Jason Abdelhadi: The transposition of other times and worlds onto this one has become a fundamental feature of surrealist experience for me. It is often a question of accidentally stumbling upon some ancient feeling in an unexpected place. But also seeing, in almost any scenario or image, a potential break-out point where different eons manifest themselves in shapes that cannot be anything else than forgotten or unidentified forms of life.

Hermester Barrington: Inasmuch as time is a fiction we tell ourselves to explain our inability to move backwards in it—and space is merely the step-sibling of time—we are always contemporary with those worlds we seem to have remembered, which are figments of our imaginations. Borges’ retelling of the story of the two kings and their labyrinths misses the point of the original—both monarchs were trapped in their own conceptions of time, regardless of the physical mazes they might have constructed for each other. I have lost myself in my own labyrinth of deep time, and live there happily among the oozing limestone, the fossils that encrust the walls, and a thin layer of Bathybius haeckelii covering all of it.

Doug Campbell: I have felt absolutely outside of time during particularly intense experiences. I have also felt deja-vu in situations that I’d never been in before, notably in my first sexual experiences. Time runs slow in accidents and confrontations, and fast when absorbed in creativity – or intoxication!

Meetings with groups of surrealists – whether involving formal games or not – always seem to create “synchronicity storms” and startling strokes of objective chance.

Passing further and further through time, nearly sixty years of it, it seems to me that these and other phenomena suggest that the experience of time associated with hauling a physical body through the rounds of food, sleep and shelter is a very small part of the story indeed.

Casi Cline: Yes, I would say this is true for me. My most blindingly beautiful experiences have been ones which have felt timeless, and by timeless I mean full of time. Time is often experienced as a form of separation, as discrete segments or the barriers between them. But time is not a collection of gates and barriers. Time is a body and the end of time is its skin. Time as a body has a complex of veins and arteries and nerves and vessels through which time passes. And nothing in time as a body ceases to exist as a cell passes beyond it.

Krzysztof Fijalkowski: Since quite early childhood I have always been very conscious of the passing of time, of the anxious uncertainty that comes with aging, and of a tangible loss as experiences turn to memories. As I get older myself, I increasingly have a sense of time as multiple: not just that different times might co-exist, but also that different types of being (organic and inorganic; physical and immaterial; ‘living’, ‘non-living’ and previously living entities) experience time differently, which is precisely why their essential and vivid qualities so often remain opaque to us. To reach, or at least glimpse, these other temporal zones seems to me a central surrealist ambition, and as such the sense that surrealism offers a bridge to them is one of the most vibrant – if also the most speculative – of its promises. Building on André Breton’s scattered discussions of this question, Georges Sebbag has written eloquently on surrealism’s pursuit of le temps sans fil: ‘wireless time’.

Mattias Forshage: ​Yes. (see separate contribution)

Joël Gayraud: Surrealism is a passionate attempt to find an elsewhere in the here, even if it be a temporal or spatial elsewhere, and notably thanks to the verbal flow of automatic writing which gives us privileged access to our unconscious. Transmitting Freudian discoveries, surrealism emancipates the practice of free association from its role as a technique for explaining and healing neuroses, in order to realize in a poetic mode the shamanic dream of displacement in time and space. Unknown worlds are born before the poet’s eyes, a labyrinth of words and images in which they hasten to get lost as in a petrified forest by the edge of an underground lake.

Like rocks formed from an accumulation of mineral or organic sediments during geological eras, our memory is sedimentary. Isn’t there a disturbing analogy here? When I collect a dream in the morning, I often have the impression of bringing back a living fossil from the depths of the ages. But does not my whole body decline in one of the geological times? Let’s take a few random organs and think: my brain dates from the Pleistocene, my liver from the Oligocene, my pancreas from the Cretaceous; my spinal cord I see going back to the Jurassic, my heart to the Devonian, my stomach to the carboniferous, my balls to the Ordovician and my skeleton to the Precambrian. As for the rest, I leave it to my friends to decide.

Nathan Grover: Consciousness is an edifice built only recently on very old, very thick bedrock. My most astonishing notions incubate somewhere down in that bedrock, in a cavern that predates language and self and all the other superstructures of consciousness. I delve as deep as I can, but I can’t say I’ve ever reached that cavern or hope to achieve any intimacy with it. Emanations from the cavern are experienced as an ideomotor reflex towards an idea and are as impersonal as a sneeze. The ecstasy I feel comes only afterwards.

Beatriz Hausner: I am told that the sounds of prehistory still echo where I stand. I am certain that this is true, because I often place my ear to the ground to listen to their millenarian mellifluousness. They sing me to sleep. It is not a deep sleep. It is rather closer to reverie, a perfect state for the deepening vowels of the water to surface and make themselves heard.

Nicholas Alexander Hayes: Civilization distorts our understanding. 6,000… 10,000 years of writing and we have lost hundreds of millennia of hominid existence. So many memories have been forgotten, so many artifacts obliterated. In the early decades of the 21st century, we stand overwhelmed with information, oblivious that solar radiation and the depletion of rare earth elements will leave us in the same silence.

Vittoria Lion: To begin to answer these questions, I feel compelled to quote the fictional doctor Venus Kaiserstiege, from Rikki Ducornet’s novel The Fountains of Neptune: “We forget that thought is a process which has evolved over the ages from anterior states. Just as our finger-bones still resemble those of the lizard, so at depths deeper than dreaming our thoughts may echo the lobster’s.” When Breton and Soupault opened Les Champs magnétiques with “Prisoners of drops of water, we are but everlasting animals,” were they not affirming our common ancestry with the entirety of life on Earth—back to the first plasmic drop of water—and perhaps that each one of our bodies contains the memory of the “endless forms” preceding us encrypted inside, accessible within certain altered states? If, under certain psychological conditions, we can uncover the memory of what it felt like to be at our mothers’ breasts or floating in the womb, shouldn’t we be able to recall traces of how it felt to be a trilobite or primordial worm adrift in the Cambrian sea? To know that the ever-inventive resilience of evolution is endless, that its potential to generate new forms is infinite—that, as Freud wrote in Beyond the Pleasure Principle, “biology is truly the land of unlimited possibilities”—is to me the most wonderful of all scientific revelations; it is a dream come true for anyone imaginative.

For me, we are absolutely always contemporary with other ages in Earth’s history and other life forms that once existed, carrying their physical and psychological traces within us. (Literally, when I was a child, I completely lacked a “normal” adult linear sense of time, and my first answer to the question of what I would “be” when I grew up was a T. rex.) I’d argue that a sense of the non-contradictory timelessness of the unconscious, represented through the compression of overwhelming spans of time or the cohabitation of extinct and present life forms in a Boschian menagerie, is central to the Surrealist understanding of “deep time.” Surrealism stretches Freud’s archaeological metaphor, so vivid in his image of the “Eternal City” of Rome where the traces of its earliest perimeter coexist with its most recent architecture, into the realm of paleontology. This kind of vision is brilliantly encapsulated in Rimbaud’s Illuminations: “The wall facing the watcher is a psychological succession of cross-sections of friezes, atmospheric layers, and geological strata.—Intense and fleeting dream of sentimental groups with every kind of being in every possible manifestation.” The idea that eons can be condensed and deep time can be immediately accessed through extrasensory perception in dreams and hallucinations, in automatic experiences, comes through superbly in the works of the Theosophists and Lovecraft’s novella, The Shadow out of Time. I’ve always found the latter to be strongly reminiscent of Freud’s case study of Sergei Pankejeff, the “Wolfman,” who accesses the “primal scene” passed down from prehistory in his dream of arboreal wolves.

It’s also interesting as an adult considering how I lacked a conventional sense of depth as a child, instead perceiving nothing inherently contradictory about disparate depths and times overlapping simultaneously: we had a primitive 90s Magic School Bus computer game about ocean life that I loved on our first family computer, and I remember making drawings inspired by it showing orcas swimming around giant tube worms, even though these species live at vastly different depths. It’s a lovely image of the strata of the sea and of geological time coinciding with one another in a multi-synchronous, polyphonic way.

RJ Myato: The time or world is no-time and all-world. When eternal recurrence eats us alive we recognize ourselves as contemporary to everything: the crystal of time is embedded within our guts lovingly by the very wide range of animals embedded in our earth. To privilege the future over the past is to be fully within time, and that is what we can hope to accomplish. Multiplicity – the very foam of moments – tangles linearity and teaches us the lessons of fossils.

David Nadeau: In the elemental reverie, matter, by means of the human mind, imagines its own Genesis for itself. Or rather, the marriage of matter and consciousness constantly reinvents this destructive Genesis.

Juan Carlos Otaño: “One of these suits of armour looks just right for me. I wish I could put it on and rediscover the consciousness of a 14th Century man” – André Breton, Introduction au discours sur le peu de réalité.

The fascinating discovery of the Gold of Time transmits what is unique and irrepeatable, the fruit of exceptional circumstance. It also marks the reach or the distance of all that has been lost and forgotten or even unknown. ‘Precursors’ are important because they not only foreshadow surrealism, but are also the likely projections of future guidelines— officiating in this way the role of “posthumous successors”. The question of ‘tradition’ is also intrinsically considered but not as an immobilizing factor, nor as a nostalgic memory, but rather as a living presence.

Anthony Redmond: On mid-summers night’s eve in 1997, myself and three Ngarinyin Aboriginal ritual specialists from the north-west of Australia were lying flat on our backs in the dimly lit main chamber of the Lascaux cave complex in the south of France, staring up at the distended interior surface of the belly of the cavern as herds of reindeer, bison, Prezlecki ponies and some other beasts long extinct in this part of Europe galloped across the walls and ceiling before disappearing into a cervical niche at the far end of the cave. It was a fabulous sight to behold and we were all overcome with awe at this spectacular panorama of long-disappeared animals rendered in such a highly animated way that one could hear the thundering of their hooves echoing through the rock.

On emerging from the air-locked steel door at the mouth of the cave a couple of hours later, a group of French journalists were on hand to seek the reactions of the Ngarinyin men. After a brief silence, Neowarra, visibly moved by the experience within, announced that the caves have “proper strong one wunggurr that” indicating that the power of the Rainbow Serpent was strongly present there. This announcement of the presence, so far from home, of the ubiquitous and diffuse body of the Rainbow Serpent was interesting in itself. But he really grabbed the reporters’ attention when he continued that it was no wonder there were no longer such beasts roaming the surrounding countryside of southern France. That heavy steel door, he claimed, was preventing the animals from getting out of what was plainly a ritual increase site for the wild animals of the northern world; “you gotta take that door down or you’ll get nothing” he declared. Expressing a deep empathy for large mammals, a sentiment commonly held amongst his countrymen, alongside practical considerations of the high value of their meats, Neowarra found it extremely sad that Europeans had suffered the loss of many of their ancient wild animals.

This experience made it abundantly clear that ancient worlds can be literally co-eval with our own as these senior Ngarinyin men, just a generation or so older than myself, retained a capacity for direct access to a poetic knowledge that had been commonly held across the globe since at least neoleolithic times.

On the following day, we were visiting the senior curator of the caves at his lovely provincial home when the same group of journalists turned up. Because the archaeologists employed at the caves were desperate to discuss lithic technology with the Ngarinyin men a demonstration of pressure flaking on some pieces of chert stone was arranged. Many of these archaeologists were consummate paleolithic boffins and had spent years perfecting the art of reproducing the kind of arrow and spear heads which had been found in the caves. Each of these archaeologists possessed their own neolithic tool kits, with handmade leather pads for laying over the knees, various pieces of reindeer bone for pressure flaking, and a range of percussion instruments of wood and stone. In fact, this kind of faithful reproduction of classic designs, as any musician or painter will tell you, is an excellent way to come to an understanding of the skills and bodily techniques involved in reproducing a particular object. The results produced by the French archaeologists over the course of the next forty-five minutes or more were actually extremely beautiful, finely wrought objects. The Ngarinyin men pored over these objects, quite a bit smaller than the ones they produced at home, most admiringly. Wama then in his eighties and an experienced hunter and spear maker, piped up with a suggestion, “Let me show you quick way” and taking hold of the percussion implements and the chert blank, quickly knocked into shape a very similar if somewhat larger version of the archaeologists’ pressure flaked arrow-heads. This attention to utility rather than to producing objects of pure contemplation, a process that took about ten minutes rather than forty-five, left the assembled archaeologists somewhat non-plussed. While they had watched carefully what Wama was doing and nodded to each other sagely throughout, they didn’t seem quite as enamoured of the finished product as they were of their own more finely wrought creations or as they clearly were of the famous Kimberley Points which they had seen in books and museums. Having shown these men how to knock a spear-head into useable shape in rapid time, though, Wama, then went on to drill out the edges of the spear-head to produce the kind of denticulate, serrated edges for which Kimberley points are renowned (see below).

There was an instant recaptivation of the audience as the maker progressed from being perceived, I suspect, as a somewhat rustic version of the European cavemen and their contemporary technological heirs, to being a master craftsman bringing the past into the present in a very vital way. And it seemed that this is exactly that they desired because while the Lascaux archaeologists could faithfully replicate the designs of their Paleolithic forebears, what they wanted in fact was to time-travel, to extract a sense of what the people who painted the Lascaux caves and hunted and fished in the river valleys around it were really like, what they thought, what they dreamed. They wanted the meaning-structures of the caves and the arrow-heads explicated for them; “we can see the objects but what did they mean to those who produced them?”

