Revolution in Dreamtime
Just before six o'clock in the morning, the old man leant his bicycle carefully against the wall. Not expecting satisfaction from life, he never found any and was always in a bad mood. If the bicycle fell it would make matters worse. A steady cold drizzle had been coming down for hours. He scanned the street for number seventy-one. He knew exactly where it was but he looked anyway. He did it every day. The quotidian bicycle trip halfway across Paris at an hour when it was more natural to sleep, only further exacerbated his grumpiness. All this was for one client who consistently underpaid him—a young woman who lacked the self-discipline to wake herself up in the morning.
He pulled his tricorn hat firmly down on his wig and unstrapped the bell. He stood outside number seventy-one and raised his arm. The three leopards inside the room had awoken at his approach, and at the first peal sprang from the bed and rushed snarling to the door. Sophia lay awake, feeling the coldness of the room on her face. She cooed to the leopards to calm them but they paid her no attention. The bell was ringing incessantly like knives in her ears. Finally, she propped herself up on one elbow and yelled out:
“All right, all right, I’m awake now. Can you please be quiet and go away!”
There were three more clangs, some clinking and then silence.
No bald Samoan strongman would ever arrive on hot summer nights to stand at the foot of her bed and cool her, his hefty arms cranking a large steel fan, which might squeak once in the same place at every revolution. There were no leopards, nor a bell ringer.
These were all phantasmagoria—just exercises of the imagination, which must be worked like a muscle for the world to blossom.
She slipped out of bed and pulled on a dress. She heated some water in a saucepan and poured it into the sink, quickly scooping it up by hand and washing the night from her face. She straightened her head and looked at herself in the blotchy mirror, then she darkened her eyebrows with charcoal.
Outside in the street, it was cold and damp. The fine wind-driven rain needled her exposed flesh. It was a foul day but it didn’t bother her, as she was alive with inspiration, distracted by the excitement she always felt when about to start something new. She was headed to the studio she shared with Alphonse, and to the blank canvas awaiting her.
She would stop for coffee and a brioche on the way but first she would visit The Bureau, on the Rue de Grenelle. It was on her instigation that this establishment boasted a lectern with eagle-clawed feet and a giant blank tome—an oneiric catalogue available to anyone who wished to gaze at the invisible, or to contribute. She would map the subconscious. Sometimes she read, sometimes she wrote. She checked on it often.
Today she would write. She hauled up the chain with pencil attached.
“I am living in a large modern house. I wake up in the middle of the night and come downstairs to find that I have many more dogs than I previously imagined. Five or six of them are outside the glass door, harrying an animal that looks like a badger. On closer inspection, I see that the badger is in fact a very small, thin man, dressed in nothing but a loin cloth, who desperately wants to come inside. I begin to open the door and he attempts to get through, but I suspect his motives and close it again abruptly, trapping his head between door and frame. Then I take pity on him and open it again. He rushes in. He is begging me for something but I am not sure if I can trust him, so I pick him up and hang him from a hook on a coatrack. As soon as he finds himself hanging up there, he says he has changed his mind and wants to leave. I take him down and let him out of the front door. He runs off into the night.”
She let the pencil fall and bounce on its tether. Breton’s idea of creating a new reality was very appealing. It promised freedom from that drab, turning wheel of servitude and disenchantment which constituted life for most people, a life of suffering and hopelessness. She admired Breton for what he had set out to do. As far as she was concerned it had all started with Dada. That was when the first cracks had begun to appear in the shell of consciousness. She had recognized it at the time and made sure she was a part of it, running off to Zurich and making an army of puppets, while the armies of Europe were destroying themselves in the trenches. Then it had all burst apart and, as the description went, rained down its spores on to a bed of fungus, from which sprouted Surrealism where she now found herself. It had provided a purpose—a direction that was no direction, a kind of rippling perfection. She was unable to differentiate her excitement about her place in the world from the picture she was about to paint. There was no need. They were the same thing.
The purists believed that artists should have no conscious engagement with what they produced. They were quite strident and vocal about it. Anything that had been consciously created was worthless. She disagreed with them. Such opinions seemed to her just another set of rules. Fundamentalism was unattractive in any guise. She would not be shackled. Thinking about what she was going to do before she did it, allowed her to focus her energies and put her in a place where something could bubble up through her, akin to the Pythia at the Delphic Oracle. Probably none of these purists created as autonomously as they would have people believe anyway.
