comet tales

THE COMET comet tales: Surrealist poetry by holly thorpe

From the author - Below are three pieces of writing completed for a surrealism course I am currently taking. Surrealists valued freedom of thought, creativity without boundaries and a certain degree of impulsivity. The poems and excerpt below were written largely in short periods of time without any real direction or goal in mind.

Waving at the moon

There’s nothing out in space but if you really squint You can see the faint outlines of the past and if you cross your eyes they look like everyone you’ve ever met.

The only things out in space are dead if rocks can be dead and if dust can be dead. But we’re shouting into space anyway, if you can count satellite beams and prayers as shouting.

Moon dust is still swirling from our last steps up there. If you listen closely you can hear it: A faint whoosh of a bygone decade, if decades can whoosh and if time can be bygone.

Time is a circle and space is a loop de loop. If you time it just right you can wave at your past self when you are hanging upside down. Do you think about tomorrow and how it might be yesterday with face paint? If it is, what will you do?

I wave up at the moon sometimes. If there’s something up there to wave at, it’s seen me, I’m sure. I sit up at night and wonder if it is waving back.

A message to be broadcast into space

Hello. It’s afternoon here but maybe it’s not where you are. Maybe there’s no such thing as afternoon where you are. Douglas Adams said that time is an illusion, lunch time even more so.

We come in peace. Well, more in pieces. You see, we’ve drawn a bunch of imaginary lines all over our planet and occasionally we kill each other over them. But those of us who are left come in peace. Well, most of us. Some of us may try to bomb you or shoot you. Do they have guns where you are? They’re loud and often deadly. A lot of us carry them around - just in case. In case we need them. In case someone else is also carrying one around and wants to shoot us with it.

I digress.

We are the people of earth. We call ourselves humans. We pseudo-hairless bipeds that can speak and write and are able to build complex things. It turns out a lot of things on our planet can also do those things, but we’re pretty sure we do it best. We’re omnivores - well. Some of us. That’s a long story. And we’re mammals - that one I’m pretty sure is true of all of us. That means we can have live babies and we are warm blooded so we thermo regulate. But we can still get too cold or too hot. And some parts of the planet are so cold and so hot we can’t survive there. It turns out those parts are getting bigger. But that’s another long story.

We’ve been trying to reach space for a long time. We’ve been trying to visit other planets but it’s very difficult and it costs a lot of money and it can be dangerous. We’re kind of easy to kill, the more I think about it. But I digress once more. We’ve been trying to see whether someone else is out there, that might want to chat with us. They say it’s because we’re curious and want to learn more about the universe, but I think it’s because we’re just lonely. There are an awful lot of us, but most of us will never meet. And even if we did, we don’t have a common language. We all look different too. It’s very complicated down here.

I won’t keep you any longer. Perhaps this message should have been more succinct. Something along the lines of, “Hello? Is anyone out there? We’re doing our best.” It’s more complicated than that, and that’s not really the truth, but we’d like to make a good first impression. Well. I would anyway.

Have a good rest of your afternoon, or whatever it may be for you. If you are out there, I hope to talk to you soon. I don’t know about the rest, but I’m lonely down here. And sometimes looking up at all that space, it makes me a little less lonely, I guess.

About automatic writing: Below is an automatic writing excerpt written for a surrealism course I am taking. Automatic writing was a popular writing exercise among surrealist poets and writers. They would write in a stream of consciousness, not selfediting or pausing. The goal is to write as quickly and as freely as possible. If you care to try it, start by setting a timer for a few minutes and then writing without pausing, editing or erasing until the timer is done.

