Date: Sat, 8 Jun 1996 16:11:03 -0700
From: biomorph-AT-ix.netcom.com (Wm. Dubin)
Subject: Re: David Lynch


>
>I have no problems with this. I wouldn't have called myself a 
surrealist >for the 
>last 20 years if I didn't think there was something special about it.
>But what I want you to tell me is what is so unique about 'Maldoror' 
to >you. 

I'll try to answer this, but with the understanding that I read 
Maldoror, in translation (I must assume its inferiour to the original), 
and after I had already considered  my artistic life to be surrealist. 
I had also already read Poe, Lovecraft, Derluith and Kafka.

Maldoror was the first thing I'de read that was CALLED surrealiste, 
rather than being ABOUT surrealism. At the time  (I think it was about 
1956 or '57), it was impossible to find any other surrealist texts 
(including Breton) in translation, so all my "knowledge" of surrealism 
was some one elses opinion on what Breton, or someone else had written. 
And, of course, my intutive knowledge gained from looking at the 
pictures (I was lucky enough to see Matta as a child in 1948... it 
spoiled my life forever!). Reading this book, particularly the parts 
about Maldoror and the female shark; the part about the young man who 
enters the torture chamber and is flayed alive; and the description of 
the christian diety with dribbles of semen comming off its face; and 
the part about the young English boy who was put into a sack and it was 
said that the sack contained a mad dog.... (its been a long long time, 
I can only hope my memory is basically correct with these 
descriptions...), but reading these things was like applying a lobotomy 
to those over-lays of: family, religion, society, logic, visual data 
and ones way of walking through life... these levels of garbage that 
had been injected into my thinking, my actions, my daily life, were 
simply dissolved by the glowing scaple of both the prose and the events 
described. What made this event surrealiste? I can only answer that it 
acted as my moment of becomming alive in a cosmic sense.(no, I didn't 
see jesus!).


>Another thing about anything being objectively surrealist. If someone 
oth>er than 
>Meret Oppenheim had made the fur cup, would it still be a surrealist 
obje>ct?. 
>Or has it become surrealist by being made by Meret?
>
I think, had I stumbeled through a South American jungle, and found an 
encampment on a tributary of the Amazon, filled with head-hunters, all 
drinking from various skull-cap vesseles, and on the edge of the table 
rested the "fur-lined tea-set", it would be no less strange, marvelous, 
or less geared to that area of my anatomy that thinking of sliding down 
the razor-clad bannister causes monstrous queazzyness could be.I have 
seen the actual object, and oddly, it has neither less nor more power 
than the photo's of it, PROVING to me, that it really exists somewhere 
in my mind.

The fact that M.O. made this, is only of interest historically. I saw 
an exhibition a few years ago with some drawings by a primitive I had 
never heard of... they were fantastic... and no, I don't remember his 
name (it didn't matter), although I have the catalogue and could look 
it up. In the end, the "who did this" concept is strictly about our own 
ego's. I have a fair memory for who did what... and did OK in slide 
identification  art history quizzes, but the only artist I REALLY give 
a shit about, is myself....if someone has done something I consider 
BETTER than I myself could do, I remember their name in order to 
someday find them an chop their hands off.

However, I would have one question, and I HOPE this doesn't stumble on 
someone's toe's.... This object is linked, in my brain, to specific 
hetrosexual acts, and the denotation and connotation of it are 
interlaced specifically on that level. What might be the difference (if 
any) for a homosexual, at least on these levels?

Of course, its true that the object functions on levels OTHER than 
sexual, but for me, at least, thats its primary position.

Oddly, most of M.O.'s things are on that level. I love the photo she 
took of the bycycle seat surrounded by a swarm of bee's........

So, to summerrize, if I can, what I'm trying here to answer. 
Surrealism, for me at least, must get under my clothes. Everything else 
just seems surface. Only surrealism, and those areas LINKED to 
surrealism, enter the areas I exist in, and only the "best" (totally 
subjective, of course), of that which enters, do I feel becomes who I 
am.

Please note: I am trying very hard NOT to enter any great Jungian 
area's... while Jung added some interesting vocabulary for us, I'm 
trying to make the words I use as personal as is possible, as I believe 
this is what you are asking for.

So, does that add anything (or answer anything)?

Wm.