressed: I am potentially sick. But then it feels like the ground is being pulled from my feet when I think of how extremely strange it is that I was mentally focussing on the eaten sandwich in an immediate way! Isn't it the case that the details assume their meaning by their place in the geography, their place in the narrative and grammar of the text? Don't I have to read the whole landscape, the whole story? Is "direct perception" (direkte Anschauung) actually possible? My head keeps spinning, I am scared. I am convinced that epistemology under normal circumstances rests on a reading of geography as grammar, but that one can be capable of direct perception if for example one is going crazy, or extremely sick. And all the time that eaten sandwich is keeping me reminded of itself, without me having to imagine the entire gasterointestinal system – the absence of the entire 9 meters of it is so dramatically striking, a blank book, a blank map. Is it extremely sick or crazy that I am becoming? Then I fall asleep again.

The dream that followed was obviously geobiographical, and so can be read on the Cormorant council page.

(*) the ambiguity of this formulation became an element in the interpretation of the material. Originally it was just poor linguistic skills, I didn't know the best way to refer casually in english to a slightly old sandwich, the best-before-date of which had already passed.

surrealist research & investigations

Recently, the results of the Hydrolith project finally became available. It is a big anthology (large size, 240 pages), English-language and international in scope, intended to display the width of investigations of the surrealist movement today.

The material covers many areas but three themes are focused: music/sound, place/geography, and myth, which might possibly be three key aspects among contemporary surrealist interventions. From the theoretical viewpoint superordinated on this blog we might particularly refer to certain contributors by regulars or occasional contributors here: Niklas Nenzén on mythopoesis, gnosticism and the ontology of the imagination; Mattias Forshage on methodological aspects of approaching the question of surrealism and music; Johannes Bergmark with other more or less general approaches to the same question; Merl Fluin on the poetic aspects of urban legends. The piece on urban geography by Forshage and Erik Bohman previously posted here is included, and from outside this narrower circle there is for example an important study by Eric Bragg on exteriority, contributing very much to the clarification of this concept.

The editorial group has consisted of the mentioned Bragg, Forshage and Fluin plus Shibek, Ribitch and Nikos Stabakis; apart from american, english, swedish and greek surrealists there are also substantial contributions from the surrealists of Paris, Quebec, Turkey and many other places.

The book can be ordered, or freely downloaded, via Lulu, here.