You just go on your nerve.
—FRANK O’HARA
In India, I remember reading as a child, there once lived people who were called Sciapodes. They had a single large foot on which they moved with great speed and which they also employed as an umbrella against the burning sun. The rest of their marvelous lives was up to the reader to imagine. The book was full of such creatures. I kept turning its pages, reading the brief descriptions and carefully examining the drawings. There was Cerberus, the dog with three heads, the Centaur, the Chinese Dragon, the Manticore, which has the face of a man, the body of a lion, and a tail like the sting of a scorpion, and many other wonders. They resembled, I realized years later, the creations of Cadavre Exquis, the surrealist game of chance. I was also reminded of Max Ernst’s surrealist novels in collage where bird wings sprout from people’s backs and rooster-headed men carry off naked women.
The history of these fabulous beings is dateless. They are found in the oldest mythologies and in all cultures. Their origins vary. Some are very probably symbolic representations of theological ideas by long-forgotten sects and alchemist schools for whom the marriage of opposite elements was the guiding idea. Others, I’d like to believe, are the products of sheer fantasy, the liar’s art, and our fascination with the grotesque image of the body. In both cases, they are the earliest instances of the collage aesthetic. Mythological zoos testify to our curiosity about the outcome of the sexual embrace of different species. They are the earliest examples of the collaboration of dream and intellect for the sake of putting appearances into doubt.
Were these visual oxymorons of ancient bestiaries first imagined and then drawn, or was it the other way around? Did one start drawing a head and the hand took off on its own, as it does in automatic writing? It’s possible, although I don’t have a lot of faith in automatic writing, with its aping of mediums and their trances. All my attempts at opening the floodgates of my psyche were unimpressive. “You need a certain state of vacancy for the marvelous to condescend to visit you,” said Benjamin Péret. Very well and thanks for the advice, but I have my doubts. The reputation of the unconscious as the endless source of poetry is over-rated. The first rule for a poet must be, cheat on your unconscious and your dreams.
It was Octavio Paz, I believe, who told me the story about going to visit André Breton in Paris after the War. He was admitted and told to wait because the poet was engaged. Indeed, from the living room where he was seated, he could see Breton writing furiously in his study. After a while he came out, and they greeted each other and set out to have lunch in a nearby restaurant.
“What were you working on, maître?” Paz inquired as they were strolling to their destination.
“I was doing some automatic writing,” Breton replied.
“But,” Paz exclaimed in astonishment, “I saw you erase repeatedly!”
“It wasn’t automatic enough,” Breton assured the young poet.
I must admit to being shocked, too, when I heard the story. I thought I was the only one who did that. There have always been two opposite and contradictory approaches to chance operations. In the first, one devises systems to take words at random out of a dictionary or writes poems with scissors, old newspapers, and paste. The words found in either manner are not tampered with. The poem is truly the product of blind chance. All mechanical chance operations, from Dada’s picking words out of a hat to the compositions of John Cage and the poems of Jackson Mac Low, work something like that. There is no cheating. These people are as honest and as scrupulous as the practitioners of photo-realism. I mean, they are both suspicious of the imagination. They handle chance with a Buddhist’s disinterestedness of mind and do not allow it to be contaminated by the impurities of desire.
My entire practice, on the other hand, consists of submitting to chance only to cheat on it. I agree with Vicente Huidobro who said long ago: “Chance is fine when you’re dealt five aces or at least four queens. Otherwise, forget it.” I, for example, may pull a book from my bookshelf and, opening it anywhere, take out a word or a phrase. Then, to find another bit of language to go along with my first find, I may grab another book or peek into one of my notebooks and get something like this:
he rips some papers
forest
whispers
telephone book
a child’s heart
the mouse has a nest
concert piano
lost innocence
my mother’s mourning dress
Once the words are on the page, however, I let them play off each other. In the house of correction called sense, where language and art serve their sentences, the words are making whoopee.
Innocence
Someone rips a telephone book in half.
The mouse has a nest in a concert piano.
In a forest of whispers,
A child’s heart,
The mother’s mourning dress.
This is more interesting. I’m beginning to feel that there are real possibilities here. To see what comes next, I’ll call on chance for help again. My premise in this activity is that the poet finds poetry in what comes by accident. It’s a complete revision of what we usually mean by creativity.
