There is a train running through my dreams
There is a train running through my dreams
With a fish, a bowler hat and a pipe.
Nothing is ever as it seems.
A man in a suit
With a briefcase
The image
Of a conservative businessman
Paints the most
Peculiar fantasies
Of surreal reality.
Nothing is ever as it seems
While such a train runs through my dreams.
Opher 13.5.2017
Magritte is my favourite surrealist but Dali comes a close second. I was greatly affected by the madness of his work – not only impressively painted but incredibly original and weird. They shook me.
The man himself was just a weird and became a surreal parody of himself. Art, films, fashion, sculptures and performance. It was all surreal.
Seems closer to reality to me than reality.
I envisaged the book as a multitude of collages creating a picture of the dream of reality. All possibilities and weirdness was considered in the view that nothing could be more strange than reality itself.
I interspersed the poetry and cartoons. It was a work of art.
27.
Whatever happens
I’ll have been
If not
And back.
With more tales of this and that
To while away
A dreary day
And whisper in the dark.
Whatever happens
I’ll see it only once
And never as it was before.
Whatever happens
I don’t care
I’ve not been here before.
Who cares about tomorrow?
Someplace else
To get lost in and dream awhile –
And if I feel I’m full
I’ll rest a lifetime to unwind.
I’m writing up my first book – more for my own satisfaction than anything else. I’m quite nostalgic about it as it took me many years to write. I started it in 1970. It is a collage incorporating cartoons, poems, sketches and a surreal story. I thought I was being really revolutionary. It is a thing of the sixties. I do not think it has any commercial promise but I felt I would like to put it in print so I can have a real book copy.
Here’s the start. What do you think?
Part 1
The Flux
The universe does not exist in space and time. It has no size, shape or form. Time is merely a measure of change; it radiates out from a point at various speeds, dependent on the energy it chooses to hitch a ride on. Usually it is fast.
Any individual appears to live in a moment in time and space and may continue to live their life unaffected by the reality of this phenomenon. Yet, perhaps, one day they may realise that the finite life they live is an illusion. The moment this realisation occurs and is believed their life will cease to exist. For who can connect cause and effect in an infinite system where time and space are interchangeable? The reality is that our lives are held by a tenuous thread. We have no static shape and the sequence of days that make up the course of a life may be nothing more than a chance progression, an anarchy of ideas in a vacuum.
For finity and infinity cannot exist inside each other. The illusion of one or the other is nothing more than the product of a healthy art of deception. The flow is a poet. Life is the metered scrawl on a clean sheet that is the void.
Each individual must make the decision to choose whether it is finity or infinity that is reality. Whatever they select they should be warned that it is likely to be incorrect. The pattern of life and memory may alter unexpectedly.
Geologically the life of the Earth is recent; the passage of a lifetime a fleeting flicker. For the void the whole universe with its stability of matter and orderly course of time is but a brief interlude. Anarchy is the path that nature treads in order to create the flux.
Nothing that exists in the flux is ever organised in finite terms. The laws that seem to govern space and time are ephemeral.
As I write and you read we may even be the same being.
I painted this in the mid seventies.
I had grown up with the threat of mutual annihilation. I remember the Cuban missile crisis. We did not expect to go home again. The Russians were heading for Cuba with missiles and the USA promised to sink them. We all knew that if that happened there would be a nuclear conflict. Fortunately they backed down.
These were the days of the Cold War.
As a child and up until quite recently I lived with the knowledge that I was in the target area for a number of nuclear warheads. In the event of war we would be obliterated. I spent my life five minutes from atomic death.
All it would take is a mistake, a piece of nationalistic bravado, gamesmanship, or flawed strategy. Now we have to throw religious fanaticism into the equation.
Nuclear bombs, like biological warfare, is a nightmare. Sometimes I wonder at the tribal stupidity that creates nations, politics and wars. We need to grow out of it.
I wanted to present the sinister face of evil peering out from the midst of the explosion. I saw the nose first, fitted in the eyes and pictured the blast zone as a pair of lips. The broiling inferno became a livid brain.
Nations, religion and patriotism is all madness to me.
I stand for one global people, united, equal and with one planet to nurture. This painting means a lot to me.
I always loved Dali. He was a showman, used car salesman, and an incredible artist. I loved the humour, trickery and expertise. There was always a sparkle in his eye and mischief in the making. You could take nothing on face value. I also adored his imagination, inventiveness and disdain for officialdom. He was a rebel.
Perhaps he did sell out? Perhaps he was arrogant? I’m not so sure. He was an artist and one of my favourites.
I wrote this after visiting Gala’s house in Spain. It was crazy. What a game!
Surreal
Confuse me with long legged giraffes
Beneath the melting clock
Armed with the Dali Gala
Feed me the nuclear shock
For I will wax my moustache
And cavort with the ants
Within the world of my dreams
That your colours all enhance
Opher 31.12.98
