Post-Dogmatist Quarterly

"An image is a stop the mind makes between uncertainties." 

 —  I  — 

All of a sudden I see something!  I’ve been reading an André Breton (father of Surrealism as a philosophy of life) book, (or rather, I should say, textual wonder) Communicating Vessels. I’ve only read the introduction and about ten pages of the text but: WOW!  (As I’m sure you’ve noted, I have a passion for superlatives, however banal they might be).  Anyway anyway — a friend suggested I keep notes between our visits on my ideas/dreams (we were discussing the fact that I often entertain them with utmost embellishment and enthusiasm, only to too soon lose my steam, as it were, and, quite completely, cool off).  She noted that I’ve a tendency to think in black & whites,  i.e.,  setting up limits within my own definitions. (“CONVICTIONS!” I have the fatuous audacity to call  them  — hah!, or rather: bah!)  (((  After this instructive visit I came away rife with dreams of magnanimity, of course.  The next day I pursue them “realistically” (in terms of the outside world) — I’m so jolly jolly pleased with myself!  (Uebermensch!)  And so the glorious day passes ... But day relinquishes her reign to the night, and with the rise of the moon so rises my doubt — in all the glory of her infamy!  (((  And oh!  By god!  What an insidious creature she! She visits veiled in the guise of a Nabakov text, Pnin.  Pnin is the name of a Russian émigré professor and one of the most absurdly lovable protagonists I’ve ever encountered in a work of fiction.  This is besides the point though, or is it?  Pnin is a professor at an American college and via his story herein we are introduced into his little scholastic world, full to bursting with the absurdity of academia (and life in general) but, somehow, charmed ... Life of the Mind ... et in Arcadia ego ... , etcetera.  (((  The notion, or rather, the dream I had been entertaining that one sunny day was concerning  visual art. I had been contemplating starting a “Small Business”  designing, producing, and selling my work under the heading of “Studio Cleo”.  (Cleo being my nickname and that with which I am now signing my work.  This sign, as it were,  is to symbolize the fact that this is not work produced by the Jean Nerval of a former incarnation. “Before” and “after”, name change signaling  turning point,  or some such utterly profound blather. (Lord, I must say that I never entertained the vaguest semblance of a notion that I would someday be laughing at the vicissitudes garnered via this [has-been devastating] physical/mental condition; I instead thought “has- been” was the inevitable result. Three cheers for the [seeming ...] invincibility of the human spirit!!!). (Please excuse the digression, I  often believe she is my muse).  (((  Where, oh where,  was I?!  Oh yes, concerning the “small business” idea.  All of a sudden such phrases as a that in a statement once aimed at me: “I’ve always thought you were too cerebral to just make things.” come to  mind.  Then images of myriad  idiots I’ve known who are proud to call themselves “Artists” (the capital “A” is definitely meant to be emphasized) and a misanthropy swoons resonantly within me ...  Could there be a more pejorative term for a thinker in this country?!  Do I want to be classed with that?!  Of course not!  I’m am a thinker and I want my work and ideas to be taken as seriously as I take them and ( my GOD you’re greedy!) in this lifetime too; that is before the definitions of the “arbiters of taste” evolve far enough to encompass truths already evinced in the work of genuine creators.  Yeah, yeah, “But what is ‘truth’ my dear?  And who the hell are you to make such a value judgment?!”  (Oh,  and how I swoon with delight when they’re riled and when they hate me!).  (((  The point of all this is simply to illustrate (in my ludicrously self- indulgent and long-winded fashion), that my latter arguments are those of a self-sabotaging nature.  This here lass who considers herself to be rather exceptionally bright is immensely stupid actually,  stupid enough to fall for the notion that one idea necessarily precludes, and thus excludes, the other.  And yet I have the nerve to emphatically ramble on about the “truth” lying in accepting the duality, even the multiplicity, innate within one’s being... ((( So, while reading Communicating Vessels I feel deliciously justified in my prejudices via a statement  Breton cites in a letter which he had received from Sigmund Freud: “‘Perhaps after all I am not destined to understand it, I who am so far removed from art’”.  This statement, of course, inferring that by defining yourself within the world of art you choose to limit yourself to an audience that can only “read” visuals.  I should think that Freud would be intelligent enough not make such an utterly obtuse blunder; why oh why must the mind choose, time and again, to erect perimeters within which to dictate the limits of its “innate abilities”?  (And I am beyond allowing such pollutants to enter into my ruminations, oui)?  (Note: laugh here. This in case my immensely subtle sense of humour evades your perception).  (((  Where Breton’s text made a valid possibility clear to me was via the example of his very own self; he chose to manifest his voice in a great number of ways.  Yes, of course, he was the father (although Apollinaire originally coined the term “Surrealism”) of a school of art and thought which has proved to be one of the major modernist movements of the 20th century.  But he also did a lot more which was, and which remains, exceptionally significant to many.  (I’m sure that Breton himself would, unfortunately,  feel that he had failed to some extent if he was aware that the word “surrealism” denotes little in any one’s mind these days except as a prompt to conjure up a Dali image.  Even more ironic is the fact that the true surrealist’s didn’t even consider him one of themselves! They had kicked him out of the movement with the name “Avida Dollars” following closely upon his heels when they discovered the counterfeit nature of the “inspirations” guiding his work).  (Digression my dear ...).  What was my point?  Oh yes: Breton’s readers and followers still abound — imbibing his fiction, philosophy, poetry, cultural criticism and politics, the School of Art being, often, as secondary to them as it often was to him.  The word “art” did not simply denote the visual to Breton, but instead alluded to an all encompassing attitude towards life itself as a process.  I’m ranting facts of surrealism to elucidate the point that in choosing to be a visual artist for a living I do not necessarily have to give up speaking in diverse languages, as it were.  All, or at least a lot, can be done without lending concrete evidence to the accusation of “spreading yourself too thin”. Ever: renaissance woman.  ((( 
 
 

To have understood him one would have had to be able to understand that his aim was not success but his own faith.  He believed in art: ... as realities not only superior to interest, but also to his own life. 

