gorse 15: Eureka!/EYPHKA!

1. ‘We [Surrealists] are not exactly artists and we are not exactly men of science; we are carnivorous fish … swimming between two kinds of water, the cold water of art and the warm water of science.’ – Salvador Dalí, Conquest of the irrational (1935)

2. Shortly prior to painting The Persistence of Memory, Dalí developed the ‘paranoiac-critical method.’ Described by him as a ‘spontaneous method of irrational knowledge based upon the interpretive-critical association of delirious phenomena,’ it consisted of Dalí inducing himself to have trances or hallucinations,^[1] the subjects of which he frequently used to inform his art. The method not only depended on irrational thought, but it also allowed him to irrationally link various objects and ideas together in his mind – links that rationally would not be made. So, in the altered state of consciousness that was induced in the paranoid-critical method, Dalí would be given free rein to imagine a nearly endless number of fantastical scenarios, combinations, and possibilities. The Persistence of Memory, created using his paranoiac-critical method, was painted in 1931, 26 years after Einstein published his theory of special relativity.

3. In December 1951, Salvador Dalí announced his interest in the pictorial possibilities of nuclear physics and molecular chemistry at a press conference in London, where he declared himself to be the ‘First Painter of the Atomic Age’ and described all the works he had produced up until this point as ‘merely evolution.’ Dalí claimed that the bombing of Hiroshima in WWII ‘shook [him] seismically’ and that ‘thenceforth, the atom was [his] favourite food for thought.’

4. ‘The aesthetic phenomenon is deeply intertwined with the history of science, as they both provide a field for experimentation.’ – Dalí, L’enigma estetic (The aesthetic enigma, 1985)

5. ‘It’s impossible to recast sculpture or painting in a narrative form because it’s a question of fundamentally different forms of art. It is simply impossible to capture the mood expressed in a Dalí painting in the right words.’ – J.G. Ballard, ‘An interview with J.G. Ballard’ (1982)

6.1. Writing in 1962, as a guest editorial for the 30th anniversary edition of New Worlds science fiction magazine, J.G. Ballard spelt out on what he found lacking in contemporary sf and advocated a deeper engagement on what he called ‘inner space.’ He said that, with the advent of space travel on the horizon, writers should delve more into stories dealing with the Earth.

6.2. ‘Too often recently, when I’ve wanted intellectual excitement, I’ve found myself turning to music or painting rather than to science fiction, and surely this is the chief thing wrong with it at present […] I’ve often wondered why s-f shows so little of the experimental enthusiasm which has characterised painting, music, and the cinema during the last four or five decades, particularly as these have become wholeheartedly speculative, more and more concerned with the creation of new states of mind , new levels of awareness, constructing fresh symbols and languages where the old cease to be valid […] The biggest developments of the immediate future will take place, not on the Moon or Mars, but on Earth, and it is inner space, not outer, that needs to be explored. The only truly alien planet is Earth […] As a final text, I am reminded of the diving suit in which Salvador Dalí delivered a lecture some years ago in London. The workman sent along to supervise the suit asked how deep Dalí proposed to descend, and with a flourish the maestro exclaimed: ‘To the Unconscious!’ to which the workman replied sagely: ‘I’m afraid we don’t go down that deep.’ Five minutes later, sure enough, Dalí nearly suffocated in the helmet.’

7. Expanding these thoughts in an interview in 1967, Ballard went on: ‘I feel that the surrealists have created a series of valid external landscapes which have their direct correspondences within our own minds. I use the phrase’ spinal landscape’ fairly often. In these spinal landscapes, which I feel that painters such as [Max] Ernst and Dalí are producing, one finds a middle ground (an area which I’ve described as ‘inner space’) between the outer world of reality on the one hand, and the inner world of the psyche on the other.’

8. ‘Coined in the early 20th century by German biologist Jakob von Uexkull, umwelt literally translates as ‘environment’ or ‘surroundings’ – but, being German, it means a lot more than that. The umwelt connotes the particular perspective of a particular organism: its internal model of the world, composed of its knowledge and perceptions […] Crucially, an organism creates its own umwelt, but also continually reshapes it in its encounter with the world. In this way, the concept of umwelt asserts both the individuality of every organism and the inseparability of its mind from the world. Everything is unique and entangled.’ – James Bridle, Ways of Being: Animals, Plants, Machines: The Search for a Planetary Intelligence (2022)

9. In 1956, for the thirtieth anniversary of science fiction journal Amazing Stories, Dalí was asked to predict 2001, and said: ‘I believe that art and science will have merged by 2001. Art is the reflection of the complete discontinuity of matter; science is its proof. By 2001, the artists, sculptors, and painters of that day will be able to portray this discontinuity in a new kind of explosive harmony.’

10.  ‘To make two bald statements: There’s nothing sentimental about a machine, and: A poem is a small (or large) machine made of words. When I say there’s nothing sentimental about a poem I mean that there can be no part, as in any other machine, that is redundant.’ – William Carlos Williams, The Wedge (1944)

11. To paraphrase Ballard, it is that inner space-suit which is still needed, and it is up to gorse to build it!

12. Based on the above, gorse is seeking submissions around the theme of science, however you choose to interpret it. Guidelines here.