In this sense, as Johannes Fabian argued a long time ago, Australian Aborigines are still readily cast as the bearers of a culture which was once widespread across the globe but which now only survived in remote outposts. It was the embodiment of a neolithic mind that the archaeologists wished to capture and to some extent this need was satisfied by watching the production of the spearheads. Later came the kind of exchange of notes on technique that one might find at a vintage motorcycle swap meet where no one speaks the other’s language but everyone knows what the desirable items are.

Despite the absolutely necessary critique of the denial of the coevalness of the indigenous Other (Fabian 1983), it is too easy to denigrate desires for immersion in other worlds – after all the fantasy of time-travelling is a very powerful one. The Ngarinyin visitors felt honoured by their reception in the Loire Valley, by the fact that these learned professionals treated them with the most gracious manners and recognized them as the bearers of rich cultural traditions, not to say put them up in their best hotels and celebrated their presence with wonderful hospitality. After all, only about thirty visitors a year are now allowed into the caves of Lascaux, for fear of the damage to the paintings caused by human breath. So we had already taken up a fifth of the quota for that year.

The French archaeologists seemed to be seeking to elicit a set of meanings from the Ngarinyin men who, while wishing to please their generous hosts and aware that something was expected of them, couldn’t quite make out what those desires were. In my view, this was partly because in the aesthetic objects they were presented with the Ngarinyin men did not make the kinds of separation between what Hegel called gestalt (form), gehalt (content) and Bedeutung (meaning). Hegel, with his evolutionary view of the dialectical progression towards the self-realization of the geist (spirit), believed that a violent separation must be wrought upon these aspects of the intentional object in order to bring human consciousness into being as fully realized self-knowledge. It was clear that the Ngarinyin visitors were disinclined to make the kind of explication of meaning which split it off from the form and content of these “strangely familiar” objects.

I also think there was something else going on in the engagement. I just noted that the Ngarinyin men entered into the spirit of the encounter with good faith. It seemed to me that what this good faith consisted of was their sense that the Lascaux caves showed them that in fact Europeans were at heart much like themselves. Just as the Europeans were inclined to think of their visitors as the bearers of Neoleolithic traditions in a modern world, so the cave paintings and the spearheads indicated to the Ngarinyin visitors that Europeans, for all their power and technological innovations, were also, at heart, hunters and painters of caves like themselves. But, unfortunately, in their view, Europeans had lost most of these skills, as well as their wild animals and their lands to farms and developments across the countryside. Rather than being abject in the face of the profusion of European wealth, technology and power, the senior Ngarinyin visitors felt compassion for the losses sustained by Europeans. This was something upon which they remarked a number of times as our super-fast train barreled through the suburban sprawl and wide swathes of cleared farmland. This revelation that Europeans were once much like themselves served to sustain the visitors’ own self-regard which was inevitably confronted by their status as the dependent guests of powerful whites, people to whom they had come to seek assistance against other whites back in Australia who were seeking to deprive them of their rights in land. In this regard, the generosity of their hosts was something which needed to be mitigated. It is very much part of Kimberley Aboriginal cultural style to make a strong appearance of indifference to gifts because, as we know, gifts always carry with them obligations and obligation can be a source of shame to those whom become so beholden. By being able to locate Europeans, especially ones who continually gave them things and who continually reinforced the sense of their difference, to be able to locate these hosts as being, in some sense, much like themselves, afforded the Ngarinyin visitors both pleasure and the possibility of reasserting their autonomy, so far from home and so far out of their own domain. So being able to incorporate the cave paintings into their own categories of understanding, to be able to make spearheads quicker and to throw the spears with greater skill, reestablished their standing as men amongst men. The fact that they were able, after some groping in the dark, to successfully intuit that this is what their French hosts needed from them served to complete this restoration of power.

Tony Roehrig: A race against or with TIME. Some chose to relinquish the ‘trophy’ for the moment and walk away from the race entirely. Others embrace the time of ‘NO TIME’ and engage with the circular movement of space. Along the journey we bump elbows with beings from other worlds and other times but we must first seek for and desire their company.

Penelope Rosemont:

And others with mad desire hope perhaps to delight in fire
…..Alas, my place is with them. —Petrarch

Surrealists inherently search for lost worlds, worlds of mystery, worlds of fantasy, worlds of the marvelous, worlds of the future, worlds of wilderness, worlds of distant cultures, worlds of utopian societies, even the worlds of the insane, we try to imagine them, populate them and inhabit them, spend time in these worlds and elaborate them. We strive for their actualization in daily-life. We understand that real life could be so much more. Deep time is a good expression for this. Daily-life clicks by unexamined. We don’t really even notice it until it’s gone. (These days of Corona one recalls the paradise of going to a cafe and having a cappucchino with friends or even a pizza, seems like long ago.)

Part of being a surrealist is the effort to increase one’s awareness. To see not only the object as it is, but how it has come to be, how it fits into the scheme of things; its particular meaning for us, where it might lead us–it is a multidimensional vision. The work of Aldo Leopold, Arne Ness, John Muir and Edward Abby are among my necessities. Thoreau was where I began many, many years ago. Transcendentalism attracted me before surrealism and I was very sorry it no longer existed. The insights of William James still enrich daily life.

We immerse ourselves in the things that attract us, impulsively, convulsively, obsessively and dive deep into that ocean of being. One of my adventurous and ever present obsessions is surrealism itself. Another that recurs periodically is Mayan Civilization. I traveled there and was immediately confronted by another world: the smell of a thousand unknown intensities, the taste of the air, the burning-bright light of Yucatan. I scrambled up the pyramid of the Sorcerers, felt the strong wind, looked to the distant horizon and discovered a secret. From the heights I could see very far. Now a scrub forest, it was once homes surrounded by crops. And there on top of this pyramid was a watcher. Even an hour’s warning could make a difference between life and death. I kept my eyes on the horizon for the sign of movement, for the stalking of a leopard or the stealth of an enemy. . .seeing the future. I was the watcher. The power of Shamans lingers there. A little of how I felt about that time was put into my essay Lost Worlds, Forgotten Futures, Undreamed Ecstasies. One of the mysteries of Mayan civilization was why their cities were abandoned—it is less of a mystery since the advent of corona.

Thinking about the past ages in Earth’s history, one realizes they are contained in us through both culture and biology. The biological aspect is unconscious unless one studies the body, its organs, its fetal development in relation to Evolution. Our very organs evolved from sea creatures; our ancestors contemporary with dinosaurs avoided being stepped on. Our life is a success story of dna survival from the very beginnings of life. The gem of consciousness arises from biology and thought arises from the images and words. This material of thought is precarious, always in danger of being lost or perverted since knowledge must be passed from one generation to the next.

Samjogo: ​Yes. Time is a flower and each moment is a petal which grows from a common center.

LaDonna Smith: I simply reach into a different time and another world when I am working in clay. When I have my hands in soil and water, forming and molding in a state of subconscious creativity, I am reaching back into the ancestral knowledge that is the basis of this impulse. I don’t see monsters or dinosaurs in dreams. I see enigmatic vegetative animated morphs rise before my hands in real time awake. I watch them grow without predetermined plans.

Darren Thomas: Time and place mesh constantly in an eternal overflowing and becoming. We ignore other ages at our peril. Witness the collapse of our eco-system and like the melting icecaps we will re-join the sea. It is for this reason I look on the pebbles and pinecones I have gathered nightly to re-connect with the earth.

Jason Abdelhadi: The rocks in my area are very ancient. Paleozoic sediment on top of occasionally exposed Precambrian rocks. The Gatineau Hills just north of me are the beginning of a long stretch of wildness that reaches right up to the arctic. There is a certain inhuman attitude I find myself in that I think relates to this. Even returning to Ottawa from anywhere in southern Ontario is enough to make me notice the difference. I think this manifests in some behaviours and certainly some thought-patterns that occur whenever I am outside in a semi-wilder area. I could fancy my thoughts are plated in Ordovician black shale.

Hermester Barrington: The rocks upon which we live, walk, breathe, dance, comingle, are part of the Conejo volcanics and diabase intrusions into the Topanga Formation of the Transverse Range of Southern California. This range, as well as the Channel Islands, were pushed up through the earth’s crust some 17.4 mega-annum ago, when Persephone and Hades, after a particularly nasty spat, made up rather vigorously in their caverns some eight kilometers beneath our feet (our house is just above their bed, so we do hear them from time to time). The sound of these two gods making love is indistinguishable to the untrained ear from the sound of fault planes grinding against each other, the songs of bats as they fly from the numerous entrances to the underworld which can be found throughout these mountains, of magma coursing beneath the earth’s crust, or of the wind carrying particles of sandstone from the mountains to the sea. This knowledge, and the sound of these ancient gods making love just beneath, has a very powerful effect upon our own love life.

Doug Campbell:

(Textbook illustration of Edinburgh with volcanic ghosts.)

My city is built around outcroppings of igneous rock more than three hundred million years old, centred on the core of an extinct volcano, with a castle built on top of it. Ice age glaciers then carved away the softer rocks, leaving a landscape of ridges both defensible and useful for terraced farming. The ridges have been spanned by bridges, and a layer cake of a city has been constructed around them. As a child, I believed that the ancient volcano might erupt again at any moment.

Growing up with all this has left me with the sense that a city is more than just a conglomeration of housing, infrastructure and commerce: An operatic stage on which all kinds of melodrama is played out every night. A Gothic castle, stuffed with ghosts, hidden rooms, secret passageways, wild romance and foul villainy.

All of this comes at a price: One of the first major population centres, and an excellent place to hide and scheme, the city has been a national capital for hundreds of years. As with every other capital, everybody else in the country FUCKING HATES US!

Casi Cline: The rocks in my area, which include schist, amphibolite, gneiss, migmatite, and granite, date from the late Proterozoic Eon to the middle Ordovician Period. So maybe 500 million years old, give or take a 100 million years or so. In the middle of last year, I moved from a flat, grassy region to the top of a rocky, forested hill. Living in the shade under the trees and making direct contact with the dirt and stones makes me feel like I have gone under the skin of the Earth or like I shrunk down to the size of an insect and began living inside the grass instead of in the brightness above it. I have always been an insect-woman. As an insect-woman-child I liked nothing better than following the paths of ants back to their hill, only to find, alas, that I was much too big to follow them further. I have always been a rock-woman. As a rock-woman-child I proudly declared my intention of being a geologist or a mineralogist when I grew up. But I was mistaken. I had really wanted to be a rock instead, a little one, a pebble, which an ant could roll into its den. Delving under the skin of the Earth has reminded me of the things I have been and still am, but had lost while dwelling up there in the light with layers of exclusionary bigness between the stones and my feet which are also made of stone.

Krzysztof Fijalkowski: We live on the coast, in a town that gives its name to the wider geological feature on which it is perched: Cromer Ridge, the terminal moraine of a glacier that arrived from the direction of what is now the North Sea and expired here around 450,000 years ago. The cliffs and beach a couple of minutes’ walk from our home are rich in all kinds of stones, but especially fossils: belemnites, echinoids and fossil sponges are a daily find (around 70 million years old); within walking distance are places where the remains of mammoths, hippos and rhinos have been unearthed (470-860,000 years old), while a few miles further on preserved human footprints were found on the beach, revealed for a few days in 2014 and at around 850,000 years old, the oldest found outside Africa.

Combing a rock pool a month ago, I found a little Victorian earthenware inkwell, perfectly preserved despite being under the sea for more than a century, its cork still rattling inside. Like all beaches, despite this sense of unfathomable duration, ours is different every day, never stays still. Visiting it daily under the lockdown of spring 2020 felt like visiting a film in which every frame is 24 hours, teeming with incident but each replaced by the next, invisible within the long entirety of its unfolding.

Mattias Forshage: ​I have always had my lasting homes upon ancient cratonic igneous bedrock. I am a bit suspicious against recent and sedimentary rocks, and when I’ve been staying upon them for several months (happily, I should say) I am relieved to return to ”solid ground”. But this is mainly a compulsive thought, and I am probably being unfair. Possibly systematically unfair. I tend to spontaneously associate sedimentary rock with unreliability, largescale agriculture, poisonous food, foul-smelling water, hard labor, boredom, provincialism, nationalism, social control, stubborn prejudice, egoism, competition, superstition, hypocrisy, puritanism, xenophobia, catholicism, or any kind of monotheistic revelation religion, lack of shade, claustrophobia. Sure, but obviously I don’t escape most of these things in my craton haven either… But maybe it’s no surprise that any montesquieuian crude materialist theory is not logically consistent? Maybe I’m just envious of for example those who will find sudden sinkholes and vast cave systems and large amounts of fossils in the deep limestone cheese upon which they live?

Joël Gayraud: I live in Paris in the Carrières d´Aérique district, near the Buttes Chaumont park. The subterranean is full of underground galleries, half-crumbled remains half-condemned from the quarries where for centuries gypsum was extracted, a sedimentary rock dating from the upper Eocene (37 to 33 million years BC), which has the appearance of a whitish stone, vaguely translucent and brittle. It is by baking this stone in ovens that we obtain through cooking the plaster which was used to build the houses of Parisians during the Middle Ages. With runoff, the roof of abandoned quarries tends to dissolve and sometimes a fault opens without warning in the basement of a building or even in the middle of the street. I always knew that a chasm could open at any time under my feet.

Nathan Grover: The western districts of San Francisco are built like the house of the Biblical fool: on sand. Giant sand dunes used to shift in constant gales coming off the Pacific Ocean, and legends tell of people and entire buildings being buried overnight. Now you rarely see any sand; it’s we who’ve buried it.

