Surrealist bestiary

The surrealist bestiary is not an old tome trying to account for the fauna of a lost continent.

If animals and especially certain animals are common in surrealism yet surrealists rarely want to make a big issue of this fact, this is because we hope to make other use of them. Some types of animals have assumed poetic associations from several surrealists and become part of a tradition of surrealist animals. Sometimes we describe such selected animals as “totems”, often when they represent a creative, spiritual or emblematic focus for the individual, or a sign of shared affinity among comrades. But on the collective level, they may start acquiring a “mythological” sense, being part of a life-world of hopes, values and fantasies shared between those who collaborate in the particular spirit, but also spanning over geography and history to those who work, have worked or will work within the same framework under other circumstances. And it is in the sense of real, active mythology in the hands of a movement that I am using the world “bestiary”. A shared imagery is a diffuse and largely objective or unconscious part of such a mythology, which nevertheless keeps being mobilised in minor struggles and perhaps also in major ones.

The major point with a surrealist bestiary is the extent to which it is and promises to be a force in the arsenal of ”miraculous weapons”, as Césaire said, and he was already at the time referring, no doubt, to something that emphatically included his own fiery invocations of close and exotic animals as living imaginative defiers of racist western civilisation and all obstacles to the exploration of the unknown and to the freedom of the imagination. Why would anyone want to be human anyway? There might be reasons. It's just a sad and lonely position, unless you know where to look for accomplices. Or you don't know at all, and therefore might start finding them.

Kenneth Cox: Canal Creature

A compendium that addresses the preliminary conditions for such a bestiary and collects element in an obsessed yet unbelievably sober taxonomy is now available through the bonegarden page or directly here.

Ika Österblad: Rabbit Fairytale

Bats and transit (variation about games)

(Niklas Nenzén)

It is always good to imagine the world from the viewpoint of fellow organisms. A famous one is to see the world from a bat's view. A philosopher even wrote a book about it. Indeed, philosophers' "thought experiments" are typically crude reveries. A biologist may say something else about the probable forms of life experience of a bat and the phenomenology of batness. The bat is, as we know, seeing the world primarily from a nightly, aerial, swiftly and erratically turning and flapping, standpoint, with the landscape and its parts painted for the hearing sense by echoes. This is a very vivid and accurate view, but not only does it play at high speed, it is also extremely demanding as it requires the instantaneous processing of a vast amount of complex information at every moment. No rest until hanging upside down in some hideout.

For this very complex processing of information, bats need a well-developed neural system and brain. But if we assume brainpower is identical with intelligence we go wrong. When basic orientation is such an immensely complex task, there is actually very little capacity left for problem-solving, flexibility, sociality and other things we associate with intelligence. In human terms, bats are brainy yet remain rather stupid.

Next place to start: I really enjoy how time stands still in travelling. The long waiting, spent on board the vehicles themselves as well as in the different terminals, is not really waiting but spending time outside time, which is good for nothing, and therefore very favourable for revery, for non-directed reflection, for unexpected discovery. My friend Riyota Kasamatsu once wrote an essay saluting the surrealist potential of this "transit time", as connected to the watchword of "worthlessness" which was popular at the time.

Indeed and inevitably, the lack of access to the tools of conventional productive work, whichever they are in the situation of each person, creates a certain void, a void that tends to get filled. There are no immediate practical tasks for the mind (unless it indeed impractically gets stuck in the mode of paranoid worries and repetition-obsession). It is not work, it is not productive side activities, it is not useful leisure, the reproduction of labor force.

With no practical tasks at hand, with the mind in several respects vacant, we enter absentmindedness, which is a state of availability. This is where thought gets its opportunity to play freely, including taking a rest, leaving the stage open for various other modes of movement of the mind. This is an area where automatism, obsessive imagery and vivid revery sometimes play havoc, and sometimes just have their little stand in some corner and the limelight remains unoccupied. This is a state which has a great potentiality to focus on the unknown, and even more which is actually focused on potentiality; the mind is available for something to happen, and it might or might not.

This is why I typically prefer to travel alone – so as not to have to spend this whole time playing out normal social interactions. Unless one is busy with socialising with a companion, there will also typically emerge potentially interesting interactions with strangers. Potentially, not necessarily; it is all about availability. Of course, I try to avoid the entertainment with which ideological forces struggle to fill this void with advertising, indoctrination and numb relaxation of all kinds. For everyday transports I regrettably often fall into a practical need of utilising transport time for something useful, but at least whenever I am on something considered a journey, I very often avoid picking up self-chosen entertainment like novels, or picking up a laptop to do some regular work of one or the other kind. Yet there is no need to stick to any of these preferences as rules, because all these entertainments and conventional tasks will produce a certain boredom or just feeling of inadequacy, and the "withdrawal" into availability will eventually be spontaneously preferred.

It was quite refreshing to see a lot of the old fantasies about this "transit time" confirmed from an unexpected angle in Olga Tukarczuk's very readable novel Bieguini 2007 (eng Runners, sw Löparna).

From this viewpoint it is remarkable to see the large amounts of people nowadays spending all such free time playing little games on their phones. A certain amount of travellers in every waiting area, in every train car, will be busy filling their time with such desperate filling out the void and avoiding the potentialities that void might contain. (And I'm not primarily complaining about new technologies, I was just as irritated with the widespread habit of reading the newspaper while travelling, long before mobile phones with games came.) So with such games, typically of the simple kinds, a lot of people make sure to stay out of boredom by rapid repetitive action, cognitively demanding but intellectually dull. Games, the crude ethologists and neurologists say, are an advanced type of behavior, keeping motoric-sensorial-neural systems vigilant, good practice for hunting and for escaping predators.

