The Glitches of Fear

August Natterer, My eyes at the moment of the apparitions, 1911-1913

Do you ever get that eerie feeling that something is not quite right?
The time is out of joint, unsynced, slowing right down,
Woozy with inertial entropy, cackling and hissing with static,
A soundtrack of ghosts residing in obsolete machinery
That reveals in the memory troubling gaps, the lacuna
Of shifting, impermanent assembled identities,
Assumed from random incidences, baroque notions
Jumbled together with jump-cuts, replays and glitches
Washed out and bleached of colour by false recollections,
Subject to the drifting haze of hypnagogic hallucinations,
The reverb and sinister echo of malevolent technologies,
That transforms all that is most tender and unique
Into a single freeze-framed image of absolute, stock fear.

69\//\96

Jindrich Strysky-Emilie Comes to Me in Dream 1931

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For a moment I thought,
When we came together
That anything, everything
Was finally possible;
Love as a greater unity,
Combining our limbs
Lips mouths cunt cock
Nothing to divide us,
No barriers to separate;
We shared a vision,
Tasted the pleasures
Of the long anticipated,
Much deferred paradise.

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But the moment passed,
Our bodies disentangled.
Even the shortest distance
Can lead to disenchantment;
Ultimately we fuck alone.
After such knowledge,
After being tantalized
With the promise of grace
Makes this world a hell
And other people,
Persecuting demons.
No, we can’t all just get along,
I will repay your hate
With pinpricks of fear,
Maybe then we can finally
Share the horror inherent
In everything, anything,
Even a wilted dandelion clock.

A Week of Max Ernst: Thursday

Two Children are Threatened by a Nightingale-Max Ernst 1924

There are fewer paintings that fully convey the peculiar quality of dreams. The clever incorporation of painted wood effects further enhances the uncanny atmosphere.

An open gate invites us in. Against a backdrop of De Chirico-esqe classical ruins and under a cloudless summer sky that is somehow too vast  we see a young girl brandishing a knife to see off a nightingale, meanwhile her companion has fallen into a swoon. Dwarfing the entire landscape is a wooden shed where a strange faceless figure is clutching another young girl while reaching for the knob attached to the picture  frame.

Ernst said that during a  fevered hallucination the wood grain panelling took on “successively the aspect of an eye, a nose, a bird’s head, a menacing nightingale, a spinning top, and so on.”