I don’t know how old our sand is, or how that would even be measured; on the contrary, it’s sand that is used to measure time (e.g. in an hour glass). I suppose I think of sand, like time, as an element of erasure. Eventually time will sandblast the paint from every sign and everything will lose its name. Sand is transience and forgetting. When sand blows in my eye, I shed a tear for the void.

Beatriz Hausner: Overlying the Canadian Shield in southern Ontario are young sedimentary rocks, which range in age from 540 to 360 million years. Shallow tropical seas were once here. There is no doubt in my mind that this is the primary reason for one’s moods shifting. These invisible seas flow in and out of the people of this place, altering everything. Sometimes they take over entire city blocks and render the inhabitants madder than strange sea animals unable to find refuge in the cratering pools which often replace the familiar buildings of my neighbourhood.

Nicholas Alexander Hayes: At the nearest Lake Michigan beach, I walk across a scar of round rocks between the dunes restoration project and the water. My gait is uneasy as the rocks shift under my feet. I would like to believe many of them are basalt. I would like to believe I stand on the remnants of the earth’s crust. But when I stoop to pick up a stone to stroke in my palm, it is concrete, or slag or ceramic gnawed smooth by waves. I wonder if it is the present that eclipses the past or if it is the Anthropocene epoch that eclipses the Hadean eon.

Vittoria Lion: Fossil sites in Canada contain the remains of some of the Earth’s earliest recorded complex life forms, and giant trilobites nearly half a billion years old not infrequently erupt from the exposed Ordovician rock surrounding creeks and riverbeds in west Toronto. Comparatively much more recently, the fossil remains of giant beavers, muskoxen, and grizzly bears from the last Ice Age have been found in Toronto and its vicinity, and the Anishinaabe language contains records of Pleistocene megafauna. I additionally recently learned of the existence of the Ice Age “Toronto subway deer,” unearthed in 1976 during excavations for the underground rail and apparently found nowhere else in the world to date. In 1988, further excavations into the prehistoric unconscious of the city apparently spat up an orca vertebra. This find initially suggested a total rewriting of the continent’s history but was later claimed to be the remnant of a freak exhibit from Piper’s Zoo, a Late Victorian menagerie that existed along Toronto’s harbour. The bone is now believed to likely have arrived somehow in the sixteenth century.

I have been increasingly reflecting upon the narcissism of conventional narratives of “deep time” as an eighteenth-century discovery supposedly made by Europeans who believed the Earth to be 6,000 years old, completely ignoring that there are lots of living people with cultural memory of landforms and species that no longer exist. Recently, I visited a 450 million-year-old stromatolite bed nearby in Ottawa, and I found it very humbling and awe-inspiring to stand upon them and feel the sensation of such unfathomable spans of time literally condensed beneath my feet.

RJ Myato: I have no idea. They are very old. I barely exist upon them. I float.

David Nadeau: The telluric activity of rocks dating from the Cambro-Ordovician period, at the cutting edge of the St. Lawrence platform, affects me little consciously.

It was during a trip to the Rockies (specifically in the province of Alberta) that I was most aware of the influence of geomagnetism on my psychic life. One day, during a moment of dreamy distraction, I find myself teleported into a vast volcanic cave, facing an old mage dressed in a dark blue robe. Maybe he was holding something in his hands then, I don’t remember…

Juan Carlos Otaño: The oldest rocks found near Buenos Aires, with a geological age of 1800 million years, are on the island Martin Garcia in the middle of the River Plate. The cobblestone of some of the streets of the historic centre of the island’s town came from local quarries.

Every time I have stayed overnight there I have had strange dreams. I don’t know if this is brought on by the magnetism of its formidable rocky presence or the history of the island itself. It could be that or its special flora and fauna or even the suggestive power of its derelict buildings. Or it may well be a combination of all. Either way the dreams flow. On one occasion, I witnessed the march of a battalion of 18th Century uniformed French troops a few streets away. They arrived to take the fort in a daring “coup de force” and on another occasion I maintained a delirious dialogue with an ex-President of Argentina (Domingo Faustino Sarmiento) as he sculpted a sentence on a rock: Barbarians, ideas never die! The monolith in effect is found in a square of the town.

Anthony Redmond: What I continually find amazing is that the limestone ranges I travel through in the Kimberley region, though now 130 kilometers from the sea, were once living coral reefs.

Tony Roehrig: The plates beneath our feet chatter and with, or because of that larger voice, the tinkling of my dishware joins in with the announcement that the hot pulse of the universal orifice still can ring our bells.

Oh, and the rocks here just celebrated their segmentillionth year on March 18th with a 5.8 Richter Ovation.

Penelope Rosemont: Fox Lake where I grew up and Lake Michigan where I live now are Glacial lakes left over from the last ice age. All of the Great Lakes are glacial lakes. Long before the glaciers, 500 million years ago Illinois was a warm ocean on the Equator. That ocean lasted 300 million years and became a swamp for 200 million. The age of Glaciers was quite recent geologically and left the lovely landscape of Northern Illinois of hills, swamps, lakes, bogs, ravines and prairies—green with a variety of trees and interesting, highly variable weather effects. My knowledge of that landscape is thanks to my Grandfathers, Uncle Willie and the Antioch Public Library.

Samjogo: ​580 million years old.​ I am the rocks I live on.

LaDonna Smith: The iron ore seam of Red Mountain in Birmingham, Alabama dates back to 3.8 billion years ago, almost all the way back to when Earth became capable of supporting life. Paleontologists have collected and cataloged tens of thousands of fossils, including cretaceous mosasaurs, Pleistocene ground sloths, and primitive ecocen archaeocete whales. It is known that at one time the coastline extended all the way up to the mid-state area of Birmingam, or “Iron Tortoise” as we have fondly called our Alabama home. The Cretaceous Mosasaur was found in Green County where our Fresh Dirt comrade Johnny P. Williams lives. We have waded the waters of the Sipsey River on his land many times collecting shark teeth and fossils.

Darren Thomas: I do not understand these rocks in such terms. They are simply ‘the eternal rocks beneath.’ Without them there would be no Sisyphus. Without them we would lose our feet. Without them all would be lost.

Jason Abdelhadi: Fossils have a moment in their lifecycle that strikes me as surrealist. The fixation of a trace of a lifeform across eons is one thing but the gradual unearthing and identifying, the slow piecing together, the potential ignorance and the sudden placements all strike me as having surrealist qualities, particularly in the relationship between psychic states that touch on core originary confrontations with the deep past and the manifestation of these bewildering thoughts from the contemplation and placement of a contingently unearthed inert material object.

I have two local fossil locations that have excited my imagination in recent years. One is an exposed cross-section of fossilized stromatolites, some of the earliest lifeforms, and another is an unnervingly geometric orthocone fossil.

Hermester Barrington: I reject the question entirely of whether fossils can be surrealistic objects for the simple reason that it is impossible to posit an alternative hypothesis that would explain, in a compelling manner, the validity of such a question in the first place. True, the strangeness of the experience of uncovering a saurian skull, a Dimetrodon’s baculum, a glyptodont’s armor, while one digs in one’s garden; the unease at the thought that one might also be buried under tons of sand and frozen in time, one’s body and mind replaced with sedimentary detritus; that one might be subsequently be dug up, classified, put on display to be stared at, poked, and photographed; the implication that our sense of time is a fiction and our lives a brief glimmer in the darkness unnoted by most everyone, soon to be forgotten; that the demiurge or his trickster brother planted these relics in the strata to fool us into believing that the earth is much older than it actually is; that we are reading Gaia’s subconscious thoughts, evidence of her desire to smother her mother and screw her father; the idea that they are puppets of some alien race and that we, too, are such puppets; that my own phantasmagorical fantasies recorded here are evidence of my diseased mind—no, none of these are evidence that fossils can be surrealistic objects for the simple reason that it is impossible to falsify the question in such a way as to validate an alternative history than the one upon which I have just expounded.

As to finding objects which I might pretend are fossils: My wife Fayaway buries things in our yard—the plastic dinosaurs she had a child; photographs sealed in glass; Klein bottles filled with her exhalations, exudations, or exuviate; miniature dioramas; Leyden jars in which she has captured lightning; a vast network of fungi defining the limits of our property; legal documents dissolving our marriage; a stack of documents proving that she herself is King of Malibu Lake—which I occasionally find as I garden. As markers of the deep time of her mind, I consider these to be fossils in the truest sense.

Doug Campbell: Fossils are undoubtedly surrealist objects, relics of the monstrous and the marvellous enshrined in museums more holy than cathedrals, traces of a world that was and will be absolutely different from what it is.

As a child I found a randomly formed piece of industrial slag that I interpreted as a monkey’s skull, small enough to sit in the palm of my hand. I had headaches that I associated with the object and threw it away. The headaches stopped.

Casi Cline: Any object may be a surrealist object if it so chooses, but I would say that more fossils I have met have been so inclined than not. As for a specific fossil that made an impression on me as a child, I would have to choose insects preserved in amber. I still remember the first time I heard that it was possible for something to have remained so distinct and unchanged from a time so distant I had until then unknowingly felt it to be wholly unconnected with the tiny present I inhabited. I had simply thought of the far away “then” and the right here “now”. However, the insect which had been “then” and “now” had not simply skipped from one place to another through a wormhole. No, it had had to travel across all the vast, intervening fullness of time. Without being able to express it “then”, I realize “now” that the insect preserved in amber had impressed me with a sense of the intellectually irreconcilable vastness of time and all it contains. If the 7 or so years I had lived felt like they contained an immensity of experience, then what could be contained in a million times 7 years. My favorite fossil-objects are old photographs. I love to look through stacks of them at antique shops. I don’t know who the people in them are or when they lived. Just that they are from a distant “then” yet here they are preserved as if in amber.

Krzysztof Fijalkowski: The Exposition surréaliste d’objets at the Charles Ratton Gallery in 1936 listed examples of ‘Interpreted Natural Objects’ and ‘Incorporated Natural Objects’ in its catalogue, as well as ‘Perturbed Objects’ and of course ‘Found Objects’ (all of these distinguished from a separate list of ‘Surrealist Objects’ but clearly participating in a shared set of fascinations). Arguably fossils might fall into any one of these, even if most classic surrealist objects are notable for combining two or more disparate components, where fossils are not assemblages but a fundamental change in the material and philosophical properties of a singular object. Still, the motive power of a perturbation – infinitely slow but devastating in its transformation; of a perversion and what Breton terms a mutation de rôle give the fossil the qualities of a kind of outlier in the gamut of surrealist objects. And then, are surrealist objects fossils, since so many of the best known are a lifetime old, and languish untouched in museum vitrines?

Our home is full of found or acquired fossils, as it is of found objects of all kinds, and all have washed up here through the same urge to collect, discover, interrogate these refugees from other times, other meanings. None of them seem fossilised in the conventional sense – that is, they are all still alive, just in a different state of slow mutation, giving up their secrets like gently decaying radioactivity. As a small child I was given a fossil shark tooth, which I buried for the pleasure of digging it up again and truly ‘discovering’ it. But to my dismay, I couldn’t find it again; perhaps I have spent my whole life looking for it, or for something like it, confusing ontology and palaeontology ever since.

Joël Gayraud: A fossil is a product of nature charged more than any other with the dimension of time. Not of a time suggesting an idea of ​​eternity, unlike the mineral, but of a finite time, common to all mortal beings, to which was added the thickness of its crossing right to ourselves. Most fossilized animals and plants have had a shorter lifespan than ours, but they come from time immemorial and are a palpable crystallization. Perhaps this is what makes them intrinsically real. As a child I always felt a curious mixture of horror and delight in front of the skeletons of extinct animals presented at the Museum of Natural History. The fossils of secondary era ammonites and primary era trilobites also exerted an incredible fascination on me, redoubled by the charm of their names. When I discovered Ernst Haeckel’s prints, Kunstformen der Natur, much later in my thirties, my wonder was renewed.
Wherever I walk, I usually pick up everything that, deposited on the ground, catches my eye with an originality of shape or color: pebbles, pieces of wood, shells or even objects, whole or fragmentary, made by the human hand. These are sort of the fossilized memories of my walks.

Nathan Grover: At a fossil shop I became enthralled by a pyritized ammonite, a metallic whorl in the exact shape of a long extinct sea creature. I had to have it and paid too much. (Pyrite isn’t called Fool’s Gold for nothing.) I’ve since realized how common they are, but doesn’t that seem like a miracle, too?

Yes, fossils are surrealist objects. Geology should be indifferent to life, but instead it selects these arbitrary specimens and casts them in mineral, creating stone monuments to Natural History with more lifelike detail than the Pietà. This statuary is commonly vomited up in earthquakes, landslides, and floods. Deep Time reveals itself in violent flashes.

Once when I was in Helsinki a luggage locker that was supposed to spit up my change instead spit up an odd brass coin with a hole in the middle. Embarrassingly, I tried to spend it at a shop and was laughed at by an incredulous clerk—not a coin. I think the locker had nothing left to give and so it offered me a part of itself, some vestigial piece of its machinery, so simple and fundamental that the machine had forgotten what it was for. This “coin” had the outside lip that many coins have, but its face was blank. Maybe it was the blankness that made the coin seem so old. The very oldest things always resist us; they’re completely without inflection. They come from an ancient world of mineral indifference.

Beatriz Hausner: I have every reason to believe that almost all the significant objects will one day fossilize, if they haven’t already. Those I cherish are mostly small, jewel-size fossils, like the heart-shaped stone I once picked up on a beach in the Upper Peninsula of Lake Michigan. Entirely ordinary in its greyness, what makes this object precious is the manner in which the heart shape appears inside another heart shape. I hope to one day be buried with this stone, and in this manner leave permanent proof of my feelings.

