Myth, dream and poetry: The occult in 1930s British Surrealism

Yiyi Lo ´ pez G a ´ ndara MYTH, DREAM AND POETRY The occult in 1930s British Surrealism In spite of general claims about British Surrealism’s purportedly more moderate adoption of Surrealist tenets, the interest in occultism was not dimmed in Britain, even if it was not shown as openly as in the spiritist se´ances of Andr´e Breton. Rather, British Surrealist poetry involves a more internal apprehension of the occult in its access to the collective unconscious through myth and dream. The lure of the esoteric a` l’anglaise is performed through the analysis of three key 1930s British Surrealist texts: Hugh Sykes Davies’s Petron (1935), David Gascoyne’s Man’s Life is this Meat (1936) and Roland Penrose’s The Road is Wider than Long (1939). In these works, the occult is revealed in a variety of forms. These range from Sykes Davies’s algolagnic and gratifyingly painful experience of fate in relation to unconscious desire, to Gascoyne’s apocalyptical prophecies and cosmogonic visions and Penrose’s recovery of a pre-industrial collective past and the myth of the primitive. Through incantatory rhythms and ritualistic chants, these poets achieve a long-sought-for reconciliation between the conscious and the unconscious, a reconciliation which is also central to different occultist systems. Keywords surrealism; myth; magic; occult; prophet-poet; unconscious; Gascoyne; Sykes Davies; Penrose The more we learn about ourselves by the objective method of observation and analysis, the more we realize that our knowledge is already crystallized in the ancient myths. (Herbert Read, ‘Myth, Dream and Poem’, 1938: 176) Introduction The present study focuses on the relation between the Surrealist mythical imagination and the occult as it appears in three key texts of 1930s British Surrealism: Hugh Sykes Davies’s Petron (1935), David Gascoyne’s Man’s Life is this Meat (1936) and Roland Penrose’s The Road is Wider than Long (1939). In the first part of this essay, I shall describe general connections between the activities of the British Surrealist Group and occultism. In the second part, I shall provide an analysis of the relation between fate and unconscious desire in Hugh Sykes Davies’s Petron. Finally, I shall concentrate on certain aspects of the occult that are present in these poets’ works: the prophetic European Journal of English Studies Vol. 15, No. 3, December 2011, pp. 221–235 ISSN 1382-5577 print/ISSN 1744-4233 online ª 2011 Taylor & Francis http://www.tandf.co.uk/journals http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13825577.2011.626948 222 E U ROP E AN J O U R N A L O F E NG L I S H ST UD IES element in Gascoyne’s poems and the myth of pre-industrialism in Penrose’s The Road is Wider than Long. Crossing the channel The interest of French Surrealism in automatism, the workings of the unconscious and the esoteric manifested itself in Andre´ Breton’s and other continental Surrealists’ incursions into spiritism, magic visual and literary automatic compositions and cadavre exquis sessions (cf. Choucha, 1991; Rabinovitch, 2002). Long before Surrealism reached England, it had already given rise to milestones in France such as Les Champs Magne´tiques (1920), Nadja (1928), L’Immacule´e Conception (1930) or Les Vases Communicants (1932). Breton’s Manifesto of Surrealism was published in 1924. Yet, it took the movement more than a decade to cross the Channel. The ‘First English Manifesto of Surrealism’ was, significantly, drafted in French by David Gascoyne and published in Cahiers d’Art in 1935, during the same year in which the first British Surrealist work was published, Hugh Sykes Davies’s Petron. Beforehand, only two texts by English authors had anticipated the imminent arrival of Surrealism in England: David Gascoyne’s poem ‘And the Seventh Dream is the Dream of Isis’ was, in 1933, the first English Surrealist poem ever published; and ‘Banditti’, a section from Hugh Sykes Davies’s Petron, followed in 1934. In spite of general misconceptions about the reception of Surrealism in Britain, critics have now begun to see that the adoption of Surrealist tenets was no more moderate in Britain than in continental Europe. Certainly, the movement did not lose momentum through time and distance. The interest in occultism, the prophetic element and its relation to automatism was not less great in Britain, even if it was not openly demonstrated in spiritist se´ances like those of Breton. This is made manifest in the recent studies of esotericism and alchemy in the works of British Surrealist women, such as Leonora Carrington or Ithell Colquhoun. 