^{1. In the fifteenth episode of Ulysses, ‘Circe,’ James Joyce experiments with a dramatic technique he called hallucination.↩}

Submission!

“To write is to write is to write is to write is to write is to write is to write is to write.”

We’ve opened submissions. The guidelines are here. To summarise: we’re looking for your best work, for writing that resists definition for stories and poems that strain against classification.

A Kind of Blue

‘Suppose I was to begin by saying that I had fallen in love with a color.’ – Maggie Nelson

‘A good painter needs only three colours: black, white, and red,’ Titian said. Blacks (‘nothing is black—really nothing’): master of ‘the aesthetics of negation’ Ad Reinhardt’s ‘ultimate paintings’ (consider point six¹ in Reinhardt’s 12 Rules for Pure Art); Anish Kapoor’s acquisition of Vantablack, the ‘blackest black’ pigment (‘it’s blacker than anything you can imagine,’ says Kapoor, ‘so black you almost can’t see it’); Goya’s Saturn Devouring His Son; Malevich’s Black Square. Fierce and definite whites: Malevich’s White on White; Rauschenberg’s Erased De Kooning; Rauschenberg’s White Paintings which in turn inspired John Cage’s 4’33” (‘I have nothing to say and I am saying it, and that is poetry’). The elusive red, its effect, according to Goethe, ‘as peculiar as its nature.’ Witness Matisse’s Harmony in Red; Félix Vallaton’s La Chambre Rouge; Otto Dix’s Portrait of the Journalist Sylvia Von Harden; Edvard Munch’s The Scream.

And yet, it is not black, nor white, nor red, but a pure ultramarine that dazzles in Titian’s painting for the camerino d’alabastro, a god tumbling from his chariot and promising her the stars (‘Who besides me knows what Ariadne is!’)? ‘It is Giotto who first let sky into paintings,’ Anne Carson tells us, but it is experimental artist Yves Klein who, for all his influence on conceptual and performance art and love of unpredictable techniques and use of (anti)materials to create art, sat under an ultramarine sky on a beach in Nice in 1947 and decided on a shade of blue² that would eradicate the division of heaven and earth. ‘The blue sky is my first artwork.’

Falsing (After Marconi)

‘Henceforth, every form of writing will consist of an operation of decoding, of contamination, and of sense perversion. All this because all language is essentially mystification, and everything is fiction.’ – Brion Gysin

‘So much of the very best literature opens up illicit frequencies so that meaning can travel along channels other than the obvious or rational. The Tintin books are full of these frequencies, these channels; they even dramatise their setting up, hunting down, rumbling and relocating.’ – Tom McCarthy

At Christmas three years ago, I was given a postcard reproduction of the shipping forecast map. Seeing the charts (Fastnet, Cromarty, Biscay, Dogger, Malin…) triggered not only the calming memory of listening to the nightly broadcasts, adrift as I was in an alien city, but an associative recollection, one from much further back: the times I used to steal into my great-grandmother’s front room and play with her radiogram. The display named cities, both familiar (Belfast, Cork, London) and enticing (Paris, Berlin, Stockholm, Reykjavik, Moscow, Prague, Trieste), and I would turn the dial and instantly be transported elsewhere. I didn’t—couldn’t—understand what was being said, but these mysterious, almost poetic cyphers¹ were simply mesmerising to my younger self.

Thinking of the radio and otherworldly broadcasts, I remember the first time I heard numbers stations, not first-hand but mediated through recordings, sampled on music albums: first, on Stereolab’s Transient Random-Noise Bursts with Announcements, then on Pere Ubu’s Story of My Life. Numbers stations were at their apex at the height of the Cold War, and were assumed to be broadcasts sending coded messages across long distances.² Often starting with a disconcerting melody, or the sound of several Morse beeps, these transmissions were followed by the unnerving sound of a voice counting or reciting letters in other languages, and usually looped on repetitive play. It was purely one-way traffic—the transmitters sent numbers to the recipient over shortwave, the receiver did not reply, but deciphered these texts using ‘one-time pads.’ The Conet Project gathered the (now mostly extinct) broadcasts together in 2004: ‘Swedish Rhapsody,’ and ‘The Lincolnshire Poacher,’ and so on, named for the jingles used.

Je est un autre

1.1 After a bout of septicemia in 1938, Jorge Luis Borges was afraid his mental integrity had been compromised, that he might never write poetry or essays again. This fear was the genesis of Borges’ first short story, ‘Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote,’ a story born of the identity crisis of Borges’ delirium.

1.2 ‘[Pierre Menard] did not want to compose another Quixote—which is easy—but the Quixote itself. Needless to say, he never contemplated a mechanical transcription of the original; he did not propose to copy it. His admirable intention was to produce a few pages which would coincide—word for word and line for line—with those of Miguel de Cervantes.’