Surrealism
Imagination, in science fiction, is subject to stringent rules that control it. Fort was also seen, though, as spurring a more unruly imagination—an imagination of individual experience, an imagination that had to fantastic to reflect the infinite depths of a single person. As Richard Candida Smith put it, “By the mid-1940s, a central political tenet crystallized out of” the San Francisco avant garde: the most important corrective to the barbarities of the twentieth century was that people excluded from power claimed the right to speak for themselves about their lives. The narration of human experience in all its complexity, particularly from those who are despised and excluded from society’s rewards, challenged all complacent views of social life and subverted the power of any hierarchy pretending to be able to explain human action.” This view was central to Rexroth’s work, as well as to others, and fit with the Fortean concentration on damned things. Clay Spohn, for example, at the California School of Fine Arts curated a project titled “The Museum of Unknown and Little Known Objects” that included scrap metal he wired together and stuff recovered from the brush of a vacuum cleaner that he labeled “bedroom fluff.” A truly Fortean project! Many San Francisco artists of the time were also fascinated by collages, particularly of found objects. Bern Porter, who had quit the life of a physicist (he had been on the Manhattan Project) for the life of the artist, for example, made many found poems. And David Bascom illustrated “A Fine Mess” with cuttings from newspapers and magazines that often had nothing to do with the article it decorated. These collages did some of the same work as Fort, gathering the detritus of everyday—the damned, the ignored, the stuff hidden in plain sight—and organizing it into striking arrangements, meaningful communications.
The merging of this unruly imagination and Forteanism can be seen in the work of surrealist poet Philip Lamantia. A literary prodigy, Lamantia published his first poems in the surrealist journal View when he was fifteen. The following year, 1944, he dropped out of high school and went to New York to be with the European surrealists exiled to the New World by the war. Andre Breton, author of The Surrealist Manifesto, hailed Lamantia as “a voice that rises once in a hundred years.” Surrealism---in the arts, at least—was interested in plumbing the anarchic, jumbled human unconscious, which, in Lamantia’s case—and several others—was done through automatic writing, allowing the images to invade one’s thoughts and flow out the pen. (Henry Miller used a similar writing technique.) The idea was that the subconscious was ruled by associative logic, synchronicity and parallels, not the logic of science and causation. Fort was of interest to the surrealists. Robert Allerton Parker made note of Charles Fort in the catalog of the International Surrealist Exhibition of New York, 1942:
“This Socrates of the Bronx . . . was primarily a collector of newspaper clippings; out of these clippings, by a craft of literary collage and montage, Fort managed to project his picture of a paradoxical and highly unpredictable universe. He was a connoisseur of the incredible—a snatcher up of unconsidered, yet disconcerting, trifles—the alogical, the illogical, the analogical, the neological.”
These were Lamantia’s interests, too—the alogical, illogical, analogical, and neological continuities of his poems. It is also likely that Lamantia, at least in his first surrealist incarnation, was drawn to Fort’s materialism. Lamantia, as noted, saw himself and surrealism carrying on the tradition of dialectical materialism. Fort was not interested in occultism or esotericism, but material, physical things that resisted conventional explanations. Given these various connections, then, one can see how Lamantia was interested in Fort not (or not only) as a source of odd facts, but as rescuing the marvelous and embedding it into a kind of poem, a collage or montage. According to the poet Neel Cherkovski was a fan of Fort, considering his books “an epic poem, one any surrealist might find especially interesting.”
The libidinal imagination—the trip into a world run by irrational laws—also was an inspiration of the painter and Fortean Ralph Rayburn Phillips. Although living in Portland, Phillips made frequent trips to San Francisco and attended some of Chapter Two’s meetings. He called himself an “ultraweird” artist and used a technique similar to the surrealists’s to generate his images. He tried to get himself into a detached state of mind so that he could receive inspiration from what he called “the invisible world.” He worked at night, when he could see (imagine?) strange faces and alien presences outside his window. Sometimes, the images—and titles—came to him fully formed. His work was often abstract, but—signs of Fort—occasionally had unexpected clarities. He told the Oregon Journal, “I start a picture with no idea what the finished product will be. Often it turns out to be a colorful network of lines, but somewhere in the picture will appear a cat carrying a kitten. Weird, isn’t it?”