But in the framework of contemporary human society, it would seem that these one-person high-speed no-thought games are much more characterised by their role as generalised entertainment, fulfilling the function of fending off thought, availability and potentiality. Indeed a lot of people in this society are in a fragile state, and know or suspect that any undirected thought might easily get stuck in repeating worries, problems, shortcomings, traumatic experiences, and lead to depression or nervous breakdown. For a lot of people, massive entertainment (be it TV, newspapers on the morning train, mobile phone games etc) is simply selfmedication against severe depression. Of course, the same entertaining noise that keep obsessive repetition away also keeps away any serious enquiry of one's desires (what one really wants to do), any serious reflection over one's situation (are there things that are in fact intolerable, and need to change, sometimes even with means already at hand) as well as any play of imagination that might constitute an inner counterpoint to depression.

There is a lot of important dynamics waiting in boredom. Because boredom is not about boredom, but only about the absence of desperate measures for entertainment. It is about facing the unscheduled, useless and sometimes extremely useful, it is about letting the mind go, and see it wander off, and discover beautiful stuff, or not.

This is not a question of denouncing modern digital gameplaying on the whole. That would not only be vain and pointless but also beyond my knowledge. Furthermore, apparently, there is also a vast sphere of ambitious games, more similar to actual playing, involving inventiveness, imagination, complexity, interpretation as well as eclectic and new mythologies, poetically suggestive graphics, and often actually entailing the development of entirely new skills, new ways of moving, new circumscriptions of the subjective unit, new utilities of the spirit, and therefore slightly altered bodily existence and individual existence. I don't know, but it seems to represent an analogy to the altered states in poetry. Of course such games tend to become obsessive and probably often outcompete most of the things that makes life itself an exciting game, but this is a delicate question, and not at all my subject here. I'm talking only about those trivial games available as apps on people's mobile phones, with which they are "killing time" unless there is any other entertainment around; making themselves permanently unavailable-occupied, extinguishing absentmindedness and potentiality along with threatening introspection, overview and boredom. The mind is constantly busy solving perfectly trivial problems. There is an incredible capacity, there is even an immense activity going on, but all this capacity is kept busy with this one particular activity and nothing is left for anything else. Just like bats! But still without the excitment of flying, of catching insects, and of experiencing the night...

Mattias Forshage

"The flora and fauna of surrealism are inadmissable"

When someone else has carried out ones ideas in advance, they reveal just how mad they are. I have referred here (the surrealist bestiary) to a concordance of animals mentioned in surrealism that I once began. Pursuing that idea in an unsystematic fashion, I stumbled upon a french PhD thesis doing the same (Claude Maillard-Chary: Le Bestiaire surréaliste, Paris 1994). Of course it was not exactly my idea, delimitations were different (the thesis dealt with occurences in text, in french language, in surrealist poets up to the second world war, only), and the academic context made that author focus more on quantitative details and less on critical and empathic evaluation of the function of different animals within surrealism, but still, many of the observations and most obvious conclusions were neatly parallelled.

Of course this duplication makes me more satisfied that I will never finish this project, and that I never pursued it in a very completist or quantitative way. In fact, being a zoologist very soon determined how I was pursuing it, and I focused on two questions which were less accesible to the non-zoologist and non-surrealist:

1) considering the width of the animal kingdom to suggest large amounts of animals with a great surrealist potential according to both inner criteria and the totemic-imaginal-fetishist-poetic patterns established by surrealist use of animals so far,

2) detailing the relationships between what is conceived as "kinds" of animals in surrealism (and in poetic imagination in general) on the one hand, and zoological concepts on the other hand; which is a case study in terms of comparison between classification philosophies and methodologies of scientific classification and folk classification.

These two aspects will be pursued in one way or another, and at least in the latter aspect, it remains possible that I will find a way of presenting my results.

MF

THE FABULOUS CONTINENT

A PROPOSAL FOR THE CREATION OF A SURREALIST BESTIARY

Simultaneously with the contemporary approach to the animal from an ecological perspective, a perspective that proclaims the animal’s excellence as a living being (this necessarily implies the protection of animals from one of the worst human diseases: slavery), another attitude imposes itself as it seeks to exalt and perpetuate the animal, once again, as a real space of emanation and intervention of the marvellous.

The animal is a great unknown, and this transforms it into a geography of the unexplored. In the relationship with the elements and its analogues, through its rituals and games, in all its ways of behaviour, the animal contains an act of inspiration as well as being inspiring.

We condemn the paralysing and despicable inclination due to which the animal is presented with human attributes. The recognition of the animal goes inexcusable through a recognition of the beauty that the animal projects: the song of the whale, the love declaration of the penguin, the headlong flight of a kingfisher, the 180-degrees head turn of the eagle owl, the ‘innocent’ ardor of a nocturnal moth and the luminous trail left behind by the firefly during its courting dance. The animal generates a magnificient succession of alternative currents, ‘true emblems of all its splendour.’ (1) On the one hand, these currents constitute an example of generosity towards itself, an authentic demonstration of ‘passional attitude’, but on the other hand, they challenge every human logical system of relation, including that which complacently passes for human sensitivity. In any case, the animal denotes the notion of the particular and the concrete, which in the universe of the perceptible by the senses – and in its relations with every operation of recognition – configures a paradigm of the revealing.

