Bitef

godina, koje oslovljavaju sa Kris, u crnobelim kariranim pantalonama. Wilson sa tim deteíom vodi nevezani razgovor, ispomažuči se gestovima, mucanjem, cmizdrenjem i šaradama. Dok se oni, na jednam kraju pozornìce, oblace u kapute od krtice, na dragom kraju, piloti u starim uniformama, puze po patosu kao lisice. Rada govori ili Unì neke pokrete, to dele kako se to obično kaže izgleda abnormalno, ili, možda, po današnjim shvatanjima, izuzetno. Za Wilsona, medutim, ono ne predstavlja nikakav neobičan egzemplar, već ljudsko stvorenje i on ga kao takvo i tretira. Oboje se zabavljaju na način koji je nama stran, ali i privlaćan. Mnogo toga je za nas neshvatijivo, a ponešto i dosadno. Ali, u celini, vodi nas ka višim i modifiât anim vrstarna saznanja, koje leże u osnovi umetničkog iskustva.

Lettre ouverte à Andre Breton

LES LETTRES françaises, 2 juin 1971 My dear André It wasn’t very likely I would ever write you another letter. It’s already been forty years. I didn’t do it with you living, and afterwards ... I remember my anger in afar away country, a socialist one at that, (but that’s neither here nor there) when a stranger brought me a letter for the dead Eluard, begging me to place it on his grave. That’s not what I am doing now for you. I write because I didn't write before, even though all the signs showed that in the autumn of 1965 we could have found each other in one of those places from the past which were marked by miracles, a cafe by chance unchanged f lout va bien no longer existed and La Régence, where Nadja had waited vainly for you in the rain, had changed so much that the shadow of Diderot had fled) or at the Palais des Miracles, which now exists as the Grévin Muséum, or at the Place Maubert, where Etienne Dolet ran away , or at the Pont des Suicides at Buttes-Chaumont . . . It didn't happen, but the miracle was produced, the one we were waiting for, about which we talked (remember that walk the length of the Tailleries, where you said, » If ever we stop believing in miracles . . ,«) the miracle came about long after I stopped believing in them. And this happened today. In a theater which was the old Gaîté-Lyrique , and

do you remember the time we spent in the square in front of the Gaîté, one day in May, 1918, before we were separated? It must have been a Sunday, the silence was absolute. Not a horsedrawn car, not a coughing taxi. You say to me, »Listen to the silence.« and we laughed for all the horses who weren t there to neigh at that idea of listening to silence ... all of a sudden, in deepest seriousnes, you continued, » It s because we have decome deaf that we think Paris is mute.« Well, that s precisely the miracle. The play they did, but was it a play and were they acting? who? was called » Deafman dance«, my friend. To get there you had to go through the hell of Paris, the tumultuous Boulevard Sebastopol, and all of a sudden one no longer needed, or hardly needed his ears. The world of a deaf child opened up to us like a wordless mouth. For more than four hours, we went to inhabit this universe where, in the absence of words, of sounds, sixty people had no words except to move. I want to tell you right away, Andre, because even if those who invented this spectacle don’t know it, they are playing it for you, for you would have loved it as I did, to the point of madness. (Because it has made me mad.) Listen to what I say to those who have ears, seemingly not for hearing: I never saw anything more beautiful in the world since I was born. Never never has any play come anywhere near this one, because it is at once life awake and the life of closed eyes, the confusion between everyday life and the life of each night, reality mingles with dream, all that s inexplicable in the life of deaf man. There are people who say about this great Game of Silence, this miracle of men and not gods, that it s a cheap kind of surrealism, a »shopwindow surrealism«, who knows what else ! Because right now surrealism is on every tongue, they say of a barque that’s slightly baroque that it’s a surrealist house everyone wants, the old people of our time and others who grew out of the soil we made fertile and then left, everyone wants to be, everyone calls himself »surrealist« and thank God the deaf can't hear them ! Bob Wilson s piece (and I hope he forgives me for preferring the diminutive of his first name) Bob Wilson s piece, which comes to us from lowa, is not surrealism at all, however easy it is for people to call it that, but it is what we others, who fathered surrealism, what we dreamed it might become after us, beyond us. And I imagine the exultation you would have shown at almost every moment of this masterpiece of surprise, where the art of man exceeds at each breath of silence the supposed art of the Creator. Perhaps you would say the same thing about this product of the future that you did of past magicians, »The Nights« of Young, of Swift, of Sade, of Chateaubriand, of Constant, of Hugo, of Débordés- Valmore, of Aloysius Bertrand, of Alphonse Rabbe, etc., that they weren t surrealists at alt, but surrealists in something, as well as Edgar Allan Poe or Baudelaire or Rimbaud, Mallarmé, Jarry . . . and I think the most beautiful, the closest after all to this play, is what you found for Germain Nouveau, saying he was »surrealist in his kisses«, and all the famous, painters from Seurat to Andre Masson . . . but I want to say too much, to begin swearing to God that you would have written that Bob Wilson is, would be, will he (the future tense would have been necessary) surrealist through silence, although one could also say it of alt painters, but Wilson —■ it’s the wedding of gesture and silence, of movement and the ineffable. You can't not see that, Andre, not possible for you not to hear this prodigious absence of noise