Dreams of an Argentine Tegu

Argentine tegus can dream. But what do they dream of? Sunshine, blue skies? I think not. The must of frog’s legs and the stickiness of wet feathers and the blood and bones of small things. I think they dream of eggs too, with orange yolks and murky whites. They dream of bananas and of hawks and of shadows of hawks. What do I dream of? Argentine tegus, of course. I am only partially joking. It amazes me what I can think of when I’m sitting here. My dreams are boring except for when they are not. Sometimes people die and fly and fight. Sometimes dogs get hit by cars and chickens get killed by hawks. Sometimes the neighbor is hauled away in ambulance or the other neighbor has a snowball fight with their children. Some of this is real, and some of it isn’t and I’ve found it doesn’t really matter which is which anymore. The only thing normal are dreams. So, the argentine tegus dream and dream and dream. For six months out of the year, they lay in a comatose state, not losing body fat or heat. And I wonder if they dream then. I wonder if we dream for a little bit after we die. The Interpretation of Dreams was overrated. They don’t need to mean anything, they can just be. What do you dream of when it’s dark and you’re alone? What silver tipped images sit inside your head. What rose dipped stories do you tell yourself. Answer me this: Do you ever dream you’ve died and can’t wake up? Last week I dreamt I woke up three times, but every time it was still a dream. I wonder every day if I am still in that dream – still waking up. I am beginning to dread knowing what waits for me when I wake. Is everything as it was? I hope not. I could sleep through this pandemic and I could sleep through this whole year and not miss it. Oh, to be a dreaming tegu, sleeping through the cold, dreaming of hawk shadows and golden eggs. Oh, to be a human girl, wide awake, never dreaming, except when it is bad enough to sleep and bad enough to dream too.

new works by wenatchee poet cg dahlin

Impressed

collect the air in your wind bags course it through flaps and tubes conjure vibrations that bellow out to fibonacci ears and see that order done, made real in existence are you not impressed?

witness the luminaries, emanating endlessly shedding light, ineffable light, boundless reach their forms perfectly circular, emitting orbs dancing their rays through the ether’s vibrato are you not impressed?

travel years throughout life say everything’s the same yet nothing’s the same many still carry their same names, the old get heavy chests and hunker way over and the young scream and thrash arched upward from wild to tamed, from nameless to named, all the works that’ve been done by our inexplicable ganglion nubs, through our undulating throats are you not impressed?

I might wonder about the end though, I suppose I can focus on my wardrobe instead and what threads have been weaved, countless threads to conjure a simple cloth, and it’s mundane I suppose, the people make it clear this is what I must wear yet each carries this mandala of intricacy, each speaking Quipu I think about the threads of fate, the strings of quanta, and to all this I can only think to ask are you not impressed?

and to take my mind off such boundless matters I impede through space to a place where pleasant pastries are presented the flour milled from grain grown tall, minded by a man named named Stan

Stan acquired the land through years as a farmhand, he holds it being that the growth of the fields have always inspired uncharacteristic wonder in his weary eyes, that all that sprawls is tied to his entrails and somehow he was forced to sell it underprice, big wigs rule because… well, you know why,

they mulled it down, procured apricots from the Prescott’s, and sugar that was to be used for sodas stopped in its tracks and was reoriented from Minnesota and Seresota to crawl across the badlands to pinch away a parcel of it’s mass to procure a glaze applied by a baker in a floured haze, it was a Sunday and his last straw, the last bear claws, the last croissants, the last danishes, and apple fritter, enough! arranged with such perfection she allowed herself a sigh of relief, and here comes me, dirty, eyes disproportionated red and groggily fluttering, rubbing my crusty, oily face, reeking of yesterday’s pain, say, “Ey! Da apricot one fuh meh.”

I shove it in my mindless face hole and groan “pleh! garbage! Tastes like a gas stations floor” unimpressed.

sometimes I feel the excess dried drips of paint on my northern bedroom wall

sometimes I test how close to candle flame I can get before the pain seers too deep

sometimes I flip open books to an undecided page read two or three of them, and don’t leave a mark

sometimes I think my car is going to blow I have no reason to think this

sometimes I like green other times is comes across as soupy and almost cliche

sometimes my thighs feel like there’s helium inside as if I’d get sent skyward leg first like a breach birth out of the ozone

sometimes I miss my childhood dog, he comes to mind in waves, I think about how he’d run up trees but never caught his prize

sometimes I like being boring, I like having nothing to add, I think about how too much of such spunk turn old men drunk

sometimes I hear words in the wind it makes me think of my grandmother

sometimes, I drag my fingernails across my skin, watching how far I scratch, tracing the white marks across

sometimes my arms feel like there’s too much blood in them I have no reason to think this

sometimes I feel confused, even though I’m not trying to figure anything out

sometimes I don’t remember my name.

