Lovers of Sophia
Page 29
be.68 Adrienne Monnier, the woman who introduced the principal
founders of Surrealism to one another, namely André Breton, Louis
Aragon, Philippe Soupault, and Paul Eluard in the Spring of 1919,
was an occultist well versed in Hermeticism who conducted palm
readings at her bookshop. Max Ernst joined them when he arrived
in Paris in the fall of 1922, and shortly thereafter these men, together with René Crevel, Max Morise, Robert Desnos, and Simone Breton
began to hold séances and experiment with automatic writing or
“magic dictation.” These séances were held at Breton’s small studio
at 42, rue Fontaine. Sometimes the proceedings got out of hand.
When the participants collectively entered an unconscious state, the
symptoms of tuberculosis that one of them had been suffering began
to manifest itself in several others for days after the conclusion of the séance. Some participants even seemed to be possessed. At one point
Desnos attacked Eluard with a kitchen knife, and was restrained
with difficulty by Ernst and Breton. He could remember nothing of
what he had done when he was brought out of the magnetic trance.
This period was known as the “époque des sommeils” and its
tumultuous experiences were summarized in Breton’s article “Entrée
des medium,” which he published in the November 1922 issue of
Littérature – the magazine he had founded with Breton, Aragon, and Soupault. It is in this article on his experience of paranormal
65 Ibid., 138.
66 Ibid., 141.
67 Ibid., 139–140.
68 M.E. Warlick, Max Ernst and Alchemy: A Magician in Search of Myth (Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 2001), 61-104.
229
lovers of sophia
phenomena with his fellow artists that, as a reference to the process
and character of psychic automatism, the founder of Surrealism
actual y used the word surréalisme for the first time. It was in their attempt at creatively channeling information from the “subliminal
self”, then being studied by psychical researchers such as Frederic
Myers, that the artists who became the surrealists first decisively
broke with deliberately nonsensical Dada activities. Although they
used some of the same techniques as mediums in the business of
prophecy and contacting the dead, what the surrealists were real y
after in these psychic workshops was a creative breakthrough
brought about by reaching into a genuinely irrational depth of the
unconscious mind.
Moreover, they saw in these parlor evenings the potential for
a communal creativity, one that proceeded to some degree from
out of a collective unconscious being collectively drawn towards
self-consciousness. They occasional y reported having telepathic
communication with one another. Max Ernst swore that back
in Cologne, he had experienced a phenomenon of levitation,
wherein some hats and overcoats had spontaneously relocated to a
distant rack without any apparent human intervention, and on his
suggestion experiments in telekinesis were also pursued.
Max Ernst’s 1922 painting Rendezvous of Friends employs
numerous symbolic and stylistic references to alchemy and
Hermeticism in its depiction of the early surrealists involved in
these occult pursuits. He appears in this painting seated on the lap
of the departed spirit of Dostoevsky. In particular, the painting has
strong affinities to the old drawings and paintings of “The Children
of Mercury”, where artists, painters, writers, architects, and sculptors are seated together at work around a table with the planetary
influence of Mercury or Hermes depicted above them. In Ernst’s
painting, the black sky above the artists features an il ustration of
a solar eclipse and its halo, which appeared in the week of his first
birthday; it is reproduced turned on its side, in such a manner that
it resembles the astrological glyph for the planet Mercury. Ernst
also reaches beyond these old drawings and paintings, to affirm
230
jason reza jorjani
the connection between the alchemical Mercury and the Egyptian
Hermes Trismegistus of classical Hermeticism, by rendering the
gestures of his associates in a geometric and hypnotic manner
suggestive of ancient Egyptian art.
The erotic and esoteric were often mingled in the course of these
surrealist explorations of the outer limits of human experience. The
early male surrealists believed that women had a greater capacity for
accessing the unconscious mind and significantly involved them in
their evenings of séances and other types of psychic experimentation.
Some of the men even claimed to be in contact with succubus
demons – not quite human females who would materialize in their
bedrooms at night, and who bore certain signs of having just crossed
over from hel , for example the smell of Sulfur, which cal s to mind
the alchemical mixture of Sulfur and Mercury.
Max Ernst painted many versions of the fusion of male and
female figures to create the alchemical Androgyne. A number of
Ernst’s paintings of this period feature the athanor, a cylindrical
furnace containing the alembic vessel in which King and Queen are
united. The sexual imagery of alchemical union between the solar
King and the lunar Queen, mirrored “as above, so below” by an
astronomical conjunction, is at the core of Ernst’s 1923 painting, Men Shall Know Nothing of This. It also features a whistle that is a stand in for the alchemist’s bellows, which blows the air that fans the spiritual fire that allows the chemicals to fuse. Nadja, a female clairvoyant
involved with Breton, offered an esoteric analysis of this painting,
whose accuracy Ernst confirmed. However, since another medium,
Madame Sacco, had once predicted that Ernst would meet a woman
named Nadia or Natasha who would harm someone he loved, he
refused to have Breton introduce him to Nadja.
