When Autumn Is Spring

I am growing old. Despite my best attempts, I am ageing and now, at the age of 66 I am about to retire. And when I retire I shall move house, leave London, where I have lived all my life and move to Wiltshire with Jane.
This is the most significant change in my life since I left work to go to art school, back in 1979. Like then, I intend to focus on painting, an activity I ceased to enjoy many years ago and now feel I have a good basis for resuming with curiosity and with relish, not to mention a certain amount of anxiety. I might make a mess of it and find that my urge to paint is a kind of dying spasm of what was once a passion. I don't know, but I must find out.
I will no longer be earning my living, except for a small amount of teaching for the Open University, which will provide me with some extra income. We shall be living in a cottage in the countryside a short distance from Fonthill Abbey, the home of William Beckford, the author of 'Vathek', possibly a suitable neighbourhood for a surrealist?
We shall have a studio as big as the little flat I currently live in, and a large garden that ends in a winterbourne that, when it flows, flows into Fonthill Lake. Some of our nearest neighbours will be sheep.
I am growing old, and yet I also feel as if I am undergoing a kind of rebirth. I remember when we asked Toni del Renzio, shortly after his 90th birthday, to join the London Surrealist Group and he said "I feel as if I am entering a whole new period of my life". sadly, at that age, it was not to be, and he died about a year later, but as somebody from a long-lived family, I can hop to last, maybe as long as Toni del Renzio, and this can indeed be a kind of spring, a renewal of life and of my vital forces, my creativity. I don't know, maybe it is just my overly optimistic dream? But then don't I owe it to myself to at least try to live that dream to the utmost? Who can stand in my way but myself?

Joel Gayraud: The Day After Is Behind Us

I have received this from Joel Gayraud of the Paris Surrealist Group:

https://illwilleditions.com/quarantine-letter-9-the-day-after-is-behind-us/

THE PLATFORM OF PRAGUE (1968)

The following link takes you to the Platform of Prague which was a joint statement of the Paris and Prague surrealists in 1968. This is also available in "Surrealism Against The Current" edited by Richardson and Fijalkowski. It is often considered to be the last statement of the integrated surrealist movement before Jean Schuster's 'Quatrieme Chant'. The fallout ensuing from the latter document, announcing Schuster's 'auto-dissolution' of surrealism, meant that no such document was possible for surrealism as such, although several quite considerable texts have been written over the years, they typically represent the views of a particular group or individual.
Although not written by Breton, who had died two years previously, this text could be seen as the last of the manifestos of surrealism. It stands as a major restatement of surrealist principles, updating them, if you like to the age in which this text was written. However, that was over 50 years ago. What would be very interesting now would be a similar restatement for the 21st century, but while there will be texts from groups and individuals, I don't think we will ever see a text so central to surrealist endeavour in such an integrated and universal way. What is disturbing is how relevant it is today when we consider repressive systems.

Recently, I attended a lecture by Simon Sverak of the Czech and Slovak Surrealist Group and found we were in agreement that a similar rethinking and restatement of our priorities for surrealism in our time was necessary. Such a text could only arise out of discussion between both collectives and individuals, and I don't know how possible it is. Certainly such publications as Hydrolith and the last issue of Brumes Blondes have provided valuable snapshots of the surrealist movement in recent times, but seem to come to no unified conclusions.

http://criticallegalthinking.com/2011/01/12/the-surrealist-platform-of-prague-the-vessels-always-communicate/

Underground

I was very struck by a new post by Merl Fluin. You can read it here: https://gorgoninfurs.com/2019/11/24/were-all-members-of-a-secret-society-are-you/?fbclid=IwAR0EEWrgWN9-Knn7TTQOz1LJFzTvq25A6pmaBQ2xRUyoRZYA590OyDjNz7w

I don't always agree with Merl, although mostly on degrees of emphasis and nuance rather than principle, but I thought that, at least on first reading, as I travelled through the wastes of South East London, this resonated with me very strongly. I did think it worth throwing in a few extra, possibly stray, thoughts on the subject.

Worth reading, if you don't know it, Jean Ferry's "Kafka, Or The Secret Society" which I know from the book "Custom-House Of Desire" edited by J.H. Matthews, but you can find it online here:
http://cafeirreal.alicewhittenburg.com/ferry.htm

Also, incidentally, nobody told me there was a book of Ferry's stories available in English: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Jean-Ferry-Conductor-Other-Tales/dp/1939663016

Consider also the idea of the Egregore, found in esoteric traditions, but also in surrealism, through Pierre Mabille. Although this concept has been described in terms of a 'group mind', understandings of the idea are quite variable. Mabille's own understanding is expounded fully in his book "Egregores Ou la Vie Des Civilisations" which unfortunately has not been translated into English, but a brief explanation can be found in Michael Richardson's book on Bataille: https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=Pg9RxLKMOgQC&pg=PT41&lpg=PT41&dq=mabille+egregore&source=bl&ots=UJa0QYkCJy&sig=ACfU3U1bDZZmW5DCwtQHRPVoVh8MPJRvOQ&hl=en&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwipu6mQ8YfmAhWHSRUIHXK_AE8Q6AEwA3oECAoQAQ#v=onepage&q=mabille%20egregore&f=false

One of the most important points for me in Merl's post was the opposition of the mass and the collective. It seems to me that this is often not understood and that many who would espouse individualism imagine that any collective effort must be opposed to individual freedom. But we are always, like it or not, social animals, and even our solitude is socially conditioned. In fact good social bonds can encourage individuality and personal freedom. Oddly enough, the very proponents of individualism are often the most conventional-minded, the most conformist and the least respectful of difference. Too often their doctrine is "you have a perfect right to be just like me!" Better to be like Thelonious Monk.

THE SURREALIST COMMUNITY

I want to try something a little bit different, to make a blog post that is additive over  a period of time, to post the bare bones, a few suggestions, invite dialogue and add and edit the text accordingly. If I am interested in my own thought, it is more than mere narcissism, it is the thought that immediately presents itself to me, but it is far from being the entirety of surrealist thought on the notion of community. So I'd like to suggest that this post could become a communal thought of what the surrealist community might be. Also that having shaped this, I leave it open enough for others to take up the idea and either make their own thoughts or collections of thoughts available to each other and to 'the world' - which will no doubt be duly grateful...

Therefore I would like to ask my fellow surrealists to post in the comments section here, ideas, practices, references, on community, collective action, utopian thought, experiments in intersubjectivity, reflections on the concept of a "surrealist civilisation". If this can become a part of a dialogue, a new document might be built up from it, or maybe we'll find a lot of more or less interesting, but very disparate thoughts and comments.

Annie le Brun: Never Boring.

I have just found a series of articles by Annie Le Brun online, they are on Not Bored here:

http://www.notbored.org/Annie-Le-Brun.html

A wonderful little cache of her writings in English which I have to share. More later.

Toni del Renzio

I'm posting here a link to an essay by Toni del Renzio, prefaced by a short memoir by me. This was in the 3rd and final issue of Arcturus. With the growing interest in Ithell Colquhoun, there are increasing mentions of Toni, but little context. The preface gives links in turn to, among other things, an essay by Silvano Levy.
https://arcturusjournal.wordpress.com/2013/12/04/toni-del-renzio-dementia-praecox-and-poetry/