Objective Chance or the Gold of Time

 

Objective Chance or the Gold of Time

Marie-Dominique Massoni

            Mayakovsky dreamed that the revolution would break down the barrier of time. Several times demonstrators have attacked public clocks, emblems of their salaried exploitation, certainly, but not only of that.

One morning in the spring of 1980, the man who designed and produced the poster « What kind of hope do you put in life? » and that I met two days earlier read some poems that I wrote in the time preceding our meeting. We are in Avignon seated at a cafe terrace. In the evening, as we are about to separate, him going south, me going north, we suddenly find that all the station clocks seemed to have stopped at 8 pm. A stopwatch, stored in my travel bag, gives us the time, we have to run to my train which is the first to leave. When the train starts moving, the clock hands go back into motion.

Not very sensitive to poetic writing, he had however noted, in the morning, a passage which seemed to find an echo in what we were living :

                    

                       « If the gallery led to

                         the station, it would be

                         8 o’ clock, I would

                         loose love there »

Our trains leave shortly after the time indicated in the poem: The gallery represents for him, the place where Vincent Bounoure went, traveling in the same city. All required by my meeting I had chosen not to make a sign to the friend who knew me in this place.

Other marvellous events follow when we relate our meeting to Elisa Breton, three months later, on August 4. She tells us the circumstances of the appearance of an autograph excerpt from « La Mort du Loup » by Vigny, one year after Breton’s death, as an intersign. She soon had the sensation of the presence of the loved one, and us with her. The poster « What kind of hope do you put in life? » takes up a passage from André Breton, a question thrown at all living beings able to read. 

       This encounter with the time of love, in Avignon, on the banks of the Célé, is announced by the poem but only happens when we realize that the clock hands have stopped. When the morning reader is required by the passage from space to time, perhaps he operates, as we know how to do so well, a manipulation of reality to raise it to the height of what he might recognize as « love ». Are premonitions not fabrications? One or more elements written, said or done, certainly occur but clairvoyance cannot be replicated. Any analysis could say that Breton did his best to manipulate the real to the height of his great desire, having met love, he creates the poem « Tournesol », a premonitory text. And all the ambiguity of objective chance lives in this question. He who speaks of his observations may not have consciously manipulated them, but what has he done internally to conform to his prediction? When I wrote « I give birth to death », a few years before giving birth to a dead child and being the victim of pulmonary edema, had I not put myself into a state of internal intoxication? However, in these moments there is the impression of being faced with a crucial message. The stopping of the clocks was indeed a « petrifying coincidence » as well as what happened at Cabrerets with the       « precipitous facts ». I went to live in Perpignan and we conceived a child on the night of August 4. the one who was born on the anniversary of the publication of the journal Liberation.      

        Who am I? To haunt as in to frequent a person or place, or to haunt as ghosts do? Objective chance haunts the one who haunts, rousing ghosts more real than the passers-by of so-called flesh and bone. For the flâneur, «the colportage phenomenon of space », as Walter Benjamin wrote, makes him sensitive to other elements or allows hallucinations or illumination of what has happened in a space and of which he knows nothing but that which he ‘sees’.

In Cabrerets, my house was at the foot of a cliff, under ‘the Devil’s Castle’ and we had crossed the bridge over the Célé so that Elisa could visit ‘my’ cave. Spacially the thing is understood; to reach the marvellous one must pass through the darkness in order to reach the ‘black source’. No one enters these territories if he has not laid down arms and baggage. The magical space of these extraordinary events is that of desire, the exterior space where the materials met have become interior. But the verb ‘to haunt’ also confronts us with the question of time.

The ‘magic week’ recounted in SURR #5 involved various friends. The terrain was apparently prepared and seeded with the children’s games proposed by Annie Bonnin. It begins with several coincidences linked to Peter Wood, who died a few years earlier, on April 4, and it ends on Oct 4. The last meeting, that of Gabriel Trujillo with the one we nicknamed Gaspard, took place at 4 o’clock in the morning. They both came to hear the Magic Flute and it was Artaud who brought them together.

« I seek the gold of time » said Breton. This material can only be picked up by those who ‘see’ it. Waiting (for nothing or no one) favours the wide opening and the interior reversal which makes it suitable for a change of temporal plan.* these times coexist with that of the clocks, but it is rarely possible for us to access them. Unite in us expectation and quest, emptiness and emergence.

