“It’s an art thing.” He turned switches, he checked gauges. He placed crystals, vacuum tubes, bits of paper at strategic places in the room. “Wait, just one second. Just a moment. Before you all unfold.”
The Surrealists looked up in mild surprise. They did as he asked. Jack held his breath and nodded and wired up the wood and metal box at the center and turned a final switch.
Static came rushing through them all. Breton frowned, Lamba laughed, Varo showed her teeth. Everyone looked at Jack Parsons.
And he gasped as they opened their papers because he had already understood what the game was, how itworked, what it would unveil. The artists flattened out what they held, and what they had drawn, in planless collaboration, were impossible things.
Figures neither evolved nor designed. Coagula of fleeting and distinct ideas and chance. Parsons’s battery clicked. The room began to fill with something unseen.
These weren’t demons they’d drawn, not the goats and beasts of Hell. They were objective chance, chimeras for this era.
Jack saw a figure with the head of a singing bird, its body a clock with the pendulum swinging, its legs a mass of fish tails deftly done in pen and ink. A sketched-out bear face on a coffin, walking on clown’s feet. A mustached man, rendered as if by a child, his body a buxom leopard’s, rooted like a plant. Exquisite corpses, tasting new wine.
The artists laughed. The needles on the gauges swung as Parsons’s battery filled. He could feel energies coiling out of these heads, these drawings, this room, into his wires.
It wasn’t just drink making people giddy now. Not just the exquisite corpses they drew, nor any other game. It was the sense of something ending, a shutter closing. A noose—yes—tightening. A last song.
They played again, made beasts of collective unconscious. It grew darker with every round. Outside the trees waved their twig fingers as if clutching for art. They gaveup wood memories. Parsons could feel the images that had hung from them slip into his machine.
He blinked rapidly, glimpsed things fleet past him, glimmers, presences as if from the Surrealists’ papers, their games. No one else looked up.
The room was filling with history, with this ebbing movement, of Surrealism, of Marx and Freud and coincidence, the revolution of cities, liberation, and the random. Knowledge poured out of everyone and left them still knowing, and drunker, their defenses down.
And in the hills where he hid, Hans Bellmer shook. His dolls and his inkwork charged the battery. Marc Chagall dreamed and the needles spasmed. On her island, Claude Cahun looked at Suzanne Malherbe with utter urgency and they shared anger and love, a determination. A thread stretched from each of them to the Villa Air-Bel.
Around the world, the dreams and images, the work of all these women and men, the rage of Simone Yoyotte and the Martinican rebel students, the fury and delight of Suzanne and Aimé Césaire, the fascinations of Georges He-nein, the red chaos of Artaud, the imaginings of Brauner, the constructs of Duchamp, of Carrington, of Renée Gauthier, of Laurence Iché, of Maar and Magritte, Étienne Léro, Miller and Oppenheim, Raoul Ubac and Alice Rahon, Richard Oelze and Léona Delacourt and Paul Nougé, Paalen, Tzara, Rius, of hundreds of women and men never heard of and never to be heard of but whowere the spirit of this spirit, the inspirations behind and unsung practitioners of this ferocious art, echoed in France. Rushed in. Through the glass. Into Jack Parsons’s battery.
The older work of renegades, the poems of Aragon before his capitulation to the man of steel. The heroes of the past breathed dead breath into the machine, the singer of
Maldoror,
Rigaut, the ghosts of Rimbaud, the ruminations of Vaché, which never went away, had never gone and never would and which were always and forever part of France, all flared up like tracer bullets. And came down again, plugholing into a
The Surrealists looked up in mild surprise. They did as he asked. Jack held his breath and nodded and wired up the wood and metal box at the center and turned a final switch.
Static came rushing through them all. Breton frowned, Lamba laughed, Varo showed her teeth. Everyone looked at Jack Parsons.
And he gasped as they opened their papers because he had already understood what the game was, how itworked, what it would unveil. The artists flattened out what they held, and what they had drawn, in planless collaboration, were impossible things.
Figures neither evolved nor designed. Coagula of fleeting and distinct ideas and chance. Parsons’s battery clicked. The room began to fill with something unseen.
These weren’t demons they’d drawn, not the goats and beasts of Hell. They were objective chance, chimeras for this era.
Jack saw a figure with the head of a singing bird, its body a clock with the pendulum swinging, its legs a mass of fish tails deftly done in pen and ink. A sketched-out bear face on a coffin, walking on clown’s feet. A mustached man, rendered as if by a child, his body a buxom leopard’s, rooted like a plant. Exquisite corpses, tasting new wine.
The artists laughed. The needles on the gauges swung as Parsons’s battery filled. He could feel energies coiling out of these heads, these drawings, this room, into his wires.
It wasn’t just drink making people giddy now. Not just the exquisite corpses they drew, nor any other game. It was the sense of something ending, a shutter closing. A noose—yes—tightening. A last song.
They played again, made beasts of collective unconscious. It grew darker with every round. Outside the trees waved their twig fingers as if clutching for art. They gaveup wood memories. Parsons could feel the images that had hung from them slip into his machine.
He blinked rapidly, glimpsed things fleet past him, glimmers, presences as if from the Surrealists’ papers, their games. No one else looked up.
The room was filling with history, with this ebbing movement, of Surrealism, of Marx and Freud and coincidence, the revolution of cities, liberation, and the random. Knowledge poured out of everyone and left them still knowing, and drunker, their defenses down.
And in the hills where he hid, Hans Bellmer shook. His dolls and his inkwork charged the battery. Marc Chagall dreamed and the needles spasmed. On her island, Claude Cahun looked at Suzanne Malherbe with utter urgency and they shared anger and love, a determination. A thread stretched from each of them to the Villa Air-Bel.
Around the world, the dreams and images, the work of all these women and men, the rage of Simone Yoyotte and the Martinican rebel students, the fury and delight of Suzanne and Aimé Césaire, the fascinations of Georges He-nein, the red chaos of Artaud, the imaginings of Brauner, the constructs of Duchamp, of Carrington, of Renée Gauthier, of Laurence Iché, of Maar and Magritte, Étienne Léro, Miller and Oppenheim, Raoul Ubac and Alice Rahon, Richard Oelze and Léona Delacourt and Paul Nougé, Paalen, Tzara, Rius, of hundreds of women and men never heard of and never to be heard of but whowere the spirit of this spirit, the inspirations behind and unsung practitioners of this ferocious art, echoed in France. Rushed in. Through the glass. Into Jack Parsons’s battery.
The older work of renegades, the poems of Aragon before his capitulation to the man of steel. The heroes of the past breathed dead breath into the machine, the singer of
Maldoror,
Rigaut, the ghosts of Rimbaud, the ruminations of Vaché, which never went away, had never gone and never would and which were always and forever part of France, all flared up like tracer bullets. And came down again, plugholing into a
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