Her mind, which seemed to have a mind of its own and was never quiet when she walked, took a momentary breath when she stepped onto the Pont Neuf—the old bridge, each arch an eyebrow. Crossing it was a symbolic act. All bridges were symbols and all symbols were bridges. That was symmetry. The studio was getting closer. The Métro would have been quicker but to reach a destination in the shortest time possible was never an important objective for her, and she wanted to walk. She would stop for coffee when she had passed the island where Jacques de Molay had been burned.
Often the shapes and movements of clouds would stimulate her imagination and she looked up to the sky. There were no discernible clouds, just an homogenous field of grey, so she looked down into a puddle of rainwater. Then she realized that she would paint a portrait. In her faint reflection she envisioned a Turkish man.
As a flake of stale brioche softened in her black coffee, the painting began to form. He stood in front of a large disc, his feet cropped by the edge of the canvas. A cavalry sabre hung from his right hip. He wore a blue uniform in the Napoleonic style. Two epaulettes perched on his shoulders, twin sunsets over a decaying empire, with greasy yellow, threadbare tassels. He had a narrow black moustache and a scarred face. He was most likely a survivor of smallpox. There was also a thin scar on his cheek that he might have received in a duel. He wore a fez.
Though her compositional technique did not conform to the automatism of those purists, she was finding her own way to the same place. The point where opposites were unified, that Hegelian idea Breton was always going on about, a kind of poetic explosion that would release enough force to sunder reality.
Breton had invited her into the group when they first met at a restaurant, and had instantly given her a title—Surrealist in the All-at-Once. She liked its metaphorical significance and the way it sounded. It felt good to be accepted. He wasn’t known to be so welcoming and she suspected that the fact that she had arrived at the restaurant completely naked might have had something to do with it. None of them could resist uninhibited nubility. Despite their brilliance and open-mindedness they still exhibited certain masculine clichés, of which they did not seem to be aware. That was part of the problem. So be it. They certainly did not appreciate crones, except perhaps, Devereux.
Her hand reached for the doorknob of the studio, when she heard Alphonse talking and then a staccato reply. It could only be Nudreski. She had not seen him for months. He had been in Mexico recuperating from a surfeit of opium and alcohol. He must have just returned. Nudreski was the son of a tsarist diplomat. His mother had died in childbirth and his father had been mostly absent, posted overseas. He was brought up by wet-nurses, governesses, servants and tutors, until at the age of eighteen he had burst into St. Petersburg and never returned. As his allowance dwindled from a trickle to a drip, his life devolved into gonorrhoea and jars of laudanum. He was left with nothing but a profound hatred of everything. That’s the way he told it, though you had to take whatever he said with a pinch of salt.
When she entered, he was staggering back from Alphonse's paintings with a half-drunk bottle of wine in his hand.
“Shit. Pure shit.” He turned as he heard her in the doorway.
Nudreski had pushed hedonism over the crest of pleasure, but still had a physical vigour surprising in someone so debauched. She thought his body must be held together by the force of his personality alone.
"Anyone can paint."
He let the monocle drop from his eye.
"Only the bourgeoisie make a religion out of it.”
When she was younger she might have been interested in a man like him—for his extremism, his drunkenness or his cultured nihilism. Now she saw him as a parasite, preying on artists younger than himself, doing the rounds, getting handouts and insulting the people who helped him, just managing to survive on a reputation that perhaps had always been false and was definitely worn thin, and he was only getting worse. He was excruciating. An encounter with him was like a meeting with death.
She went to Alphonse’s aid.
"Most artists and revolutionaries come from the bourgeoisie. They are the only ones with the education and the time."
Nudreski violently swung his head and turned his combative attention to her.
"They’re animals. All of them. Dogs, monkeys and parrots. Take your pick."
That kind of senseless denigration of animals infuriated her. What made humans assume they weren’t animals? And what kind of animal was he? But there was no point getting drawn in.
Meanwhile Nudreski had turned back to Alphonse and was swigging more wine.
"Artifice!"
He waved the bottle at a painting Alphonse had been working on.
"There are people in prison for less than this."
Alphonse stood by, somber and silent. Nudreski continued unabashed.
"If you have the gall to create art, then at least make fetishes. No pretense there, just blood, bone and shit. And maybe some feathers."
He finished off the bottle and hurled it through the window, shattering the pane. Alphonse seemed suddenly to inflate.
"Get out!"
It felt as if Nudreski had taken all the oxygen with him when he left. They stood in a vacuum, her inspiration had withered and Alphonse looked depressed.
“I don’t know why I keep letting him in here. I feel like putting my feet through these paintings.”
