Night Games

Ellen Rogers

Maybe it’s the answer but sleep
I feel is out of the question
As your skin crackles with electricity
Surging through the nerve endings
Generating a force field that shocks
When our skin and flesh intersect
I know you want to play once again
Those night games in earnest
My wanton snake eyed charmer
Dancing only to the best tunes
Sinuously moving to a rhythm
Hypnotically vicious as a wet dream
Compulsive as the masturbator’s motion
As compelling as a large scale disaster
We don’t dare pause to consider
That our impulsive night games
Are careering right out of control
Skidding towards the concrete barrier
Even if we did do you doubt
That we would press down hard
Accelerating loosening seatbelts
Elatedly bracing for the impact
Of the ultimate folie a deux
A drastic re-configuration of identity
But come there are so many more
Games we could play in the darkness
I see you staring back at me in the bar
We are strangers meeting for the first time
That illicit thrill a depth charge to the core
I know of a hotel around the corner
A fine and private place I’m assured
Once alone together I promise
To do you so good to do you so right
Make you experience the exquisite
Head fucking psycho-drama of attraction
Once again this time with renewed emotion
Believe me I am never more serious
Than when I am playing night games

Forever 3:33AM Eternal

Eugena Loli

It’s that time of the night
Forever 3:33AM eternal
The hour when the wolf howls
At the big bitch in the sky
The untouchable mistress, unloving
Moon, mother of archaic memories
Baying for blood to nourish the brood
Of nocturnal predators, night creatures,
Witches familiars, demons spawn,
Furious hordes, insatiable cubi,
All the swarming hosts of darkness.

I think that….
We really need…
We got to have us some…
But we can’t get no….
Sleep…

So sleepless
We cackle and fizz:
For a split second
The view is expansive
We can see everything
Future past far
Wide near narrowing
Until it contracts to a vanishing
Still point that finally disappears
Into the oh-so sleazy
Right here-now nowhere
The forever 3:33AM eternal.

The clocks have stopped,
The rest of the world
Is no longer in motion;
Yet you slowly approach,
Rosy red glowing pale-bright
Translucent, tinged with the electric blue
Of raw sex, resonating with the sadness
Of a stone cold seductress
Towards my slouched figure:
You will make a heathen of me
Worshipping in the dead of night
Raised ravished razed by the mystery
Of your magic as I rip through
Your diaphanous veils one by one
All the while praying to you
That it remains
Forever 3:33AM eternal.

Death’s Discoteca

 

Clovis-Trouille-Mon-Tombeau

 

Soulless automaton,
pallid vampire,
with your amphetamine blush,
ceaseless opiated caresses
if only looks could melt.
Last of the gravers,
nodding away
at death’s discoteca
do you miss
that old morbid élan,
with real live girls,
packets of gear,
being the man,
making them wait?
You ain’t who you
used to be anymore,
hollowed out by the night,
spooked by a thousand insomnias,
an uncertain spectre
at the feast of the auto-cannibals:
paying the heavenly revenue service
the vig for deceiving syntax;
now every lying word turns to ash
within your pitted and parched mouth,
and every cruel intention,
conning misdirection
is now a stone within
your bloated stomach.
Pallid vampire,
soulless automaton,
time to open the curtains
and let the sunshine flood in.

Sleep Spaces

Robert Desnos-Man Ray

In 1922 Rene Crevel told his friend and mentor Andre Breton about a visit he had made to a Spiritualist seance. It was the time of  the mouvement flou, the increasingly nihilistic Dada had negated itself out of existence and Surrealism was yet to come into being. Breton was intrigued and arranged an event with his friends. The results were startling; and this was the beginning of the Period of the Sleeping Fits. Crevel and Robert Desnos were particularly  susceptible to  falling into the trance state and answering questions that was put to them by the group, sometimes with unnerving effect. Each day they would spend longer in a trance, Desnos even had the ability to write while asleep. Both Crevel and Desnos began to rapidly lose weight and Desnos became convinced that he was possessed by Rrose Selavy, Marcel Duchamp’s female alter ego, even though he had never met Duchamp. Events began to spiral out of control and the experiment with trance states was abandoned completely when Crevel led a group suicide attempt.

Desnos loved to sleep (most photographs show him asleep) and his poetry vividly evokes that universal yet nebulous state  Below is  his 1926 poem Sleep Spaces, translation by Mary Ann Caws.