In this sense everything indicates that the operations of extinction and appropriation performed on the animal, cause, simultaneously with the animal’s eradication, a kind of taming of our emotions, or in more brutal terms, a kind of castration of the human emotional capacity and disposition towards the ‘inspiring’. The criminal activity directed against the Amazonian rain forest and countless other actions perpetrated on a national, regional or local level, monstrously and hypocritically by all States of the world, without exception, leads to the gradual disintegration of an infinitely sensitive space of reality, where the intervention of the marvellous could be found in an unadulterated state. Therefore such operations implacable tends to deprive us of that which, inseparable from every activity of our spirits, corresponds to a horizontal and vertical dynamic of knowledge. Because the animal is wisdom! Its forms of existence include an authentic expression of an intuitive, emotional and passional life, which, as we enter into contact with the poetic thought, opens the true path of sailing towards that island which some beings agreed to call, after resting on its shores, the island of wisdom.

This attitude is not, in any way, that which appears in the Article 2, Section B of the Declaration of the Universal Animal Rights: ‘Man is obliged to put his knowledge into the service of the animal (sic).’ Such an appreciation – the ‘good will’ of which does not suffice – characterises the pathetic nature of general approach of man towards the animal being, exposing openly and unashamedly his determination rooted in a system of rationalist thought that places the faculties of the animal onto a lower existential plane. Far from resuscitating a new sensitiveness that would reactualize and reorientate our relationship towards the animal onto a plane of reciprocity, it continues to express the same obscure presumptions by which man strives to establish, now through declarations, the human capacities as superior to that of the animal. And nothing seems to indicate that in order to aspire to this reciprocity it is necessary to be in the field, or that its recognition would pass for such reciprocity. The contemporary difficulty is obvious of a recovery, under the present form of contact, of a relationship that existed as a result of an everyday contact with the animal in tribal, ‘primitive’ or entirely rural societies, and brought a form of knowledge of the animal being. It will have to reconcile the scientific information (which presupposes – principally objective – the absence of such a contact) with an attitude of longing and passion towards the animal, an attitude that responds to an incipient and fundamental recognition, transcending and overriding, at the same time, the limits installed by a restrictive and socially dissociating form of life (inseparably on the mental and the physical level). Moreover, the absence of practical conditions for the concrete recognition of the animal ‘is not incompatible with theoretical recognition, nor would it be incompatible with feelings.’ (2) What is proposed is a necessary change of disposition as a first step towards the breaking of the equivocal: a recognition of the animal? yes, by our recognition of the wisdom of the animal. Only by giving the latter a paramount significance we can place our knowledge at its service and thus establish the coordinates of a reciprocal relationship. As Mariano Auladén affirms, ‘this would require the placement of the operations of relationship between humans and the animal on the same level as the relationships which humans attempt to establish among themselves. Only a human effort departing from such a premise, independently from the result which we can obtain with our present strength, would enable us to leave the trite path of routine and mental lethargy towards the animal.’ (3)

In all its categories, the animal awakens an intricate web of correspondences in their highest degree of transparency. The poet will make them his own; surrendered to a state of metamorphosis the poet will establish with the animal, ‘in contrast with the scientist and his methods of enquiry based on plain descriptions of the animal’s physiology and his habits’ (4) a relationship animated by a dialectic between the unknown-marvellous-revealing that leads him to a new magic recreation. The poet will employ means of analogy and poetic imagination as a vehicle for translating his knowledge of the animal, from a perspective which would exalt, once again, the animal’s totemic and symbolic role. The animal has not lost its fabulous essence seen by travellers in past times, an essence confirmed by the tradition of the imaginary. Similarly, the image of the animal as an instructor and inductor of his wisdom has not disappeared. This role surfaces in indigenous cultures (‘…we have been here for thousands of years and long time ago the animals instructed us.’) (5) It is the modern and the contemporary man who has rid his spirit of the awareness of these phenomena that were traditionally consubstancial to him. The reestablishment of relationships based on the principle of the marvellous entails an attitude by which the faculties of the animal are to be recognized.

As an eagle over the forest, as a sheldrake on a female shelduck, the animal accelerates a reunion with the lost mythogenic consciousness of life. This will become the foundation stone in a construction of a bridge, the determination of which implies that the desire of Joseph Jablonski that one day man should know, again, how to identify the animal world as his totem, will begin to be fulfilled. In any case, such a provision does not cease to incite a form of reconduction towards that being (it remains to us to place and contemplate that day in our time). In this way, the end of the false fascination expressed in the condescending vision of the animal, a vision that predominates at the present time, would begin; the end of a vision that turns against him ‘the double stigma with which the modern man tries to defend his enslaved reason: the useful-the harmful.’ (6)

Neither a perverted action (appropriation, murder) nor an obscene one (the animal as entertainment for the masses, i.e. circuses, zoos, art exhibitions…) can lead, in spite of man, to a decimation of the animal. At the same time, no such actions can prevent us from seeing in the spiral of its forms of life a space of enchantment from which to reenchant what we vaguely take as the Human Condition.

As Mariano Auladén asserts, ‘…the animal is not property, it is a REVELATION. It is not a cultural object, but a CREATOR OF ACTS.’ Such manifestations will open for us the source of a true recovery of sensibility regarding the animal world. In their critical consideration, these manifestations proclaim the absence of awareness that the modern and contemporary man holds of the animal world. The repercussions of such an absence are omnipresent: man projects his base condition on the animal and extends it over the animate and inanimate continent of new references. To this attitude we, surrealists, would like to respond with a formula to convert the historical time that restricts it to a mythogenic time that would transcend it.