"I know. He’s suffocating”
"Maybe he has a function in the bigger scheme of things. A negative function. He’s a tonic for self-delusion. It makes me wonder what I’m doing. You know... the surrealists won’t let me in. Not that I want them to. But rejection is rejection.”
“It’s all politics. Don’t let it it bring you down. You’re from Brittany. There's your way in. Let's go out and eat something. I’m going to see Josephine Baker later. She’s at the Casino de Paris. After that I'm going to a performance by Devereux at his new place. Why don’t you come with me?”
Alphonse was somewhere else. He remembered those eyes staring down into his, just after dawn. One brown, one green. If there was such a thing as fate, it had a bitter taste. He would have liked to go with her but there was something else he had to do.
Slivers of glass lay on the windowsill, and on the floor below it. The violence was still present.
"No, you go. I'll stay here and clean up."
© Tom Newton 2020
This is an excerpt from the novella Revolution in Dreamtime by Tom Newton (to be published by Recital Publishing 2021).
Just before six o'clock in the morning, the old man leant his bicycle carefully against the wall. Not expecting satisfaction from life, he never found any and was always in a bad mood. If the bicycle fell it would make matters worse. A steady cold drizzle had been coming down for hours. He scanned the street for number seventy-one. He knew exactly where it was but he looked anyway. He did it every day. The quotidian bicycle trip halfway across Paris at an hour when it was more natural to sleep, only further exacerbated his grumpiness. All this was for one client who consistently underpaid him—a young woman who lacked the self-discipline to wake herself up in the morning.
He pulled his tricorn hat firmly down on his wig and unstrapped the bell. He stood outside number seventy-one and raised his arm. The three leopards inside the room had awoken at his approach, and at the first peal sprang from the bed and rushed snarling to the door. Sophia lay awake, feeling the coldness of the room on her face. She cooed to the leopards to calm them but they paid her no attention. The bell was ringing incessantly like knives in her ears. Finally, she propped herself up on one elbow and yelled out:
“All right, all right, I’m awake now. Can you please be quiet and go away!”
There were three more clangs, some clinking and then silence.
No bald Samoan strongman would ever arrive on hot summer nights to stand at the foot of her bed and cool her, his hefty arms cranking a large steel fan, which might squeak once in the same place at every revolution. There were no leopards, nor a bell ringer.
These were all phantasmagoria—just exercises of the imagination, which must be worked like a muscle for the world to blossom.
She slipped out of bed and pulled on a dress. She heated some water in a saucepan and poured it into the sink, quickly scooping it up by hand and washing the night from her face. She straightened her head and looked at herself in the blotchy mirror, then she darkened her eyebrows with charcoal.
Outside in the street, it was cold and damp. The fine wind-driven rain needled her exposed flesh. It was a foul day but it didn’t bother her, as she was alive with inspiration, distracted by the excitement she always felt when about to start something new. She was headed to the studio she shared with Alphonse, and to the blank canvas awaiting her.
She would stop for coffee and a brioche on the way but first she would visit The Bureau, on the Rue de Grenelle. It was on her instigation that this establishment boasted a lectern with eagle-clawed feet and a giant blank tome—an oneiric catalogue available to anyone who wished to gaze at the invisible, or to contribute. She would map the subconscious. Sometimes she read, sometimes she wrote. She checked on it often.
Today she would write. She hauled up the chain with pencil attached.
“I am living in a large modern house. I wake up in the middle of the night and come downstairs to find that I have many more dogs than I previously imagined. Five or six of them are outside the glass door, harrying an animal that looks like a badger. On closer inspection, I see that the badger is in fact a very small, thin man, dressed in nothing but a loin cloth, who desperately wants to come inside. I begin to open the door and he attempts to get through, but I suspect his motives and close it again abruptly, trapping his head between door and frame. Then I take pity on him and open it again. He rushes in. He is begging me for something but I am not sure if I can trust him, so I pick him up and hang him from a hook on a coatrack. As soon as he finds himself hanging up there, he says he has changed his mind and wants to leave. I take him down and let him out of the front door. He runs off into the night.”
She let the pencil fall and bounce on its tether. Breton’s idea of creating a new reality was very appealing. It promised freedom from that drab, turning wheel of servitude and disenchantment which constituted life for most people, a life of suffering and hopelessness. She admired Breton for what he had set out to do. As far as she was concerned it had all started with Dada. That was when the first cracks had begun to appear in the shell of consciousness. She had recognized it at the time and made sure she was a part of it, running off to Zurich and making an army of puppets, while the armies of Europe were destroying themselves in the trenches. Then it had all burst apart and, as the description went, rained down its spores on to a bed of fungus, from which sprouted Surrealism where she now found herself. It had provided a purpose—a direction that was no direction, a kind of rippling perfection. She was unable to differentiate her excitement about her place in the world from the picture she was about to paint. There was no need. They were the same thing.
