“But I gotta, kn-kn-kn-know what-what’s your fan-ta-ta-sy” – Ludacris
PART 1: ANDRÉ & THE ALIENS
New Mexico, 1942. On a dusty road between Taos, and Roswell…
Deep Night. And in our great solitude, we orbit. We? We, the translucents. The wireframe ones. We, the thousand-years young.
The still air shifts beneath us—a car is seen on the horizon. Approaching.
We hover above Car, our camera drone zooms down within it. And we see the face of André Breton, sitting behind the wheel. His face is grim, worn, determined. It’s been a long few years. But he looks up. Sees us. Stops, and gets out. And he isn’t—pay attention now kiddos—he isn’t wearing any shoes.
We know this André-face. We know it pretty well. We’ve been getting the usual reports. So we land our craft on the empty desert, so we end all our orbits. So we get out, and walk over. All seven of us. All seven. A party consisting of Mantis, Cthulhu, and Grey. A welcome party, in fact. A welcome party from the fourth dimension.
André is waiting. But we can’t read his face. Fearful? Bemused? But we can’t read his face. A tumble weed tumbles. For a moment, he appears to us as cowboy. As bandit gunslinger. But only for a moment. And then he is André again. André, the aging surrealist. Trick of the light? We reach out our hands, tentacles, claws. A shake, yes? A shake? Have we given proper signal? Our knowledge of human social custom, it is fragmented, at best. But he takes them, and he shakes them. All our seven of our slimy “hands.” Good. The Watchers had been right. First contact has been made without incident. Wonderful, wonderful success.
“Dear André”, we begin. “We are writing to you, sweetest pumpkinmuffin, merely in order to bring Word to World. Word of us. Of the fourth dimension, and the truth found in transparency.” (Small side note. We learned to speak his language by abducting the unguarded papers we found within human “mailboxes”, and then analyzing them. Clever, are we not?) We continue: “and now, my dearest pumpersnickle, these gladdest of tidings are being transferred over to you, to you…on this most delightful of all summer evenings…oh and yes and also we have spoken towards you today in order that we might clear out a few of those previously passed airs which long stood between us…blocking the consummation of our love…and also yes of course also to bring to you new tools…mapways, in fact…towards some future possibility-land, to a maybe-perhaps yet to come, or perhaps not…” André waves us silent, his patience worn thin. André says that he already knows us, actually. We can’t believe it, can’t believe it. André says he regularly raises our Praying Mantis kin as his pet-things, or at least, that he did back in France. And he could speak with them too, and he raised them to become first-class insect poets, the very first of their kind, and he published their works under the pseudonym “Joeboy Mantidle.” André says he quite regularly channels our funny (his words) prophecies and jokes with a little tech-thing called “automatic writing” too, and knows many others who can use it as well. Can’t believe it, we can’t believe…Leaky ships shrink hips, or some such humanoid drivel. We must all be “leaking through” in more ways than had initially been guessed. Many more. Oops. It seems André, and others like him, have been putting ear to underverse, have been stealing our thoughtforms without a second thought. So he’s a voyeur, then, this André. A voyeur, and a pervert. A 4D peeping tom. We accept this new revelation. It is No Problem.
André’s a betting man, so he strikes us a deal. He’ll write all about us in his new manifesto, he says. He’ll spread out our Words. But only if we turn him into a nice grub first. A purple grub, in fact. But only for one minute. And also, he asks that we might perhaps crack a fresh egg over him too, while he is so engrubbed. So we do it, no biggie, POOF. And he squirms. He eats cabbage, and delights. And we, we crack that egg real good. And suddenly—BAM! He’s back with us now, he’s old André once again. André, the aging, taciturn surrealist. Our friend. He tips to us his big invisible hat, and then, still smiling like a schoolboy, hollers “Always wanted ta do that…Always.” Our work here? Done. So we scramble up our spit-slick entryway ramp, so we power up “‘Ol Spinny”…so we blast up ‘n off…towards a newish Elsewhere-Unknowns…
André watches with minimal interest as the now half-spectral saucer putters away into the dark night, jumping and jittering and stretching above him like the strangest of all Fleischer cartoons. He catches a brief glimpse of its license plate as it goes: GR8 INVSBLZ. “A vanity tag?” mutters André. “Seriously?”