1 Yet, it is also reflected in the various activities of the British Surrealist Group during the 1930s and 40s, and even beyond. These included Sheila Legge’s impersonation of the Surrealist Phantom at the opening of the 1936 London International Surrealist Exhibition, Ithell Colquhoun’s ordination into several hermetic orders and Grace Pailthorpe’s studies of the unconscious fantasy in writing and painting. Grace Pailthorpe and Reuben Mednikoff collaborated extensively with the British Surrealist Group between 1935 and 1940. Their connection with the occult developed out of their mutual friendship with Victor Neuburg, a former lover and follower of Aleister Crowley (cf. Pailthorpe, 1938–1939; Walsh and Wilson, 1998). In spite of some residual scepticism, Roland Penrose also engaged in esoteric practices. In his Scrapbook, he recalls how his then wife, the Surrealist poet Valentine Boue´, introduced him to the occult teachings of Spanish guru Galarza during a trip to Egypt in 1927. Finally, Charles Madge (1937) established the connection between anthropology, psychology and materialism in his article ‘Magic and Materialism’. In this article, he discusses the persistence of magic in poetry in the capitalist era. The very inception of British Surrealism shows the deep impression that the occult was to have on it. Surrealism in England came into being due to a chance encounter between Gascoyne and Penrose in a Paris bookshop. Paul E ´ luard, a good MYTH, DREAM AND POETRY 223 friend of Penrose’s, played the part of the Medieval moral guide during this episode which instigated the Surrealist revolution in Britain. According to the Surrealist theory of hasard objectif, chance encounters represent the realisation of a universal law that responds to the secret dictates of subconscious desire, allied with abstract necessity and the uncanny forces of the universe. Thus, the chance encounter between Gascoyne and Penrose and, by extension, the emergence of Surrealism in Britain, can be considered an act of objective necessity. The roots of the occult in British Surrealism The alchemical tradition in which Breton’s programmatic texts are embedded is undeniable, and it would certainly require a longer study to analyse Breton’s multiple references to magic and the ‘Alchemy of the Word’. 2 Although the founding texts of the British Group, including Gascoyne’s ‘First English Manifesto of Surrealism’, Herbert Read’s volume Surrealism or the International Surrealist Bulletin no. 4, are not explicit in their adhesion to Breton’s alchemical pursuits, it is still possible to trace the roots of the occult and the marvellous in their theory of poetic creation. As early as in 1933, Sykes Davies showed an interest in the alchemical power of the poetic word in his article ‘Magic and Meaning’. There he advocates for the magical word of poetry that is capable of creating a new reality as it names. ‘Words are things’, Sykes Davies says; poetry can only be understood as we understand ‘abracadabra’, as a form of incantation which, like myths in so-called primitive societies, ‘makes us more at home in the world which is beyond our control’ (1933: 255). This idea is also present in Penrose’s essay ‘Why I am a Painter’, written around 1938. The role of the Surrealist poet in the creation of a collective myth is further dealt with by Hugh Sykes Davies in his defense of poesy, ‘Homer and Vico’ (1934). There he advocates for the return of the natural and primitive poet, the pre-linguistic genesis of poetic creation and the conjunction of imagination and memory as the mechanisms for the creation of myth. Thus, the Surrealist automatic image becomes a myth-creating device which forces the juxtaposition of apparently dissimilar realities within the poet’s mind. In his 1938 article ‘Myth, Dream and Poem’, Herbert Read, the movement’s foremost theoretician in England, defends the automatic genesis of the Surrealist image and the trancelike state of the poet’s mind at the moment of creation. The poet becomes the prophet, for he is the creator of myth, conceived as a universal dream whose significance reaches into the depths of the collective unconscious (Read 1938: 178). The psychoanalytical theory of art and the relation between artistic creation and magic became central elements in the development of Surrealism in Britain. Several links between psychoanalysis and the occult are revealed