SURREALISM IN THE AMERICAN SOUTH

INTRODUCTION

The marvelous here reveals itself in light of a surrounding aura of fertile life-and-death excess, brought on by an alchemy of merciless heat and humidity, storms, past military rule and cultural ruin. – Davey Williams, Arsenal #4

The American south is a weird place, filled to the brim with weird people. Yes, it’s a veritable cornucopia of oddballs and creative mania down here, ask anyone. We are the punchline of every non-southerner’s joke, we are America’s archetypal uneducated yokel, the scapegoat for various societal ills. And we love it, O yes we do. We just love playing it up, just love playing the clown at all the parties, y’all. We’ve got a healthy (and sometimes not quite so healthy) disrespect for authority, for the pretensions of the rich and the over-educated. Our humor is absurd and dumb and goofy, and it’s chock full of lame puns. We have a dark and gruesome side to us too, a history filled with racism and slavery and indigenous genocide. Yet we’ve had more than our fair share of rebellious, revolutionary moments here as well–slave rebellions in Savannah, the maroons of the Great Dismal Swamp, a long history of labor struggle, among other things.

The south is a land of magic, too, we’ve got our Hoodoo, we’ve got our Appalachian witchcraft…In this area, as in others, our most interesting aspects are to be found in so-called “low” quarters, in cultures marred by slavery and poverty. By way of illustration; in Georgia, we once had our own idiosyncratic form of mumming, dubbed “Ridin’ Fantastic”, or “Serenading”. Around Christmas time, groups of revelers called the Fantastics would suddenly emerge and roam the countryside after dark, sporting strange and marvelous homemade masks, all dressed up as “ghoulies and ghosties and long legged beasties”. Eventually? They would stop by at some stranger’s door, demand from them an offering of wine, of eggnog, or other treats. A refusal of this simple request would gain you a whole lot a Nothin’ Good. A pranksterish upside-down always took flight, whenever the Fantastics came to town. They would ride horses with their clothes and masks on backwards, they would tie up all your chairs up a very tall pole, or perhaps free all the horses from your stables. And much more, much more.

The world of the south is a world which is painfully vibrant, hot, and humid. Sweat consumes us all. At a certain temperature, our minds will simply cease to function. In the dreaded depths of summer, we all become deranged madmen. Yes, it is quite a delirious air that we breath here, an air filled with constant overgenerous outpourings of death, sex, and birth. To live in the south is to live among excess, as Davey Williams pointed out. Nature has lost all control among us, she is sex-mad, she is cruel and violent. And, living inside her as we do, we become infected by her madness. And so we wish to fuck, to fight, to rip blindly at some animal’s red flesh, to dive deep into darkest swamp. Under this blazing cruel sun, we all lose ourselves. We wish, inexplicably, suddenly, to be the alligator.

A FEW POPULAR ACCOMPLICES, PRECURSORS, FELLOW TRAVELERS

The marvelous is strange fungus, a fungus which thrives best only on the very edges of mainstream life. It procreates in forgotten alleyways, it spreads like kudzu among society’s worthless spaces. Or at the very least, it is given more space in which to grow there, to individualize, to nurse and feed its own eccentric singularity. We see society’s fear towards the unchecked worthless in films such as ‘Texas Chainsaw Massacre’ and ‘Deliverance’, or more recently, in a game such as ‘Resident Evil 7’. That old backwoods archetype of THE MAD KILLER REDNECK!, that dirty devil containing motivations completely beyond the pale, completely beyond all rational understanding. And more recently perhaps, we see it in that most lovable internet meme “Florida Man”. Dadaist king of all nonsensical crimes? Those people exist, undoubtedly. And all those tropes fill me with amusement and, well, perhaps even just a tiny bit of pride. But if ya like those ones, kiddo, well, how ‘bout a few a these other nutters over here then, too, eh? Well how ’bout it? Will y’all let me be yer tour guide..?