The creation of a Surrealist Bestiary corresponds to these ideas. As long as the surrealist thought will demand a mythogenic perspective of life, it will communicate an attitude of exaltation and recognition of the animal’s behaviour (way of life) and its own morphology from the view point of a dialectic of imagination that would transmutate it onto a totemic level.

The animal, a being whose existence is inseparable linked with a total sense of the marvellous, and whose majestic presence fabulously completes and presides the universe of the imaginary, contributes here to the realization of the immanent attraction that exists between the desire for a myth and its satisfaction. It offers to our sensitivity and knowledge an invitation in a way of challenge:

Let the flight of thousands hummingbirds create through the agitation
of their wings an equal number of air currents which will surround man
and erase him, return to him his absolute presence that would irreversible
identify him - this was for Marianne Van Hirtum already a practical condition -
with the perennial image of the Enchanter.


The Surrealist Group in Madrid
Madrid, 1993


Notes:

1. The Anteater’s Umbrella. A Contribution to the critique of the Ideology of Zoos, The Surrealist Group in Chicago, 1971.
2. Claude Levi-Strauss, La Pensée Sauvage
3. Mariano Auladén, “Quiyi-yi-yi-yi-yi-yi-yi-yi”, Luz Negra, Comunicación surrealista nº 2, Gijón, 1981, p 5.
4. Mariano Auladén, ibid.
5. Claude Levi-Strauss, ibid.
6. Mariano Auladén, ibid.

Inflated flounders revisited and multiplied

NN's question about the strange sea creatures he was dreaming about a while ago (inflated flounders?) seems to have got an answer with a piece of recent news from National Geographic. Now, does this mean that the acronym SOMS means Semi-solid Obese Marine Sentiences?

This might also be a good opportunity to point out to those that haven't noticed that the Icecrawler has increased its circle of sibling blogs. The terrestrial cephalopod cites the blob news too, and the Biografier åt okrossbara hälleflundror is named after the unbreakable halibuts. These two have a similar focus on poetic investigations, the one in english and the other in swedish. A third sibling, Kormorantrådet or The cormorant council, seems to be eventually switching to english for most of its dream geography enquiries.

THE SHIP OF FOOLS AND INFLATED FLOUNDERS

preface:
Stockholm surrealist group: polemics over dreams

Some of its members revisiting some questions of largely academic interest whether the surrealist atopos is closely related to Foucault's heterotopia, whether the latter is closely related to the ship of fools, whether Foucault's ship of fools is Breton's ship of fools, an interesting debate took place in the Stockholm surrealist group based on the interpretation of a dream each by a couple of members.

MF started out harshly with a dream about himself. "Now I am going to bore you with a rather dull and painful dream. The sadism of the act follows logically from its subject. Because: in a Stora Saltet issue I reread the other day, Niklas and I had each written a text about our own person. Bizarre, I thought. Immediately thereafter I ended up in an uncomfortable position in a written discussion with a significant person, where a long line of thought I developed was interpreted as if being about myself. I still haven't come up with a way to correct the misunderstanding, I overreact, I repeat to myself antipersonalistic ponderings, from reasonable ones like 'I don't exist, except as a relay station for associations' to highly doubtful such as 'The single common denominator of all the important events in my life is that there is one factor which could always be subtracted from the picture without chainging its meaning: myself'. And at night when I'm asleep that famous 'old man inside me' punishes me by bringing up the subject of my birthday, which is the annually recurring event when one is allowed, even in the most selfsacrificing duty ethics, or even supposed, to focus on one's own person.

/.../ I leave out the dream itself here, but when awakening I heard a ridiculous little glockenspiel tune being repeated over and over again (I often wake up to these repetitive audial hypnagogies); after a while I recognise it as John Cale´s 'Ship of fools'. Poor me. How I resent the sweetly witty, and how I prefer the harshly unreasonable, like yesterday, when I couldn't remember a single dream image but during my entire breakfast I had PJ Harvey's growling going on in my head 'I wanna bathe in milk!'"
NN quickly replied "Isn't the Ship of fools and the Milk bath the same method, that is idealistic selfpersuasion?", which may have made sense as strategies in the dream visavis the birthday setting and other complications, and cited Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj saying "The self is so self-confident that unless it is totally discouraged it will not give up. Mere verbal conviction is not enough. Hard facts alone can show the absolute nothingness of the self-image."


The next day or so, NN replied with a dream of his own. Only part of it is cited here: "A coherent sequence about some kind of marine creatures, obviously belonging to the same mythological family as the siren and the sea monk. They were intelligent, had their own language, and their appearance was almost spherical, with a narrow hindbody and tail like on an anglerfish or a flounder, and were sparsely pubescent on the head. They were called SOMS, which made me associate to SEAMONSTERS while the capital letters gave the impression of being an acronym. Somebody has a suggestion what SOMS might mean?"

MF went on about personal associations and film reminiscences, and made a serious attempt to understand the word, supposing it to be "of greek origin, as in chromosome, allosome, autosome, which all are derived from Soma = body. But it could also be from indoeuropean soma, a mythical drink giving much pleasure and knowledge, or from greek somnus (sleep), somnium (dream) or somphos (spongy, porous). But if an acronym I would guess an english-language one (english uses acronyms more); something so-to-speak sticking out its chin, like Sexualrepressed Obsession Matrixes? Sons of Mothers? Or, in order to avoid bad feelings, something descriptive and uncontroversial like Somnimarine Obese Monsters?" Then he went into stingy polemics against the apparent denial of the sensory concrete aspects of the milk bath in focusing on a symbolic aspect.

