Lux lucet in tenebris

[…] he also classified her as a demon, a devil, a fiend, a spirit and a sorceress, descriptions that actually capture her strange essence.

The water-lilies beckon to him like little dead female hands, and they sway in sad reverie to the quiet sounds of the wind.

Of all that is written, I love only what a person hath written in blood, and thou wilt find that blood is spirit.

“On completing his violin concerto, Schoenberg is said to have exclaimed, “Now they will have to invent a completely different way of playing the violin.” But I believe that a true avant-garde is characterized not merely by a modification in the way a work is constructed or executed, but also by a program of changes for its reception (it is true that the performing of an already written musical score lies somewhere in between these poles, which are often thought of as active and passive). New kinds of perception, new forms of listening attention, are explicitly demanded, along with the new material or content, the new formal structures, of the “text” in question. These programs then allegorically project the vision of a new community organized around them, so that while the essentially collective production of a given avant-garde is necessary in order to mark a given aesthetic moment as such, it is not sufficient.”

When surrealism rediscovers Lautréamont's traces, it will enjoy the same catachreses; it will break up familiar images even if it must bring together "a sewing machine and an umbrella on a dissecting table." The essential thing will be to center the word in the aggressive instant by freeing oneself from the sluggishness of a procession of syllables appealing to the musician's ear. In effect one must move from the realm of images to the realm of actions. The poetry of wrath is thus opposed to the poetry of seduction. The sentence must become a schema for angry mobiles, set in motion by a series of psychic explosives, not by parceling out "explosives" through pedantic phonetics. It suffices to say that the explosion is not syllabic but semantic. It is the meaning that explodes, not the breath. The fracturing word of Lautréamont and the good surrealists is therefore created less to be heard in its outbursts than to be desired in its sudden decisions, in its joy of deciding. Its energetic meaning cannot be grasped through diction; one must accept an active, vigorous induction and feel its induced virility.