The Black Starfish

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I cannot tell what is the sky

And what is swimming

What is chalked heather burning

And what is music

What is the lying in state

And what is gutter barking

What is this shroud

And what is the crackling of vocal chords

I am in love with spider eyes

Ringed blind like monkeys

Petrol cascade on the road

Clapboard torches and this howling

Melted red pistols at the breast of the fallen mermaid

A highwayman of snow depths

Wrapped in a roaring cloak of coaldust

The black starfish

Stands arched and stretching

Walks on fingertips of hair

Up into the unfolded oil sheet

The white waters of steeled skies

We inhale fired cinders

We swallow our burnings

On iron-filed crab tracks

Le Maître d'effroi

The Ragnarokesby Venus

for Dean

There are stairs
Where blue skin

Is washed in flakes from the face

And all that can be heard is a hopping

Long legs and salt for the toad

Falling fire leaps up

From the sudden grey lakes

Steel tumuli runestones

Scored with curses

A broken stone fist clutches hidden seeds

Eyes rise white from the ground

Gripped by ash roots

And I am the whistling of horse omens

The Escapologist's Dream

I have no secrets

Fifty Years

Let’s play a new game.

I tire of endings.

Every Surrealist today has, at some point or other, complained at the historical falsifications and traducements of our opponents and art historians. More particularly, it is a commonplace to mock their random selection of a date for the death of the movement: the Second World War, the death of Breton, invent your own, it’s a lucky dip completely unconnected with the ongoing activity and existence of Surrealists and Surrealism.

But it’s not interesting.

So let’s play a new game.

Let’s pick beginnings.

Like any vibrant movement, Surrealism has had its ebbs and flows. It hasn’t had a straightforwardly ascendant trajectory (that’d be liberal nonsense) because it needs fighting for and championing. As a result, at certain points, there have been vital lurches forward, vital steps taken that have shaped our subsequent fortunes. Go on, pick one! Pick several! The founding of the Chicago Group, the 1976 World Exhibition, the establishment of the Stockholm Group … Of course there have been many illusory moments that led to nothing, but there have also been real developments that have given a spur to our renewed vitality.

In Britain, where Surrealism’s been marginalised and overlooked at best, the sometimes contradictory character of such events has been pronounced: some events have been spectacular in the minds of their organisers but had no lasting effect whatever, while the lingering effect of others has been underestimated by even sympathetic commentators. The hilariously bathetic conclusion to Michel Remy’s purported chronology of British Surrealism – ‘Failure to restructure activities’ – may reflect his sketchy coverage of the recent period, but it is unjust to its subject (the Melmoth Group) and also in its failure to acknowledge the later establishment of the longest-running Surrealist group in Britain (Leeds).

So let me tip my hat to one hugely important contradictory event that opened 50 years ago today, the Enchanted Domain exhibition, the Exeter Festival of Surrealism (24 April-20 May 1967). Dismissed at the time by the Paris Group as a ‘nostalgic reunion’, it was nonetheless a key moment in identifying and organising Surrealism in Britain. It brought together work by international big names and various figures associated with the movement in Britain.

Its organisation was an indication of how such events are situated historically. Conroy Maddox, perhaps the single most important individual catalyst of post-war British Surrealism, organised the show in collaboration with bookseller John Lyle. Maddox, already established as an important figure in his own right, worked closely with ELT Mesens to ensure the loan of works from the latter’s collection. Another contributor of historical pieces who also helped organise the event was the veteran French Surrealist Jacques Brunius, who had worked with Buñuel and Dalí on L’Age d’Or and participated in British activity since the war.

Indeed, if you wanted to be playing endings, there’s your chance. On the morning of the show’s opening Maddox received a ’phone call from a hotel manager informing him that Brunius had died of a heart attack overnight. (Mesens said to Brunius’s girlfriend ‘Did you go through his pockets? You can’t trust hotels’, before turning to Maddox, Lyle and Roland Penrose to ask ‘What shall we do with dear Jacques? Shall we incinerate him?’)

Look round trees with Brunius (from To The Rescue)

Mortality and accusations of nostalgia notwithstanding, however, the event kickstarted interest in Britain. Within 18 months there was another show, in Durham, while Lyle and Maddox began producing the magazine Transforma(c)tion, bringing together the likes of Tony Earnshaw (later a big influence on the nascent Leeds Group), Patrick Hughes, Ian Breakwell and others. Maddox himself, always vigorous, began collaborating anew with younger figures like John Welson, John Digby, and with several of the emergent attempts at groups. Exeter 1967 is where to look for the start of recent Surrealist activity in Britain.

It hasn’t been smooth progress, but anyone who wants a beginning to result automatically in an unbroken and unbreakable upward ascent is looking for a religion, not a practice. Exeter was a large rock thrown into a muddy pool. It is worth remembering today because so many got their trousers splashed by it.

So let’s play a new game, again and always.

Let’s play beginnings.

Again and always.

Artificial Insemination of the Glass Eye

A Map for Sparty

New port to new port

A train skulks up the water’s edge

Creeping through gardens

Crouched low against the fences

Stealing knickers as it goes

Utterly bastard groovy, indeed.

My mysteron-marked hands

Maybe it’s my age

Moulded in the chicken-headed rock

With the pawprints of large beasts

Repointed with place-names

And fingerprint whorls of red dust

Arsenical mummification

Leaves purple and white thumb smudges

Across the corners of the marshlands

Where a crocodile-back finger swims

Anhingas ready to strike

And the spine cracks into fissures

Traced in river charts of the narrows

Guides for the intrepid and the blind

Through these impassable gulleys

My journey to the west took me left

Until the land ran out

Across country from the mudflats

Wondering where the rock caves are

It was a shoe

And a man with a bandsaw

While all movement stopped

At news of an unexploded badger

On the tracks ahead

Burnt white goods have fallen down cuttings

Casting off their masks of caramelised faces of pain

Into a grey city carved from green rocks

Where the hairy-faced piss against granite boundary stones

My passage grave oesophagus

Trumpets from the slate beds

As you rise from the ground

With a light on your head

Heat strengthened laminated inside

A fractured map in the bowl of a skull

Take the weight of your shoulders

Crackling in the burning black synapses

A spectrograph flickers Raudive voices from the damp

Snow mist over the great laid slabs

A milk scar echogram of Greek song

Smears our eyes to the passing blur

Three screaming long-eared bats

Squat like sheep at the foot of a streetlamp

Two voices separate into plainsong

Where runs and roads and rivers bark

One unheard accent points a map

Finger to finger

Into the gulf

Without a roof