through Freud’s theories of the unconscious (in spite of his explicit rejection of such links) and reinforced by Jung’s later immersion in the study of Hermeticism and Gnosticism. In an article published in transition in 1930, ‘Psychology and Poetry’, Jung established the connection between the artist and the seer/prophet in their experience of the ‘nocturnal world, the ghosts, the demons, the gods’ (1930: 35). His first major work on alchemical symbolism, Psychology and Alchemy, appeared in 1944 (Jung 1953). For Freud, external objects have a life of their own in our unconscious. Surrealists aim at bringing such internal life to the surface. In the ‘phantasy’ created in the work of art, 224 E U ROP E AN J O U R N A L O F E NG L I S H ST UD IES as well as in dreams and child play, desires which are otherwise thwarted in conscious life are fulfilled. In ‘Sympathies with Surrealism’ (1936b) and ‘Biology and Surrealism’ (1936a), Sykes Davies defends the psychoanalytical theory of art and rejects the concepts of inspiration and aesthetic intuition on account of their implications of intentionality and deliberateness. Moreover, he defends the idea of poetic creation as a biologically determined (i.e. automatic, instinctual, unconscious) human faculty. Sykes Davies sees art in modern culture as the direct descendant of magic in so-called primitive societies. In a form of atavistic regression, the artist connects with the so-called primitive man, and his images acquire a universal dimension. Having replaced the concrete and therefore incomplete metaphor, myth bridges the abyss between the real and the fantastic. Hugh Sykes Davies’s Petron (1935) Hugh Sykes Davies’s Petron precludes rational categorisation at all levels. It is a prose poem and a piece of poetic prose, a composition where narration or lyricism find no place. It narrates no incidents save the occurrences that take place at the unconscious level, in the state of trance or in dreams. There is no action except for psychic action. There is no time except for the mythical time of the spiralling descent into the unconscious. There are no characters save the collective memory, and no narrator save the reader. This conjunction of totality and nothingness is a point where reality and consciousness vanish and the magic and the supernatural prevail. Petron is a nightmarish journey into the depths of the human psyche; images of massacre and blood pervade the text and bring it closer to rituals of demonic exorcism. The Surrealist algolagnic sensibility that is found in Petron derives gratification from the experience of pain. This connects with the English Romantic and Gothic traditions and the French po`etes maudits. It also relates to the crisis of consciousness and the malaise of the fin du sie`cle. Desire, pain and pleasure become inextricably entwined in the text, where pain is inflicted and endured in a self-satisfying and cathartic manner. Finally, Petron also represents a metafictional commentary on the conventions of travel narratives: it follows the mythical structure of the classical journey (Homer’s Odyssey), the symbolic structure of the medieval journey (Dante’s Inferno), the dystopian structure of the adventure novel (Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels) and the psychological structure of the Modernist journey (Joyce’s Ulysses). Petron’s wanderings are a-temporal and anachronistic. Repeated several times throughout the novel, the word procession reinforces the idea of circularity, which is represented by the alchemical Ouroboros and continually evoked in Petron’s penitence through hell. Time is condensed as in dream states, and events follow randomly, gradually metamorphosing into each other and defying the natural laws of causality. There is no temporal advancement. Although night and day follow one another in a seemingly periodical succession of days, time repeats itself endlessly in mythological dawns and sunsets in a way which can only be described as cosmic. Time becomes mythical in spiralling oneiric vortices where external metamorphoses are counteracted by unchanged essences, or time repeats itself cyclically: the hedger, who divides his fingers ad infinitum with a pruning-bill, turns into a fakir and a prestidigitator (Sykes Davies, 1935: 8–9); Petron incessantly ventures into the ruins MYTH, DREAM AND POETRY 225 of a castle, where he is repeatedly assaulted by a gang of bandits; two giants are merged into the natural landscape; a twisted tree turns into an old man; a toadstool becomes