Nicholas Alexander Hayes: Fossils resist absorption into culture. They are mineralized shadows of what has deteriorated, of what has decayed. Like many others who have a scientific or mythological impulse, I try to reflesh these artifacts with narratives. But these stories serve to muffle the realities of the objects that cast the shadows.

When I was in fourth or fifth grade, I found a broken piece of stone with four oval impressions. I would press my toes into the indentations and imagine myself stepping in the smooth mud of a river bank before humans had built bulwarks between themselves and nature. Of course there is a good chance these were just irregularities in the stone’s matrix.

Vittoria Lion: Upon seeing the original Archaeopteryx skeleton, the “London specimen,” at the South Kensington Natural History Museum I felt profoundly emotionally moved, and it surprised me that this fossil ended up being the object that resonated with me most from that trip. Looking at that fossil, I was overcome with this immediate sense of the Archaeopteryx’s visual kinship with Paul Klee’s Angelus Novus, Walter Benjamin’s “Angel of History” from his Theses, and indeed I read that some of its initial scientific observers could not comprehend what they were seeing and believed that they had found the remains of an angel. I still don’t know quite how to articulate it, but the Archaeopteryx is what now immediately comes to my mind as the embodiment of Benjamin’s “dialectical image,” a form paradoxically frozen in time in the instant of transformation, of blossoming into flight, their wings spread, caught in the storm blowing from Paradise. Crystallized like the dream image in the moment of contradiction and metamorphosis, of alchemical fusion, fossils are Surrealist objects. (Slightly closer to home, seeing the gigantic petrified lepidodendrons erupting from the Carboniferous cliffs of Joggins, Nova Scotia made a powerful impression upon me as a young person. When I was around four years old, I was completely mesmerized and obsessed by a room in the Royal Ontario Museum that contained the cast of a T. rex skeleton, but that is not terribly original for a small child and I thus chose not to dwell on it for the bulk of my answer.)

In The Infinity of Lists, Umberto Eco describes what he calls “chaotic enumeration,” the tendency of modernism to clutter together disparate words and images in order to create a hodgepodge, to give rise to the “absolutely heterogeneous,” directly referencing the works of Rimbaud and Breton’s collections. Arguably, however, the “chaotic enumeration” of which he speaks is simultaneously found in the fossil record, in the bizarre and fanciful galaxy-like burst of complex life preserved in the Burgess Shale, stretching this genealogy back 500 million years. (Notably, the Burgess Shale findings prompted Stephen Jay Gould to reflect that evolution is best visualized as a “copiously branching bush”—the quintessential rhizome, Eco’s labyrinth, not a tree.) If you want to let your mind run with it, the Burgess Shale is the beginning of a magical thread, an ark of Babel, that continues through the abundance of the Lascaux and Chauvet Caves, through the phantasmic marginalia of the Rutland and Luttrell Psalters, into Darwin’s collections and the jumbled bestiary of the archaeological miscellany of Freud’s study. (Indeed, I have a hard time separating all the menageries above from each other!) Thus, I would say that assortments of widely diversified small things more broadly have a very fossil-like quality to me, and I tend to interpret them as such. (The strange, glowing little objects of Man Ray’s “rayographs,” for example, have always struck me as bearing a semblance to the organisms of the Burgess Shale.) Miniature fossils, especially those from the Cambrian and Ordovician, tend to inescapably remind me of small toys in particular, specifically with their weirdness of form and lack of normative use value (and vice versa). I have a small collection of these I found with Jason in Ottawa, and holding them certainly brings me back to clasping a cherished toy as a child.

RJ Myato: I was fascinated by dinosaurs as a child as I was and am by monsters, beasts, creatures of all kinds. Many children are. The imagined full bodies and sounds of the fossil-dinosaurs informs my practice to this day. I own a book – a chemistry book, a field of which I have forgotten all my lessons, written in Russian, which I do not read or speak – which is a fossil to me. It’s a code I can’t comprehend. A fossil is a code through time and I am no good at interpreting codes.

David Nadeau: Yes, their morphology can quite correspond, like surprisingly precise ideograms, to certain movements of interior life. I would love to find such items.

Juan Carlos Otaño: They represent to me processes analogous to the formation of dreams: they are the “precipitated” of living experiences, “fixed” in a certain moment, and which for some reason establish enigmatic relationships with the background of desire. As such, I consider them surrealist objects.

My first encounter with fossils was in a flagstone path that wound through the garden of my parents’ home. I would have been ten years old at that time and already well informed about their fascinating existence through the reliable weekly delivery of school encyclopaedias.

It’s easy to imagine that the possession of these prehistoric objects was a great honour and privilege for me. All the more so because I was the only boy in the neighbourhood who possessed such a collection. Unfortunately however the previous owner of the property reclaimed them one day, and unable to find any valid reason for keeping them my father gave them back.

The rocks were pulled up and piled in an old barrow along with my shock and despair.

Anthony Redmond: Fossils are shadows cast by time, the fourth dimension. As Duchamp puts it, a three-dimensional object casts a shadow in only two dimensions. From that he concluded that a three-dimensional object must in its turn be the shadow of another object in four dimensions.

Tony Roehrig: Fossils are the Bones and Impressions of the first Surrealists. From these, the first pulses of the Stars here on Gaia, the Surrealist Revolution began. We are the offspring of that initial fire and rebellion sent to this planet to raise the Marvelous to Consciousness and our Dreams to Reality.

Penelope Rosemont: Collecting pebbles on the beach is a huge pleasure, one that surrealists have often pursued. Here there are granites, schists, limestone, slate, quartz, quartzite, crinoid stems, etc. in pocket size pieces. My first fossil, found when I was eight, and my greatest treasure, I held in my hand and felt connected to the Prehistoric past. I thought it was a crystalized honeycomb. It was really beautiful. I have it still on my desk. It is actually a type of coral that lived in our ancient ocean.

Found Objects as fossils: there is a connection. First, rock collecting and mushroom collecting reminds me of the excellent Agnes Varda film The Gleaners. My Grandmother, who had a reproduction of the Millet’s The Gleaners in her dining room, liked to pick mushrooms. She gave me a small tin box that she got from her mother. Besides pewter salt and pepper shakers, a handkerchief embroidered with 1919, and a button of Bohemian Old Settlers 1859, it contained a stone from the Chicago Fire of 1871. The stone looks like burnt limestone covered with gold crystals. Hard to tell how it came about, but the heat must have been intense. The ruins from the Chicago Fire were dumped into the lake, it’s now called Grant Park. For me this stone is a fossil of the fire. And then there is the wonderful art of Dennis Cunningham who makes sculptures of found objects. Fossils of our time. A surprise when I visited London, Paul Cowdell gave me his book Snowy Plains of Estonia—A Diagnostic Travelog in Objects—a wonderful surrealist poetic analysis which fits to the idea of fossils. But think, aren’t photographs fossils of light! Once they were living images now trapped in silver (or computer bits these days).

Samjogo: ​Yes. The fossilized bones of the ichthyosaur, which are hidden in an underground temple, were present at my birth. Humans are my favorite found object.

LaDonna Smith: The question might be turned around. Are Surrealists fossils? I am particularly excited by petrified wood, and it goes without saying that at my age, some of the kids of the younger generation might consider me just another piece of fossilized wood.

Darren Thomas: Fossils are indeed surrealist objects – in themselves, but also when combined in various ways in artworks. They have found their way into my own work or indeed, inspired many artworks. One of my happiest finds was a strange, gnarled piece of driftwood that I discovered on the beach, in Southend, which helped me to create my Transformation Cabinets. (see below) I also discovered some antique Victorian butterfly prints in a second shop in Chepstow, Wales, which caught my eye as teenager. They have followed me everywhere and have given me wings, so to speak and helped me understand the importance of transformation, which I have written about and explored in my research and artworks but most importantly in my attitude to life and the way I live.

Transformation Cabinet No 2 (Assemblage: Dimensions: 82.5 cm x 35.5 cm)

Jason Abdelhadi: I would pick Dickinsonia, a mysterious symmetrically ribbed something that existed in the Ediacaran biota, before the Cambrian explosion. Because I always want the mystery prize.

Hermester Barrington: I spent a long and dreary (though comfortable) career as archivist at the Law Offices of Largesse, Coelacanth, & Uncanny, until I retired at age 72. To stave off the effects of an inherited condition, I placed myself in the hands of the esteemed Dr. Serge Voronoff, who transplanted slices of the glands of an individual of the supposedly extinct species Gigantopithecus blacki into my own testes. That was the end of my own extinction, and each day I greet the day with a rousing cock-a-doodle-do, to the great delight of my wife, and, sometimes, our neighbors.

Doug Campbell: A friend argued passionately that it would be wrong to recreate an extinct animal without the ecology that supported it. I would be most interested to see the creatures of the Burgess Shale or Titanosaurians of the Cretaceous, assuming that I could survive the re-emergence of their world.

(The friend, a palaeontologist, was notorious in the profession for having fainted onto a large articulated skeleton, scattering the bones across the museum floor.)

Casi Cline: I would like to see the ​daeodon reappear. If modern wild boars can be such amazing forces for chaos, then I shudder to think what could be done by a giant boar that could grow six feet tall at the shoulder and weigh thousands of pounds.

Krzysztof Fijalkowski: The moa. (I was about to write: truly living human beings, but these are endangered not extinct.)

Mattias Forshage: If one has given an affirmative reply to question 1 about the contemporariness of other ages, this question makes less sense, because the extinct animals are actually here in the sense that they are available. Having said that, I could add that there are some landscapes where I will keep expecting to see sauropods in the distance on a lonely walk, and that some of the feelings involved in birdwatching will just need a little bit of exaggeration to become the experience of seeing a real huge pterosaur such as a pterodactyl, it’s easy, you know what it’s like, just like flying, or eating glass, even if you haven’t done it in your waking life.

Joël Gayraud: The archeopteryx. Because it features prominently in a play by Alfred Jarry. But also the triceratops, for the beauty of its name, and because Dürer would have loved to draw it.

Nathan Grover: Fifty-million years ago there was a wolf—I forget her name—who loved to gallop and splash in the surf. She spent all day just galloping and splashing until, after a very long time indeed, she turned into a fish and swam away. I would like to see the Great Great Grand-dolphin return from sea and shake the water from her slick pelt with a grin. What a frolic that was.

Beatriz Hausner: The time of the saber tooth tiger, which my brother so revered when he was going through his dinosaur phase, has come. I am confident that the large feline is the only force capable of saving our species from likely extinction.

Nicholas Alexander Hayes: Every few months, I wander the Rewilding Europe website looking for news about the reverse breeding of cattle into aurochs. I dream of these giant cattle roaming streets paved with native grasses. These reimagined aurochs cultivated with an eye towards docility promised to correct some of the aggressive tendencies of Heck cattle – which found themselves the darlings of fascist, racist essentialists. Now I fear a collapse in pursuit of the goal of back breeding. Does the introduction of Heck into the new project anticipate the devolution of the liberal political into plutocratic kakistocracies? Yet I fantasize about aurochs lowing outside the cave where I watch shadow puppets govern.

Vittoria Lion: My first, most impulsive answer to this question would be the thylacine, or Tasmanian “wolf,” a creature I have been rather mesmerized by since my early childhood. I distinctly recall seeing the spotty black-and-white footage of “Benjamin” (what a name!), the last known member of the species who died in captivity in 1936, pacing around his cage when I must have been around five years old, and I had a terrible time processing my grief over the realization that all of those unusual and stunning animals were now dead (and that humans were the cause). I think a canid-shaped “doggy” organism with those rippling, slat-like, really prehistoric-looking parallel stripes must have seemed like the perfect marvelous juxtaposition embodied in animal form to my very young mind. Knowing that they had pouches like kangaroos, of course, made it even better. Mind you, I was already obsessed with dogs and wolves of the Northern Hemisphere placental garden variety, and the thylacine appeared to me to be this extraordinary anatomical synthesis of tigers and wolves, two of my favourite animals during that period (a real-life CatDog, to reference a bizarre cartoon I vaguely recall from that time that featured, as its protagonist, a tube-shaped animal with canine and feline heads at its terminal ends, with apparently no anus or external genitalia; one wonders how digestion worked and the creature did not just explode). I have never been able to shake this feeling as an adult when looking at old pictures of thylacines, and the profound sense of loss over never being able to see a live one has never left me. I remember feeling incredibly upset over seeing lions and tigers in small enclosures during a kindergarten zoo visit, and I gave compulsive repetitive speeches to my classmates about Benjamin and how he died all alone in his cage afterward, which must have bored them. It would bring me such happiness to know that there are still a few of them living deep in the rainforests of Tasmania, survivors of the ruthless European campaign of destruction.

Yet, since I cannot give only one answer to this question out of so many endless forms, it would also be a wondrous dream to have the Archaeopteryx back, to note the colour of those limestone feathers. I imagine them having the most luminous night-black iridescence, or having a colour so singular that it is at the limits of our vision, that it is possibly only perceivable through extrasensory sight. And Hallucigenia, the tiny fossil from the Burgess Shale so strange it was first depicted upside down, literally named for seeing beyond one’s eyes. And, while I’m at it, those Late Cretaceous mega-sized penguins who coexisted with the dinosaurs in what was possibly the greatest period of Earth’s history ever. I could go on.

RJ Myato: I would like to see the chalicothere come back. Its name means gravelbeast, and it is a kind of giant ape with a horse’s head.