Sometimes

John Martin and the Theatre of Subversion

The Great Day of His Wrath (ca. 1851) by John Martin

By Max Adams

John Martin, born in the week that the Bastille was stormed in July 1789, was an instinctive revolutionary. His generation may have suffered from a misty-eyed envy of new-found liberties in America and France, but they understood what practical revolution might mean at home and they strove to achieve liberation from repression and tyranny without bloodshed; very largely they succeeded.

Martin has often, and wrongly, been seen as a religious fanatic by a comprehensive misunderstanding of his paintings and by false association with his schizophrenic arsonist brother. He has also been portrayed as a Luddite (by critics who should have known better) and by Ruskin, a late contemporary, as a mere artisan in lamp-black. Poor Martin. Despite his very evident technical deficiencies as a painter – he inevitably suffers by comparison with his friends and contemporaries Turner and Constable – he was equally adept at creating a theatrical sense of a world undergoing irreversible change, and more fervent than either in his desire to be an engine of that change. If there were dramatists better placed to portray the dilemmas of the human condition, and one immediately thinks of Shelley and Byron, of Delacroix and Dickens, no-one came closer than Martin to designing the perfect sets on which to act out the drama: he was the supreme architect and engineer of the sublime.

To start at the curtain’s uncertain opening, we see Martin, a Geordie ingénue with a chip on his shoulder, arrive in London to find that its streets are not paved with gold but with beggars. He makes his debut in the greatest city on earth in 1806, the year in which Pitt the Younger and Charles James Fox die and in which Nelson’s pickled body is carried up the Thames in mawkish pomp. Martin struggles against more proficient competition: has insufficient imagination in his mental palette other than to paint the misty blue hills of his native Northumbria and dream of maidens in skimpy veils straight out of Ovid. By 1812 his mood has darkened: his radical friends the Hunts have been jailed for seditious libel (the Prince Regent was a fat, useless libertine, a drain on the treasury and a traitor to his Whig friends but saying so in the pages of the Examiner in such terms was asking for trouble); the first global war showed no sign of ending, nor did the horrors of wage-labour poverty. Caricaturists had a field day: they could not be imprisoned. Martin’s response was weightier, loftier. His Sadak of 1812 is a dark, portrait-format theatre flat of abysmal fire in which the struggling righteous loner (his friends the Hunts, the beggar, or Martin himself: take your pick) faces alpine odds in seeking the Waters of Oblivion.

From here on in Martin was on a mission to bring down the unjust from their lofty perches to the level of the populace. For him scale was everything: his deployment of trompe l’oeil devices, three-dimensional column-and-tunnel special effects and epic scales has often, and rightly, been seen as a forerunner of the Hollywood movie set of the 1920s and beyond. By 1821, when he produced his Old Testament masterpiece Belshazzar’s Feast (a thinly disguised libel on the self-same Prince Regent made more potent by his coronation as George IV and the grotesque accompanying feast) Martin was exploiting his audience’s familiarity with the Bible to recreate for them the immensity of its drama, its injustices and the majesty of the retribution which God (not Martin’s God – he was a sceptic) could and would visit on those who committed the sin of hubris.

The Tate Gallery, which recently hosted the largest Martin exhibition for over a hundred years, hung his paintings wrong: that is to say, too low, with the viewer’s eye line directed into the centre of the picture when Martin’s intention, I am certain, was to force the viewer to look up, up at the crenellated towers of the tyrant, to be left in no doubt of the task required in bringing its monuments down. Martin liked to open his play right in the middle of the drama, just like a modern movie director: he drops us into the action so that we are part of it, believe we can be part of it. Martin is inciting us to tear down the house; but we are

The Bard (ca. 1817) by John Martin

Belshazzar’s Feast (1820) by John Martin

certain, as participants, that we start at the bottom, as Martin had.