There came in some other suggestions as to what SOMS might mean, based on "Sound of Music" or "Swedish Oral Medicine Society", personal associations, google searches, or jokes; or all three.

Next morning, the phrase waking up MF was "HALIBUTS DON'T BREAK", connecting to the possible flounders of NN:s dream. An interpretation of the phrase was offered, which is of minor importance here.

NN duly thanked for the suggestions and associations. He went on to defend the symbolic interpretation by a general defense of psychoanalytical methodology. Then for a short time arguments got nasty, before a need was felt to displace the discussion into some more constructive efforts, where NN first offered a poem, claiming among other things that "sensuality six weeks a year/ is transformed into an ugly family just like others/ on the beach" where it "hands out icecream with slaps in the face and insights with intentions/ concretions with artifacts of nothingness/ abstractions with boiled potatoes and currant jelly". JE, sitting on the top of a canarian volcano studying the sun and reading Novalis' "Disciples in Sais" outlined a needed "archive of representations" by way of a mathematical series of operations between latent and manifest; an archive that would track the transformations between latent contents and manifest dreams and make them available for games. MF stubbornly felt he needed to specify why milkbathing is interesting considered as sensory experience and wrote en essay about it (to which JB reminded of a few significant aspects missed).

The surrealist bestiary

Ils sont des animaux...

Surrealist imagery is full of organisms, and it is quite obvious that animals make a certain type of particular sense to surrealist sensibility, for several reasons.
1) the marvellous abundancy and diversity of shapes, solutions, lifestyles, oddities, juxtapositions, exceptions in general in the animal kingdom;
2) the way very many animals are very easily subjected to empathy and experimental identifications, as well as easily interpreted as mere distorsions of whatever is human;
3) the way animals are among the everywhere available wonders of given reality, proffering poetic encounters to anyone with a poetic vigilance, especially when combined with a prelidection for walking alone and with somewhat oversensitive hearing, sight and smelling, traditional character traits shared by the poet and the naturalist;
4) the way other animals are related to ourselves but keep making other choices and arrangements, thus serving as reminders of the lack of basis for our own sense of superiority, and providing yet another field of real concrete experience supporting antihumanism;
5) the dynamic roles played by animals in traditional and popular mythologies, including various kinds of old and new folklore of various cultures, contemporary horror and quasiscientific lore, traditional hermetic imagery, etc
6) the sense in which animal diversity demonstrates the wonders possible within a scientific perspective, where pure astonishment and scientific rigor share interests, and especially so in the appreciation of the radically demystifying and antireligious dialectical-historical discipline of evolutionary biology and its fundament the darwinian theory of evolution.

But among humans, including surrealists, it is also quite obvious that some people are more interested in animals than others. And it became even clearer to me when doing a small study in the form of sweeping through my bookshelf for examples of animals in surrealist imagery. Many surrealists just love filling their works with animals and animal-like objects (Breton, Péret, Ernst, Miró, Carrington, Césaire, Lam, Molina, Gomez-Correa, Caceres, Cabanel, Morris, Le Toumelin, Camacho, Toyen, Lacomblez, Joans, Lamantia, West etc etc), some focusing on the concrete sensory experience of animals actually encountered, others on the fantastic character of various exotic animals encountered in books and films, still others on either vaguer (in terms of diagnostic characters) or just less known animalistic presences in the imagination. Others cite them less frequently but still as an important part of their coherent imagery (Desnos, Tzara, Eluard, Dominguez, Brauner, Magritte, Dalí, Mansour, Kahlo etc) - among those we obviously see a sensitivity towards the general surrealist aspects of animals but probably no particular interest. While some others cite remarkably few animals, usually in a very unspecific way ("bird" "fish" "insect" etc) and sometimes notably in a strangely nonsensuous way as if utilised as concepts or symbols rather than in their own right (Arp, Artaud, Char, Paz, Pellegrini, Chazal, Dotremont, Cobra painters) - this is sometimes bodies of work with some kind of a metaphysical focus sometimes corresponding with a lack of sensuous concretion on the whole, and sometimes bodies of work focusing on a more narrowly anthropocentric phenomenology. In a few of the classic surrealists I've seen no obvious references to animals whatsoever (Duchamp, Ray, Tanguy, Sage).
Indeed, animals always run the risk of being utlised as mere nonsensuous symbols (as in religious imagery including hermeticism, including Artaud) or as mere words or shapes without particular meaning in careless automatism (cf Arp with his limited set of word-matter elements, but also for example Franklin Rosemont, whose poems and collages abound with interchangeable animals).

If those latter directions are dismissed as not truly concerned with animals, we could make a temporary distinction between a few fundamental modes of animal fantasy; which I will call animalistic, zoological and field vigilance. The animalistic one is the one focusing on empathy with, alienation and horror before, and fantasies of transformations into, different lifeforms and particularly their wildness, freedom, fierceness, lack of reason - this type of fantasy often targets animals at hand (domestic mammals) or animals representing wildness in popular fantasy (very often the mammals of the african savannah). The other type, which I call zoological, is the more exotistic type of fantasy focusing on diversity of life forms, often covering the strangest possible kinds of animals and the most remote faunas, typically including the sea, the tropical rainforests and the "hidden worlds" of Australia, Madagascar etc. And finally as a third type of fantasy we may regard the simple field vigilance which makes anybody who is outdoors observe remarkable forms and behaviors in the animals surrounding us, of which birds and insects are usually the most conspicuous but all kinds of animals (whose geographical range, habitat choice, diurnal and annual rhythm and behavioral patterns the poet overlaps) may occur as strange encounters.