Imagination, in science fiction, is subject to stringent rules that control it. Fort was also seen, though, as spurring a more unruly imagination—an imagination of individual experience, an imagination that had to fantastic to reflect the infinite depths of a single person. As Richard Candida Smith put it, “By the mid-1940s, a central political tenet crystallized out of” the San Francisco avant garde: the most important corrective to the barbarities of the twentieth century was that people excluded from power claimed the right to speak for themselves about their lives. The narration of human experience in all its complexity, particularly from those who are despised and excluded from society’s rewards, challenged all complacent views of social life and subverted the power of any hierarchy pretending to be able to explain human action.” This view was central to Rexroth’s work, as well as to others, and fit with the Fortean concentration on damned things. Clay Spohn, for example, at the California School of Fine Arts curated a project titled “The Museum of Unknown and Little Known Objects” that included scrap metal he wired together and stuff recovered from the brush of a vacuum cleaner that he labeled “bedroom fluff.” A truly Fortean project! Many San Francisco artists of the time were also fascinated by collages, particularly of found objects. Bern Porter, who had quit the life of a physicist (he had been on the Manhattan Project) for the life of the artist, for example, made many found poems. And David Bascom illustrated “A Fine Mess” with cuttings from newspapers and magazines that often had nothing to do with the article it decorated. These collages did some of the same work as Fort, gathering the detritus of everyday—the damned, the ignored, the stuff hidden in plain sight—and organizing it into striking arrangements, meaningful communications.
The merging of this unruly imagination and Forteanism can be seen in the work of surrealist poet Philip Lamantia. A literary prodigy, Lamantia published his first poems in the surrealist journal View when he was fifteen. The following year, 1944, he dropped out of high school and went to New York to be with the European surrealists exiled to the New World by the war. Andre Breton, author of The Surrealist Manifesto, hailed Lamantia as “a voice that rises once in a hundred years.” Surrealism---in the arts, at least—was interested in plumbing the anarchic, jumbled human unconscious, which, in Lamantia’s case—and several others—was done through automatic writing, allowing the images to invade one’s thoughts and flow out the pen. (Henry Miller used a similar writing technique.) The idea was that the subconscious was ruled by associative logic, synchronicity and parallels, not the logic of science and causation. Fort was of interest to the surrealists. Robert Allerton Parker made note of Charles Fort in the catalog of the International Surrealist Exhibition of New York, 1942:
“This Socrates of the Bronx . . . was primarily a collector of newspaper clippings; out of these clippings, by a craft of literary collage and montage, Fort managed to project his picture of a paradoxical and highly unpredictable universe. He was a connoisseur of the incredible—a snatcher up of unconsidered, yet disconcerting, trifles—the alogical, the illogical, the analogical, the neological.”
These were Lamantia’s interests, too—the alogical, illogical, analogical, and neological continuities of his poems. It is also likely that Lamantia, at least in his first surrealist incarnation, was drawn to Fort’s materialism. Lamantia, as noted, saw himself and surrealism carrying on the tradition of dialectical materialism. Fort was not interested in occultism or esotericism, but material, physical things that resisted conventional explanations. Given these various connections, then, one can see how Lamantia was interested in Fort not (or not only) as a source of odd facts, but as rescuing the marvelous and embedding it into a kind of poem, a collage or montage. According to the poet Neel Cherkovski was a fan of Fort, considering his books “an epic poem, one any surrealist might find especially interesting.”
The libidinal imagination—the trip into a world run by irrational laws—also was an inspiration of the painter and Fortean Ralph Rayburn Phillips. Although living in Portland, Phillips made frequent trips to San Francisco and attended some of Chapter Two’s meetings. He called himself an “ultraweird” artist and used a technique similar to the surrealists’s to generate his images. He tried to get himself into a detached state of mind so that he could receive inspiration from what he called “the invisible world.” He worked at night, when he could see (imagine?) strange faces and alien presences outside his window. Sometimes, the images—and titles—came to him fully formed. His work was often abstract, but—signs of Fort—occasionally had unexpected clarities. He told the Oregon Journal, “I start a picture with no idea what the finished product will be. Often it turns out to be a colorful network of lines, but somewhere in the picture will appear a cat carrying a kitten. Weird, isn’t it?”