Shelley, whose sympathies were in tune with Martin and with Prometheus, the liberator of humanity, chose to set Ozymandias (1818), his own cameo drama of fallen tyranny, after the action had long finished, in the shapeless desert where two vast and trunkless legs of stone stood as a quiet, if profoundly eloquent, epilogue to Martin’s revolutions. Shelley was interested in what the world would be like after the revolution and, in describing his idealistic new world in Prometheus Unbound (also 1821) he offered a later Romantic poet and activist, Karl Marx, the blueprint for the real thing: a revolution every bit as fantastic as Martin’s.

The mid-1820s witnessed a reformist lull in Britain and abroad: opposition emasculated by internal rivalry and suicide, the lassitude of once-fervent ideologues like Wordsworth and William Godwin (a friend of Martin’s); the announcement by critics like William Hazlitt of the passing of an age of action. Martin set himself to make money to support the realities of a large family and generous domestic establishment, and he was not the only one (he lost his first fortune to a dodgy banker). But the appearance of somnolence is an illusion, just like Martin’s various engravings of Paradise Lost during that decade. Britain’s creative revolutionaries were not done. The French have a phrase for it: reculer pour mieux sauter – draw back to take a running jump. In France itself dissatisfaction with the post-Napoleonic world would lead to revolution in 1830 and its diarist-in-oils, Eugène Delacroix, heavily influenced by Martin but more interested in the actors than the stage sets, has left us the supreme finale of the drama in Liberty Leading the People (1830), with its bare-breasted Amazonian heroine and her pistol-toting lieutenants climbing on piles of bodies to wave the Tricolore. It is virtually a curtain call. Not to be outdone, John Martin’s own brother Jonathan had been tried for his life after setting fire to York Minster in a suitably Promethean gesture and by 1830 was confined for life in Bedlam. Martin himself began to plan for a new world before the old had been brought down: he designed a new sewage system for London and evolved a curious idea for a circular underground railway to run beneath the streets of the capital: Babylonon-Thames, as it was known in a public nod to his prescience.

More subtle revolutionaries – Michael Faraday and Charles Wheatsone making sparks in the laboratory, the Brunels with their tunnels, the Stephensons with their belching locomotives and railways – were busy forging a completely new symbolic lexicon of steam, electricity and subterranean sublimity for artists to work up on their canvases. Turner, as so often, was first on the scene. He was there, when the old Houses of Parliament burned down in 1834, to record the irony of a Reform Bill, passed the year before, which left Parliament more or less unreformed. He was there when the old warship Temeraire, a symbol of the patriotic Heart of Oak Royal Navy, was towed up the Thames by a steam tug to be scrapped. He was there, in spirit at least, to record the impression which the onrushing steam railway age left on a generation which had previously only known the pedestrian power of the horse and millwheel (Rain, Steam and Speed, 1844). In doing so he leaves us still physically reeling, as if the action is now so hot that we cannot, literally, focus on it. The stage has become a roundabout and we are dizzy, clinging on for dear life.

A look at Martin’s later works, from 1838 (when he and his son Leopold visited Turner in Chelsea to watch progress on the Fighting Temeraire) and his overtly populist and tediously static Coronation of Queen Victoria, to the ethereal beauties of Solitude (1843) and Arthur and Aigle in the Happy Valley (1849) might give the impression that Martin, like Wordsworth, had become an old fogey, too comfortable or cynical or tired to light the touch paper for any further apocalypse. The impression is understandable; but it is quite wrong.

One of the things I most admire about Martin is that, almost with his last breath, he had the guts to once more put on the costume of the grand ringmaster, crack his whip and serve up the greatest show on earth. Until The Great Day of His Wrath (1853) the victims of Martin’s retributive fury had always been tyrants or hubristic fools: Pharaoh; Lot; Belshazzar; Edward I, even. Now, as if to say ‘That’s all, folks!’ (and meaning just that) Martin took the set, the whole set, and burned it down, stage, proscenium arch, auditorium, theatre and all: the entire world is folded in upon itself in an unimaginable (by anyone but Martin) volcanic conflagration. Everything, everyone is terminally punished for every sin ever conceived. This is the Day of Judgement. The world ends. The End (and no curtain call).

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