INSTANT FOSSILS OF THE FUTURE

I was a man, I was a rock
I was a rock in the man man in the rock
I was a bird in the air space in the bird
I was flower in the cold river in the sun
Carbuncle in the dew

Fraternally alone, fraternally free
– Paul Eluard

It could be the subject of a new myth: the common expression that we, as well as anything or everything in the universe, are made of stardust. This very poetic expression, measured by the growth of my hair or my nails, does not leave me just a dreamer: I too come from a distant elsewhere, from the depths of a universe in full prenatal explosion on the other side of an atomic clock. Mentally retracing the course of those ages before time? If two mirrors facing each other give an exemplary image of the infinite, when I place myself between them, I reinstate the present and its spatiotemporal limits, this present in which I am only just able to break an hourglass and spread its dust over my shadow – a conjuring act to dream better and to let myself be possessed, briefly, by the totality of the ancestors that I carry in my neurons, my bone cells and my spermatozoa.

This place where I am now, at the gates of Paris, was in the secondary era covered under the waves of a tropical sea. This very slowly withdrew to give way to a vast swamp populated by gigantic saurians whose various frolics no doubt amused the already venerable dragonflies. Dinosaur fossils were unearthed under the pickaxes of workers digging the subway tunnels at the beginning of the twentieth century: paleontological knowledge had by then permeated people’s minds enough so that we no longer risked mistaking these imposing remains for the relics of dragons. This fabulous latter animal, definitely exterminated as species by the superheroes of nascent Christianity, has no place in natural history museums, although its multiple descriptions and representations in medieval literature and imagery offer enough plausibility with respect to each other that cryptozoology enthusiasts can with quasi-pataphysical seriousness investigate the possibilities of its existence. Come, one day we will concede to such meticulous debaucheries of the epistemology of natural science the power to simulate much wider domains than the current playful spirit which still reigns in certain laboratories: linked to the overflows of the oneiric experience, these speculations help to build a machine that seeks not to merely play with time, but to open in its very perception quasi-hallucinatory dimensions—expanding the real by means of the whirlwinds of consciousness, and grappling with what could be named, without superfluous anguish, the eternal return of the other.

Poetic thought never secures its empire better than when it questions itself about this other, and when exasperated by its own abyss, it provokes and urges consciousness to expand until it takes the form of the obverse of the mirror from which the other is signalling; the unknown but not the unknowable. Rimbaud’s formidable assertion had already been guessed by Taliesin (“I put on a multitude of aspects / before acquiring my final form”) and Paul Eluard knew how to “rock” himself to better know himself as a human. This is the initiatory adventure par excellence, in which the mind discovers itself to be the memory and guarantor of all possible metamorphosis. And can we hope to recognize some tangible traces of it in a world that is becoming more insane, more insensitive every day? The rock that was Eluard was certainly not entirely crushed to produce the mass of gravel that covers his tomb in the Père Lachaise cemetery, aggregating around him famous Stalinist carrion under their granite cubes. And Rimbaud is no more in Charleville than Taliesin is under a hillock somewhere in Wales, forgotten by all except the brambles and daffodils. No, the three of them are just as well united in some dreamlike dimension around a feast of mammoth thighs; the same mammoth whose dusty skeleton struts around in the paleontology gallery of the Jardin des Plantes. And it is enough for me to play with this idea in order that my revolt against this capitalist civilization, which believes it has already subjected all future becoming to its miserable routines, escapes joyfully from the nihilist temptation which suffuses the air of this age.

And then, we can play a lot at the Jardin des Plantes! Try to lift, for example, the huge black meteorite that is in an alley not far from the entrance of the Great Gallery of Evolution. One would think it had fallen, not from Lucifer’s pocket, but from one of those paintings by Josef Sima in which Dürer’s melancholy polyhedron lurks. I have never touched this extra-terrestrial stone except with a vague feeling of dread, undoubtedly a relic of the great sacred fears which must have seized my ancestors the Gauls and a few others, when they saw the sky beginning to fall on their heads. Isn’t it in one of his novels that Abraham Merritt imagines that a Kraken-shaped monster sleeps in just such a rock? Stone of great mystery, in which, too, could be stuck the sword Excalibur or the rapier of the Chevalier de Pardaillan; but upon which, above all, no temple is ever to be built! Instead, let’s dig a bathtub for Marat-le-Mélusin…

Digging: that old Parisian habit. The geological nature of the subsoil lends itself admirably to this, made mainly of limestone and gypsum mined for centuries in underground quarries, part of which have become the catacombs and ossuary. A legendary labyrinth which could have served as a refuge for many refractory to the law and order reigning on the surface, and in which the prodigious imagination of Gaston Leroux located the utopia of the people of the Talpas. These came to settle there in the middle ages to flee feudal iniquity, and in this dark underground, in these twists and turns of time, formed the kind of communist society one always dreams of seeing flourish under the sun. Premonitory fossils of the social future? If they welcomed, during the Belle Epoque, Théophraste Longuet, the ridiculous hero of Leroux, will these mole-people soon have the chance to receive among them some delegation of the yellow vests who have come to take shelter from the police and observe the mores of an emancipated society?

