Date: Thu, 12 Apr 2001 21:21:47 -0500
Subject: Who am I? everything would amount to knowing who I haunt


steve.devos wrote:
> 
> Hey-up ... I object to the statement of Andre Breton as reactionary... not


I meant it in an aesthetic sense, not political...the demand for a
revolution in everyday life, there is still much to credit in Andre,
this little pope who is now almost forgotten...

Andre Breton seems in many ways like a throwback to the mystical
romantics, searching for the blue flower amid the iron ruins...the long
shadows cast by a memory of Paris that is now forever gone....

Breton only seemed to understand painting as deranged narrative, the
movement towards modernism, formalism, the flattening of the canvas were
always lost on him....

I have always loved Nadja, however, and love Breton, despite himself and
the way perhaps he misused her....

"I prefer, once again, walking by night to believing myself a man who
walks by daylight.  There is no use being alive if one must work.  The
event from which each of us is entitled to expect the revelation of his
own life's meaning - that event which I may not yet have found, but on
whose path I seek myself - is not earned by by work."

"Last of all, now, the tower of the Manoir d'Ango explodes and a
snowfall of feathers from its doves dissolves on contact with the earth
of the great courtyard once paved with scraps of tiles and now covered
with real blood!"