The purists believed that artists should have no conscious engagement with what they produced. They were quite strident and vocal about it. Anything that had been consciously created was worthless. She disagreed with them. Such opinions seemed to her just another set of rules. Fundamentalism was unattractive in any guise. She would not be shackled. Thinking about what she was going to do before she did it, allowed her to focus her energies and put her in a place where something could bubble up through her, akin to the Pythia at the Delphic Oracle. Probably none of these purists created as autonomously as they would have people believe anyway.
Her mind, which seemed to have a mind of its own and was never quiet when she walked, took a momentary breath when she stepped onto the Pont Neuf—the old bridge, each arch an eyebrow. Crossing it was a symbolic act. All bridges were symbols and all symbols were bridges. That was symmetry. The studio was getting closer. The Métro would have been quicker but to reach a destination in the shortest time possible was never an important objective for her, and she wanted to walk. She would stop for coffee when she had passed the island where Jacques de Molay had been burned.
Often the shapes and movements of clouds would stimulate her imagination and she looked up to the sky. There were no discernible clouds, just an homogenous field of grey, so she looked down into a puddle of rainwater. Then she realized that she would paint a portrait. In her faint reflection she envisioned a Turkish man.
As a flake of stale brioche softened in her black coffee, the painting began to form. He stood in front of a large disc, his feet cropped by the edge of the canvas. A cavalry sabre hung from his right hip. He wore a blue uniform in the Napoleonic style. Two epaulettes perched on his shoulders, twin sunsets over a decaying empire, with greasy yellow, threadbare tassels. He had a narrow black moustache and a scarred face. He was most likely a survivor of smallpox. There was also a thin scar on his cheek that he might have received in a duel. He wore a fez.
Though her compositional technique did not conform to the automatism of those purists, she was finding her own way to the same place. The point where opposites were unified, that Hegelian idea Breton was always going on about, a kind of poetic explosion that would release enough force to sunder reality.
Breton had invited her into the group when they first met at a restaurant, and had instantly given her a title—Surrealist in the All-at-Once. She liked its metaphorical significance and the way it sounded. It felt good to be accepted. He wasn’t known to be so welcoming and she suspected that the fact that she had arrived at the restaurant completely naked might have had something to do with it. None of them could resist uninhibited nubility. Despite their brilliance and open-mindedness they still exhibited certain masculine clichés, of which they did not seem to be aware. That was part of the problem. So be it. They certainly did not appreciate crones, except perhaps, Devereux.
Her hand reached for the doorknob of the studio, when she heard Alphonse talking and then a staccato reply. It could only be Nudreski. She had not seen him for months. He had been in Mexico recuperating from a surfeit of opium and alcohol. He must have just returned. Nudreski was the son of a tsarist diplomat. His mother had died in childbirth and his father had been mostly absent, posted overseas. He was brought up by wet-nurses, governesses, servants and tutors, until at the age of eighteen he had burst into St. Petersburg and never returned. As his allowance dwindled from a trickle to a drip, his life devolved into gonorrhoea and jars of laudanum. He was left with nothing but a profound hatred of everything. That’s the way he told it, though you had to take whatever he said with a pinch of salt.
When she entered, he was staggering back from Alphonse's paintings with a half-drunk bottle of wine in his hand.
“Shit. Pure shit.” He turned as he heard her in the doorway.
Nudreski had pushed hedonism over the crest of pleasure, but still had a physical vigour surprising in someone so debauched. She thought his body must be held together by the force of his personality alone.
"Anyone can paint."
He let the monocle drop from his eye.
"Only the bourgeoisie make a religion out of it.”
When she was younger she might have been interested in a man like him—for his extremism, his drunkenness or his cultured nihilism. Now she saw him as a parasite, preying on artists younger than himself, doing the rounds, getting handouts and insulting the people who helped him, just managing to survive on a reputation that perhaps had always been false and was definitely worn thin, and he was only getting worse. He was excruciating. An encounter with him was like a meeting with death.
She went to Alphonse’s aid.
"Most artists and revolutionaries come from the bourgeoisie. They are the only ones with the education and the time."
Nudreski violently swung his head and turned his combative attention to her.
"They’re animals. All of them. Dogs, monkeys and parrots. Take your pick."