As the Surrealist movement crystallized over the course of the
1920s in Paris, it ever more explicitly affirmed its occult character.
A special October 1923 issue of Littérature, includes a list of the surrealists’ favorite artists, writers, philosophers, and poets of the past that features occultists quite prominently, including the legendary
Hermès Trismégiste, Nicolas Flamel, and Cornelius Agrippa. This
231
lovers of sophia
same issue featured rather explicitly hermetic line drawings by
Max Ernst as accompaniments to its poetry, for example The Cold
Throats where two disconnected alchemical vessels that ought to be connected are next to a headless woman lying on the floor like
a manikin with a chastity belt. In October 1924, Breton issued the
first Surrealist Manifesto, which unambiguously defined surrealism as “pure psychic automatism.”69 He praises Desnos’ trances, despite
their volatility, and he refers to automatic writing as among the
“Secrets of the Magical Surrealist Art.” In a 1925 “Letter to Seers”,
Breton commends psychics for their perseverance in important work
despite relative impoverishment on account of the unwillingness of
academic scientists to recognize the validity of their experiences. He compares their patien
ce to that of the alchemist Nicolas Flamel –
who was dismissed by many so materialistic as to scornful y retort
that had he discovered a way to transmute base metals into gold, he
would be ‘richer’ than he was. In point of fact, unlike many other
alchemists, Flamel was quite wealthy; had he been any wealthier he
might have attracted a great deal more unwanted attention.
The publication of Fulcanelli’s Mystères des cathédrals 70 in 1926, with its elucidation of alchemical symbolism in Parisian cathedrals
and other medieval buildings, inspired the surrealists to take walking tours of mysterious passageways in Notre Dame cathedral and other
sites mentioned, especial y the Les Halles neighborhood of Flamel,
the rue Saint-Martin, the rue des Escrivains, and the Tour Saint
Jacques. They would haunt these places into the twilight hours and
the night, and some of the surrealists were quite convinced of having
met phantoms at certain of these sites, including the ghost of the
infamous murderer Liabeuf and that of the poet Gérard de Nerval.
Around 1928, the surrealists began actively investigating occult
manuscripts from the magical traditions of Alchemy, Hermeticism,
and Kabbalah; symbols and diagrams from these il uminated
69 André Breton, Manifestoes of Surrealism (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 1972), 1-48.
70 Fulcanelli, The Dwel ings of the Philosophers (Boulder, CO: Archive Press, 1999).
232
jason reza jorjani
manuscripts would often be reproduced in the movement’s
periodicals.
In the Second Manifesto of Surrealism71 that Breton put out in 1929, as a definitive statement of the now mature artistic movement,
signed and endorsed by his colleagues, he takes an even more
radical stance on the occult than in the first manifesto. He identifies a kabbalistic concern with the power of language in the poetry of
Arthur Rimbaud, but then criticizes Rimbaud for not going far
enough – for not recognizing that the world is constituted by poetic
logos, in other words that poetry literal y has the power to transform the world. The alchemical Philosopher’s Stone becomes, for him,
that which allows the “imagination to take a stunning revenge on
all things,” to re-imagine the human reality. Breton called for a
“derangement of all the senses” directed toward this end, and for a
revolt against centuries of “domestication” and “insane resignation”
to an all-too-unimaginative conception of ‘reality’. He also suggested that a “veritable occultation of surrealism” should take place, by
which he meant not only that the movement should explicitly
concern itself with the occult, but also that it should conceal its
investigations in this area and their outcome from the general public
just as the alchemists had guarded their own secrets.
Breton explicitly lays out the means toward such “occultation”:
a “serious investigation into those sciences which for various
reasons are today completely discredited”, among which he includes
astrology, extrasensory perception, telekinesis, and so forth. He
has no problem with experiments in these areas being carried out
in the stimulating manner of “parlor games”, so long as a modicum
of “necessary mistrust” is maintained to eschew blatant fraud and
make genuine discoveries. The inscription on Breton’s tombstone,
“Je cherche l’or du temps” (“I seek the gold of Time”) is clearly a
reference to the Philosopher’s Stone that he spent his life seeking.
Jackson Pollock’s early paintings are an evolution directly
out of Surrealism, and they continue the surrealist concern with
alchemical or occult themes and motifs. If the later were not obvious
71 Breton,
Manifestoes of Surrealism, 117-194.
