The Last Days of New Paris

During the course of our conversation, he mentioned many other phenomena and animate manifs, some of which I recognized or later identified, and all of which I recorded in my long notes on the city’s history, demonology, manifology, my drafts of an encyclopedia of New Paris. They are not dealt with here, as they featured in his story only as asides. All his offhand descriptions kept me breathless with a sense of how the war- and dream-ruined city must teem. The explorer in New Paris might encounter nudes descending staircases or brides stripped bare, composites in dark lines from Emmy Bridgewater, the nocturnal cats of Alice Rahon. Her mouth and eyes might be stopped up by butterflies, an assaulting echo of Winged Domino from Roland Penrose. Her watch could melt. Wilhelm Freddie’s mummy-wrapped horse-head figure might come for her; or a ripple-skirted dress from Rachel Baes, or Seligmann’s scuttling woman-legged stool; a swan-neck on dancer’s legs, manif from Teige. She might watch Picabia’s layered people crawl through each other, or see the hauling exhausted rattling red shapes of Eileen Agar’s reaping machine. A clergyman could crawl along her path, manifest from the film of Germaine Dulac. She might face Lise Deharme’s young girl in tatters. Hunt the spindly animal skeletons of Wols. Pick from trees laden with meat thrust between the paving slabs. Hide from darkly glowing solarized presences from Lee Miller and Man Ray.

The point, I hope, is clear. The streets of New Paris throng.

Of those manifs mentioned in this narrative, there are, I’m sure, many I’ve failed to identify. If I understand it correctly, it’s in the nature of the S-Blast that the bulk of its results are random, or manifest from the work of unknown artists — by which in Surrealist fashion, I mean people. These I could never possibly know. Other manifs I may not have recognized as such during the telling. There were also presences I feel sure derive from works I’ve seen, but that I’ve been unable to recall or track down. Someone more knowledgeable about art than I am may fill in the holes.

The literature on Surrealism is, of course, vast — there are far too many excellent books to list more than a fraction. Besides a huge stack of volumes of reproductions, several dictionaries and encyclopedias of Surrealism, collections of its manifestos and texts, a few of the volumes that I found particularly helpful in making sense of New Paris, as it was described to me, and in identifying the manifs, included Michael Löwy’s Morning Star; Franklin Rosemont and Robin Kelley’s edited Black, Brown & Beige: Surrealist Writings from Africa and the Diaspora; Penelope Rosemont’s edited Surrealist Women: An International Anthology; Michael Richardson and Krzysztof Fijałkowski’s edited Surrealism Against the Current; and Anne Vernay and Richard Walter’s edited La Main à plume: Anthologie du surréalisme sous l’Occupation.

Just why the visitor and the woman wanted the history of New Paris told I have no idea. I feel it may be germane, somehow, that a good number of the manifs seem to originate in artworks that, in our world, post-date the moment of the S-Blast in theirs. What that might say about the relations between our realities — whether there are certain pieces that insist on being born, whatever the contingencies of a timeline, whether there are certain manifesting forces that reach across what might otherwise seem impermeable barriers of ontology, taking or leaving traces — I don’t know.

Three weeks after my meeting in the hotel, I was in a café in Stepney considering our encounter. I chanced to look up, straight through the storefront, at a man standing outside, looking through the glass at me. That is, I think he was looking at me. I can’t be sure. Food was displayed on shelves in the window, and from where I sat, an apple blocked my view of the man’s face. I could see him beyond it, coated and hatted, unmoving. The apple obscured his eyes, his nose, his mouth. Still, I think he was staring at me.

I drew breath at last and he was gone, too fast for me to ever see his face.

Perhaps some understanding of the nature of the manifs of New Paris, of the source and power of art and manifestation, may be of some help to us, in times to come.

In any case, having been told the story of New Paris, there’s no way I could not tell it.

NOTES

Some Manifs, Details, and their Sources

“It’s the Vélo!”: The bicycle-woman is from Leonora Carrington’s 1941 pen-and-ink work, I am an Amateur of Velocipedes. Though Thibaut was scandalized at the sight, in her drawing, Carrington also depicted a rider on her figureheaded machine.