Haunted by the number 4, analogically associated with the earth, I believe that these slippery facts allowed me to pass through the barrier of earthly time. Was it the stopping of the clocks in Avignon that made me aware of the relationship to time? It suspends, so to speak, a sign of the importance of the meeting, the will hinders the successive revelations allowed by the debacle of understanding. The one who pretends, who wants without giving will not necessarily dive into the ocean of dreams where materials float which could be useful to him. He cannot find the entrance to the mountain where the prima materia is, he will only bring back artifacts. If he gives in to his spirit, a sibyl may come to his aid one day.

What the unconscious distils exists just as much as the misleading data of the senses or the irrational foundations of reason, its nothing, its chaos. Like the universe, the human spirit is both unknown and permanently expanding. It is only if we dive into its archaisms, like the drop of water enclosed in the agate that Nicole Espagnole liked to hold in her hand, that we can understand how it works and where it is expanding. Objective chance allows us to meet objects, places and people who become symbolic agents of our mutations, agents of necessity.

The event creates the sign. The clocks stopped at Avignon station have condensed my experience of time. In any initiation process, ‘trials’ lead the applicant to loose the notion of space but also that of time. Of course everyone knows that the time of dreams is not that of succession. Those instances of objective chance which Jung calls « synchronicity » seem to be beyond the revelation of networks of connection existing between living beings or with the inanimate, they open the folds of a material that we already believed to be open. We access unthinkable understandings of ourselves, in accord with a world that has escaped identity, deductive logic, and the sophistries of postmodernity. In these folds that we lift or unfold, sometimes in terror, but always with a fascinated desire, other  temporal regimes are at work. Only certain dates, certain hours seem illuminated, at the same time that they seem to have escaped succession. Time, freed for a moment from its slavery allows us to be in an intimate relationship with a dead person (Artaud, Breton, Peter Wood for the events that I am relating) without denying his death, without believing in a beyond, but because he lives in the folds where we have found his traces. The same goes for the ‘traces’ of the future which we call ‘premonitions’. Our capacity of reception being multiplied we find the doors of access to the signatures of time that only the analogical functioning of the mind allows us to decipher.

Petrifying coincidences, revealing « slippery facts » or « precipitous facts » which change the course of our life, objective chance, « form of manifestation of the external necessity which makes its way to the human unconscious », is the pivot and the password to the gate of time. it is one of the areas where surrealism seems ready to investigate a «psychoanalysis of reality » and one of the places of high subjectivity where no one should fear the delirium of interpretation provided he is in constant critical vigilance of himself. We are on the edge of an anxious, twilight territory which exceeds the state of knowledge of the human brain and gives free reign to all disquieting strangeness. Freud himself, who had observed this, saw in cases of « clairvoyance » one of the limit points of psychoanalysis.

Objective humour can enter the constellation taking shape, and questions our relationship with time. « Black Sphinx » of humour, « white sphinx » of objective chance.« The embrace » of the two sphinxes takes place in a mental light that desire can illuminate a giorno before darkness no longer allows insemination. As in certain myths or rites. Human head emerging from an animal body « symbol of symbolism itself » for Hegel, the sphinx is before the logos, before the concept, before time and the order it imposes. Here thought wanders and waits. It is not channeled but open to what may happen at the crossroads. It yawns. Objective chance allows new connections, access to new material. Nothing has changed and everything is different. Forces of nature (physiological, biological, climactic, spacial) arise and force those who receive them to question their understanding and to undergo a process of transformation, of transmutation. He is no longer in a time limited by life and death (his own, that of his relatives, or that of civilizations), nor in a fantasy of the eternal present because he is in movement from one temporal stratum towards others.

 Objective chance proceeds from language, because it cannot exist without the analogical functioning of the mind, without word games, without games of meaning, even if it is situated in the twilight territories of deductive reason, whether it concerns those of dusk or dawn. No diving into a grandmothers womb, into the night of deafening music where bodies move, no mystical ecstasy, which poetry brings to light and which does not reject the day. Anticipation, receptivity, discovery and objective chance help us to see from which fibres and from what times we are woven.

Translation by Erik Volet, originally published in French in Ce Qui Sera, Almanac of the International Surrealist Movement, Brumes Blondes, 2014