David Nadeau: It would certainly be the Microbrachius dicki that I would like to see reappear, in order to be able to witness the first form of sexual penetration ever practiced by an animal.

Juan Carlos Otaño: The mammoth, of course. Being as it is the ancestor of elephants, for whom I feel a special affection. And for the feeling I have towards mammals in general.

Anthony Redmond:

The Carnivorous Tree Kangaroo (Balbaroo fangaroo) joined voracious desire almost perfectly with marsupial nurturance and an ability to retreat from predators – though obviously not quite perfectly.

The Giant Platypus (Obdurodon tharalkooschild) – This marvellous creature had the capacity to sleep for twenty hours a day allowing it to dream the eggs which became its younger cousins playing a starring role in F. Engels’ Dialectics of Nature.

Tony Roehrig: The Moa, one of the original inhabitants of Aotearoa. I would love to listen to the tales this giant bird could tell of life before the army of louts arrived to take this creature’s breath away from us all. Open up the tomos of Aotearoa and release the tales of these beautiful cousins.

Penelope Rosemont: Many animals should be brought back. To begin, the Archaeopteryx, to see how gloriously beautiful they really were. The drawings made of them make them look like plucked chickens, feathers on wings and tail, naked body; the same reconstruction theory stretched Tyrannosaurus bones so they resembled lizards when they really should have looked like kiwis. And balanced on their tip toes like lizard ballerinas, when they actually had sturdy, flat, good bird feet. I observed this when as a child visiting the Field Natural History Museum—my very favorite outing. Then there is the dearly loved Godzilla who should return to a exact a terrible revenge on this stupid and careless “civilization.”

Samjogo: ​The koegi. Just for a friend who was a koegi.

LaDonna Smith: Now we’re talking! Animals, yes! Of course! I would love to reappear as a barred owl, who flies silently through the woods, inhabiting treetops, and who sings, “Who cooks for you?’ Or as a mountain goat, who can climb rocks and balance on thin precipices, bleat with a soft expressive musicality, and have those beautiful slit green eyes! I could just as happily be a cute red fox, laughing at the moon, and sneaking around playing prankster, chasing chickens and stealing cornbread, disappearing in my foxhole with a sense of accomplishment. I would fall in love with a handsome gray wolf, who howls at night, my hero! Our love life would certainly shock and disrupt the hierarchy of forest species integration. How did we get the Unicorn, after all?

Darren Thomas: The woolly mammoth. They remind us that love, too, can become extinct in a world that sees only what it can exploit for gain and selfish ends.

FINAL TALLY:
Archeopteryx – 3
The Wooly Mammoth – 2
Moa – 2
Microbrachius Dicki – 1
Creatures of the Burgess Shale – 1
Titanosaurians – 1
Godzilla – 1
Koegi – 1
Gigantopithecus blacki -1
​Daeodon – 1
Chalicothere – 1
Dickinsonia – 1
Great Great Grand-dolphin – 1
Balbaroo fangaroo – 1
Obdurodon tharalkooschild – 1
Aurochs – 1
Saber Tooth Tiger – 1
Thylacine – 1
Hallucigenia – 1
Late Cretaceous mega-sized penguin – 1

Jason Abdelhadi: It would seem not frequently, although I did have two fossil dreams in 2017:

November 19, 2017

The world seems to undergo some intellectual panics and crises. A big digital map of the world continually shows a real-time view of panic spreading, pulsing out over many different topics. One involves the rumour of a dearth in coffee beans, which upsets the whole world. The next one is a panic about a shortage of dinosaur fossils, which spreads pretty quickly but according to the map does not affect people in Alberta or the Yukon, since they have plenty of fossils there. A final panic is very particular to Sweden. Apparently they have released wild dogs there as part of some ecological program. They are little springy haired dogs with Rottweiler coloration. The Swedes have also started burying people without coffins for ecological reasons. Then one of the dog packs digs up a coffin-less corpse and devours it. This causes a national debate.

April 3, 2017

I am in a car with my German instructor driving to a tourist destination, Andrew Haydon Park, which in the dream overlaps with Bank street. Helen Keller’s fossilized bones are located a few minutes from my parents’ house, at the bottom of a cliff near Dick Bell park. They are just sticking out of the cliff-face.

Hermester Barrington: The night I decided I was going to answer this survey, and for two nights subsequent, I dreamt that I was hauling a Schindler-Patalas trap from the depths of a lake and discovered a crumpled version of myself therein…Fayaway, likewise, dreamt that she found a blow-up doll bearing her face folded up in the pages of her high school yearbook. We have burnt the aforementioned items and scattered the ashes among our herb garden, and do not expect to be bothered by such dreams of the past again.

Doug Campbell: I have dreamed of pulling plastic bags from between layers of sedimentary rock. In a more general way, I think dreaming is a process by which experience is fossilised into memory and excavated nightly. The extinct life forms and landscapes of my life live and walk again.

Casi Cline: Hmm, I don’t think so, but I probably will now.

Krzysztof Fijalkowski: Not to my recollection, except in the sense that arguably all landscapes are at some deep level prehistoric; and that of course it is perhaps in dreams that we come closest to experiencing a more accurate sense of the multiform nature of time, and in which categories of past, present and future lose their conventional meaning.

Mattias Forshage: ​Yes. (see separate contribution)

Joël Gayraud: Sometimes, as in these two dreams, one dating from October 3, 2016, at 7 a.m.:

I am in the metro on line 6, and get off at the cue at Corvisart station. As soon as I arrived on the platform, I noticed that the exit was blocked by large plywood panels in a light blue color, like everything else in the station. I’m the only passenger to have alighted, and am starting to get a little worried. Concern reinforced by the fact that the platform has become at least five times wider than usual, and that on the track which now seems far away from me, I see an old train pass, painted in light blue too, which does not stop. I have the unpleasant impression that I will have to stay there for a while. I head towards the head of the station where there is normally no exit when I realize that, near the rails, a path opens encased between two walls painted in white. I commit myself and, after a few meters, come across a team of paleontologists who are doing excavations and have just unearthed a superb skeleton of a prehistoric animal, an iguanodon, they say between them, without speaking to me. I continue on my way in Paris, and night falls. I wander for a long time in increasingly dark streets, and turn around to go home, when my cell phone rings, notifying me that I have just received a message. It is one o’clock in the morning, the message consists of two MMS, one representing the thumbnail of the books from the venerable collection of philosophy once directed by Jean Hippolyte at PUF, Épiméthée, where we see the Titan with his wife Pandora, and in the second a room whose walls are covered with musical instruments.

Or as in this one, more recent, dating from April 1, at 8 am:

On my way home, I find in my mailbox a lined envelope containing a small object. I open it and discover a sort of ivory paper cutter, engraved with geometric decorative patterns. Then, by manipulating it, I notice that it unfolds like a Swiss knife, but in three dimensions, like these animated books for children which, when opened, present scenes in three dimensions. I see the entrance to a cave appear, which I enter myself. There is a diffused light inside. The walls are streaked with whitish stripes up to the vault. They are gigantic bones. I realize then with fright that I am locked in the rib cage of a mammoth skeleton.

Nathan Grover: Not landscapes, that I can remember anyway. For me, the primordial is most often embodied in the sea. My dream sea produces, from time to time, enormous, powerful animals—leviathans—that threaten to gore and devour me. But more often it’s the sea itself that’s the threat. Vast and ancient it rears up, towering over me, and I’m helpless to do anything but be washed away.

Nicholas Alexander Hayes: Sleep covers me each night as I decay. An eon of psychic sediment presses into me no matter how short I rest. The impression that endures the night is only the fossilized trace of a me – more supple and vivacious than the crystalized, reified detritus who types this.

Vittoria Lion: I believe that dreams are transformative windows into deep time, much as they were for Lovecraft’s protagonist in The Shadow out of Time, Nathaniel Wingate Peaslee. I have had numerous dreams over the years involving ancient megaliths, fossils, and enormous skeletons of various kinds. In one of my most recent dreams that touched me deeply, I was holding a picture of Lyuba, the frozen mammoth calf unearthed from the Siberian permafrost in 2007. Except, in this image, she had emerged from the ocean depths covered in strange lichens and violet starfish and multi-coloured ribbon worms were consuming her, like the corpse of a seal on the Antarctic sea floor. I was struck by how this dream image expressed the paradox of something preserved in time, yet simultaneously overgrown and in the process of decomposition. A few nights ago, on the verge of falling asleep, I had a vision of an autumnal forest where the ribs of a great whale were interspersed vertically among the tree trunks.

In a favourite dream I had nearly two years ago now, I fell asleep under a surgical lamp in a hospital and dreamed I found myself within what I can only describe as a hallucinatory landscape that glowed vividly with luminous fossils. I dreamed I walked to the edge of a promontory overlooking a lake surrounded by jagged, piercing mountains, and all of the rock around me appeared animated with translucent, iridescent fossilized organisms reminiscent of plasmic deep sea creatures, producing this beautiful kaleidoscopic effect. Shortly before I had this dream, I had been writing about Hegel’s belief that fossils were supposedly not the remains of extinct animals, but the spontaneous half-formed premonitions of future entities, and I think this carried over into the dream.

RJ Myato: I dream everything. I remember always Conrad’s quote: “Going up that river was like traveling back to the earliest beginnings of the world, when vegetation rioted on the earth and the big trees were kings.” That is what dreaming is.

David Nadeau: As a child, I was sure I saw dinosaurs made of metal rods moving in a field of pylons on the edge of the highway. In fact, for a few years, I was convinced that it was something that I had actually seen, and not dreamed or imagined.

Juan Carlos Otaño: No. Except if you interpret that every mnemonic print produced in a dream is a ‘fossil’ of some circumstance or activity that you have experienced in your waking hours. Then, each dream would be like a curiosity cabinet, or wunderkammer, conceived by Rudolph II in the Castle of Hradschin.

Anthony Redmond: I dreamt of a night-sky in which all of the stars were arranged into algebraic formulas and this struck me, laying awestruck on the ground, as a prehistoric configuration.

Tony Roehrig: I dreamed of being alone in a dense primordial jungle not knowing how I got there or where I was. In the close distance I heard (and felt) the sounds of thundering footfalls which shook my whole being. Further out I could hear the swooshing of what I thought were huge wings flapping followed by unnerving screeches. Closer still my fears screamed out as I felt a bizarre sensation moving up my legs. Looking down at my feet I could see vines wriggling all about my shoes and intertwining with my laces. I couldn’t move my feet because of the larger, stronger vines holding me in place. The smaller quicker vines were moving up my legs. These smaller ones pierced my flesh and entered my veins. My legs began to turn green and the feelings started to leave my lower extremities. My skin had the feel of leathery scales. Some of the vines exited my body at various points and started to bud. Quickly those buds bloomed into the most exquisite flowers attracting beautiful humming birds and honey bees. Upon seeing these marvelous creeping critters enjoy the fruits of myself, I gave up my fears and succumbed to the joy of being of service to the glory of nature. The surrealist fruits live on today.

Penelope Rosemont: I often dream of prehistoric landscapes: the warmth, the lushness, the calls of animals, the song of birds, the warm moist smell, it is not a fearful place for me, there is a great feeling of belonging. Nothing happens to disrupt this calm.
Probably I am a tree.

Samjogo: ​Yes, I am dreaming of them all right now.

Darren Thomas: My collage ‘Museum Stories’ arose from discussions on museums and museumification with the London Surrealist Group and friends in our weekly online meetings as well as several dreams. In these, I dreamed that the imagination is a hunter, discovering artefacts and memories from different times and places, and our minds are the museums that we memorialise these in. I referred to these interactions as the museum-human interface.

It seems to me that our brains, museums (actual and virtual) are all concerned with collecting, categorising, displaying and interpreting myriad content in specific ways. The museum-human interface is constantly evolving (dialectically/convulsively) with new elements added and discarded and the ways in which we display, encounter and interpret these elements is also ever-changing – due to various historical, cultural socio-political/ideological contexts and factors. Essentially, all of us will engage with these uniquely – despite various commonalities.

Jason Abdelhadi: A mannequin in bed pretending to sleep and trying hard not to laugh as a shadow pokes its face.

Hermester Barrington: The primal scene is a hyena and a lamia, fighting and politely taking turns penetrating each other, laughing and cackling and calling each other dirty names.

Doug Campbell:
“(in Freudian theory) the occasion on which a child becomes aware of its parents’ sexual intercourse, the timing of which is thought to be crucial in determining predisposition to future neuroses.” – Oxford English Dictionary

“. . . And all earthly life, it is told, shall go back at last through the great circle of time to Ubbo-Sathla.” – Clark Ashton Smith, Ubbo-Sathla

“ . . the Earth is alive, a living being, and that the early legendary forms of life may have been emanations—projections of herself—detached portions of her consciousness…” – Algernon Blackwood, The Centaur

I suppose it usually all begins and ends in a bed, whether in warm sheets, or deep ocean sediments heated by volcanic vents. If there are dreams in one bed, why not another?

Casi Cline: A black bird the size of the universe splits open its chest to reveal the sun. The sleeping sun in the center of the earth hears it and is awoken. Unable to remain cold now that it has heard the first birdsong of morning, it burns and seeps up through the planet’s pores to join its voice with dawn.

Joël Gayraud: In the beginning was the mirror. But since there was only it, it had nothing to reflect, not even the emptiness, which, for lack of intervals between things, did not exist, nor time, which did not elapse. Then the mirror felt boredom, and to make it pass, it created the image. The image of boredom, precisely. Immediately boredom took place in front of the mirror and its image at an equal distance behind it. And here it is: the intervals between the mirror, the image and boredom had filled with emptiness and time was about to run out.

