A.A. Marcoff
the atomic egg
I once read that, when he arrived in the USA like a manifestation of Hollywood itself, Dali said, “Surrealisme—c’est moi.” Surrealism grew from the horrors of the First World War—a new and revolutionary mode of creating art and poetry to take the place of a failed ‘civilization’:
a pink moon
over a pink lake
a million flamingoes
await
the dawn
it was built on foundations laid down by Marx and Freud: Apollinaire it was who first used the word “sur-realisme,” and he wanted it to be a “super-reality”—more real than anything, more real because it included not just our waking minds, but all that’s in our dreams and nightmares and also the weird and wonderful things deep within our subconscious:
the tangled light of dreams
where
wolves run wild
like blue fire
in the forests of the mind
Dali merged his Catholic faith with his interest in Einstein’s discoveries to create his own nuclear mysticism—I think of his The Last Supper (with its echoes of Leonardo and the metaphysical structure that rises behind the disciples and binds them mystically to Christ), and his Christ of St John of the Cross (the crucified Being rises out over the planet, rising on his Cross into the universe itself): to me these represent the greatest mysteries—the most profound, the most sublime, the most moving and beautiful: and after his outpouring of painting and poetry and all his eccentric behaviour, it is said that he was terrified of dying: what might he have said at the end to give some account of himself?
where does my eye end
& the universe begin?
the sky itself
is on my tongue,
& I speak of stars
I AM Narcissus and Columbus, Leda Atomica and St James of Compostela, I AM the Hallucinogenic Toreador: and I have forged—basketball players metamorphosing into angels, fried eggs without the plate, memory, skulls, a Mae West lips sofa, the ghost of Vermeer, landscapes with telephones, honey is sweeter than blood, the important thing is the rose, a burning giraffe, swans reflecting elephants, and a dream caused by the flight of a bee around a pomegranate, one second before awakening—with its two tigers leaping out of the dream towards a naked, supine woman…
the metamorphosis
of reality...
the butterfly
has turned
into its own dream
About the Author
A.A. Marcoff is an Anglo-Russian poet who has lived in Africa, Iran, France and Japan. He writes haiku, tanka, tanka-prose and mainstream poetry, and lives near the beautiful River Mole in England.
What a fantastic meditation on Dali. Each prose block and tanka is different but unified in the service of the whole. Most touching—and electrifying—is the slow, steady build up to the religious ecstasy in the final prose block. A momentous achievement and a delight to read.