Much of surrealism's zoological iconography rests solidly on that of Lautréamont and of Lewis Carroll, and to a lesser extent on HP Lovecraft and hermetic philosophy, while also zoologists like Haeckel, Fabre, Darwin, Wallace, Lamarck, Buffon, Say, Linnaeus, Kinsey etc and visionary zoological amateurs such as Strindberg, Maeterlinck, Toussenel, Zötl, Dürer, Bosch etc have inspired many surrealists. Few active surrealists have been professional zoologists themselves (but many have been amateur naturalists) - it seems like the only surrealist dealing with a broad perspective of contemporary zoology (beside myself) has been Desmond Morris; at core a mammalologist and a popular scientist. But many surrealists have been, and are, active amateur naturalists, notably as birdwatchers (Barbaro, Camacho, Cowdell, Digby, Forshage, Hérold, Lamantia etc) or as entomologists (Buñuel, Caillois, Forshage, Starr, Tunnard). Other zoologists with notable and sometimes close relations to the surrealists have included Tom Harrisson, Jean Painlevé and Laurent Schwartz.

A few exposées of surrealist animals have been made before. Kurt Seligmann made a famous collage of "Les animaux surréalistes" reprinted in the Dictionnaire abrégée de Surréalisme 1938, Breton listed a certain number of animals as mythologically important for surrealism during the 40s, Ted Joans compiled a list of surrealist animals in his magazine Dies und Das 1984. All of these listed a small number of animals of particular totemic/mythological value within surrealism, and did not consider the width of the animal kingdom.

It should also be noted that a study such as this cannot give justice to those surrealist painters who invent a lot of animals (Ernst, Brauner, Lam, Carrington, le Toumelin, Morris, Miró, as well as the few animals of Matta, and those - if animals they are - of Tanguy) which are not obvious how to name or classify.

Provisionary conclusions:
it is the classical fierce animals, the classical damned/ evil/ dark animals, the near animals, the classical poetic animals, the hermetic animals and the famous wondrous/ exceptional/ fantastic animals, which most frequently occur in surrealism. Many of surrealism's totem animals clearly belong to several of these categories.

The few most common animals of all in surrealist imagery I'd like to divide into a general and a specific category. The general ones are those very common in human thinking, human language, human life in general, popular image and/or all kinds of poetry. The use surrealism has made of them may be particular but is not quite distinct from popular use. I was in fact a bit surprised to see that the animal perhaps most frequent in surrealism on the whole was the horse, which has never been acknowledged as something totemic for surrealism (but perhaps for a few of its pictorial artists specifically). Other such common animals common in surrealism are corals, snails, butterflies, elephants, lions, cats, wolves, eagles, parrots, owls and nightingales. The more specific ones are the elective affinities, the chosen totems, the selected oddities put to particular use within surrealism. Of those, the most common ones are the octopus, the mantis, the hippocampus, the salamander, the platypus, the anteater, the black swan and the ibis (several others are traditionally recognised as surrealist totems but just not as widespread).

A list of other animals that are frequent in surrealist imagery could include: jellyfish, mussle, centipede, lobster, spider, scorpion, dragonfly, locust, scarab, glowworm, fly, starfish, sea urchin, shark, moray, turtle, kangaroo, sloth, mole, bat, lemur, dog, polar bear, donkey, rhinoceros, pig, deer, giraffe, chamaeleon, iguana, boa, cobra, crocodile, dinosaur, peacock, pelican, cormorant, pigeon, nightjar, bird of paradise, raven, etc etc.

Those occasionally singled out, or still unused but with a big potential according to the parameters discussed, will make up a huge set and include more or less most animals, and the list where I've been collecting such information for this minor study has some 600 different animals. Its voluminous and eternally unfinished nature makes it perhaps less suitable for public view.

Mattias Forshage

(Triops, an enigmatic creature in english called a tadpole shrimp, though not really a shrimp but belonging to an ancient group of weird crustaceans, not having changed their appearance for more than 200 million years)

Surrealism is a shrimp

(third part of a pentaptych (or hexaptych?) of not-very-exciting technical texts, the series of notes as prerequisits for autosurrealismography – see also The process of defining surrealism and What about surrealismologists?)

We don’t need a definition of surrealism. We need surrealist activity and surrealist sensibility. And within that, we will now and then stumble upon practical and theoretical problems which will make it interesting for us to think about the meaning, the logical and ontological status of surrealism, and the mechanisms by which it is detached from other concepts, by which it creates itself staying separate but making alliances and partial confluations with other currents, movements and perspectives, et cetera.

Some basic semantics: the surrealist tradition

Surrealism is a movement, a tradition, an activity, a sensibility and a point of identity. It is not a style, a doctrine, a religion, a theory and an institution. Of these different aspects, these different ways it is meaningful to talk about surrealism, the surrealist tradition seems to be the logically central as all the others gain their meaning from it. For different people, in different situations, other aspects might seem more central or even more fundamental, but it is also by way of the surrealist tradition that surrealism gets a content that makes it possible to make objective correlates. For example, the surrealist movement is surrealist, can recognise itself as surrealist, and can meaningfully claim to be surrealist, only inasmuch as it rests on the surrealist tradition, and also its innovations, novelties and deviations only make sense inasmuch as they take the surrealist tradition to new areas and new combinations.

