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Several conversations this week have circled questions of collaboration and the creative energy of breaking old forms and shaping new dances that can only be danced once—-and Robert Desnos swirled to mind for his friskiness, his willingness to admire a hat and then borrow it without asking.

In 1922, mouvement flou was in the Parisian air. After Rene Crevel recounted his experience at a Spiritualist seance, Andre Breton got excited and set up a similar event with his friends. This is how the pre-Surrealist Period of the Sleeping Fits began. Crevel and Desnos slipped intro trances easily and didn’t startle or break trance when answering questions posed by the group. With each day that past, their trance-length increased. Desnos even had the ability to write while asleep.

Both men started losing weight. Although he had never met Marcel Ducamp, Desnos believed that Rrose Selavy, Duchamp’s female alter ego, had taken possession of his body. Apparently, trance-sleep was not restorative because both men grew increasingly unnerved and prone to hallucination. After Crevel attempted to lead a group suicide attempt, the trance state experiment was abandoned completely.

Desnos’ first published book was a collection of surrealistic aphorisms titled Rrose Sélavy (1922), a title one could read as dialogic or duplicitous or both. A pun on 'Eros, c'est la vie', Rrose Sélavy emerged from the experience of being possessed by Duchamp’s female side. Leveraging this play on eros into an erotic othering of character, Desnos literally imagined Duchamps’ feminine imaginary. I covet this possibility.

Eros drove many page-centered couplings in surrealism. And Dean Young has written on Duchamp’s ironic objectification of desire in The Art of Recklessness. “One of the greatest technicians of desire was also one of the most ironic,” Young wrote of Duchamp:

Much of his work can be seen as forms of keep-away, electing and befuddling the viewer's drive toward attainment, toward verifiability, a frustration he called "delay." This notion of delay, he has said, began while he was looking in a shop window at a chocolate grinder (and in the hermeneutic lexicon of Duchamp, the mechanized grinder as eroticized object and the window or glass receive many reiterations). What he realized was that the desire he felt for the grinder as an object was accentuated and sustained by the interrupting barrier of the window, which, in contradiction, allowed certainty that the desired object was available while frustrating any final union with that object, any touch, any gratification of attainment.

Desire is sustained through delay and Duchamp's works are conjugations, positions of evasions and exposures. A door that is both open and closed. A highly occult, obscure glossary of dadaist images and procedures that you can quite literally see through. Materials of insistently ordinary availability suspiciously transformed into works of art purely by context and/or slight intervention. A final work in which we glimpse, through a peephole in a wooden door, an elaborate and obscure arrangement of kitsch and puppetry. The glimpse. (De Kooning, the most eroticized of the abstract expressionists, referred to himself as a "slipping glimpser.")

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It was Benjamin Péret who introduced Desnos to Breton and the Parisian Dada group in 1919. Working as a journalist during the day, Desnos experimented with surrealism at night. André Breton admired his automatic writing enough to laud him in the 1924 manifesto and to include two photographs of Desnos sleeping in his novel, Nadja.

Eventually, Desnos and Breton fell out over personality politics. Breton’s heavy-handed approach to supporting the Soviet Union, and dictating this support as part of the surrealist practice, annoyed Desnos (and others). An art focused on liberating the imagination did not not an Emperor Breton to shove his ego down the throats of fellow radicals.

Georges Bataille and the writers involved with Documents also viewed Breton’s podium-thumping as a power play. Breton was being serious: he wasn’t even performing his own monstrosity. It was a crime against art.

By 1929, Desnos was done.

When Breton condemned him for failing to Surrealize himself in accordance with the new program, Bataille welcomed Desnos into the Documents fold, where he published essays on on avant-garde cinema, Pygmalion, Sergei Eisenstein, and became an official signatory the group’s corpse —Un Cadavre —-attacking "Breton the beefhead”.

Unlike the beefhead, Desnos became an active member of the French Résistance network Réseau AGIR. He helped produce and distribute false identity papers, among other things, was arrested by the Gestapo on 22 February 1944. Desnos was deported to various camps and moved across borders by the Nazis: Auschwitz (Poland), Buchenwald (Germany) and finally to Theresienstadt (Czechoslovakia).

