from "A Recipe: How to Produce Erotic Dreams"

Ingredients: One kilo black radishes, three white hens; one head of garlic; four kilos honey; one mirror; two calf's livers; one brick; two clothespins; one whalebone corset; two false moustaches; two hats of your choice.

Pluck the hens, carefully setting aside the feathers...

-Remedios Varo, 1970-


"Where the Wolf Sings"

There is no wolf, of course--
merely the echo of a once-howl
scattered among the undergrowth.

Yet even now the trees seems dangerous, forbiddingly fanged,
flinging themselves about in menace.

But the lake! Only a muddy rose of blood
where the unquiet spirits of fish
flit among drying reeds.



Where have the bright, pulsating waters gone?
And the two linked figures that used to lie
upon the conniving bank?

No one is here any more.
Only some large, idle stones
cumber the glade with white oblivion,

Then suddenly it came, from that obliterated time:
the long, the sad,
the asking, aching, unforgotten cry!

Beyond the diminished forest's utmost edge,
far off and faint, the wolf sang once again.
I heard him.

-Mary Low, 1994-


from "Legend"

"Please be advised that I will vaccinate the world with a desire for violent and perpetual astonishment. Disguised in my own presence, I will conduct a horde through the five aqueducts of knowledge, after which their guardians will ask the authorities for replacements. I will provoke prodigies. When I have built the torpid town, certain words will fall into disuse: eminent prominent peerless noble honorable lordly stately august princely majestic sacred and sublime. I will make rhapsodies from grains of sleep. I'll wrap up a manmaking hat and drop it in the mailbox. I'll hold a revolver up to nature. When professional critics lose themselves in the swamp I'll arrange a delegation of chimeras with their own language and their own secrets. As for the night, I will discover all its phases. And I will fall in love."

The three graces had been looking rather sleepy, but at the last words they opened their mouths in horror, then picked up their knitting and fled.

-Dorothea Fanning, 1949-


from "What Is a Woman?"
Pretension is, in fact, a blind alley that leads nowhere because it is a lie. I think we must try to look in through the smog in ourselves and ask who or what is this, and what within this we could evolve, live, grow.

-Lenora Carrington, 1970-



from "I Didn't know Gertrude Stein"

I didn't have time to think about her from an historical angle (she died a few days later), but I had time to speak to her dog.

-Lise Deharme, 1977-





from "Down Below"

I am afraid I am going to drift into fiction, truthful but incomplete, for lack of some details which I cannot conjure up today and which might have enlightened us. This morning, the egg idea came again into my mind and I thought that I could use it as a crystal to look at Madrid, for why should it not enclose my own experiences as well as the past and future history of the Universe? The egg is the macrocosm and the microcosm, the dividing line between the Big and the Small which makes it impossible to see the whole. To possess a telescope without its essential half--the microscope--seems to me a symbol of the darkest incomprehension. The task of the right eye is to peer into the telescope, while the left eye peers into the microscope.

-Lenora Carrington, 1944-


from "The Domain of the Marvellous"

No longer is it a matter of the narrow roads where traditional beauty is offered in its clarity and obviousness to the admiration of the crowds. The crowds were taught the victory of intelligence over the world and the submission of the forces of nature to man.

Now it is a question of seizing and admiring a new art which leaves humankind in its true condition, fragile and dependent, and which nevertheless, in the very spectacle of things ignored or silenced, opens unsuspected possibilities...

-Suzanne Cesaire, 1941-


Surrealist Inquiry: What Do You Hate Most?

1) What do you hate most?
2) What do you love most?
3) What do you want most?
4) What do you fear most?

-Savoir vivre, 1946-


My answers:

1) Stasis, broken memory, and international, national and emotional violences

2) Gathering: the details, languages, the pieces, knowledge, understanding, together

3) At first I would say "to belong," but to belong to what? Not the wrong place of belonging, I guess. To belong in a group of those who don't belong.

4) The US, silence, ignorance, shatterings, pink, stasis