That kind of senseless denigration of animals infuriated her. What made humans assume they weren’t animals? And what kind of animal was he? But there was no point getting drawn in.
Meanwhile Nudreski had turned back to Alphonse and was swigging more wine.
"Artifice!"
He waved the bottle at a painting Alphonse had been working on.
"There are people in prison for less than this."
Alphonse stood by, somber and silent. Nudreski continued unabashed.
"If you have the gall to create art, then at least make fetishes. No pretense there, just blood, bone and shit. And maybe some feathers."
He finished off the bottle and hurled it through the window, shattering the pane. Alphonse seemed suddenly to inflate.
"Get out!"
It felt as if Nudreski had taken all the oxygen with him when he left. They stood in a vacuum, her inspiration had withered and Alphonse looked depressed.
“I don’t know why I keep letting him in here. I feel like putting my feet through these paintings.”
"I know. He’s suffocating”
"Maybe he has a function in the bigger scheme of things. A negative function. He’s a tonic for self-delusion. It makes me wonder what I’m doing. You know... the surrealists won’t let me in. Not that I want them to. But rejection is rejection.”
“It’s all politics. Don’t let it it bring you down. You’re from Brittany. There's your way in. Let's go out and eat something. I’m going to see Josephine Baker later. She’s at the Casino de Paris. After that I'm going to a performance by Devereux at his new place. Why don’t you come with me?”
Alphonse was somewhere else. He remembered those eyes staring down into his, just after dawn. One brown, one green. If there was such a thing as fate, it had a bitter taste. He would have liked to go with her but there was something else he had to do.
Slivers of glass lay on the windowsill, and on the floor below it. The violence was still present.
"No, you go. I'll stay here and clean up."
© Tom Newton 2020
This is an excerpt from the novella Revolution in Dreamtime by Tom Newton (to be published by Recital Publishing 2021).
Narrated by Tom Newton
Narrated by Tom Newton
POST RECITAL
TALK
BR: Well, here we are in 2021. Say hello to the new year, same as the old year…
TN: Hello.
BR: Except not the same, since our other venture, Recital Publishing, will be putting out several new books this year. One of those is what we just sampled. Your two novellas, “Revolution in Dreamtime” and “Warfilm,” will be grouped into one volume, Voyages to Nowhere. So let’s talk about “Revolution in Dreamtime.”
TN: Okay.
BR: First, tell us something about the title, and if there’s a plot, maybe a little about that. No so-called “plot” is required, of course.
TN: Well the revolution in the title is ambiguous, as it should be. There was a book called The Songlines by Bruce Chatwin, which was popular in the eighties. I think that’s where I first learned about The Dreamtime. It’s a word that describes Australian Aboriginal beliefs. The way they thought about space and time is quite different to what we’re brought up with in the West, and I don’t really understand it at all, but it fascinates me. The thing is, the word Dreamtime was coined by anthropologists, and it might have been based on a mistranslation or misunderstanding of an Australian word. So the whole concept could be erroneous. But that makes it even better for me, in terms of ambiguity. Anyway the story has nothing to do with Australia. It’s about a couple of artists in Paris in 1930. The protagonist wants to create a new reality, and she suffers a mental breakdown in the attempt, or then again maybe she doesn’t. My interpretation of the word Dreamtime has some relevance to that. I suppose there’s some sort of plot but I wouldn’t want to give it away.
BR: What inspired this story?
TN: I’m trying to remember… Well, I was sitting in my living room and I wanted to write a story. I felt really inspired but I had no idea what to write about, and stories have to be about something I suppose.
BR: Usually.
TN: Then it occurred to me that I could base each chapter on one of the pictures on the walls. There were quite a few, which have now mysteriously disappeared. The first was a detail of the Gustav Klimt painting The Kiss, and that gave me the idea for Sophia. I looked at her and thought: “Ok… she’s an artist from Paris in the 1930s.” Another was a copy of an old Iranian picture of people playing polo. That’s why, later in the story, she has to cross a polo field mid game. I just followed these pictures sequentially around the room and they dictated the plot. They were jumping off points.
BR: So we’re looking back about ninety years, to Paris. I know you have a lot of knowledge about the beginnings of the surrealist movement, so give us a little history there. And would you say you’re carrying on that tradition?