Boredom, through play, gave rise to forms in the mirror: curves, flat, sharp, colorful, sonorous, fragrant, tasty. All these images generated by boredom spread around the mirror and began to populate the void, to disintegrate time. They thickened, grew in size and consistency, and gave birth to coral, stars, ferns, plesiosaurs, locomotives, coffee grinders, automatic writing, and many others. Hopefully, by letting boredom produce all these living images in it, the mirror of the world will one day cease to be bored.

Nathan Grover: I imagine it smelled awful. Goop everywhere. And very hot. In the sweaty life-forge everything comes to crawly life and it’s all mouths, every mouth devouring whatever mouth came before it, a great mise en abyme of devouring, absorbing, repurposing.

I suppose this question is meant to evoke Freud’s ‘primal scene’: the child walking in on his or her parents having sex. I stand by my first impressions.

Nicholas Alexander Hayes: Before expansion and the cosmic laws sagged into order, the tenuous, plasmic wisps of possibility swirl. Radiant beyond spectrums we can fathom, eddies twist into themselves and form abscesses of alternate histories. These abscesses drift away in the turbulence created as contraries collide in subatomic cataclysms. The primal tumult deteriorates to order, locking us in a path to equilibrium. We are left where we end and where we begin.

Vittoria Lion: To further elucidate W. J. T. Mitchell’s claim that the dinosaur is the “totem animal of modernity,” the primal scene of modernity is self-evidently a small child eating dinosaur-shaped chicken nuggets while watching the scene in Jurassic Park in which T. rex plucks the defecating lawyer off the toilet and devours him. It is the purest expression of the totemistic obsession with simultaneously desiring to devour the dinosaur (and, eventually, shit dinosaurs) and fearing being devoured by the dinosaur (also seen, for instance, in Benjamin Waterhouse Hawkins’ famous dinner held inside one of the Crystal Palace Iguanodons on New Year’s Eve of 1853). (The dinosaur “chicken nugget” being, obviously, the ultimate capitalist distortion of the dinosaur-to-bird dialectic.) Naturally, this repeats the posterior, anal emphasis of the original reconstructed “primal scene” from Freud’s analysis of Pankejeff. Or, perhaps, the mirror of Pankejeff’s painting of his famous dream is John Conway’s beautiful visionary illustration of three Protoceratops in a tree from All Yesterdays: Unique and Speculative Views of Dinosaurs and Other Prehistoric Animals.

RJ Myato: My father and mother cast in amber, forever separated, nothing but revulsion in their eyes.

David Nadeau: Spontaneously generated from nothingness, animals all derive the maintenance of their individual existence from the vital energy of Antonin Artaud, the Primordial Poet, whom they somehow vampirize.

Anthony Redmond: Two opalescent snails ejaculate streams of golden honey over each other’s shells which then begin to rotate in high-speed spirals before rolling across the primordial landscape.

Tony Roehrig: I imagine a big block of Green Swiss Cheese knocked through with the animated, clothed heads of the fossils we find today. The heads all sporting wet crimson lips. In the background there’s a symphony of monstrous liquid fireworks, of which the orchestra is directed by the febrile pen of Ishmael Reed.

Penelope Rosemont: Sex was not hidden since we lived in the country, there were plenty of animals following their instincts. We did not neuter our pet dogs so they regularly were excited. First, they circled, then they sniffed each other’s sexual parts, then they licked, and then got on to mating. At seven, I was tempted to interrupt a loving dog couple, but my Grandfather said they must be left in peace. There were six wonderful puppies later that summer.

Samjogo: ​Things form and unform, burst apart and mend, thrash and diminish, and squirm and run with the pace of the orbiting of galaxies’ great suns.

Darren Thomas: It is the scent of rain that leads me to the bedroom beneath the waves and the sea feeds my dreams with: the sounds of distant thunder, the midnight sun that fills my throat with yearning, peacock feathers that tickle my open eyes – and my flesh writhes in intrauterine agony and ecstasy until I give birth to panthers in a glass hive.

Jason Abdelhadi: To start with micropaleontology, I have found many small objects in the streets, including game or puzzle pieces, toys, toy dinosaurs, toy dinosaur bones, which struck me as urban fossils. On a larger scale, certain older building façades that stand out because they have no buildings to go with them (property managers being forced by the city to maintain these historic fossils, while the actual creature has long been disposed of). There is an old school façade on Cumberland street in Ottawa that looks particularly fossilized. Another noteworthy aspect are the cracks and impressions left in the few remaining old bus terminals such as Westboro station, which have a lot of fossil-like forms and shapes.

Hermester Barrington: I was walking through a parking lot and a small child pointed at McDonald’s Golden Arches and said “What are those?” I told him that they were part of a plot to make him into Oedipus and skipped away, while the child ran off in tears. His question nagged at me, though, and I tried to think of a more charitable answer. Perhaps they are the tusks of mammoths, whose bodies are routinely excavated from the permafrost of Alaska and sold as burgers. Or maybe they are the tracks of two shooting stars, each caught in its parabolic path around a miniscule black hole, and whose light may live on after the stars have died. Or they might be modeled on the brassiere of the mother of folklorist Alan Dundes (both safely dead). Or perhaps they are the twin tunnels that lead down to Pellucidar, where creatures from Deep Time still exist. My thoughts were interrupted by a woman in a car coming up beside me, slamming on the brakes, and asking me for the time. When I didn’t respond, two young men jumped out and one of them punched me in the face. I don’t remember anything after that.

Doug Campbell: Edinburgh’s old town is formed round a long street running the glacial ridge formed behind the Castle rock. Blocks of high buildings divided by narrow alleys or ‘closes’ extend to either side of the street, and built-up bridges connect it to other high ground on either side. It is impossible not to interpret this as the skeleton of a dragon, with the castle as the skull and fossilised ribs, wings and limbs extending to either side of the spine. Mysterious treasures surely lie beneath.

Casi Cline: My childhood library was like the large, intact skeleton of an ancient whale or dinosaur. It was made of marble, soft and cool and white as bone. On the top floor was one long room with endless stacks to peek under and white marble columns too big to circle with my stubby child arms. That room resembled nothing more than the rib cage of some great beast.

Krzysztof Fijalkowski: The connection between bones and human structures is explicit in nineteenth-century architectural spaces such as the wonderful Museum of Palaeontology and Comparative Anatomy in the Jardin des Plantes in Paris, in which the ribs and femurs of countless skeletal specimens from across the entire animal kingdom (and led by a flayed human body) are echoed in the struts of vitrines or the metal ribcages of joists and casements around them, as though the collection were held inside a whale. In these now less-fashionable institutions from the golden age of the natural history museum, you both view the articulated skeletons, but look through them towards other bodies, other vistas: the skeleton as both armature and vision device (like Dürer’s optical ‘perspective machine’ that allowed him to understand and capture images). Many modern buildings, especially those made of concrete, are of course already formed of geological material, and are promised to ossification and ruin from the moment they are constructed: they were built not as places in which to dream or dwell, but as petrified capital.

Joël Gayraud: A close correspondence has long seemed to prevail between the ruins of certain large buildings and the skeletons of extinct species. In La Peau de l’ombre I noted this: “One of the first manifestations of the sacred was, among the Neanderthals, to brush the bones of their ancestors with red ocher. This gesture of covering with a color reminiscent of the blood that we hold sacred was perpetuated until Greece, where it was no longer the bones of the dead, but the bones of the temples – the columns – that we painted in red ocher”.

The flying buttresses of large Gothic churches and in particular cathedrals like Notre-Dame de Paris always made me think of giant diplodocus ribs. But the analogy extends to many areas other than architecture. I must have been between 8 and 9 years old, when my father once took me to one of his friends, a photographer who lived in a very dark apartment located in Ménilmontant, in rue Villiers de l’Isle Adam (*). In order to pass the time, I rummaged through her library and grabbed an old geographic atlas. For me who had almost never left Paris and dreamed of escape, the maps opened like so many keys on countless extraordinary journeys. I remember that evening an old geography map, in black and white, where the Indonesian archipelago of the Sunda Islands was represented suddenly made me think of the bones of the fossils that I had seen recently at the Museum of Natural History. To my child’s eyes each island featured a bone and the archipelago the entire skeleton of an unknown animal. This fascinating and disturbing image is etched in my memory forever and I still shiver.

(*) While I was totally ignorant of Villiers de l’Isle Adam and did not suspect that he was a writer, the name of this street was so evocative to me that I have always remembered it, no doubt because of the poetic association that was established in my child’s mind between the island and Adam, an island inhabited by the first man, image of an immemorial elsewhere. But at the time I could not imagine with what passion I would later read Cruel Tales, Axël or L’Ève future.

Nathan Grover:

These metal mastodons stand at the water’s edge at the Port of Oakland. They’re beasts of burden whose movements have calcified into an endless genuflecting before the massive cargo ships that have enslaved them.

Beatriz Hausner: There are buildings, like the Toronto Reference Library, or the Guggenheim Museum in New York, which were probably inspired by natural forms resembling fossilized shells. It’s an assumption one easily makes. When one approaches the stone walls of the Royal Ontario Museum, one can easily find tiny fossils marking their place in history. As to the rest of the buildings multiplying and spreading like some kind of pestilence in this city, their banality, their ugliness, their obvious betrayal of our dream of a better place, do not merit fossilizing at any point in time: they will crumble and will become dust. Nothing will be left of them on this earth.

Nicholas Alexander Hayes: On early mornings when Federal Plaza in Chicago remains abandoned, I emerge from the subway to encounter a theropod at rest. Calder’s Flamingo towers meters above me and if wakened its weight could easily crush me. But its gestural skeleton has become stuck in the tar pits of the 20th century. My synapsid genius lets me flee the monumental back to the underbrush of memetic ephemera. I may not be safe, but I may evolve.

Vittoria Lion: I am particularly fascinated by the overlap between fossils and mummies: the dichotomies and liminal, porous boundaries of archaeological and paleontological deep time, of bony structures and soft tissues. Although mummies need not always be human, I tend to think of mummies as the fossils of human deep time. Mummies and fossils both exemplify the body as a sort of alchemical crucible undergoing a process of transformation from one substance to another. The display cases filled with mummified animals from ancient Egypt—cats, ibises, falcons, crocodiles, even cows—I have seen at the Royal Ontario Museum and the British Museum count among my favourite of museum collections, and I imagine the Saqqara necropolis, the famed subterranean “mummified zoo,” as a veritable fossil bed, an internal psychological ark stretching infinitely into time. Occasionally mummies present us with the most explicit kind of direct foray into paleontological deep time: for instance, the specimens of Pleistocene megafauna erupting from Siberian ice, which gave Victorian scientists crucial clues about Earth’s geological past, and the astonishingly well-preserved 110 million-year-old nodosaur discovered in Alberta, Borealopelta, given the truly unfortunate name of the “Suncor nodosaur.”

Possibly my favourite item from Freud’s collection of antiquities is a linen bandage from an Egyptian mummy decorated with excerpts from the Book of the Dead. Seeing this object in his home in London prompted many thoughts about the body as legible, a palimpsest, as a medium of writing or an inscription itself, something that has also often occurred to me looking at the vellum of medieval illuminated manuscripts. To me, fossils are hieroglyphs, secretive inscriptions within the Wunderblock of the Earth’s crust that one peels back the layers to find. I find this to be particularly true of some of the earliest fossils, which resemble indecipherable squiggles, automatic doodles of a sort. Which brings to my mind that amazing image in Luigi Serafini’s Codex Seraphinianus showing a pair of skeletons awaiting some outlandish reanimating surgical procedure involving fitting their dead bones with suits of flesh and skin, performed by masked acolytes who appear like extraterrestrial versions of Anubis-headed Egyptian priests. It’s a reverse mummification, if you will perhaps. On this note, Giuseppe Fiorelli’s frozen plaster tableaux of the human and animal victims of Pompeii and Herculaneum, existing in some middle territory between mummies and sculptural artifices, additionally register to me as fossils.

There is also something special about the metal bones of a corset, reminiscent of the ribcage of some gargantuan skeleton or the delicate lobes of a trilobite, which have enchanted me since I saw Leonor Fini’s corset-shaped chair in a museum at the age of sixteen. (Of course, they were originally made from whale baleen before the industrial production of steel ramped up by the middle of the nineteenth century. I think this inherent mental association with the bodies of gigantic, monstrous creatures likely partly constitutes why I have always perceived the corset as having this strangely revered aesthetic place among all the traditional female garments.) In the Arcades Project, Benjamin notably described the corset as the wearable equivalent of the arcade, the steel armature.

RJ Myato: The mall is a fossil of 50s utopian capitalism. There is a dead mall near me. I have also a VHS of footage from dead malls that is highly impressive.

David Nadeau:

Ces empreintes fossiles si proches des sources de nous-mêmes (A. Artaud), photographie numérique, 2020
Translation = The fossil impressions so close to the source of ourselves (A. Artaud), digital photograph, 2020.

Juan Carlos Otaño: I spent my first years in the city of Bahia Blanca some 800 kilometres to the south of Buenos Aires where the mysterious realm of Patagonia begins. In that free and happy time I used to venture out with other little friends, preferably during the siesta to places banned by parents: river beds and inaccessible areas, canyons frequented by pumas and giant spiders, herons and marine birds that seemed inspired by Odilon Redon. And already in what is referred to as the urban area we explored roofs and eaves or frequented empty lots.

