Supposing one could cut into the poetic thought of these times, one would discover that its roots reach deeply into the id, which is to the human mind what the geological stratum is to the plant. It is in the id that mnemonic traces, the residue of innumerable former existences, are deposited. Automatism is nothing more than the penetration and dissolution techniques that the mind uses to delve into this soil, nothing more than the counterpart of the mechanical action by which vegetable roots manage to push aside stones and break down hard strata. The ego, differentiated from the id in that it is forced to suffer the influence of the outside world, is charged with transforming sexual libido accumulated in that same id: we know that it can do this only by overcoming the Oedipus complex and the constitutional bisexuality of the individual. The superego, which presides over this latter operation, can be likened to the layer of humus that covers the soil after the leaves have fallen and that catalyses the earth’s fertilizing elements. As we have seen, humour, in the sense we mean it here, would constitute a latent means of sublimation: it represents the possibility of landing softly, of resting on the humus that the plant uses to restore, to the benefit of all others, its own vital energy when this energy has been seriously depleted.
How I loved, as a child, effortlessly pulling from the forest’s spongy carpet the light shoots of the chestnut tree, only a few inches high, at whose base the chestnut shone with a glow of antique furniture – the chestnut conserving all its presence and already bearing concrete witness to its power of green hands, shadow, white or pink airborne pyramids, dances … and of future chestnuts that, beneath young sprouts, other children will discover in wonder, stretching into infinity! It’s in this perspective that Arp’s work is uniquely situated. He is par excellence the one who could make the cut mentioned above. All his poetry – whether visual or verbal – seems inclined to sensitize us to the partly aerial, largely subterranean world that the mind, like the plant, explores by means of feelers. Every morning he would sit down and make the same drawing in order to discover its variations: he composed it using pieces of cardboard that he would cut out, colour, shake, and paste down once they had stopped moving (objects assembled following the law of chance). In his innermost self, he entered into the secret of that germinative life in which the tiniest detail is of utmost importance, but in which any distinction between elements loses its value, thereby introducing a permanent, under-rock-bed humour of the most peculiar kind. ‘The air is a root. The stones are filled with entrails. Bravo, bravo. The stones are branches of water. On the stone that replaces the mouth a fishbone-leaf grows. Bravo. The stones are tormented like flesh. The stones are clouds … Bravo. Bravo.’
Summoned to the German consulate in Zurich during the last war, Arp, who admitted to feeling rather nervous, stopped to make the sign of the cross before the portrait of Hindenburg. Some time later, asked by a psychiatrist to write down his date of birth, he repeated it all the way to the bottom of the page, at which point he drew a line and, without worrying too much about the accuracy of his addition, presented a sum of several figures.
BIBLIOGRAPHY: Le Siège de l’air (poems), 1915–1945.
BIBLIOGRAPHY IN ENGLISH: On My Way: Poetry and Essays. Arp on Arp (selections).
the elephant is in love with the millimeter
the snail is proud
beneath its golden hat
its leather is calm
with its tallow laugh
it carries its gelatin rifle
the eagle has gestures of alleged void
its udder is swollen with lightning
the lion wears a moustache
in pure flamboyant gothic
and pale and purged slippers
like a neo-soldier
after a lunar defeat
the crayfish climbs down from the mast
exchanges its cane for a rod
and with its stick it climbs back up
the tree trunk
the fly with a snoring gaze
sets its nose down on a fountain
the cow takes the parchment road
which vanishes in a volume of flesh
each hair of this volume
has an enormous volume
the serpent jerks itchingly and itchingly
around washbasins of love
filled with arrow-pierced hearts
when a butterfly is stuffed
it becomes a buttered stufferby
the buttered stufferby
becomes a salt-buttered stufferby
the nightingale a brother to the sphinx
waters stomachs hearts brains guts
that is to say lilies roses marigolds lilacs
the flea carries its right foot
behind its left ear
and its left hand
in its right hand
and jumps on its left foot
over its right ear
(translated by Joachim Neugroschel)