which very late in the play again underlines a kind of music which is often distant, weak and out of rapport with this speaking of bodies which has not need of ears. Ah, I think of one moment, you are in mining country wihth a slag pit on the horizon, a thousand things happening, ending up as though we were with William Blake in a sort of mouth of hell, but in a safe corner without a care about the crowd milling around him, for him alone, a boy, half naked, dances in counter time to the others, yet not in countertime, because he simply is unaware of their time and doesn’t pay any attention to the place where he is on stage, nor to those around him, de dances for his own pleasure, a continual improvisation there, on the right, in a sort of satisfaction born out of himself, like a laugh one cannot hear. Imagine that there is also a problem of time, with the human being as clock: these boys there, and those girls, who pass at the deepest limits of the stage and of the unknown . . .is it a beach, a track... as a simple runner goes from left to right and right to left, and perpetual return, and who serves as the clock of human time; or else these fish-men crawling on their bellies in the forefront of the stage, elbows for fins, from one side to the other of the theater, and then beginning again; or even the time object a chair which takes longer than four hours to descend from the height of the balconies to the floor, at the end of a rope. No, Distinguished Professors, it is not surrealism, that is to say, for you something to be classified, a subject for a thesis, for a class at the Sorbonne, no, no, no. But it is the dream of what we were; it is the future which we were foretelling. If I wanted to, how could I? it s impossible, even calling on the help of Raymond Roussel and Lewis Carrol, to give an idea, if I absolutely wanted to find some precedent for this spectacle, I’d have to transcribe a text, Andre, which you used once. It s a passage from My Life, by Jerome Cardan, in which the great mathematician tells about his childhood dreams, when his father forced him to stay in bed until the third hour of the day and he perceived some very little lambs making a semicircle from the right corner of his bed only to disappear on the left. » But «, said Cardan, »/ had time to notice cities, horses, animals, horses with their cavaliers, grass, trees, musical instruments, theaters, individuals of different aspects dressed in strange clothes, but mostly I saw trumpeters; the trumpets seemed to sound, yet I heard nothing. I also noticed soldiers, crowds, forms I'd never seen, prairies, mountains, forests and lots of other things I don t remember any more . . .« Even if »Deafman Glance « depends on different objects altogather, nothing is so similar as this catalog of dreams, which are the negative squares of reality. You will excuse me if I turn again to Cardan, who, speaking of you, speaking of. . . but how stupid of me: you had already left us, you don’t know that text written in 1966. I take from it the image of the »soluble fish«, which is yours, for the prototypical example of the negative square in poetry. Well, in the speciale at the Theatre de la Musique everything is » soluble fish«, including those measurers of time to whom a fisherman drops his fish hook, which they never catch. But they are men of flesh and the difference is there, that the terms of the metaphor, much more than the sets and costumes, are living characters. I really only come back to Cardan as an authority for another very different reason five years ago, five years ago, when the occasion was different, I said then, speaking of the novel, and I was defen-

57