In one of these last places that was the favourite of the gang and where we built a little house with tree boughs and palm leaves, we dug down to a certain depth and unearthed the bust of a statue. It was a woman’s face sculpted in marble in the art decó style, lightly flattened and boasting a mysterious red mark on the forehead, similar to a brushstroke.

This discovery led to an infinity of hypotheses, of which the most convincing was the supposition that there had been a murder there, and that an unmarried mother had thrown her newly born child into the pit. Years later, as an adult, I discovered that the sculpture had been rescued from that almost legendary place and is now found among the collections of The Museum Of History and Natural Sciences of the city.

How it got there, is anyone’s guess.

Anthony Redmond:

Dun Angus, Aran Islands, west of Ireland

Tony Roehrig: I came upon the ruins of a long abandoned underground bowling alley. The skeletal remains, mostly reclaimed by the elements, sat beside an industrially polluted river and were guarded by dive bombing swallows. While wandering through the tangled weeds and trees, I spotted atop a support beam for a missing roof a bird nest. Looking into the nest I saw the ossified remains of four baby birds frozen in the position of waiting for food that never came.

Penelope Rosemont: Here in Chicago we have Lower Wacker Drive, a somewhat scary version of Walter Benjamin’s arcades; it has been upgraded, but still resembles the inside of a giant prehistoric Boa Constrictor Skeleton. I love the magnificent old iron bridges that cross the Chicago River and exist on the Southside. They resemble sturdy black dinosaur bones; these are draw bridges so one gets to appreciate them in motion. The same is true of the cranes in the Oakland, California docks…they move like dinosaurs. Movie Dinosaurs perhaps.

Samjogo: ​Yes, the jungle because it is a remnant of times long past.

LaDonna Smith: Last year, I visited an enigmatic place in the Czech Republic. It was just outside of Prague. 
It was called “The Bone Church.” It was a modest chapel in a small village. Workers were excavating for some foundation repairs, and in the process they kept running into bones. More and more bones were excavated. Turns out they were human bones, hundreds of them. As they kept digging more and more appeared, and as they did not know what to do with all the bones, they just stacked them in a pile inside the chapel. After some time, the chapel was full of piles and piles of bones. So at that point they realized that they must organize them, but how? Which bones belonged to who? What head belonged to what neck, that belonged to what spine, to whose appendages? It was a complex and mortifying prospect. So, they decided to renovate the inside narthex, transept, colonnades, towers, and altars using all the bones. They hired an artist who made incredible altars and chapels, the arches, ambulatory, apse, chevet, and vault, and everything one could imagine in a glorious miniature cathedral built of bones. The bone church was an eerie recognition of an interior space radiating the presence of evaporated sentient beings and the cessation from existence as a sustained living organism.

I am destined to be one of them.

Darren Thomas: A lamp post near the sea front where I live has almost been completely swallowed up by ivy, which has climbed to the top, brushing against the actual light. From a distance it looks like some primeval creature from another time, the leaves swaying in the breeze like the shifting sinews of its monstrous neck. It is nature reclaiming her birth right and ironically daring to extinguish the light and the last remnants of man’s attempts to tame the earth. I keep meaning to photograph this but I know the creature would disapprove…

Jason Abdelhadi: I am attracted to surrealist activity precisely because I think it is a refusal of the limitations of humanism and humanist notions of creativity. Humanity isn’t anything to me in particular, unless it is characterized in such a way as to emphasize its contingency and weirdness without imposing these as limiting factors. It seems like a concession to admit fundamental human characteristics in any metaphysical way, a trap that offers a narrative of exceptionalism but really serves as a walled prison. I am attracted to ideas of the “New Humanity” only insofar as they are a negation of limitations imposed by current concepts and assumptions. So there is a double aspect to humanity: on the one hand, the poor alienated and exceptional creature bound by their own misery (a philosophical tradition which I reject) and the other, being a golden ticket to utopian dreaming that does not push away the “natural” world.

Hermester Barrington: It is true that we evolved, via natural selection, from species we consider to be more primitive than our own. It is also true that those species dreamed us into existence, that we might fulfill the Freudian death wish of the Gaiasphere. Sleeping, we unknit our quotidian actions, restoring with our turgidity and torpor the balance of O, CO2, and CH4 which we have undone during the hours of business as usual. I awoke this morning and wondered, Am I a man who dreamed that I was Gaia’s gas, or am I now the flatus of Gaia dreaming that I am a man?

Doug Campbell: I think the surrealist perspective on the concept of humanity would involve identifying the point at which the human and the not-human (living or purely material) cease to be contradictions, or at any rate closely examining the ways in which these categories may blur. The policeman-bicycle of Flann O’Brien’s ‘The Third Policeman’ is more relevant in this context than any trans humanist fantasies of becoming a mobile phone.

Casi Cline: Humanity as distinct in some way from nature is not important to my conception of surrealist activity. A human can take part in surrealist activity, but not because they are human. I believe that surrealist activity can occur in the absence of human animals. I would also argue that all surrealist activity involving human animals must also involve the non-human and that those non-human participants are full partners in the activity. Does the human act on the object any more than the object acts on the human? I don’t know, but I think that human animals tend to take for granted the one-sidedness of the actions they take part in.

Krzysztof Fijalkowski: “Humanity is perhaps not the centre, the focus of the universe” (Breton, Prolegomena to a Third Manifesto of Surrealism or Else, 1942). The idea of surrealism is evidently a human endeavour, but its whole thrust has been both to re-define and re-orient what the notion of the ‘human’ might be, and to re-plant this expanded notion of humanity into wider, perhaps limitless realms – the animal, the vegetable and the mineral, the visible and invisible, and so on – in a flash of connection and communication. The transfiguration of commonplace unitary or linear conceptions of time and space are part of this thought.

Mattias Forshage: In a sense, surrealism rests on the same “nothing human is alien” pillar as radical humanism. But then, humanists thereby make a demarcation against whatever they do not wish to accomodate and consider that the dividing line between human and non-human. Whereas for any true poets the category of the human makes little sense without the non-human, grappling with which includes confonting oneself with the potentialities and if you will rights of all that is not oneself, including abandoning oneself, profoundly imagining the lives and perspectives of other lifeforms, irrespective of geographical, temporal or phylogenetic distance, and sometimes indeed radically other lifeforms, as well as maintaining modesty, respect and curiosity towards that which can hardly or only with vast difficulty be really imagined or empathised with. We will have no use for humanity which would not include unreasonableness, pointless exuberance, endless variation, transgression, negation, imaginary omnipotence, animality, bestiality, vegetativity, and incomprehensibility, and what some would call radical otherness, and then we can start negotiating.

Joël Gayraud: First, let’s be clear, the presence of humanity in nature was not necessary. It is by chance that the blind dynamics of evolution produced a being endowed with this strange faculty of symbolization by means of discrete elements which is language. And this being, by this very faculty, has in a way enabled nature to become aware of itself. Since nature is intrinsically surrealist, one would expect that humanity would multiply this faculty, since it is and as well is aware of it. This is what it did during the longest part of its history, according to the various species in which it was embodied. The Neanderthal who painted ocher the skeletons of the dead was surrealist, its colleague sapiens, with whom he did not fail to cross paths as science finally recognized it a short time ago, was surrealist in wall art. Anyone who has visited an ornate cave, such as that of Niaux, Pech-Merle or Font de Gaume realizes firsthand that this is where the paranoiac-critical method was invented, in the flickering light of torches, three hundred centuries before Dali. The invention of fire and, as Apollinaire had seen, that of the wheel, was a surrealist act. But unfortunately, this display of artistic and technical inventiveness has been captured by the economy and political power. With the Neolithic revolution, work, hierarchy, the state made humanity regress in the most abject and sordid realism, subject to the principles of utility and productivity. From then on, humans posed in front of the environment of which they were previously the consciousness, and treated it as an object, of which they established themselves the possessor and the master. As a result, they mutilated themselves as much as they devastated their new possession. They might as well have penetrated the mysteries without exploiting and reducing it. They would not have proliferated as a harmful species incapable of limiting their expansion, and would have known how to complete the work of nature with all the resources of their art and freedom.

Nathan Grover: I see surrealism as an all-in investigation of the instinctive, generative side of the creative process. This furious recombination of ideas which synthesizes all new, surprising things is what nature does all the time. It’s not a special human ability. We’re the product of it just like everything else.

But I also see surrealism as a cult of the marvelous, and nature does not marvel. Only humans do. Only those intimate with humanity’s rational order will recognize when something surreal has manifested itself.

Nicholas Alexander Hayes: Surrealist activity… ostranenie… lets us scratch at the edges of the domesticated human. But without our hominid cousins even the most intrepid gleaners present in their work lost pocket change and littered gum wrappers. We are severed from a true depth of understanding other beings by a pernicious anthropomorphic urge. Late capitalism promises in time the degradation the vast majority of us endure will bring us to an apotheotic chrysalis from which we will emerge true Morlocks. We will meet our cousins the C.H.U.D.s in the great Temple of the Bomb. In this communion of our species, with wafers of Eloi jerky on our tongues, we will celebrate the realization that we were never human after all.

Vittoria Lion: With regard to the remnants of human deep time, the paintings of the Lascaux and Chauvet Caves have had a very enthralling appeal to me since my childhood. What strikes me especially about the animals on the walls, what I believe gives them so much of their magical quality, is their overlapping, superimposed outlines; none of the creatures seem to have clear perimeters to their bodies and they all flow into each other quite fluidly, as if in a non-contradictory dream space. I wonder if this is perhaps because the people who painted them perceived themselves similarly. Our ancestors who coexisted with these Pleistocene animals lived in a very rich universe where dreaming flowed seamlessly into waking life, where unconscious content was seen as alive in, and inherently incorporated into, the “external” world. I often linger on how paradoxical it is that these monumental paintings, which I would ultimately choose if I had to pick one image to attempt to communicate what it means to be a member of my own species to some intelligent alien organism, contain almost no human figures.

Instead of grandiose “birthplaces” of humanity and the starting points of our supposed unique separation from the other animals, as even Bataille wrote of Lascaux, to me Lascaux and Chauvet reflect an acute perception of the continuity between us and other species, and it is the sense of our kinship and fusion with them that comes out much more strongly. To me, Surrealism emphasizes this continuity and is a refusal of inherently theological assumptions of human uniqueness and our entitlement to subjugation of the other animals, a refusal of all forms of what Freud termed “human narcissism.” The unconscious is the imprint within the human being of our collective past as animals in nature, and our inner worlds, our dreams, and our imaginations are our direct inheritance from the animal kingdom. If you look at the forms and structures and miniature collections that animals (especially birds) create in nature, completely outside of the realm of commodity value, they definitely have an automatic, magical quality to them.

So, I suppose if I were to more concisely answer the question of what humanity’s place is in my vision of Surrealism, I would say that it is the place that humanity occupies in the vast murals of Lascaux and Chauvet—an animal among the other animals, comparatively humble and insignificant and freer than us, nothing more and nothing less. Furthermore, I would interpret the quintessential Surrealist goal of eliminating all boundaries between dreaming and waking life as an aspiration to alter the future course of evolution, ultimately transforming and arguably doing away with the “human” (or, perhaps, liberating us to return to our much-maligned animality?). There has always been a strong speculative evolutionary current in Surrealism, from Aragon’s reminiscence that Breton wished to fill his imaginary glass pavilions with “a reinvented zoology, a reinvented botany” onward.

RJ Myato: Humanity is a transitory form. But it is the main form currently. To leave behind human qualities is to be a half-formed being. But to build upon them is to become a psychopomp. Evolutionarily: evolution never ends. It’s circumstantial. There’s no goal, so as long as the earth churns, there will be bigger things.

David Nadeau: Surrealism is the becoming of the dissatisfied human consciousness resulting from modernity and which knows or feels detached or separated from nature. It is an activity whose goal is in a way the reconciliation with nature, prepared by the return of the feeling of nature from romanticism. It would have been necessary to know the drama of the fall into instrumental rationality, in order to desire a synthesis between what this instrumental rationality made us gain (class consciousness, etc.), and what it made us lose (animist participation in the environment). In other words, it will have been necessary and inevitable to go through the long series of upheavals that have marked the history of Western civilization, then of globalized capitalism, to foresee and desire the advent of “surrationalism” (Gaston Bachelard).

Totemic, animals embody the surreal; while some humans consciously search for it, alone or in groups. Spontaneous animal creativity (nuptial dances, mimicry, nesting) and, more simply, the characteristics specific to each species, make each animal a living myth.

Juan Carlos Otaño: It forms part of the certainty of belonging to a tradition of the immemorial past from which we are its direct descendants and that we would do well to honour and continue. For that a certain constancy is needed for all the moments that have marked the history of surrealism, without opportunistic exclusions, but also without concessions to easy comfort and without falling into the tastes and whims that tempt every generation. To know how to discern between the permanent and the fleeting, or from what is eclectic in form from what is eclectic in content. To recover a vast dominion in line with the advice of Heraclito “The Dark”.

And in the general order of nature to know that we are not in the centre. That the world is not a games-board for feudal gentlemen, nor that the rest of the creatures are merely snacks and servants.

Anthony Redmond: Our capacity for empathy is forged in early childhood through identifications with other species of animal and this continues to lie at the root of all imaginative explorations for the rest of our lives. This is why animals, plants and other non-human life forms are the ultimate source of our earliest intimations of being human.