St. Eom, creator of Pasaquan. A man who seems almost too perfect to be real. Did we surrealists dream him? Is he tall tale? Is he Paul Bunyan? St. Eom was a man who moonlighted as fortune teller, as male prostitute, as drag queen. He was a man who ran a gambling parlor, trained dogs and snakes to guard his home, and danced naked at the top of the Empire State Building. Most importantly of all, he was the man contacted by three tall and pointy-haired Pasaquoyan entities from the future, and told to build for them a colorful, marvelous Xanadu. In the backwoods of Georgia, in the middle of absolutely nowhere. And so he did. When one first stumbles onto Pasaquan, one feels utterly overwhelmed. All those bright colors, all those intricate solar patterns, all those strange figures and towering heads. All those very prominent genitals. It invades one’s senses, it rewires them. One pinches oneself. Are we actually seeing this? Can something so marvelous as this really exist? Echos of pre-Columbian Mexico, indigenous art, and ‘The Lost Continent of MU’ can be traced. Yet Pasaquan remains its own wholly singular entity, the true meaning of absolute divergence. I’ve been to downtown Buena Vista, Georgia, i’ve looked around. And it is so small, so unremarkable, that it hardly leaves a trace in one’s mind. Yet St. Eom somehow flourished in this environment, somehow created in this land his own personal Xanadu. Nothing really accounts for it this aberration, not really. And so we realize, abruptly, that our world, that our seemingly predictable world, is a complete and utter black box. Because without rhyme or reason, some unsummoned Pasaquoyan may appear. Without warning, a Utopia may suddenly materialize, right before our unbelieving eyes. In some mundane spot of Nowhere, in a place that we all least expect.

Let’s move on then, let’s behold the man–Edward Leedskaln. Man dropped from outerspace. Man? No; probably not. Something else. Something better. Facts? Ok. Mere facts. Not from outerspace, no, not a little green saucerman, after all. Instead? A traveller from Latvia. Close enough? Don’t know. Never been there. Never been. But this Edward, well, he built a nutbug utopia down here, also. Just like St. Eom, just like Howard Finster, just like Joe Minter. And Coral Castle was its name. Coral Castle. Simple name? Sure. Yet, it was anything but. A real headscratcher. An atlantean jewel. In constructing it, Edward worked alone. Worked at night. Built (levitated? materialized?) a wonderland of heavy oolite limestone without rhyme, reason. And noone, and nobody, knows how. How he did it. Mere 10 cents admission, into Coral Castle. Yes, mere 10 cent, in order to see the Impossible. To see Marvelous. When asked by visitors about his technique, about his method? Edward, merely shysmiling, merely divulging no real truths. “I know the secrets of the people who built the pyramids”. That is all he ever said. All he ever hinted at. Edward studied magnetism, it seems. Wrote one incomprehensible book on magnetism too. Is that a piece to his puzzle. And what else did he study? What else? Alpha Centurian anthropoetechnics? Don’t know, I don’t know. And he’s dead now, he’s well gone. Or perhaps…merely magnetized…towards some mermaid’s… Newest Dreaming. Miami knows. But. She won’t be ‘a tellin.

Dropped from outer space? Edward Leedskaln? Perhaps not, no. Perhaps there, I was mistaken. But? We do have one such a figure, dear reader. A painter who in fact was dropped down from just such a high place. Dropped from there many, many times, in fact. Countless times. His name? David Huggins. Born in 1959, then raised in rural Paulding County, Georgia. Paulding County–which happens to be my own (small, insignificant, supermundane) place of origin. Grown themselves some real odd ducks out there, eh? Apparently, ‘pparently so. And this David Huggins, well, this Mister Huggins has had the great and sublime pleasure of being chosen to perform near-endless sex acts with the several interdimensional beings who have visited him throughout his long years. These erotic escapades started in the forests of Dallas, Georgia, outside his childhood home. And at a certain point, David began recording all these rare experiences of his in paint–to quite magical results. Our veryown Roberto Matta? David’s marvelous canvases shiver and shine with an obscene strangeness, they are loveletters to a new posthuman copulation, an ode to surrational sex. DESIRE unbound by space, time, or good manners. DESIRE…made interdimensional.

In the 1990s, a very peculiar collective Egregore haunted the southern states of Louisiana and Georgia. It was called The Elephant 6 Recording Company, and one of figures at its most surrealist core was a man (or was he?) called Jeff Mangum. In those days, Jeff was a somnambulist-thing, a man of night terrors and waking dreams. Jeff slept very little. But when he did sleep, when he did dream, he would be greeted by marvelous nighttime visitors. Visions of amorphous little balls of light, of giant bugs on the floor, of mad screaming monks… Numerous stories from the E6 “inner circle” recount an overflowing procession of many such strange encounters, as though Jeff were unconscious magnet for them. One bizarre account tells of Jeff and another E6 musician engaging in conversations with each other through the walls of their rooms, while both were completely asleep. Surrealist books, pataphysical books, Gerard de Nerval, René Daumal… these surrealist-favorites all made the rounds too, influencing members of the collective to various degrees. In interviews, the surrealist movement is mentioned as one primary model for the formation of Elephant 6. Some bands like Of Montreal, have even made overt references classics such as Story of the Eye, Les Chants de Maldoror, and Paul Éluard. Objective Chance often reared its beautiful severed head to these madmen, too, like when the band explored the Musée Mechanique in the Bay Area, and suddenly came across a child in the spitting image of Anne Frank, around which their most famous album was based. As for the lyrics, well, Jeff he just felt like he didn’t write those songs at all. He felt like he had just channeled them all from somewhere. Automatically. Unfortunately, this period of intense high weirdness and joy didn’t last. Jeff Mangum soon suffered an inner crisis, and left the band, left the music scene, left the still-young Elephant 6 collective. At his very height, he evaporated and embraced silence. Just like Rimbaud.

