Date: Tue, 24 Jun 1997 02:31:21 -0600 (CST)
Subject: MB: Sur-reel turn-st(y)le to render/Sur.




 first, a moment of diffused clarity;

 "(Surrealism) is not so much a school, but a state of mind. Nobody
belongs to this movement, but everybody is a part of it. Is surrealism
disappearing? No, because it is neither here nor there: it is everywhere. 
It is a phantom, a brilliant obsession which, by a powerful
transformation, has become surreal."  M.Blanchot, La Part du Fue, Paris,
1944 as cited by Patrick Walberg in Surrealism, 1965. 

second, to recall this question openned and closed around the question
mark, "Is surealism disappearing? No, because..." . This No speaks in the
affirmative that gives its chances to all plausible nobodies that come
along or go along with the movement whose ambiguity pertains to everybody,
an art for all and none that would bend back once more this ring of
recurrence. What has happened to this question that's immediately silenced
by the affirmative negation, that peeks forth to return more directly to
the artifactual induction of the "phantom"? Fellow phantoms, help me out.
Where has the question vanished? Is it one or 1x2x3x4 questions on the
spur of the moment? Doesn't it just stretch out that far, envisioning its
surface effect on the mild curiosity of the lurking mind? A question is a
rumbling disturbance that makes the murmur an appreciable way of prattling
on conducting the energy of a desire into a plausible mechanical
formulation, a trelliswork of time and form whose work is spread over an
uneven grid, controlled and haphazard at the same time that evokes
restlessness, an unfulfilled urge whose marginal existence is woven in the
very folds, in the demarcation of one subsistent thought from another. 
The question mark is like a hook by which we hope to turn the entire
edifice of a writing in a vigorous counter-position to ourselves. Is this
me? Is this what becomes of me in the twisting and turning of these
inhuman digital impulses? Or are you somewhere else? Are you there? Are
the questions going there and returning rotten? If the fruits are ripe
will you be the one to fall? Yes or no? Spinning these questions causes me
to sway between this "alchemy of the word"(Rimbaud) and this void by which
I inherite the wind, that is, a space and a passage, an infinite mirror
image which never returns. 
   "For how long, sleeping logicians, philosophers? I would like to sleep 
in order to surrender myself to the sleepers, as I surrender to those who 
read me with their eyes open, in order to stop the conscious rhythm of my 
thought from prevailing over this material." Breton, First Surrealist 
Manifesto, 1924.
   I too will go on and Sur/render, to render forth that to which all 
things are given, there, "between chance and austerity" (Neruda). There 
recounting the accumulation of solitary memories whose number equals the 
vertigo of rotating spokes ...

Leo Raggo//\\//\\//\\
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