Tony Roehrig: We are slowly regaining our understanding of ‘humanity’ both through the teachings of other life forms and through the development of our surrealistic senses. We are evolving as true ‘humans’ through these teachings with the hopes of being fully accepted and reintegrated back into the folds of wildness and life – a Surrealistic Life – thereby destroying the need for words like ‘human’ and ‘humanity’.

Penelope Rosemont: Humanity and Humanism: there is much to consider here. What is the relationship of Humanity to Humanism? Humanism comes in several varieties: Literary, Renaissance, Western Cultural, Philosophic, Christian, Modern, Ethical, Secular….. As surrealists we fit into the history of Humanism. Humanism which led to the Renaissance, with its reawakening of ancient knowledge, translations of Lucretius, especially the great scholar Petrarch who exalted romantic love. His poems written for Laura, though he was a cleric and she a married woman who he saw for the first time on April 6, 1327 in Avignon and fell madly in love. Laura died of the Plague in 1348, a time of mass infection like these days. This story of Mad Love has come to us from over seven hundred years ago. Importantly, the philosophy of Humanism eliminated God and made humans masters of their own fates. This was the beginnings of great revolutions in thought and science. Today, “Secular Humanists” are an atheist grouping (which I think is an excellent idea) that attempts to keep religion out of government and fight monetary support for religion by the state.

Appeals to our “Humanity” are often used by religious and political liberals who would appeal to our guilt, and thus motivate us to improve and ameliorate conditions at least sightly—usually, only minor changes. Guilt is not a good motivation. Guilt as means of social control has been used by Christianity for generations. It is tiresome, boring, and uninspiring. I disown guilt. Currently, we see a comeback of religion; liberals are much too tolerant. Do not be misled, religious interests aim for total social control: one that is anti-woman, anti-intellectual, anti-science. It is necessary for Surrealists to oppose this. Surrealists are rational- irrationalists, we seek to expand the knowledge of mental processes in every direction but are not deceived by the God fallacy.

Today, there is a growing awareness of the dangers of environmental degradation and mass extinctions. This calls for a broader deeper concept than “Humanity,” one that embraces all living things and even extends to the preservation of things that are not living, the gloriously beautiful mountains, prairies and seas on our unique planet. I admire women like Jane Adams who did excellent social work and education but I admire Emma Goldman even more. I admire Jayne Cortez and Diane di Prima—words on fire! Our idea of Surrealism surpasses “Humanity,” sees farther, demands more —we are motivated by desire, the power of attraction.

Samjogo: Not at all. History is a place where gore sends itself through the bodies of kindred beings.

LaDonna Smith: I have no idea how seeing through the eyes of a fox or a turtle, an owl, or a mouse interprets the amazing environment on which life inhabits. How they read the activities of humanity, and its arcane insanity, its structures, its vehicles, its activities and actions, and all the debris that is left in the ocean, the sky, and land due to human materialism. Perhaps they see us in a kind of surreal way as threats, enemies, hosts, or prey. However, it is only through human eyes that I as a living being perceive the environment & conditions around me. It is through my connection with artists, musicians, and associate surrealists that my world view is colored and inspired. It is through these eyes and the phantom consort of camaraderie that create multiplicity of view and vision, humor, and attention to the ephemeral and dream life that one self-creates to view the world through a lens of the marvelous, magical, and the extraordinary prelude of unpredictable imaginings. And what one human imagines another creates, as illusions are reality just as reality is illusion. After all, it is spoken in the texts of antiquity, just as today ones and zeros function as brains. This alone is proof enough of l’universe surrealiste.

Darren Thomas: Humanity is central to surrealist activity. Particularly collective activity. As a collective we learn to move beyond our own individual desires – which are of course important – to an awareness of those of the Other. Intersubjectivity and empathy are nurtured through such activity – learning to see through the eyes of the other and feel with the heart of the Other – like a herd of lions or a school of dolphins. More than the sum of its parts.

This is why my collective activity with The London Surrealist Group and friends – here and across the world – is so important to me. We are all one.

Evolution comes from constant reflection, interpretation and living – the adventure of living. Evolution is another word for transformation and revolt is necessary when change is needed, We constantly see how a selfish, greedy, criminal class seeks to limit our freedom to think and act and instead forces us to choke on the poisoned morsels of mediocrity.

Jason Abdelhadi: I wonder if certain preserved mummies or bog people might eventually become candidates for fossilization proper? Or maybe some random people caught in a very non-representative death situation, deep sea explorers or mountaineer corpses on the Himalayas, just like most fossils actually are not at all “likely”. But what really keeps coming to mind is the unfathomable but mouth-watering prospect of a museum environment becoming fossilized. Then we are going to be interpreted as accumulators and hoarders, if the beings who are interpreting the remains can figure out what is going on. Or it could be that they interpret the fossilized museum as a big body or cell in itself, a distinct lifeform, which isn’t incorrect. But maybe this is too anthropomorphic. We ourselves do not interpret most fossils but burn them as fuels. Perhaps the future entities will use them like we use chalk, in which case it is not a question of interpreting what they are in themselves but how they serve to manifest the collective desires of the future beings. Which is what fossils always seem to be anyway. Asking what things become fossilized seems to be an indirect way of asking what we think is currently alive.

Hermester Barrington: I’d like to speak for the human race, so allow me to provide an example from my own existence. A laundry chute (with plexiglass walls) leads from Fayaway’s boudoir on the top floor of our home to the subbasement, just below the Invisible Library. Into this this memory hole of glory Fayaway & I toss our emptied jars of petroleum jelly (fossil juice to lubricate a fossil, I suppose), the silenced ashes of crickets, expired safe words, pwdre ser, unfeathered boas, erotica which our eyebeams have erased, liquefactions of the kundalini, and empty bottles of a popular soda which was in fact discovered or invented by alchemists in Kentucky in 1745. Archaeologists of the past have already published their astonishment at the richness of our lives in the journal Aubepine (37:23:8).

Doug Campbell: Other than millions of human skeletons, and the conspicuous absence of other species, I expect drifts and deposits of tiny pieces of plastic and wire will remain. I can imagine these being interpreted as naturally occurring minerals like oil or coal. It is hard to know what more solid objects will survive. There are millions of cars, mobile phones and children’s toys, but will they retain any sort of recognisable structure? There is perhaps an analogy with the flocks of manufactured objects that wash up on beaches, sorted by size and weight in the ocean currents. (I remember a dozen footballs of different designs and in different stages of decay caught behind a bridge at an inlet to the sea.)

The large building structures and ceramics of previous times seem to have survived best, but how long into deep time they will last is an interesting question. As to the interpretation of these remnants, the history of Egyptology suggests this will be creative and often dependent on the circumstances and aspirations of the interpreters. I would like to know which set of ruins from our era the inhabitants of the far future will point at and say that this can only have been the work of aliens.

Casi Cline: I think it is too soon to tell what fossils we leave. How can we tell what things will decompose and what will be preserved like insects in amber?

Krzysztof Fijalkowski: So much of contemporary ‘advanced’ culture is sclerotic, moribund and fusing into marketing clichés and the shells of gestures, its participants already most of the way to becoming solid objects. Is what is most vivid and vital about the experience of life precisely the elements in evaporating motion, the ‘soft tissue’ of desire and imagination that shan’t physically endure, or may be just occasionally trapped in amber? Either way, perhaps those creatures or beings that will pore over the remnants are already here (or rather, we are already there), invisible to us: will our remains be treasured as specimens, or ground to dust? It won’t be our responsibility to know.

Mattias Forshage: Oh plentiful. And what revelations they will bring. We never knew that of ourselves.

Joël Gayraud: Modern syphilization leaves metal fossils – cars, planes, boats, locomotives etc. – but also fossils of concrete which, except with very rare exception, are particularly hideous and will not fail to strike the particularly developed aesthetic sense of the new human species I have no doubt will supplant us. But with the help of her archibras, she will quickly rid the planet of the dross of false capitalist industry. Fortunately, some self-taught sculptors will have left higher-end fossils at the bottom of their anarchic gardens. And the works of Rodin, Max Ernst or Virginia Tentindo will testify to the golden faceted eyes of our successors that the 20th and 21st centuries were not those of Jeff Koons or Anish Kapoor.

Nathan Grover: Cars. So many cars. As ridiculously shaped as codpieces. To those future beings who discover them, whose vainglory will of course take its own ridiculous shape, our petrified cars will seem particularly hexed. They’ll be known as vampire fossils, because they fed so insatiably on other fossils.

Beatriz Hausner: There are tiny, hence secret objects that will likely fossilize inside the layers and layers of detritus we’re leaving behind. These fossil-objects will be found by our successors, who will be perfect dreamers, beings who will be visible and invisible, able to transform themselves into cyborgs, animals or people. They will find our objects and will recognize them as instruments for the transmutation of their souls.

Nicholas Alexander Hayes: When the last human closes their eyes, decades, centuries, millennia will pass. Eventually a synod of cephalopods will undulate in rage as an insolent subadult presents evidence that plastic was created and manufactured by some unknown terrestrial creature. The faulty research methodology and resultant sacrilege will result in the subadult being denied tenure with the simple question – if plastics aren’t natural, then why are they found everywhere in the food chain?

Vittoria Lion: To reverberate the consensus of the scientific authorities on this matter, lots of chicken bones, and in the age of COVID I imagine animals fully physiologically capable of ingesting hand sanitizer without suffering the toxic effects of its alcohol content burrowing in abandoned hollowed-out shopping malls. Various real and hypothetical examples of a world with humans removed have been a frequent topic of perseveration for me, ranging from Dougal Dixon’s After Man, Jeff VanderMeer’s “Area X,” and the radioactive ecosystem of the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone to the lyrical passage from Italo Calvino’s The Castle of Crossed Destinies describing a ruined city where “foxes and martens wave their soft tails over the control panels.” If anything is certain, any life forms that survive this mass extinction and succeed the industrial civilization that doomed us will have adapted to living among and within the wreckage of capitalist ruins, perhaps as seamlessly integrated with them as extant polar animals are with the seasonal ebb and flow of the pack ice. I wonder if animals living now, their distant ancestors, have had the realization that our world is already one of ruins. It’s likely that the descendants of domesticated animals will not survive, having been bred for total dependency upon humans, and I find it rather satisfying contemplating Dixon’s hypothesis that the most widespread fauna of the future will be largely descended from species currently vilified and exterminated as pests. Mammalian life has honestly become sort of tiresome, and I would love for birds to become the dominant fauna—essentially, I realize now, my childhood fantasy of a return of the dinosaurs, considering all extant birds phylogenetically are theropods. It saddens me to think that I will not be alive to see with my own eyes all the lovely forms still waiting to emerge.

If anything, it’s some consolation that, speaking in terms of the Earth’s broader geological history, plenty of bizarre animal forms tend to arise in quick succession following mass extinctions because evolution is essentially more or less figuring itself out, figuring out what to do with all the empty niches left behind. Additionally, I find there to be a simultaneously distressing and hilarious irony in our naming of significant fossils and museum collections after the very forces reducing our species to a fossil—for example, the aforementioned “Suncor nodosaur,” the David H. Koch Dinosaur Wing at the American Museum of Natural History, the Jurassic theropod literally christened Gasosaurus. In many ways, the dinosaur has functioned as the totem animal of the extraction-industrial complex.

RJ Myato: We’re a bizarre civilization. We’re leaving a special kind of legacy behind: the annihilation of our own fossils. There’ll be nothing left for anyone to interpret. But on a long enough timescale this is all we have, in general. The question might be: had we lasted as long as we could? The answer seems to be no, for now.

David Nadeau: The seer-archaeologist of the next humanity will wonder about the strange fascination exercised by capitalist witchcraft, which leads to a manifest ugliness and a shrinking of the sensory and imaginary field.

Juan Carlos Otaño: I hope they are not ours! And unless history gives a fundamental reversal, which is desirable and to be expected, you can be completely sure they won’t be interpreted.

Anthony Redmond: What we are mostly leaving behind are the residues of burnt fossil fuels which will be interpreted by life forms of which we know nothing.

Tony Roehrig: The tintinnabulation of dreams waiting to be mapped.

The calloused hands of a poet caught in the moment of striking the final blow to misery.

The released breath of the oppressed gushing forth from the dislodged keys of Cecil Taylor’s piano. Once found they will be interpreted as the missing letters to the Rosetta Stone thus allowing the rest of the doors to open.

Penelope Rosemont: Fossils found in the Future: There will be an entire layer of face masks. Gibbon-people will interpret it as the result of a sudden religious revival and death cult. There always has to be a death cult or cannibals or no one is interested.

I found a lovely piece of metal on Thursday, if it is preserved the beings of the future will find a quartz imprint in limestone. It will confound them; they will consider it a magnificent piece of art and realize our civilization was higher than they thought. They will be from Mars. They will be bugs. Handsome bugs in Titanium space suits.

Samjogo: Memories. For our ancestors.​ They will be interpreted through dreams.

LaDonna Smith: Our fossils will be our bones, our teeth and our hard drives. Perhaps the living will build a cathedral to the mystery of life from the refuse of our existence. Notwithstanding, the larvae that feed on our wasted organs will morph into exquisite creatures that fly.

Darren Thomas: The new fossils will be all those mediated forms and the various artefacts and worlds we encounter through our screens – such as social media, streaming services such as Facebook, Netflix, YouTube and so on. Future generations will have replaced the screens with mirrors or perhaps they will realise that real life (la vie) is elsewhere. If I were being pessimistic, the screens would be internalised, the mirrors, too, so that the subject was constantly lost and controlled by unseen forces in a kind of hyperreal nightmare where simulated reality was indistinguishable from lived reality.