Time for a brief sidesquirm through Discordianism? Sure, and why not? ‘Principia Discordia’!? That great Counterculture Classic of Chaos, written by Kerry Thornley and Greg Hill. That great prankster bible of surrealist ontology! First xeroxed on Jim Garrison’s copy machine in New Orleans, and later popularized by Robert Anton Wilson’s Illuminatus! Trilogy. (The same Wilson who, oddly enough, knew the Chicago Surrealist Group…) Well, after New Orleans, and numerous other stops along the way, this very same Kerry Thornley settled down in Atlanta. Kerry spent his last few decades in Little 5 Points, playing his funky trickster shtick up and down Moreland Ave, working over at A Cappella books (still existent), and leaving behind hazyhappy Eris trails, wherever his two golden feet took him…

Bessie Ficklen? Definitely, definitely. Virtually unknown in Georgia, and yet, a fellow surrealist undertaker friend of mine found her, he dug her up from the wordvaults, dusted her off. And then (naturally) she began to molt, before Very Eye. Began to speak. What was found there? Underneath time’s thickhidden, vast petticoat? An authority on hand puppets was found, yes. But, more importantly for us, an authority on dream, and on dream poetry was found there. In Savannah, Bessie collected all instances of dream poetry that she could, and then studied these strange shards. These little gifts left behind by her Underselves, by the goblins of her Unconscious. She even formed a small local poetry circle to study the phenomenon. An early surrealist group, of sorts? Perhaps. Perhaps.

Pretty funny, aren’t we? Pretty funny. Tex Avery. Walt Kelly. George Herriman. Our list goes on, goes on&on&on. And this humor, well, it stretches. It stretches us, and all of our smallsad rationalist heads. It shows reality’s true (lackof) boundaries under the guise of a harmless child’s joke. A hide-in-plain-sight of our veryown surrealist ideal of freedom. Isn’t it? Quite clever, quite unexpected, quite delightful. That’s our sublime morethanreal sitting over there, isn’t it? Parading obscenely before a billion lazy eagereyes?! On some unremarkable saturday morning…those unending cartoon blocks…those trashy newspaper funnies…ah~! There, at the very bottom of the deranged fishbowl of culture…it can still be found. The delirious octopi of truest marvelous. Those couchpotatos, those cartoonkids? Future revolutionaries, all. Future molotov-throwing bugbunny wabbits, future anvil-throwers, future flatteners of tedious cops, and tiresome oldies. And all of this, going on right underneath the unsuspecting parental nose, too, going on right underneath each and every snot-filled, molasses-filling, bourgeois crustnose. But this isn’t just something that the south does only, no, of course not, wouldn’t think it. It’s everywhere, actually. The laughvirus is everywhere. O sublime revolutionary chuckleworm–thy spreadeth thyself so far…! Yes. I believe in the countless Robespierres of the Giggle a-growing, a-hiding inside of this grey and miserablist world. Under every rock and tree, shall ye find them. Under every blade of suburbanite grass. With pun-slingshots ready–ready to strike, to wound, to maim…with savage giggle. Yes! Within every sunken continent, within every cocooning lost moon–it’s the funnies, a gathering! It’s the Toons! In every language, on every shore. Bugbunny-ism? Eternal contagion! Pogo-itus? Unspeakable danger! And yet…all that being as it is…as universal is it is…well…but we do do it damn well down here though, now don’t we? We do it damn well…