In the night there are naturally the seven marvels of the world and greatness and the   tragic and enchantment.
Confusedly, forests mingle with legendary creatures hidden in the thickets.
You are there.
In the night there is the nightwalker’s step and the murderer’s and the policeman’s     and the streetlight and the ragman’s lantern.
You are there.
In the night pass trains and ships and the mirage of countries where it is daylight. The last breaths of twilight and the first shivers of dawn.
You are there.
A tune on the piano, a cry.
A door slams,
A clock.
And not just beings and things and material noises.
But still myself chasing myself or going on beyond.
You are there, immolated one, you for whom I wait.
Sometimes strange figures are born at the instant of sleep and disappear.
When I close my eyes, phosphorescent blooms appear and fade and are reborn like carnal fireworks.
Unknown countries I traverse with creatures for company.
You are there most probably, oh beautiful discreet spy.
And the palpable soul of the reaches.
And the perfumes of the sky and the stars and the cock’s crow from two thousand years ago and the peacock’s scream in the parks aflame and kisses.
Handshakes sinister in a sickly light and axles screeching on hypnotic roads.
You are most probably there, whom I do not know, whom on the contrary I know.
But who, present in my dreams, insist on being sensed there without appearing.
You who remain out of reach in reality and in dream.
You who belong to me by my will to possess you in illusion but whose face approaches mine if my eyes are closed to dream as well as to reality.
You in spite of an easy rhetoric where the waves die on the beaches, where the crow flies in ruined factories, where wood rots cracking under a leaden sky.
You who are at the depths of my dreams, arousing my mind full of metamorphoses and leaving me your glove when I kiss your hand.
In the night there are stars and the tenebral motion of the sea, rivers, forests, towns, grass, the lungs of millions and millions of being.
In the night there are the marvels of the world.
In the night there are no guardian angels but there is sleep.
In the night you are there.
In the day also.

Sleep has his house

Mystery and Melancholy of a Street-Giorgio De Chirico 1914

Although Anna Kavan is primarily remembered (when she is remembered at all) for her extraordinary apocalyptic novel Ice, she also wrote a number of remarkable short stories and novels, including the compellingly grim Who Are You? and her most surrealistic work, the dream narrative Sleep has his house from 1948.

Taking its title from a poem by the medieval English poet John Gower, Kavan states the works intention in the brief introduction:

LIFE IS TENSION or the result of tension: without tension the creative impulse cannot exist. If human life be taken as the result of tension between the two polarities night and day, night, the negative pole, must share equal importance with the positive day. At night, under the influence of cosmic radiation quite different from those of the day, human affairs are apt to come to a crisis. At night most human beings die and are born.

Sleep has his house describes in the night-time language certain stages in the development of one individual human being. No interpretation is needed of this language we have all spoken in childhood and in our dreams; but for the sake of unity a few words before every section indicate the corresponding events of the day.

Sleep has his house raised little comment upon publication. Traditional English fiction of the time was obsessed by character and the class structure, concerns that Kavan didn’t share in the slightest. Here we are in the realm of universals and archetypes. As well as exploring the nature of dreams, Sleep has his house primarily deals with the mother-daughter relationship (it is safe to say that Kavan had mummy issues) although in the most abstract fashion possible. Kavan’s dream surrogate is simply named B while the mother is just A.

Dream narratives are notoriously difficult to sustain; dreams are by their very nature elusive, incoherent and intensely personal, however Kavan, in prose that is poetic, painterly and cinematic manages to achieve this near impossible feat.

Below is a short excerpt that gives a flavour of Kavan’s night-time language. Although she rarely directly addressed her heroin addiction, the preference for fevered, apocalyptic and macabre imagery shows her kinship with other opiated writers, namely Coleridge, De Quincey and later, Burroughs.

Are you afraid of the tigers? Do you hear them padding all round you on their fierce fine velvet feet?

The speed of the growth of tigers in the nightland is a thing which ought to be investigated some time by the competent authority. You start off with one, about the size of a mouse, and before you know where you are he’s twice the size of the Sumatra tiger which defeats all corners in that hemisphere. And then, before you can say Knife (not a very tactful thing to say in the circumstances anyhow), all his boy and girl friends are gathered round, your respectable quiet decorous night turns itself into a regular tiger-garden. Wherever you look, the whole night is full of tigers leaping and loping and grooming their whiskers and having a wonderful time at your expense. There isn’t a thing you can do about it apparently.

The wilder the tricks of the tigers, the more abandoned their games and gambols, the more diversely dreadful become the dooms of the unfortunate A in this dream. Her fugitive shape, black-swathed, varnishes at the end of every cul-de-sac. Through the cities of the world she pursues her fate, in streets where the dead eyes of strangers are no colder than the up-swarming lights which have usurped the brilliance of the stars. From shrouded platforms among the clouds she hurtles down. She plunges from towers strict and terrible in their fragile strength, delicate as jerboa’s bones on the sky, perdurable with granite and steel. Slumped on his stained bar, Pete the Greek, beneath flybown Christmas festoons which no one will ever remove, hears the screaming skid of wheels spouting slush with her blood. Limp as an old coat not worth a hanger, she is to be found behind numbered doors in hotel bedrooms; or dangling from the trees of country churchyards where leaning tombstones like feeble-minded ghosts mop and mow in the long summer grass. The weeds of lonely rivers bind her with clammy skeins; the tides of tropical oceans suck off her shoes; crabs scuttle over her eye sockets. Sheeted and anonymous on rubbered wheels she traverses the interminable bleakness of chloroform corridors. The sardonic yap of the revolver can be taken as the full stop arbitrarily concluding each ambiguous sentence.