It began in a feral and unnamed country, which was the nerve-center of dreaming.
Telephones wires hanging down like snipped umbilicals, like severed hyphens that had lost all sense of meaning and purpose. The telephone poles doubled as crucifixes.
You didn’t see the crucified posted there anymore, but they had been, and would be again.
The ghosts of the crucified were in the splinters and knotholes of the poles, they were deep in the wood like spectral termites. And they were in the ruptured cables. And in the electrical surges and currents that carried the voices of your friends to you, your voice to them, the entire freight of voices and exchanges and transferences, all of it haunted by the ghosts of the crucified.
If you ever felt like someone was listening to your conversation, that someone was eavesdropping, you were right. If you ever felt inexplicably guilty or ashamed or fretful when talking on the phone, that was because of the ghosts of the crucified. Your conversations, your talking and listening, implicitly carries the renewable seeds of a serialized haunt and pall.
They, the ghosts of the crucified, are with us. To open your mouth, to utter a sound into the mouthpiece of a telephone is to cardinalize disgrace. To speak is to implicate yourself in unspoken crimes.
The telephone poles were designed to model crucifixes colonizing landscapes, a proliferation of totems representing persecution, mania, ill communication.
There is indeed something rotten in Denmark, and next time you pick up your telephone, if you listen closely, you will hear exactly what it is.
(Note: This piece first appeared in ______, in the year 19___. Its applicability has shifted, with the viral spread of cellular technology, and therefore crucifixes have been reduced to sideshow relics and anachronisms that will continue to diminish in relevance and tangibility, until eventually there is nothing left and the guilt and shame and sense of unease will become floating fossilized digits in a series of wrong numbers and disconnected lines. Thank you for holding….)
Questions, images and philosophical ponderances, rooted in and belonging to the “sur-real.” A term that may have been coined by the poet and luminary, Apollinaire, or if we are to take Picasso’s word for it, he was the father-tongue, with Apollinaire adopting his word which stood for “a resemblance deeper and more real than the real.” Then, of course, there’s Andre Breton, he of the Surrealist Manifesto, who took appropriation to the next level and formalized the term “surrealism” into a poetic philosophy, while extending its cope of definition to include automatism, marvelous chance encounters, and the significance of the unconscious. In a wider global, cultural and cosmic sense, none of these men “invented” surrealism (same as Columbus didn’t “discover” America), as drawing words, images and impressions from the unconscious, from unseen realms and dreamscapes, in forms that appear radically divergent from surface “reality,” has a long and varied history. What was new: the organizing forces and influences that went into shaping surrealism as a movement, as well as the context provided by a new century, which catalyzed a sense of fragmentation that found its schisms and shards reflected back through creative seizures and calculated disorder. This is the world that author and art historian, Sue Roe, vividly plunges you into in her new book, In Montparnasse: The Emergence of Surrealism in Paris, from Duchamp to Dali.
John Biscello 