Postcript: In the subsequent decade, bizarre UFO encounters of a similar nature to the one above began to multiply across the united states, causing much panic and/or annoyance to its populace.The cause? Why, the surrealist’s exile in America, of course. Like moths to flame, the transparent ones followed them all across the Atlantic. And then, deciding they liked the weather here a bit more,“set up shop.” And they started their game. And they played it…
PART 2: WHEREIN THE AUTHOR REMINISCES
In Prolegomena to a Third Manifesto of Surrealism or Else, Breton muses that “Man is perhaps not the center, not the focus of the universe. One may go as far as to believe that there exists above him on the animal level beings whose behaviour is as alien to him as his own must be to the day fly or the whale. There is nothing that would necessarily prevent such beings from completely escaping his sensory frame of reference since these beings might avail themselves of a type of camouflage.” Later, he continues “it would not be impossible, in the course of a vast work, which would be constantly presided over by the boldest kind of induction, to succeed in making plausible the complexion and structure of such hypothetical beings which obscurely manifest themselves to us in fear and the sensation of chance.” A pretty accurate criteria, that seems to me. I don’t know what it is about fear that opens the pathways so, but most of the moments in my life in which there seemed to be some connection with the Marvelous were accompanied by that emotion. A kind of sublime, convulsive terror, a feeling entirely absent in the watered down religion of my youth. No, it was always the figure of THE ALIEN that was most feared in my childhood. The dreaded “monsters under the bed” were always imagined by me as grey alien, as drooling HR Giger creature…Kitsch pop culture images yes, yet they filled my mind with more “fear and trembling” back then than any supernatural image ever did. A much more potent myth, at least for me. And it remains so. The complete impenetrability of their reasons for doing what they do, the unfathomable nature of their minds—These intrigue me in the extreme. The ghost wants to find closure. The vampire sucks blood in order to live. The devil wishes to steal your soul in his opposition to the trinity. But what does the alien want? One particular scene in the movie Dark Skies (2014) illustrates this quite well. In the middle of the night, aliens build a strange tower out of normal everyday food cans in the middle of this suburban family’s kitchen table. Why? Nobody knows…There is no mythology or rational explanation which can even begin to solve the riddle of this action. There is no priest to give guidance, no offering to make, no magical protection one can cast. The Alien remains a myth without map, a specter beyond all human reason. Fresh from its womb, this most modern of myths still remains without speech. And consequently, much closer to the Marvelous.
PART 3: WHEREIN THE AUTHOR SEARCHES THE CITY STREETS FOR SOME SIGNS OF ALIEN LIFE
In the middle of writing the above sections, I was suddenly interrupted, called away. I had to drive to downtown, and pick my partner up from her job. I pulled up a bit early, and parked. Aliens still occupying my thoughts, I decided then and there to play myself a little dérive, with the framing of “a search for extraterrestrial life.” I looked down at the clock on my phone. Twenty minutes, this was all I had. Speed dérive? Guess so. I hit the streets then, expecting marvels. I was not disappointed.
ALIENOID ADDENDUM
Gavin Parkinson’s essay Surrealism, Science Fiction and UFOs in the 1950s: ‘Myth’ in France Before Roland Barthes (from the anthology Surrealism, Science Fiction and Comics) is the primary reason this essay exists. I recommend it. Turns out Michel Carrouges was really into UFOs, and saw Breton’s “Great Invisibles” idea as a prophecy of the coming of extra-terrestrials in the 1950s. Can’t make this stuff up, folks.
Roberto Matta—most exquisite painter of the science fictional phantasm? Yves Tanguy, a close second?
Outsider artist David Huggins, well-known painter of explicit alien erotica, grew up in the very same small Georgia town that I did. Pretty Fucking Cool.
I’ve seen a lot of alien movies. Too many. But I think these following films encapsulate the orientation which I describe in this essay best: Dark Skies, Communion, Fire in the Sky, Under the Skin, Alien Abduction, and (of course) X-Files. That two or three second scene in the television show Serial Experiments Lain of a tiny grey alien in a Freddy Krueger sweater grinning madly from the protagonist’s cracked door is also something that will be forever burned in my retina…
-SC