233
lovers of sophia
from the content of the paintings themselves, the titles he chose
for them make this explicitly clear. Here are some of my personal
favorites from this period: Male and Female (1942-43); Guardians of the Secret (1943); Troubled Queen (1945); Alchemy (1947). There is also a related totemic quality and shamanic trend in this early
work, for example: Bird (1941); Birth (1941); The She-Wolf (1943); Totem Lesson 2 (1945). Yet once he makes the transition to his ful y abstract expressionist style, somehow the magical dimension is still
there and in a few pieces it appears to be working its effect on the
viewer at an ever deeper level; again, the titles that Pollock chose
reflect his awareness of this: Lucifer (1947); Full Fathom Five (1947); One (1948). Pollock made a similar transition as Max Ernst did when he went from painting overtly alchemical pieces to creating
paintings alchemical y – even if they do not feature any explicitly
discernable esoteric symbols. The nature of the magic at work in
Pollock’s paintings has now been discovered, and it is far from any
trickery unless real conjuring of the kind practiced by a sorcerer is
to be considered trickery.
Richard P. Taylor, a physicist at the University of New South
Wales, who is also an abstract painter, discovered that there are
fractals in Jackson Pollock’s abstract paintings at many different
levels of magnification.72 Taylor happened upon this discovery
during a break from his work at the university to go on a retreat
organized by the Manchester School of Art. However, a storm struck
the Yorkshire moors in northern England and instead of simply
being holed up indoors, Taylor recruited some fellow artists to build
a contraption made of fallen branches with paint buckets attached
to them that would harness the wind pattern and direct the paint
onto an appropriately positioned canvas. What they found after
the windstorm was astonishing: a Jackson Pollock painting. Taylor
had an insight and went back to test it at the University, working
with a group of experts in respective fields from mathematics and
computer science to perceptual psychology.
72 Richard P. Taylor, “Order in Pollock’s Chaos” in Scientific American (December, 2002).
234
jason reza jorjani
It turns out that if quintessential Jackson Pollock paintings are
scanned in to a computer and then overlaid with a grid that can be
loosened or tightened in its level of magnification, a mathematical
analysis of the drips on the canvas reveals that they conform
precisely to the kind of fractals that are found in nature: in sea
shel s, in sunflowers, in tree branches, in weather patterns, and so
forth. The difference between these fractals and those mechanical y
produced by a computer are that they display only a probabilistic
statistical self-similarity that has an organic feel to it, rather than an exact self-similarity where the pattern breaks and repeats the same
way at regular intervals. Moreover, these natural fractal patterns
are discovered in Pollock’s paintings at many different levels of
magnification, in other words – there are fractals within fractals
within fractals. The smallest fractals found are 1,000 times smaller
than the largest.
There is no way that Pollock could have planned this kind of
painting, at that in the 1950s – decades before t
he scientific study
of the fractals discovered by Benoit Mandelbrot. It is absolutely
impossible for the rational mind and lies completely beyond the
conscious or analytical perceptual capacity of human beings. Yet,
Pollock once chose to epitomize his artwork with this statement:
“My concern is with the rhythms of nature.” There is documentary
evidence that he would dance around his canvas with movements
that very closely resemble the ritual dances of Native American
Shamanism, except more fluid and dynamic. He would also paint
in bursts, over a long period of time – sometimes months. This
would account for the many different layers of fractals. He would lay
down only so many as he could while an unconscious force was still
moving his body, then he would stop.
The best evidence that such an extraordinary process was at
work is that only Jackson Pollock’s abstract paintings have these fractals in them. When other drip paintings in ‘the Pollock style’,
including clever forgeries that might even fool some art critics,
are scanned into the same computer program, they fail to yield
the fractals in a genuine Pollock. Taylor theorized that the unique
235
lovers of sophia
aesthetic experience of Pollock paintings, the reason why they are
more widely appreciated than other works of abstract expressionism
by people with a well-developed aesthetic intuition, is that the
human mind is natural y keyed to respond to the beauty of fractals
in nature.
Pollock’s paintings pose a serious problem for Hegel’s
understanding of paranormal phenomena in their relationship to
the development and perfection of scientific rationality. They are the most abstract expression of artistic creativity, as Hegel would put it, the form of art that has most freed itself from its content, but these artworks are even more clearly produced by psychic automatism
than the occult art of the surrealists. Even the latter, coming as it did after Impressionism, would leave Hegel at a loss to account for why
these successive – and thus presumably progressive – art forms were
not expressive of an increasingly rational and self-conscious mind.
You see, Hegel thinks that art passes through a series of successive
stages: the symbolic or naturalistic, the classical, and the romantic.