TN: Well I’ m no expert but I do have a strong affinity to European art from the early twentieth century—Dada, Futurism, Cubism, Surrealism and so on. It was a time of great upheaval and the art reflected that. It took a giant leap from the 19th century. I like its questioning of reality as we perceive it, and its humour. My father introduced me to it when I was very young—he’d come home from work and give me some postcards of Magritte paintings. I’d stare at the train in the fireplace and the man with an apple above his head, and new vistas opened up for me. They’ve stayed with me. Maybe I was naturally open to it, or maybe it was a case of how a parent can influence a child. I don’t know, but I see it as a gift and I’m forever grateful. As far as carrying on the tradition—well I wouldn’t describe myself as a surrealist. That was then. This is now.
BR: I’m wondering about your philosophy about writing. Do you have your own manifesto? Or do you care to make one up right now?
TN: I don’t really have a philosophy about writing or a manifesto. You know, one’s sensibilities are in constant flux. So what I thought a few years ago might seem ridiculous to me now. But, as you’re asking I’ll give it a shot. So here’s my manifesto: First I’d say, don’t over analyze. Allow ideas to form so unconsciously that they seem to have nothing to do with you, as if they come from the world around you and not you personally. When you have something down, then you can put your critical faculties to work for editing and revising. Also I think that aside from the meaning of words and phrases, their rhythm is very important—the way they sound together when read. And to a lesser extent the way they look. By that I mean the picture that the text creates on the page, when you divorce it from meaning. And of course I’d also say: don’t write self-consciously, don’t write for effect or just because you hope readers will find it clever. How’s that for a manifesto?
BR: Works for me
TN: I should add the caveat that I don’t presume anyone should actually write like this. People can write however, and whatever they want. That’s the beauty of it. And talking of manifestos, here’s something from André Breton:
Surrealism is based on the belief in the superior reality of certain forms of previously neglected associations, in the omnipotence of dream, in the disinterested play of thought. It tends to ruin once and for all other psychic mechanisms and to substitute itself for them in solving all the principal problems of life.*
So, there you go.
BR: Well if a writer wants to get at deeper truths by rejecting rational logic, what are some methods or exercises you would suggest?
TN: The first thing that comes to mind is the pataphor. The term ‘pataphor’ was created by Pablo Lopez, a musician and writer. He drew from Alfred Jarry’s ‘Pataphysics, that wonderful absurdist pseudo-science. The pataphor is an extended metaphor—extremely extended. His idea was to create a figure of speech as far from the metaphor as the metaphor is from non-figurative language. When I discovered this concept I became completely enamoured. This is an example of one I wrote for the story Intervals in my book Seven Cries of Delight:
My constant speculation is not an attempt to answer life’s questions. I threw truth and meaning from a window long ago. They lie shattered on the pavement, kicked aside or stepped on by pedestrians, and noticed only by children who gather them up for their games.
BR: Oh I remember that.
TN: It can be overdone of course, but you can think up pataphors without feeling you always have to write them down.
BR: Okay back to the story. Are any of the characters we just met in this chapter based on actual historical figures?
TN: Not so much based on, as loosely influenced by… With the character Sophia I thought of Leonora Carrington and a little of Sophie Tauber. Both of them were very talented but were not as acknowledged as their male counterparts. Sophie Tauber was married to Hans Arp, who is better known than her—and she was the one who made Tête Dada as well as numerous other highly appreciated works. Leonora Carrington lived with Max Ernst, until the war interrupted their relationship and she had a breakdown and was instiutionalized for a while. She lived a long, highly productive life but Ernst was the one who is remembered. So it seems the surrealists were not as progressive as they imagined. The other main artist character in the story, Alphonse, was in some ways inspired by Marcel Duchamp. But I wasn’t in any way trying to fictionalize these real people, I was just influenced by what I perceived as their essence—their quiddity you might say.
BR: I know there is another major character in the book that we didn’t meet yet: Ferdinand. Give us some insight into him.
TN: Well… Ferdinand is a plain clothes cop and a nasty piece of work. He uses his position of power as a policeman to indulge himself and not for the benefit of society. He’s the kind of person who is gay but persecutes homosexuals. I was influenced by Roy Cohn. In some ways Ferdinand is unable not to be evil, he’s lived a life bereft of love. In that way he’s a victim and might be considered ill. He’s cruel and paranoid—a malignant narcissist. Does that remind you of anyone?
BR: A bunch of them actually… Well your story collection from 2019, Seven Cries of Delight, won the Dactyl Foundation Literary Award and was called “thought art.” What do you suppose that means, and does this book qualify for that description as well?
TN: Well I don’t know exactly what it means but I like the sound of it. I think it must refer to the fact that the point of the stories is to play with ideas, rather than to follow a plot, and have a descriptive or realistic structure. The important word there is “play”. I think our lives depend on it much more than we realize. And as far as this book goes… yeah, I’d describe it as “thought art.”