Then, the surrealist tradition is the part worth taking a closer look at. It is mostly a continously disenveloping investigation and creative expression of a field of investigation and creativity; a rhetoric, a sprit, a vague methodology, a particular hope, connecting with each other a growing set of classic themes, classic aims descriptions and classic techniques. The tradition is the volontary historical continuity of these investigations, a freely chosen and mythical social community spinning over many decades and countries accumulating experience in this field. As soon as we place ourselves in this tradition, we become comrades with the earlier explorers, and their results become ours.

Thus, the core meaning of surrealism is dynamically and intrinsically tied to the developments and activities of the surrealist movement. We do find surrealism outside it, and long before it, but it is only in the light of the ongoing activities that these various elements get their surrealist meaning. The adhesion of such elements to the surrealist tradition is a part of surrealist activity. The tradition and the activity do not exist without each other. Schuster’s famous idea of the distinction between eternal surrealism and historical surrealism makes no sense and is just a piece of really bad metaphysics; this has been pointed out before but is worth repeating.

Some boring semantics: the surrealist adjective

There is a surrealist identity. Different criteria can be applied to who is a surrealist. The most common criteria is either or a combination of three: subjective surrealism (who regards himself/herself as a surrealist, preferrably based on adequate knowledge of the surrealist tradition), objective active surrealism (who pursues a surrealist activity, in everyday life investigations and subversions, in thinking, writing, painting, playing etc, preferrably in several of these), objective formal surrealism (who is involved in the surrealist movement by participating in a group or in network collaborations, in discussions, journals, exhibitions, anthologies, declarations from within the surrealist movement, preferrably actively and by own choice). These criteria all make sense by way of the surrealist tradition.

The subjective and the objective formal criteria are very straightforward to apply, even though the circumscriptions will have to be specified for the particular purposes wherever the question is asked. But the objective active criterion is more fundamentally problematic. What activity do we regard as surrealist if not a subjective surrealist identification or an association with the surrealist movement is there to highlight it?

On an intuitive level this is still fairly easy, and we might explicate it as those activities which are in line with the overall aims and some of the particular methodological characteristics and some of the thematic focuses that are part of the surrealist tradition. Again it is the surrealist tradition which decides. In this sense, it is also fully comprehensible and makes sense to speak about not only the surrealist painters and surrealist poets but also their surrealist paintings and surrealist poems. Single works merit the adjective by their being congenial with the surrealist tradition, often but not necessarily also inspired by and in turn inspiring that perspective. It does not have to be more difficult than that.

(Some people are eager to make it more difficult. A particular strand of surrealists like to modestly repeat that “we probably don’t really live up to surrealism”. Michael Richardson recently in a personal communication gave this a more coherent explication, claiming that surrealism must not be conceived as something attainable, and specifically that no works can be surrealist films, surrealist paintings or surrealist poems, because surrealist work is “’the annihilation of being into a jewel that is neither of ice nor fire’, lies beyond life and death and therefore cannot exist in this realm of existence”. This perspective does have some appeal, but it is not consistent with the traditional usage within the surrealist movement (and indeed, would force the the movement to rename itself as the “movement for surrealism” instead?) and mostly it will just create unnecessary difficulties.)

Because of course we keep forcefully denouncing that there could be any stylistic or doctrinal criteria from which to judge whether things are surrealist or not. Let us not be obstinate, there are stylistic and doctrinal elements in the surrealist tradition, yes there are, but none that are homogenous, straightforwardly applicable, nor very interesting. A certain style which we associate with surrealism, or a certain opinion we regard as central to surrealism, may serve to initially awaken our interest when we see it elsewhere, but we would certainly not regard it as part of surrealism unless we also found a meaningful creative relationship with other and more general concerns within the surrealist tradition.

Some ludic semantics: the surrealist shrimp

As the meaning of surrealism rests in the surrealist tradition which is continually actualised and partly revised in the surrealist movement, it is quite obvious that one of the things we can do with it is to play with it. As we have learnt from this tradition itself, play is an easy, difficult, joyful and instructive way of opening new perspectives and leaving behind ones own petty prejudices. Similar to how experimental identifications of the self in play and in poetry is far more interesting than the self which is analytically or spontaneously-defensively constructed; identifications of surrealism which appear in surrealist games, in poetry, in playful improvisations which are part of alliances and collaborations, will produce numbers of suggestions which can gain further meaning when they are confronted with each other, or pondered upon, or transferred into new media, and thus incorporated into the elements of a mythology in becoming. “Surrealism is a secret society, which will initiate you into death” Oh yeah? Well how is this going to happen?

A couple of years ago, the Stockholm surrealist group were fond of a game we invented that we called “the objectification of morals”. It was a simple analogy game where we found concrete objects as correlates to abstract concepts. We chose an abstract concept, each player suggested one sensory characteristic associated with the concept, and from the constellation of adjectives we kept discussing until we found an object that embodied all these sensory characteristics. The first succesful round was doing this with the seven deadly sins, which we sent as a somehow contribution to the surrealist exhibition in Plzen 1999. Once, we tried with Surrealism. I don’t remember now what the actual sensory adjectives were, (like, hmm, wet, calcareous-hard, quick, submarine, itching? this is obviously just a pedagogic later rationalisation) but it was very easy to realise that what we had all converged in a shrimp.