an idiot whose overstretching mouth extends over the horizon in a new dusk. The text’s incursions into mysticism are made clear through the exordial paragraphs in which positivist science is derided as the antagonist of poetry, which is personified by Milton, Shakespeare, Shelley, Poe or Coleridge. Mental conditions such as paranoia, delusion, insomnia and hypersensitivity are praised as psychological paths to another liberating and unconstrained reality. The poet is the prophet of this new reality, free from external restraints, social conventions and moral impositions. Surrealism becomes a sort of religion, and the poet is its priest. Through poetry the poet comes into direct contact with a superior reality, which is made available via a passive state of mind, where no control is exerted by reason and unexpected associations take place at the unconscious level. Through this mystification of poetry, the poet has the power to create by naming the new reality which is perceived by the Surrealist sensibility. Thus, the very name of the protagonist, Petron, evokes in the reader the totality of his experiences, which lie in the collective unconscious and, therefore, which we all know of and share: ‘All his adventures, all his sufferings flash before you at the mention of his name, as do the events of your own life when you fall down the cliffs’ (4). In his use of Dal´ı’s paranoiac-critical method, Sykes Davies presents a protean reality that is in constant flux. 3 Objects are perceived to be in a permanent state of transition where the real and the fantastic meet: a battered toy becomes simultaneously a grasshopper, an old man, a monstrous spider, a woman’s breast, a bunch of grass, a heap of bones and a lizard that marvellously eludes being grasped (66). Paradoxically, Sykes Davies’s gallery of fantastic elements, personifications and metamorphoses contributes towards the verisimilitude of the overall composition, for it creates a coherent system of universal interpretation whose credibility and truth lie in the marvellous. 4 However, Sykes Davies is aware of the sceptical eye, as he shows in the quotation from Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso with which he begins the first part of the book: ‘Forse era ver, ma non pero` credibile’. Petron is, like Orlando in part, an elegy on madness. In ritualistic sacrifices of self-immolation and self-mutilation, the destructive element, Thanatos, annihilates all sense of self: a crab attacks itself as its two front claws fight each other (25–6); Petron disfigures his face with hammers and mallets in order not to be recognised by others, or himself. Through multiple references to astronomy, Petron entrusts himself to the irrational forces of the universe, which hypnotically guide his journey. There is a black speck underneath the sun which Petron cannot cease to contemplate. This black speck is the planet Mercury. In Roman mythology, Mercury (the Greek Hermes) is the god of travellers, a messenger of the gods and the guide to the underworld, to whom prophetic and oracular powers are also attributed. 5 Mercury becomes Petron’s guide in the initial stage of his journey. As the journey progresses, omens of danger and death surround Petron, who not only ignores them but even challenges their ominous threats: signposts warning of the dangers of deviating from the right path are palimpsestically transformed by Petron, who draws the monstrous metamorphoses of the hedge keeper on the signposts; crows, ravens, rooks and a moribund man (who also turns out to be Petron himself) warn him against going into the ruins of a castle, 226 E U ROP E AN J O U R N A L O F E NG L I S H ST UD IES but he is nevertheless drawn there once and again by a procession of marching trees; Petron’s absorption in the menacing scene of a flock of cranes flying around the moon is soon interrupted when his attention is caught by the image of the self-annihilating crab. Finally, when the prophecies of several fortune tellers whom he encounters on his way find no correlation in the natural world, Petron challenges their oracular powers and decides to trust his own omens about the future, thus becoming the chiromancer for his own destiny. A self-devised mechanism for the prediction of the immediate future is the element that reconciles Petron’s desire and fate in a way that is as hazardous as it is objective: One end of a tough rope he tied firmly to the topmost bough of a pine tree. The other he set in a tight noose about his own neck. Then he set off