BR: Well, I think that’s a good place to close.
TN: I think you may be right.
BR: Yeah. Stories like this are always welcome to me but even more so in these times when an escape from everyday reality can be very good for one’s mental health. In fact, what if you were to use your movie special effects skills to invent an actual portal that people could physically enter to go back to 1930 Paris. We could market it along with the book.
TN: It’s already done. (SFX: large power switch) In fact, I just activated it and we’re in the tunnel right now, on our way out of here!
SFX: Sound of walking in a tunnel.
BR: Alright, cool!
TN: Brent, remember it’s just a movie…
*Excerpt from The First Surrealist Manifesto (1924) by André Breton. From André Breton: Manifestoes of Surrealism, trans. Richard Seaver and Helen R. Lane (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1969) Copyright © 1969 by University of Michigan Press.
BR: Well, here we are in 2021. Say hello to the new year, same as the old year…
TN: Hello.
BR: Except not the same, since our other venture, Recital Publishing, will be putting out several new books this year. One of those is what we just sampled. Your two novellas, “Revolution in Dreamtime” and “Warfilm,” will be grouped into one volume, Voyages to Nowhere. So let’s talk about “Revolution in Dreamtime.”
TN: Okay.
BR: First, tell us something about the title, and if there’s a plot, maybe a little about that. No so-called “plot” is required, of course.
TN: Well the revolution in the title is ambiguous, as it should be. There was a book called The Songlines by Bruce Chatwin, which was popular in the eighties. I think that’s where I first learned about The Dreamtime. It’s a word that describes Australian Aboriginal beliefs. The way they thought about space and time is quite different to what we’re brought up with in the West, and I don’t really understand it at all, but it fascinates me. The thing is, the word Dreamtime was coined by anthropologists, and it might have been based on a mistranslation or misunderstanding of an Australian word. So the whole concept could be erroneous. But that makes it even better for me, in terms of ambiguity. Anyway the story has nothing to do with Australia. It’s about a couple of artists in Paris in 1930. The protagonist wants to create a new reality, and she suffers a mental breakdown in the attempt, or then again maybe she doesn’t. My interpretation of the word Dreamtime has some relevance to that. I suppose there’s some sort of plot but I wouldn’t want to give it away.
BR: What inspired this story?
TN: I’m trying to remember… Well, I was sitting in my living room and I wanted to write a story. I felt really inspired but I had no idea what to write about, and stories have to be about something I suppose.
BR: Usually.
TN: Then it occurred to me that I could base each chapter on one of the pictures on the walls. There were quite a few, which have now mysteriously disappeared. The first was a detail of the Gustav Klimt painting The Kiss, and that gave me the idea for Sophia. I looked at her and thought: “Ok… she’s an artist from Paris in the 1930s.” Another was a copy of an old Iranian picture of people playing polo. That’s why, later in the story, she has to cross a polo field mid game. I just followed these pictures sequentially around the room and they dictated the plot. They were jumping off points.
BR: So we’re looking back about ninety years, to Paris. I know you have a lot of knowledge about the beginnings of the surrealist movement, so give us a little history there. And would you say you’re carrying on that tradition?
TN: Well I’ m no expert but I do have a strong affinity to European art from the early twentieth century—Dada, Futurism, Cubism, Surrealism and so on. It was a time of great upheaval and the art reflected that. It took a giant leap from the 19th century. I like its questioning of reality as we perceive it, and its humour. My father introduced me to it when I was very young—he’d come home from work and give me some postcards of Magritte paintings. I’d stare at the train in the fireplace and the man with an apple above his head, and new vistas opened up for me. They’ve stayed with me. Maybe I was naturally open to it, or maybe it was a case of how a parent can influence a child. I don’t know, but I see it as a gift and I’m forever grateful. As far as carrying on the tradition—well I wouldn’t describe myself as a surrealist. That was then. This is now.
BR: I’m wondering about your philosophy about writing. Do you have your own manifesto? Or do you care to make one up right now?
TN: I don’t really have a philosophy about writing or a manifesto. You know, one’s sensibilities are in constant flux. So what I thought a few years ago might seem ridiculous to me now. But, as you’re asking I’ll give it a shot. So here’s my manifesto: First I’d say, don’t over analyze. Allow ideas to form so unconsciously that they seem to have nothing to do with you, as if they come from the world around you and not you personally. When you have something down, then you can put your critical faculties to work for editing and revising. Also I think that aside from the meaning of words and phrases, their rhythm is very important—the way they sound together when read. And to a lesser extent the way they look. By that I mean the picture that the text creates on the page, when you divorce it from meaning. And of course I’d also say: don’t write self-consciously, don’t write for effect or just because you hope readers will find it clever. How’s that for a manifesto?