ORGANIZED (& NOT SO ORGANIZED) SURREALISM IN THE SOUTH

Surrealism-proper (if one wishes to make such a dubious distinction) started with Clarence John Laughlin. And it started in New Orleans. Most surrealist of all our cities? Perhaps. Yes, of course it would start there, naturally. Late 1940s, thereabouts? And this old Clarence John, well, he would set all his traps for his phantoms. His little camera-traps. And he caught so many down there, he caught so very many. A thousand surrghosts, utterly collected. A thousand fragile enigmas, obtained. In stunning black in white, in silent haunted whisper. Of all southern surrealists, it is Clarence John Laughlin who best recorded, best discovered our most seldom-spoken mysteries. Who best outlined best our gothic, decaying undercurrent. At our deepest strata? We are haunted. Deadened. Insect bitten. Clarence swam in that black, decadent fluid of our past, of our future, Clarence communed with South’s shadows. He ensnared time, he reversed it, he put it on display. A photographer outside of time. And perhaps…perhaps…he was able to photograph, to enchain his own ghost once, too. Perhaps. Yes, and maybe that lost photo lays at the bottom of some dusty forgotten drawer in Louisiana, awaiting our true arrival. A strange greyscale Shadow-Clarence, wearing hisn obscured, celluloid eyes. Frozen forever inside self-imposed, rectangular boundarylines. Eyes staring out at us, staring out on our desolate, disintegrating world. An ever-observing sentinel, on the backforward flows of Time. In trademark sibyllic silence, from coldcruel vantage point of deeper, distant Elsewheres. Yes. Perhaps he gazes still, still. Perhaps he speaks in tongues, perhaps he conjures prophecies. But we will never really know his mind. Don’t you think? We shall never truly know him. He’s far, far too crystalline. Far too “of translucent” for that. The enigma which he hunted year after years slowly devoured him. Slowly became him. Inch by inch, photograph by photograph. Where Clarence stands, we see nothing. Nothing, that is, except for a muffled, hidden scream. An aperture…without organ

And then? And then we skip ahead a bit, folks. And then jump in our big fancy time machine, and we strap ourselves in, and we go WOOSH! And then? Here we are–the 1970s. In a little ‘ol place called Tuscaloosa, Alabama, where several hushed whispers have recently been overheard. In dusty back alleys, in half-empty parking lots after sunday school…strange tales of a new beast, a-stirring, aome kind of as-yet undocumented cryptid perhaps, slowly waking up, slowly stretching long dinosaur legs, yawning wide. The beast’s name? ‘Raudelunas’. Raudelunas? A freewheeling artistic collective (or perhaps a traveling circus) inspired by Pataphysics, Dada, and Surrealism in 1970s Alabama. Its activities? Varied, unpredictable. One thing though is quite certain— Tuscaloosa, it didn’t know what hit ‘em. A marching Vegetable Band suddenly appears alongside a wholesome Homecoming Parade, completely shocking Ma and especially Pa. And then, on another year? Appliances! A dancing fridgeman cavorts with a singing washing machinething, and everywhere, good upstanding christian folk are being ear-assaulted by the most unwholesome and satanic music that they have ever heard. Poor Ma, poor Pa, poor Sally-Mae. One Raudelunas member, the pantsless Reverend Fred Lane, gets famous writing sick songs about cutting people with knives, or about devilish men with ears that fold back, or most shocking of all—about sinister “french toast man”, driving in shadowy “french toast van.” Behind those dark and pointy sunglasses of his the eye of satan himself burns, of this we are 93.7% certain. Yes, and for a good four or five years, Raudelunas continued to wage its mad guerrilla war against the humble Alabamites, mocking everything good upstanding hardworking and patriotic. But Raudelunas eventually faded away, leaving in her wake a thousand shocked and overcooked minds, as well one very pesky water bill, seven years overdue.

From within the madcap trickster belly of this strange Raudelunas Athanor, a new formation soon was birthed. All bloodyred and wailing, just a tooting its sacred canine horn…Basically? It came to us SUPERLOUD. And it honked Alabama’s earhole something fierce, on that birthing day. And it laid a golden noiseworm inside Alabama’s ear, so irreversibly. It was to be an explicitly surrealist group this time, unlike Raudelunas. Poetic and bold, very unlike quite the opposite in fact of a wheel-spinning, bumpkin-boy hamster. Anti-domesticated and wild, wild like wildfire. The very first truly surrealist group of the American south–“Glass Veal”. Ladonna Smith, Janice Hathaway, Davey Williams, Mitchell Cashion, Johnny Williams, and Thomas Falkner sat at its core, though fellow travelers were always welcomed, always invited in to take a little ride on this marvel-multiplying ferris wheel called Surrealism. Glass Veal called Birmingham, Alabama its nesthome, it created cornucopia of automatic writing, paintings, drawings, games, music…One of its primary dreams? To take surrealist experimentation further into the domain of the sonic. To massage Ear with Marvelous, to explore pure psychic automatism via a vessel of weightless sound. Playing together as “communicating vessels”, without score, form or discussion, giving the unconscious mind allowance to speak to scream its own songs through the medium of their welcoming bodies. These experiments were released through their label Transmuseq, and publications of automatic writing and other allpurpose madness dripdrizzled onto a few papery bookstuffs too, bookstuffs containing such fabulous names as ‘Beef Sphinx’, and ‘Divining Tongue’. Members traveled far and wide, meeting distant surrfolk whenever and wherever possible, forming several alliances, friendships, and aquatic symbiotic relationships, influencing and being influenced in turn. Still active today? Yes, ever active, active like a volcano, active like an earthquake. Remaining today as an iron turtle’d beacon, as an improvising colliedove’s pirate radio. A signal, yes a whisper, towards the anyall southern surrpeoples still left, in this rabid, this underwormed land. “Just hand that unsung unconscious 1 untuned antique geetar, little fruitfly–just see what kind a beautiful new hole is bound to open up, b’neath yer feathered feets…!”