briskly due south. As the rope grew taut, the tree bent over, and finally achieved such a tension that it jerked Petron off his feet, swung him through the air, and flung him on the ground stunned and bruised. Coming to his senses, he found that the rope was still firm on the tree and about his neck, and that he was now facing due west. (30) The tree represents an intersecting point where, like in the Cabbalistic Tree, all potentialities converge: it is the tree of all possible and impossible fates, of life and death, of doom and salvation. Petron repeats the routine described above in directions that are set by the tree in a ceremonial manner. This is reminiscent of the Ritual of the Pentagram in the Hermetic order of the Golden Dawn, in which the cardinal points are central to the process of invocation of the four natural elements (cf. Regardie, 1986). During his final attempt, he goes ‘much further than ever before without being jerked back’ (Sykes Davies, 1935: 31), the rope becomes a thread and finally releases him. A physical, albeit illogical, sign (the rope coming loose) is understood by Petron as a mystical sign for the direction in which he should go: North. Hasard objectif has thus become his compass, guiding him to the city where he arrives with a messianic purpose. Petron’s deeds in this unknown city are recounted in a passage whose narrative structure suggests that his visit is indeed the result of an act of universal necessity. As he enters the city, the reader discovers that a terrible and mysterious crime has been committed there, which has thrown the citizens into a state of mutual suspicion and self-distrust. When Petron guides the helpless citizens to the remote place where the corpse is to be found, he does so in a trancelike state which renders his actions automatic, as if he were being led by a primitive instinctive force, and the place itself is described as mythical: ‘the sense of setting foot upon ground unvisited since the creation of the world, ground where through innumerable revolutions of the heaven, an endless procession of seasons had seen the flowers and herbs grow and fade, and grow again, wither and bloom, and wither again, untended, untilled, and unused by any of the passing generations of mankind’ (37–8). The murder of the pregnant woman becomes an individual and a communal crime. As in dreams, her identity is made fluid through mechanisms of compression, and it is never clear either who she is or whether or not Petron and the citizens had ever met her. She thus becomes a universal symbol for unconscious common desire. The crime can be given both a psychoanalytical and an esoteric reading: the myth of the devouring father combines with the woman’s sacrifice and the final act of exorcism that draws the devil out of the her body: ‘From the still bleeding wound there issues, like a red and headless serpent, MYTH, DREAM AND POETRY 227 the entrails of his beloved! See! The monster is moving slowly towards him, writhing with pain and anger!’ (48). Petron’s eventual confession to the crime redeems the citizens and liberates them from their communal guilt. In the scene of his public confession, Petron becomes the bard of the terrible deed nobody dares to confess, a speaker for the collective unconscious and the intermediary between an uncanny superior reality and the citizens that acclaim him to be their leader. When the crime goes unpunished, he becomes the priest who administers the sin and the sacrament. His liturgical narration of the crime is interspersed by variations of a sententia which contribute to the incantatory rhythm of the passage: ‘Neither of them had seen it before, but one has now seen it for the last time, and the other will never forget it’ (ibid.: 48). It is a ritualistic celebration of ancestral memory, an act of communal expiation and of communal purification. Catharsis is achieved through the liberation of irrational instincts, and the accolade of crime – a recurrent element in Surrealist writing – represents a liberating process: this is the total annihilation of the repressive forces that function at the conscious level. In Petron, literature becomes confessional and, as such, an anthropophagous activity. It represents an ancient rite of self-sacrifice on the part of the poet who offers himself for the salvation of others. His is a phantasmagorical voice that can only be responded to by a party of cannibals (the readers). Similarly, the eerie cries that emerge from the ghastly wounds of a cattle-dealer are answered