BR: Works for me
TN: I should add the caveat that I don’t presume anyone should actually write like this. People can write however, and whatever they want. That’s the beauty of it. And talking of manifestos, here’s something from André Breton:
Surrealism is based on the belief in the superior reality of certain forms of previously neglected associations, in the omnipotence of dream, in the disinterested play of thought. It tends to ruin once and for all other psychic mechanisms and to substitute itself for them in solving all the principal problems of life.*
So, there you go.
BR: Well if a writer wants to get at deeper truths by rejecting rational logic, what are some methods or exercises you would suggest?
TN: The first thing that comes to mind is the pataphor. The term ‘pataphor’ was created by Pablo Lopez, a musician and writer. He drew from Alfred Jarry’s ‘Pataphysics, that wonderful absurdist pseudo-science. The pataphor is an extended metaphor—extremely extended. His idea was to create a figure of speech as far from the metaphor as the metaphor is from non-figurative language. When I discovered this concept I became completely enamoured. This is an example of one I wrote for the story Intervals in my book Seven Cries of Delight:
My constant speculation is not an attempt to answer life’s questions. I threw truth and meaning from a window long ago. They lie shattered on the pavement, kicked aside or stepped on by pedestrians, and noticed only by children who gather them up for their games.
BR: Oh I remember that.
TN: It can be overdone of course, but you can think up pataphors without feeling you always have to write them down.
BR: Okay back to the story. Are any of the characters we just met in this chapter based on actual historical figures?
TN: Not so much based on, as loosely influenced by… With the character Sophia I thought of Leonora Carrington and a little of Sophie Tauber. Both of them were very talented but were not as acknowledged as their male counterparts. Sophie Tauber was married to Hans Arp, who is better known than her—and she was the one who made Tête Dada as well as numerous other highly appreciated works. Leonora Carrington lived with Max Ernst, until the war interrupted their relationship and she had a breakdown and was instiutionalized for a while. She lived a long, highly productive life but Ernst was the one who is remembered. So it seems the surrealists were not as progressive as they imagined. The other main artist character in the story, Alphonse, was in some ways inspired by Marcel Duchamp. But I wasn’t in any way trying to fictionalize these real people, I was just influenced by what I perceived as their essence—their quiddity you might say.
BR: I know there is another major character in the book that we didn’t meet yet: Ferdinand. Give us some insight into him.
TN: Well… Ferdinand is a plain clothes cop and a nasty piece of work. He uses his position of power as a policeman to indulge himself and not for the benefit of society. He’s the kind of person who is gay but persecutes homosexuals. I was influenced by Roy Cohn. In some ways Ferdinand is unable not to be evil, he’s lived a life bereft of love. In that way he’s a victim and might be considered ill. He’s cruel and paranoid—a malignant narcissist. Does that remind you of anyone?
BR: A bunch of them actually… Well your story collection from 2019, Seven Cries of Delight, won the Dactyl Foundation Literary Award and was called “thought art.” What do you suppose that means, and does this book qualify for that description as well?
TN: Well I don’t know exactly what it means but I like the sound of it. I think it must refer to the fact that the point of the stories is to play with ideas, rather than to follow a plot, and have a descriptive or realistic structure. The important word there is “play”. I think our lives depend on it much more than we realize. And as far as this book goes… yeah, I’d describe it as “thought art.”
BR: Well, I think that’s a good place to close.
TN: I think you may be right.
BR: Yeah. Stories like this are always welcome to me but even more so in these times when an escape from everyday reality can be very good for one’s mental health. In fact, what if you were to use your movie special effects skills to invent an actual portal that people could physically enter to go back to 1930 Paris. We could market it along with the book.
TN: It’s already done. (SFX: large power switch) In fact, I just activated it and we’re in the tunnel right now, on our way out of here!
SFX: Sound of walking in a tunnel.
BR: Alright, cool!
TN: Brent, remember it’s just a movie…
*Excerpt from The First Surrealist Manifesto (1924) by André Breton. From André Breton: Manifestoes of Surrealism, trans. Richard Seaver and Helen R. Lane (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1969) Copyright © 1969 by University of Michigan Press.
Music on this episode:
Onion Bhajee by xj5000
Used with permission of the artist.
Sound Effects used under license:
Pencil,writing,close, A.wav by InspectorJ
License CC BY 3.0
