“Psychic automatism in its pure state, by which one proposes to express—verbally, by means of the written word, or in any other manner—the actual functioning of thought. Dictated by the thought, in the absence of any control exercised by reason, exempt from any aesthetic or moral concern.”
—Andre Breton’s Surrealist Manifesto
Sometimes I think we’re all still in the Surrealist movement—that even Conceptualism (and its precursors/iterations thereof) is in some way a permutation of the Surrealist idea of breaking apart signifier/signified—that in dreams, for example, things may not “make sense” and that’s okay. Exploring that nonsensical, whimsical aspect of our thoughts is what art should be about. At least, that’s what I think after reading Valerie Mejer’s Rain of the Future (Action Books, 2014), edited and translated by C.D. Wright, with additional translations by A.S. Zelman-Doring and Forrest Gander.
For example, in “from the wave, the way (de la ola, el atajo),” the opening poem of the collection (which is made up of four subcollections of poetry), Mejer conjures dreamlike imagery that is emotionally evocative but doesn’t seem to signify anything in particular:
Last night I dreamed of my father’s flabby body and of my blue
resolve to run away, to find a way, I dreamed of your eye
and for an instant I found the vertex of the road,
the imaginary line that falls across the earth:
that meridian where the sun on a tiger’s back meets the shade at its belly.
Waking up, we are swallowed by wakefulness. (15)
Mejer combines stark and suggestive imagery with the confessional with the surreal to produce…what? I mean, it’s pretty and it sounds good (especially in Spanish—as the original text is shown on the facing page of every English translation). OK, I’m just going to say this: Spanish sounds better than English; the internal rhyming is easier to construct—but what is all this beautiful-sounding imagery leading to? An answer to this question seems to be hinted at in “Parenthesis (Paréntesis)”:
Nothing’s in the nest. No needles. No newborn ravens
Maybe something like night in the hollow,
an eggshell planet, cracked in the middle, an empty bowl of soup.
Nothing’s in the nest. No thread. No webs of words…
In the nest, nothing…
In the space, something, yes. A piece of cloth. Sounding like flags
taking wing, a worm in its beak and suddenly, eyes, my eyes,
which, cutting across the empty air, direct themselves at something noiseless over there (35)
That “over there” may be nothing—without sound/imagery—an ever-elusive meaning that doesn’t exist. Nothingness is everywhere in this book. In the subcollection, On the Third Day (Al tercer día), Mejer demonstrates that the depth that one seeks in imagistic metaphors is all just an accumulation of surface:
Everything in you is sea-like.
Not in the distant
nor in the deep
yes in the whirlwind
and in the surf,
in the combat of touching
the earth and withdrawal,
perhaps, in that,
you will seem less like the sea
than in the other:
the distant
the deep. (83)
Anytime the speaker and/or reader tries to “touch” the surfaces of the text, like water, all one finds is just more and more surface/water. Yet Mejer seems to wonder, maybe it’s through what we do with the meaningless that means something? The word tocar (to touch) in Spanish can also mean “to take.” Maybe this slippery touching/taking is the meaning:
You caress the surface
of a phrase as if it were a face
As if your gesture might help it find its fullness,
And maybe it does, despite that the denouement
comes long before the poem ends. (37)
Writing, Mejer suggests, is a sort of taking/touching of nothing, a grasping at something through the infinite surface—and maybe it’s all for naught or maybe it’s not—it’s all unclear.
This question of whether art can “mean” anything while being aware of its meaninglessness is a very current question that I think all writers struggle to answer. Maybe all we can do is play with the medium, the water/the dark/the nothing, as we touch/search:
…All this I say, but not in my own language. Asleep, we know so much. The mares multiply and you tell me this could have been a nightmare. But a nightmare is a single mare in the night or the night turned mare. (31)
Mejer’s Spanish “yeguas en la noche” (mares of the night) has to be translated into English to get that English wordplay of “night/mare.” Through translation, through dreams, through the slipperiness of words, we may find a depth in the blackness, even though the dark of the night sky seems doomed to be flat.
