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[Back] Examples 1) #98: matter and weather Habit,
desires, [Back]
2) # 154: marl and pit upturned [Back] 3) #26: second and process From a
landscape, [Back] 4) #952: second and part I thought
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[Back] Sources 1) "Music and Mushrooms," by John Cage Music and mushrooms: two words next to one another in many dictionaries. Where did he write The Three-Penny Opera? Now he's buried below the grass at the foot of High Tor. Once the season changes from summer to fall, given sufficient rain, or just the mysterious dampness that's in the earth, mushrooms grow there, carrying on, I am sure, his business of working with sounds. That we have no ears to hear the music the spores shot off from basidia make obliges us to busy ourselves microphonically. [Back] 2) Excerpt from What is Surrealism?, by Andre Breton Having settled down in some spot most conducive to the mind's concentration upon itself, order writing material to be brought to you. Let your state of mind be as passive and receptive as possible. Forget your genius, talents, as well as the genius and talents of others. Repeat to yourself that literature is pretty well the sorriest road that leads to everywhere. Write quickly without any previously chosen subject, quickly enough not to dwell on, and not to be tempted to read over, what you have written. The first sentence will come of itself; and this is self-evidently true, because there is never a moment but some sentence alien to our conscious thought clamours for outward expression. It is rather difficult to speak of the sentence to follow, since it doubtless comes in for a share of our conscious activity and so the other sentences, if it is conceded that the writing of the first sentence must have involved even a minimum of consciousness. But that should in the long run matter little, because therein precisely lies the greatest interest in the surrealist exercise. Punctuation of course necessarily hinders the stream of absolute continuity which preoccupies us. But you should particularly distrust the prompting whisper. If through a fault ever so trifling there is a forewarning of silence to come, a fault let us say, of inattention, break off unhesitatingly the line that has become too lucid. After the word whose origin seems suspect you should place a letter, any letter, l for example, always the letter l, and restore the arbitrary flux by making that letter the initial of the word to follow. [Back] 3) "A Process," by Charles Tomlinson A process; procession, trial. A process of weather, a continuous changing. Thus, the gloom before darkness engenders its opposite and snow begins. Or rain possesses the night unbrokenly from the dazzle on the lit streets to the roar, dense, ubiquitous and incessant, that overcomes the hills drinking-in their black harvest. Its perfect accompaniment would be that speech of islanders, in which, we are told, the sentence is never certainly brought to an end, its aim less to record with completeness the impress an event makes, than to mark its successive aspects as they catch the eye, the ear of the speaker. To process: to walk the bounds to lay claim to them knowing all they exclude. A procession, a body of things proceeding, as in the unending commerce of cloud with the seamless topology of the ground. Or a procession of waters: the whole moveing belt of it swallows itself in sudden falls to be regurgitated as combed-over foam. Flung in reverse against the onrush that immediately pushes it forward, it is replaced by its own metamorphosis into this combed-back whiteness. [Back] 4) "The Marl Pit," by Charles Tomlinson It was a language
of water, light and air [Back] |