In 1945, a month after the camp’s liberation, Desnos died of typhoid fever in the section of Theresienstadt reserved for political prisoners. Like many Resistance fighters, Desnos wore his death in the mirror. And he dealt with his fear by addressing it directly and acknowledging the risks he had chosen. The love poems he wrote to Youki, his wife, resist endings. With a love song in one hand and self-elegy in the other, Robert Desnos

What follows us “The Voice of Robert Desnos” in its haunting entirety (PDF version here).

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Susan Griffin related a story that provides a “slipping glimpser” into Desnos' surrealist imaginary:

Even in the grimmest of circumstances, a shift in perspective can create startling change. I am thinking of a story I heard a few years ago from my friend Odette, a writer and a survivor of the holocaust. Along with many others who crowd the bed of a large truck, she tells me, Robert Desnos is being taken away from the barracks of the concentration camp where he has been held prisoner. Leaving the barracks, the mood is somber; everyone knows the truck is headed for the gas chambers. And when the truck arrives no one can speak at all; even the guards fall silent. But this silence is soon interrupted by an energetic man, who jumps into the line and grabs one of the condemned. Improbable as it is, Odette explains, Desnos reads the man's palm. Oh, he says, I see you have a very long lifeline. And you are going to have three children. He is exuberant. And his excitement is contagious. First one man, then another, offers up his hand, and the prediction is for longevity, more children, abundant joy. As Desnos reads more palms, not only does the mood of the prisoners change but that of the guards too. How can one explain it? Perhaps the element of surprise has planted a shadow of doubt in their minds. If they told themselves these deaths were inevitable, this no longer seems so inarguable. They are in any case so disoriented by this sudden change of mood among those they are about to kill that they are unable to go through with the executions. So all the men, along with Desnos, are packed back onto the truck and taken back to the barracks. Desnos has saved his own life and the lives of others by using his imagination.

Desnos has saved his own life and the lives of others by using his imagination.

[….]

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The Starfish (1928), directed and produced by Man Ray and Jacques-André Boiffard, was written by Robert Desnos. It starred Kiki of Montparnasse (Alice Prin), André de la Rivière, and Desnos, himself. The music by Fratrez (Minsk, Belarus) was recorded during live session at Azgur museum for Cinemo festival 2013. I’ve included it because it speaks indirectly to Desnos’ friendship with Artaud.

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Signals Noise made available sections from the first of Desnos’ Three Books of Prophecies, adding that Desnos predictions, beginning in July 1924, seem “to anticipate the production, in 1944, of uniquely ‘gruesome’ weapons.” The prophecies were published posthumously in Pleine marge, and some were included in Gallimard’s edition of Desnos’ collected works.

An excerpt, as translated by Louis Cancelmi:

On this very date, Humanity, conquerer of disease, a most terrible malady will decimate your ranks, and only the blood of a certain species of bird will provide an antidote to the sickness. On this very date the most beautiful marriage ever celebrated beneath the heavens will take place between a quasi-divine adventurer and his preordained child bride. At the mere mention of liberty, bronze statues will tremble, and it will take no small amount of work to melt down and refurbish them into the giant trumpets of the Celebrated One. The equatorial forests having all but disappeared will no longer be useful as terms of comparison but because of the new essence of life our similes will be built on the deep forests of the North, firs and blackthorns and even antlers and Reindeer flesh. You will pluck this leaf the day of your fondest love, ah, may it come

I see an enormous lighthouse falling into the Atlantic among the spatters of shadows and stars 1948

A naval battle—not the last—expands the Sandwich Islands in 193 That’s all I know

1941 will unify the cemeteries

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Finally, here is Kenneth Rexroth’s translation of Robert Desnos’ “Epitaph,” as found on the Bureau of Public Secrets—-a poem I share because it seems to revoke the spirit of “The Voice of Robert Desnos”:

I lived in those times. For a thousand years
I have been dead. Not fallen, but hunted;
When all human decency was imprisoned,
I was free amongst the masked slaves.

I lived in those times, yet I was free.
I watched the river, the earth, the sky,
Turning around me, keeping their balance
The seasons provided their birds and their honey.

You who live, what have you made of your luck?
Do you regret the time when I struggled?
Have you cultivated for the common harvest?
Have you enriched the town I lived in?

Living men, think nothing of me. I am dead.
Nothing survives of my spirit or my body.