— II — 

My original intention concerning these pages was to fulfill the infamous friend’s edict, as it were: log of dreams ... ((( I find this instruction rather uncanny for a number of reasons, one being that the vast majority of the people whom I’ve encountered throughout my life who’ve thought themselves fit to give me advice (usually on account of their age in respect to mine, an assumption I often find erroneous) which might help me to “function” in the “real” world ” have (in general) thought that it is my immense proclivity towards the dream that is, ultimately, my downfall.  Now here I am with the major “authority figure” in  my present life telling me to note these  ideas, the most minute details of their content!  She inferred briefly that it was not the tendency to extremes in my nature which barred me from living within the world (the “real-world” being a place of rather relentless middle ground), but the fear which too soon induces me to drop my ideas with a brash and condescending laugh at their absurdity.  (((  Ah, my dear!  Such a greedy wench!  She wants more than survival?   But didn’t someone well respected once say that “Man does not live by bread alone.”?  How horrid am I, really, to want more?  (And that more so damned elusive...).  Or to find bread pointless if it can feed no more than one’s body? (((   Sustenance — what a strange word.  Denoting (at least!) two needs of an utterly different tenor (material and spiritual), yet both equally essential to existence.  (((  The second oddity I discern concerning the friend’s request has to do with the Breton text I’m reading in which he is contemplating, ruminating upon the question and concept of the dream.  Of course the “dream” he’s centrally concerned with is that of the subconscious, and of course it’s chance that these two particular elements of contemplation (my own and Breton’s) come into my life at the same moment in time, but to think ... why are you such a romantic?  (The title of Jung’s book Synchronicity glares up at me from beside my bed, a book I glance upon with both intrigue and derision ...  What was that line?  “You say it’s fate (or was it “faith”?) because you need it”. “Intelligence” and education say its the need of human weakness and stupidity. A different intelligence and intuition would hold otherwise if, of course, the nature of such thoughts did not breed so much loss and disillusion).  (((  The interesting thing to note here, again, is the same word (“dream”) indicating two such diverse things; ah, but is  not that the point?  That  these two tendencies of human nature — one referring to the self in the outside, day to day world, the other referring to the self within — are of the selfsame necessity?  No, no, that’s not right.  Sleep dreams are not a matter of necessity because, as far as we know, they are simply a biological occurrence, a “fact”.  (I have problems with this last word and thus the quotes are to indicate that I don’t “own” [to coin a pop-psychology phrase] it, but instead only utilize it.  No details to explicate my reasoning here, but I’m sure I’ll go into that later).  And day-dreams?  Hmm, what is their nature? A necessary contingency of consciousness?  Biological fall-out, as it were.  That notion’s ascribing them the same cause as sleep-dreams and I, for one, don’t believe that is the case.  I’m not sure of the “factual” details pertaining to this matter, but I would surmise that the tendency to day-dream functions in quantities as myriad as the number of people within whom it functions; the quantity diminishing in many as such dreams are superseded by the accumulation of the “facts” of life (no pun intended) which come with the succeeding years.  (((  All this blather of mine retains a focal point in the word “dream”;  this focus does not lie in the delineation between conscious and unconscious because that’s absurd (as if we’re ever unconscious while we’re alive!); “subconscious” is a much more apropos term I believe. The point referred to above is a matter of eradicating the delineation, eradicating the notion that “dream” is perforce a private matter (or, at best, to be shared with an intimate), and not an element of being which has any place in “real life”, except in denial of it.  “Dream” is an indicator of falsity, illusion, artifice — all words which cloak derogatory sheaths closely about them.  (((  Yes, yes, I know the surrealists have claimed all this before, and that Hakim Bey is shouting it ever loud and pop/youth culture clear presently, but the friend’s indicating that the tendency to the dream is not an inhibiting or crippling factor in this (too!) prosaic “real-world life” — how can I phrase it?; the concept of melding the dream-into-waking-life is not a new one, but other than in a few exceptional  cases, this idea has not had much life beyond an intellectual one (Jung, Heidegger, etc.), a textual one (Breton, Huysmans, etc.) or a visual (inanimate) object oriented one (Cornell, de Chirico, etc.).  All cultural. (Ah, but is not culture often elemental to life?)  (((  I’ve still not clarified how the friend’s inference differed — she, very simply, implied that acceptance of my proclivity towards the dream of magnanimity as an essential element of my nature could help me to utilize this proclivity in my dealings with/in the world in a beneficial way, even (believe it or not!) in (ugh!) practical terms.  (((   Being: a very arduous thing indeed!  (((  Wait: didn’t she ask me simply to make a list? 

Claire Dinsmore
http://www.StudioCleo.com