MF

"...and his own morphological reverbations..." (painting by Niklas Nenzen)

Animal Walks

One of the games suggested in this years London International Festival of Surrealism (16-29.vii.2007) (the festival before and after and who were the participants) was called “Animal Farm” (rules were simples: pick a random animal and identify with it when taking a walk) and had some appeal to the Stockholm group, but first a good dose of critical remarks on the analytical difficulties…

The major difficulty of doing the animal walk with a zoologist in the group is the part of randomly picking an animal. What is random in this connection? The suggested method of picking one at random from a book relies heavily on what kind of book it is, and most popular books will be subject to the same particular bias as most people’s intuitive choices. Other books will be subject to other biases.

First of all, being mammals and genetically programmed to react empathically to things resembling possible mates and/or possible offspring, and having a strong tendency for complacency, narrowmindedness and chauvinism, most people display a strong mammal-chauvinistic bias, preferring middlesized more or less furry things with large eyes. Childhood programming by toys, popular science and TV entertainment (and usually very little by direct personal experience) make us imagine most ”typical animals” as belonging to either of two categories: domestic animals of farms, and wildlife of (african-indian) savannah (this may be slightly different in other parts of the world and even more in other generations). A few birds and perhaps an occasional reptile will come along with the mammal lot there. But in many everyday language situations, many people actually use the word animal as synonymous with mammal, as in the phrase ”animals and birds”. If pressed such people would probably see two different meanings of the word, animals sensu lato and animals sensu stricto, because otherwise it is a bit difficult to conceive what would be the more inclusive term for the whole animal kingdom – creatures? beasts?

Thus, for people without a well-developed zoological imagination or zoological education, picking an animal by random from a book or from one’s own mind will probably conform to this bias.

Systematic attempts of picking a random animal would have to be based on some assession of animal diversity. Potentially there is an infinite number of ways of doing this, but the ones readily available are species diversity or phylogenetic diversity.

If random picking an animal is based on an assessment of overall diversity of animals in terms of species numbers; then almost all animals are insects. There are some significant portions of crustaceans, arachnids, molluscs and (admittedly) vertebrates too (predominantly fish though) and all other groups are close to zero fractions. This will produce a species diversity bias, which thus is strongly in favor of entomological choices.

It is notable that one readily available chance method, that of picking an animal by closing one’s eyes and then opening them and picking the first animal seen will, unless it becomes a human (many people will not count humans as animals) or unless the person has poor eyesight, most probably result in an insect.

But the other option in assessing overall animal diversity is the systematists way of imagining the animal kingdom in the representation of a phylogenetic tree showing out hypothesis of the evolution of the group. In this way, an extremely species-rich lineage such as insects, and an extremely subjectively important lineage such as mammals, will only be individual lineages among large numbers of others. As this perspective tends to give dominance to lineages that have been separate for long times, it sees an animal kingdom strongly dominated by (often species-poor groups of) marine invertebrates, usually more or less wormlike. This is a phylogenetic diversity bias.

With the zoologist in the group being a systematist, there was no option but to base the selection on the phylogenetic diversity bias prespective. Starting from a random point picked in a strongly schematic tree of the animal kingdom, each player described an imagined walk with left and right turns, back and forth movements, occasional leaps, etc, which were followed by someone else on a more detailed tree of the particular region in the tree. So it was simply a blind walk in a labyrinth, the topology of the labyrinth being a phylogenetic tree. Whenever the persons walk led to a terminal in the tree, and the person did not retreat from there, the animal represented by that terminal was the result.

In this way, EL became a crinoid (sea lily, featherstar, ”hair-star”, including the medusahead, gorgonhead etc) – marine echinoderms, easy to imagine as starfish with long and strongly branched arms, often stalked and sessile, otherwise slowly crawling on the ocean floor. A crinoid had played an interesting part in a dream by MF involved in the collective ”moon novel” project where it was mythologised into the character of the ”evolutionary runneress”.

KF became a shark. The night before he had been telling an anecdote of meeting potentially threatful reef sharks while scuba diving in Belize.

EB became a centipede, in popular culture (like in Burroughs’ Naked Lunch) usually represented by large scolopenders, extremely swift and venomous predators, sometimes with phosphorescent colors and sometimes with poisionous cuticular exudates substantiating the ghost stories of people getting bad rashes when scolopender had been running over their body at night.

JE became a nemertine, a ribbon worm, a very common group of marine slimy, flat, simultaneously extremely fragile and extremely flexible worms, one species being able to stretch out to 30 m length.

MF became a siphonophoran, a ”state medusa”, one of Ernst Haeckel’s favorite animals (in Kunstformen der Natur and elsewhere), a kind of jellyfish made up by a large colony of hydroids showing spectacular degree of specialisation into ”swimming persons”, ”prey-catching persons” (with the nettle cells), ”sex persons” etc, often producing a gas-filled sailing bladder (for example the famous portugese manowar, probably the most famous but certainly not the most spectacular siphonophoran).

If someone would have ended up with an animal that didn’t make sense to them even after having learnt about it, it would have been considered a false hit and the process repeated, but as it were everybody felt quite happy with their results which all seemed very significant.

Now this was only the first step of the game and the point was to take a walk as that animal, and see what alterations and novelties it suggested in sensory input, body awareness, social relations etc. So the rest is up to the different participants.

MF