only by ravenous wolves in the text (65). In the end, Petron remains solitary, deluded, paranoid and cursed by a series of terrible dream visions of a cobwebbed gibbet, the dismembered body of an old man, a desecrated funeral, a farmer devoured by vermin, a botanic Eden of treacherous plants, a field of hands that hypnotically follow the orb of the sun, and a headless horseman who is urged towards his sepulchre. Although the completion of Petron’s journey is announced, only the reader’s dream of the journey approaches an end: ‘Let us leave him unobserved to perform those deeds the nature of which we both dimly surmise, and of which we should be unwilling and horrified observers! Let his be the action: ours be but a dream of the action’ (76). The poetic narrative fails to achieve completion for a new frontier is crossed and a new initiation rite is begun. This includes mixed images of the apocalypse and a pseudo-Biblical exodus through a red stagnant sea; the mythological cycle of the eternal struggle for liberation is entered upon again: ‘Already at the frontier his approach is awaited by a strange sentinel, a white stallion, restive, his nostrils a-quiver, and far below, in the valley, gleam the saffron-hued waters of a stagnant mere’ (79). David Gascoyne’s Man’s Life is this Meat (1936) Ever-present in Petron, the Biblical element merges with an increasing metaphysical interest in Man’s Life is this Meat, David Gascoyne’s collection of Surrealist poems. Through a constant invocation to deities, heavenly bodies, mythologies, the four elements and Hermetic science, the poet advocates for his being the prophet of a new reality, which is at once marvellous and apocalyptic. Gascoyne’s Surrealist poetics become a veritable attempt to create a new system for interpreting reality. Even, if at 228 E U ROP E AN J O U R N A L O F E NG L I S H ST UD IES points the images are apocalyptic, the poet is as much concerned with eschatology as with genesis. In this Surrealist cosmogony, the individual is only a minute element in an eternal succession of days. The present exists in timelessness and only becomes comprehensible through the automatic images of the prophet-poet, who creates a magic dimension in which to interpret time and space. Gascoyne’s ‘And the Seventh Dream is the Dream of Isis’ was the first Surrealist poem to be written in English. The fact that it is devoted to an ancient myth closely related to fertility remains fortuitous, for British Surrealism did indeed beget fertile offspring after the poem was published. In ancient mythology, Isis was the Egyptian goddess of magic and was associated with the four natural elements. Isis became a central deity who was connected with motherhood in Golden Dawn magic: Aleister Crowley (1973: 343) described her as ‘the eternal mother’ in his seminal treatise Magick. Performed with Victor Neuburg at Caxton Hall in 1910, Crowley’s Rites of Eleusis also took up the Isis theme. By the time Gascoyne wrote his ‘Seventh Dream’, Isis was central to British occultism and was thus a perfect Surrealist muse (cf. Colquhoun, 1975; Owen, 2004). In Gascoyne’s poem, her seventh dream is a dream of resurrection which defies the laws of the natural world. Gascoyne presents a decaying capitalist society and its legacy of biblical plagues, parricides, clerical corruption, selfishness and sterility. The new reality emerges from the remnants of this dying system in a way that is reminiscent of the mythological resurrection of Osiris.6 In Gascoyne’s poem, an earthquake announces the new world: creation and revelation, like beauty for Breton, must be convulsive. This new world of subversion and liberation resembles the one that is bombastically broadcast in Roger Roughton’s (1936) ‘Animal Crackers in your Croup’. Both salute an era in which religion is satirised, sexual freedom is advocated, capitalism is damned and the new wor(l)d of poetry is proclaimed. Roughton’s highly visual image of a ‘palmist’ lunching on his crystal ball reinforces the idea of the poet-prophet, whereas Gascoyne’s images of eternal damnation show the black-magic powers of the poet-priest: prayer books open themselves during death services; a horrible dentist is sent to examine the methods of cannibals; terrible illnesses are brought onto the possessors of pistols. The poem is full of implicit references to Theosophy, and it is no wonder that one of the foundational books of the Theosophical Society is Helena Blavatsky’s Isis Unveiled (1877/1994): here, she defends spiritualism and the role of magic and the occult against religious zeal and scientific dogmatism. 