Twenty years ago, James Tate and I collaborated on some poems in the following manner: We’d take a word or a phrase and then we’d turn ourselves into a “pinball machine of associations,” as Paul Auster would say. For example, the word “match” and the word “jail” would become “matchstick jail.” At some point we’d stop and see what we had. We’d even do a bit of literary analysis. We’d revise, free-associate again, and watch an unknown poem begin to take shape. At some moments we felt as if we were one person; at others, one of us was the inspired poet and the other the cold-blooded critic.
Russell Edson, who with James Tate and John Ashbery is one of our greatest believers in lucky finds, says, “This kind of creation needs to be done as rapidly as possible. Any hesitation causes it to lose its believability, its special reality.” I have the same experience. One doesn’t come up with phrases like Tate’s “the wheelchair butterfly” or Bill Knott’s “razorblade choir” by way of a leisurely Cartesian meditation. They are as much a surprise to the poet as they will be to the future reader.
I open myself to chance in order to invite the unknown. I’m not sure whether it’s fate or chance that dogs me, but something does. I’m like a reader of tea leaves in that store on the corner. In Madame Esmeralda’s metaphysics, there is a recognition scene, too. Clairvoyants believe that there are lucky days, moments when one’s divinatory abilities are especially acute. Today, one says to oneself, I’m the waking dream, the source of the magical river! I see the hand that guides fate. The miraculous thing is that the tea leaves and the poem always end up by resembling me. Here is a near-portrait, the story of my life, and I’ve no idea how they got there.
If you worship in the Church of Art with a Message, stay away. Chance operations make trouble, promote ambiguity, spit on dogmatism of any kind. Everything from our ideas of identity to our ideas of cause and effect are cheerfully undermined. Surrealist games are the greatest blasphemy yet conceived by the arts against the arts. In them, the disordering of the senses is given ontological status. Chance brings a funhouse mirror to reality. They used to burn people at the stake for far less.
There has never been a poet who didn’t believe in a stroke of luck. What is an occasional poem but a quick convergence of unforeseen bits of language? That’s what Catullus and Frank O’Hara are all about. Only literary critics do not know that poems mostly write themselves. Metaphors and similes owe everything to chance. A poet cannot will a memorable comparison. These things just pop into somebody’s head. In the past one thanked the gods or the Muse for it, but all along chance has been passing out freebies. Pierce claimed that only by granting the occurrence of chance events can one account for the diversity of the universe. The same is true of art and literature.
How does one recognize that blind accident has given one poetry? This is what puzzles me. What is it that guides the eye or the ear to accept what appears at first ugly or nonsensical? One says to oneself many times while writing, what I have here I do not understand at all, but I’m going to keep it no matter what.
Painter of doll faces
Here’s a window where my soul
Used to peek out at night
At the quickly improvised gallows
If there’s no such thing as an aesthetic sense, how does one pick and choose among the various products of chance and decide some are worthless and some are not? Obviously, the history of modern art and literature has accustomed the eye and ear to the unexpected. We are happy, or so we believe, to reorient our vision, to accept any outrage. Is it still our old fascination with freak shows that drives us, or are formal aesthetic considerations just as important?
No doubt both. Successful chance operations stress the ambiguous origin and complex nature of any work of art or literature. The art object is always a collaboration of will and chance, but like our sense of humor, it eludes analysis. There has never been an adequate definition of why something is funny or why something is beautiful, and yet we often laugh and make poems and paintings that reassemble reality in new and unpredictably pleasing ways.
What shocks us more in the end, what we see or what we hear? Is the ear more avant-garde or the eye? Surrealist art has found more admirers than surrealist poetry, so it must be the eye. It’s the new image that both painters and poets have dreamed of in this century, an image that would be ahead of our ideas and our desires, an image magnificent in its shock and its irreverence. Perhaps some new Temptation of Saint Anthony, in which the holy martyr praying in the desert would be surrounded by the rioting menagerie of exquisite corpses instead of traditional demons?
Surrealists intuited that the creation of the world is not yet finished. The Chaos spoken of in ancient creation myths has not said its last word. Chance continues to be one of the manifestations of cosmic mystery. The other one is mathematics. We are crucified in awe between freedom and necessity. The future is the forever unfolding game of Cadavre Exquis.
In the meantime, like the song says, “I’ve got my mojo working.”
____________
Written in 1993 for an exhibition at the Drawing Center in New York City called The Return of Cadavre Exquis.