Time fer a “Jump Forward”, O Earl. Time fer a “punch up” on the up-cord, inside of our fancyfresh timemachine, vehicular. Whompwhompwhompwhomp. Ah shit, back it up now, Earl. Missed the target. PmohwPmohwPmohwPmohw. Here, here we are now. We traveled proper. Our Observer-Eye setting sight on Atlanta, on  year two thousand and sixteen. And? We are seeing two weirdfish now, just a Hazel Cline, just a Steven…Cline. And we follow them along, and they rush away, and they lose us…in a dank Cartersville alleyway….Camera shy, the mousy bastards. But we catch up with them, anyway. Sooner or later. And it seems they’ve been meeting with several other weirdfish too, ‘gainst all odds. A certain Megan Leach, a certain Steve Morrison…Here in this sunken aquacity, in this hotwet feathered Atlanta…and a fella named Aaron Dylan Kearns, and a certain James Robert Foster, a certain Alvero Michael…yes, later on…not to mention those others, those others…An Atlanta Surrealist Group? In this economy? My my. They said it couldn’t be done..!  And yet these weirdfish, they just seem to be accumulating shadow. Just seem to be spreading out…moist webs. And a deluge of gameplaying is suddenly unleashed! Upon unsuspecting city! And an avalanche of black and white photocopied zines! Dropped down, from bluest sky! Zines, yes, zines! Filled to brim with bizarre poetic vagaries, with lost occult secrets, inane puns! And those mailboxes? They’re all now speaking in tongues, too. These Atlantean madmen it seems have been spitting numberless erect postcards out from Surrealist HQ, a strange new breed of surrealist undercommunication. The stories tell of chance cut-ups, collaged devils, hidden codes…And our timeclock? Moving onwards, otherwards. A fleshy exhibit-tentacle drops down from the ceiling in 2019, all pinkred, all tactile and stinksweaty. ‘Polymorph Bodyshop’ is the name which it gives itself. Then? In 2021, their veryown Egregore materializes itself in exhibit form, all black and spectral, all shadow-spawning. And of 2022, what of 2022? Why, a cavernous, extradimensional clown carnival is unfurled across town in that year, spreading firm insurrectionist’s dream…Yep, that atlantean dice just keeps on a rolling, rolling. O, but where will it end up? That, my dear sasquatch, the old No-body knows. Or maybe…he don’t?

Rolling busybody possum abruptstops in speedy roll. He turns to me, spits out wad of chewtobacco, cries. Wags finger, and despairs. “But…ya din’t even roll round tha southern iceberg all tha way even once, ya loon! Ya din’t even give time ‘nough ta turn over full-like, on Chattahoochee’s surrhistorical jazz tortoise! Her tortoise!” I wave my fastly deflating writer-arm upout at this Busybody Possum in mock-defeat, elbows flabby-flailing. I pull down my thickly mildewed, witch-cursed father’s bluest of britches. I give naughty possum the ol’ southern stinkfunk, I give him an illustrious anal “wink”, by way of an apology. And? He seems more or less satisfied by my kowtow, this busybodyboy possum. More or less? Yeah, more or less. Possum gives me 1 furry thumbs up, and then, he drives far. far away. In a red Ford pickup. He is cawing.

 

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SOME RELEVANT LINKS:
http://www.fresh-dirt.us/
https://houseofmysticum.wordpress.com/
https://elephant6.com/
https://www.loveandsaucers.com/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pasaquan
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clarence_John_Laughlin
https://coralcastle.com/
https://principiadiscordia.com/
https://peculiarmormyrid.com/2019/02/03/bessie-a-ficklen-dream-poetry-1891/
https://monoskop.org/images/9/95/Cultural_Correspondence_10-11_Surrealism_and_Its_Popular_Accomplices_1979.pdf