7 In the Surrealist imagination, the food motif is closely related to the arcane revelation of an otherwise impenetrable truth. Thus food imagery becomes a key element of Surrealist poetics from Lewis Carroll to Salvador Dal´ı. In Gascoyne’s poems, purification is achieved in ceremonial banquets of orgiastic convulsive perception, as in ‘Purified Disgust’, where ‘Heavy flesh invokes the voice of penitence / . . . / Seated at the banquet of the carnal lusts’ (Gascoyne 1936: 16). In ‘Direct Response’ the four elements sit at the table in an invitation to a ceremonial rite in which the human body is grotesquely disfigured. Thus, the banquet becomes a quest for totality and truth. A deeper form of apprehension of reality is called for as sensible perception becomes deceptive: ‘What can you etch upon the eyes’ quick web? / . . . / Whose profile can you sketch upon their filmy screen?’ (14). Furthermore, a state of trance is invoked as the mind becomes a stone and is put into a cataleptic and passive state in which shadows are clearly and intimately perceived. MYTH, DREAM AND POETRY 229 Synesthetic automatism deconstructs the idea of reality and the fallacy of mimetic apprehension: ‘A bird’s blue shadow trembles on my breasts / . . . / And I am neither white nor warm nor cold’ (14). In ‘The Rites of Hysteria’ and ‘Charity Week’ mental conditions are praised as the psychological path to a new form of perception, and religion is deprecated in favour of the sublimation of desire. In ‘Purified Disgust’ rational knowledge and judgment are dismissed as forms of cruel pretence which do not lead to the truth. Spirituality is praised when the poet becomes a martyr and undergoes a gradual transfiguration into Saint Sebastian. Eventually, physical and psychological torture brings about purification and cathartic realisation in a state of semi-unconscious trance: ‘A sudden spasm saves us/A pure disgust illumines us’ (16). In ‘The End is Near the Beginning’ time becomes mythical in the image of the eternal unloading of the sea, where origin and end reunite: ‘Several men are standing on the pier/Unloading the sea/The device on the trolley says MOTHER’S MEAT/ Which means Until the end’ (20). Similarly, in ‘Unspoken’, circularity is re-enacted in an endless procession of voluptuous primitive forms: And here I am caught up among the glistening of/Bodies proud with the opulence of flesh/The silent limbs of beings lying across the light/Silken at the hips and pinched between two fingers/Their thirsty faces turned upwards towards breaking/Their long legs shifting slanting turning/In a parade of unknown virtues/Beginning again and beginning/Again. (23) The voluptuousness of the parading figures contrasts with their mannequin-like contorted gestures: the roundness of their fertile hips is counteracted by the spasmodic movements of their elongated legs. This is a pilgrimage through the unconscious realm of the human psyche which anticipates typically Dalinian double images of fertility and dearth. The praise of irrational primitivism is further reinforced in the echoes of Joseph Conrad’s modernist journey into the Belgian Congo: Travelling through man’s unspoken continent/Among the unspeaking mountains/The dumb lakes and the deafened valleys/Illumined by paroxysms of vision/Clear waves of soundless sight/Lapping out of the heart of darkness. (23) Thus, the poem becomes a celebration of the pre-logical and pre-linguistic state of human consciousness. This is evoked by a physical and spiritual return to the origins of mankind which resembles Penrose’s own journey to antiquity in The Road is Wider than Long. ‘The Diabolical Principle’ combines fantastic imagery and omens of death in its incantatory invocation of the demonic forces that govern the universe. A unicorn is the fantastic element that establishes the contrast between the magical real and the apocalyptic-real. Two symbols of the biblical apocalypse (the white horse and the living dead) are combined in this eschatological scenario. There are also images of decay, destruction and death: a broken bottle and a broken torso, a card palace at the point of collapse, an eye winking from the gallows and an execution. Finally, a bed sliding upwards, which recalls unorthodox rites of Catholic exorcism, and a doomed marital bed become the symbols of eternal damnation. A planetary apocalypse is announced and the end of the world is enacted in this prophetic drama, which may