To imagine such a situation could lead to the invention of a new subversive game within the Surrealist Movement: it would be a question of building simulacra of fossils, which would be the fossils of a utopia that could have existed somewhere in the past or which might exist in an anterior future. Hey, what if we found, for example while excavating in Hauterives, near the Ideal Palace of Postman Cheval, the (very well preserved!) fossil of one of those anti-lions dreamed of by Fourier? Or even by digging less than six meters deep somewhere near Houston, where Victor Considerant had attempted to found a phalanstery, we might have a good chance of finding the richly decorated tombs of the phalansterians, and we could see, unsurprisingly, that these skeletons are equipped with the requisite extra bones that form the archibras. It would be interesting to make such objects and then either put them into circulation, to sharpen our imaginations, or bury them in suitable places for the future revelation of their disconcerting mystery. Like paleontology, archeology is worth hijacking for surrealist purposes.

We remember the photographs of Raoul Ubac showing the fossils of the Stock Exchange or the Paris Opera: the critical dimension that this entailed, by denouncing the deadly nature of these famous monuments of a detestable society, asks to be pursued again with renewed means. But hasn’t industrial civilization gotten a few millennia ahead of us in dispersing its own long-lived fossils around the world: nuclear waste? And yet aren’t the phosphorescent covers of the issues of the journal Surrealism in the service of the revolution (Surréalisme au service de la révolution) slightly (very slightly) radioactive?

***

It has often happened to me in my dreams that I find myself in exuberant landscapes, kinds of tropical jungles, inspired by the cinema. But I now remember an old dream, during which I was led to kill mammoths, armed only with a very long pin. It seems that progress in the field of genetic manipulation would make it possible to “resuscitate” this extinct species of pachyderms. But global warming would of course be fatal to them once again; as well as the woolly rhinoceros, whose sheared product would however make it possible to weave some beautiful rugs and knit carmagnoles. This is undoubtedly what our ancestors of the Paleolithic era were concerned with when they did not draw exquisite corpses on the walls of their caves. They were certainly not bored, and we know they had the chance, over several millennia, to be able to make love with voluptuous Neanderthals and libidinous Cro-Magnons: would that I could at least one night in a dream know the delights of a Neanderthal woman! A way of replaying, at least for my pleasure and my edification, a primitive scene obscured from generation to generation, since racism was invented and the priests reshaped the fable of the earthly paradise.

In a series of dreams, the memory of which still inspires me, I was led to visit or explore in immense rather gloomy undergrounds, the remains of an unknown civilization. It had reached a significant level of technical development, judging by the wreckage of machinery whose usefulness completely escaped me, such that I did not understand the hieroglyphic writings carved on the walls. There were a series of doors that I did not go through: I nevertheless knew in one of the most recent of these dreams that the final door opened into Agarttha, that mythical city that captured my attention at the time. Of course, these dreamlike images are dependent on readings of science fiction novels and comics, of popular culture feeding on the myths and legends of Atlantis, Eldorado, Shangri-la. They are also nourished by the more or less strong sensations received during visits to abandoned factories and industrial ruins. At a certain level of emotionality and active reverie, can we not perceive these ruins as those of a sunken city emerging from the depths of time, or even from parallel time? André Breton, in the 1930s, asserted that no factory would ever offer the imagination the poetic turmoil delivered by ruined castles; my friends, the surrealists of Madrid, however, see with melancholy jubilation – and I am not far from sharing their opinion – in these happily disaffected industrial prisons places now suitable for poetic adventure. Places that if haunted, are haunted by the golem of capitalist exploitation. We can also observe that this, to conjure the doubtless guilty curses of this phantasmal monster, now takes on the form of the cultural industry: how many old steel factories or mine sites are now museums of the industrial revolution where memories and testimonies of the workers’ struggles of yesteryear are carefully watered down if not erased!

Nowadays, except for those who work there, places of production are becoming invisible, whether they are relocated deep within China or across the ring road, into areas neutralized by their unambiguous functionality. But all the rest of the geographical space becomes a cultural commodity, where the lure of brief possession is sold to herds of consumers, tourists and onlookers in these pilgrimages of reification. One of the first examples of this was the organized visits, barely ten years after Waterloo, to the famous battlefield. Here the reward of the visit was manifested in the discovery of a fragment of a shell or a rusty saber. What would those brave bourgeois of that time have said if a joker had sown the grounds with one or two hundred copies of Napoleon’s famous hat? Humor, no doubt, which could have come from a Belgian surrealist and accompanied by the rain of men wearing bowler hats in the Brussels suburbs. Of these men, who nowadays have simply changed their clothing to put on what Wilhelm Reich called their “character armor”, one feels only disgust when fascinated by the ideologues of biopower and the technocrats of transhumanism, they propose to subdivide eternity like a seaside resort, forever shareable with the combined progress of neurosciences, biochemistry and robotics. Relieved of its mechanistic outlines, the human-machine always tries to offer itself a future in the image of its present, where death, quantifiable as it is at all levels of the economy, from the domestic puzzle to the renewed spectacle of world epidemics, must nevertheless become more and more abstract, and more and more unthinkable, become unreal even and thus, be abolished. Also, because we have the desire and the urgency to change life more than ever, we have to observe on the contrary the presence of death as a fact of nature, the better to get rid of the civilized curses of Thanatos, whether it be in the overwhelming memento mori of Christians or the role of the death drive in the dynamics of the reality principle. Jean Benoît’s Necrophile still prowls the streets and rooms we pass through. And this sentence from the first Manifesto of Surrealism still remains very enigmatic: “Surrealism will introduce you into death which is a secret society.” On the way to Arcanum 17, there is the Nameless Arcanum, which so aptly illustrates the surrealist search for instant fossils of human becoming.

July 21-27, 2020