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This is the translation of Breton's short essay "Rising Sign" as it appears in the selection of Breton's writings, What is Surrealism? (edited by Franklin Rosemont). Its subject is poetic analogy, the practice of which is at the heart of magic and occult sciences. I will later complement this article by sharing the rules of a game the surrealists play as a means of sharpening this practice.
Rising Sign
The desire the female feels for the male
resembles the mists which rise from earth
to the sky so that having formed clouds
the sky might water the earth.
— ZOHAR
I never have experienced intellectual pleasure except on the analogical plane. For me the only evidence in the world is commanded by the spontaneous, extralucid, insolent rapport which establishes itself, under certain conditions, between one thing and another, and which common sense hesitates to confront. True as it is that the most execrable word I know is the word therefore, with all it bears in terms of vanity and morose delectation, I madly love everything that adventurously breaks the thread of discursive thought and suddenly ignites a flare illuminating a life of relations fecund in another way. Everything indicates that men of an earlier time possessed the secret of these relations. And the flare, though it quickly dies, hardly needs to be measured on the dismal scale of exchange values prevailing today: No answers except to immediate utilitarian questions. Indifferent to anything that does not approach from very near, more and more insensible to anything that can deliver him (provided he has some amplitude) an interrogation of nature, the man we shun gives himself hardly any other task than to float. The millenarian conviction which maintains that nothing exists gratuitously and that, on the contrary, there can be neither beings nor natural phenomena deprived of a ciphered communication with us - the conviction animating the majority of cosmogonies — has lost its position to the most obtuse of detachments; we have thrown away the axehead with its handle. We stop and ask ourselves: ‘Where do we come from? Why am I here? Where am I going?’
But is it not an aberration, and impudent, to wish to transform a world which one no longer cares to interpret in any permanent sense? Primordial links are broken. I say only analogical tools reach fleetingly towards their re-establishment. Whence the importance assumed, at long intervals, by these brief flashes from a lost mirror.
On the bed of the whites of the eyes, the
iris is the base for the mattress of the
pupil, where a phantom of ourselves lies
down in a dream.
— MALCOLM DE CHAZAL
Poetic analogy has in common with mystical analogy that it transgresses the deductive laws in order to make the mind apprehend the interdependence of two objects of thought situated on different planes, between which the logical functioning of the mind is unlikely to throw a bridge, in fact opposes a priori any bridge which might be thrown. Poetic analogy differs profoundly from mystical analogy in that it never presupposes, beyond the bounds of the visible world, an invisible universe tending to make itself manifest. It is entirely empirical in its movement forward, except that the empiricism assures it the total liberty of motion necessary for the leap it must provide. Considered in its effects, it is true that poetic analogy seems, like mystical analogy, to militate in favour of the conception of a world ramified as far as the eye can see and entirely filled with the same sap, but it maintains itself without any constraints in the sensible or even the sensual structure and without displaying any propensity to orient itself towards the supernatural. It tends to hint at and bring to account truly ‘absent’ life. And, just as it cannot lose its substance in metaphysical reverie, so it cannot for an instant dream of turning its conquests to the greater glory of some ‘beyond’.
The dream is a heavy
Ham
Which hangs from the ceiling
— PIERRE REVERDY
I arrive a sparrow hawk and depart a phoenix.
— VOICE OF THE THIRD SOUL, EGYPTIAN BOOK OF THE DEAD
Given the present state of poetic research, little should be made of the purely formal distinction which might be established between metaphor and comparison. It suffices that both constitute interchangeable vehicles of analogical thought and that if the first offers flashing resources, the second, which one must judge by Lautréamont’s ‘beautiful as’, presents considerable advantages of suspension. It is understood that beside these the other ‘figures’ which rhetoric persists in enumerating are absolutely devoid of interest. Only the analogical switch arouses our passion; only by it can we start the world’s motor. The word like is the most exalting at our command when it is pronounced familiarly. Through it human imagination fulfils itself and the highest destiny of the mind comes into play. Likewise, we reject disdainfully the grievously ignorant abuses of the image in today’s poetry and we appeal to it, in this regard, for an always-great luxuriance.
Your throat which advances and which pushes the silk
Your triumphant throat is a beautiful armoire
— CHARLES BAUDELAIRE
The analogical method, though held in honour in antiquity and the Middle Ages, was thereafter grossly supplanted by the ‘logical’ method which has led us to our well-known impasse. The first duty of poets and artists is to re-establish analogy in all its prerogatives, taking care to uproot all the rear-guard spiritualist thought, always carried along parasitically, which vitiates or paralyses its functioning.
Your teeth are like a flock of sheep leaving the washpen.
— SONG OF SONGS
It should be remembered that thirty years ago Pierre Reverdy, first approaching the source of the image, was led to formulate this capital law: “The greater and truer the distance between two juxtaposed realities, the stronger will be the image and the greater its emotive power and poetic reality.’ This absolutely necessary condition never can be taken as sufficient. Another exigency which, in the final analysis, could well be of an ethical order, takes its place beside it. Let notice be taken: The analogical image, to the degree that it illuminates in the brightest way partial similarities, will not be traduced in terms of equation. It moves between the two realities present in a determined way which is never reversible. From the first of these realities to the second, it marks a vital tension turned possibly towards health, pleasure, quietude, given thanks, consented usages. It has as its mortal enemies the deprecative and the depressing. If noble words no longer exist, false poets cannot avoid identifying themselves by ignoble rapprochements. The classic example is the ‘Guitar - a bidet that sings’, by an author [Cocteau] who abounds in such ‘discoveries’.
I see the spirits assembled; they have their hats on.
— SWEDENBORG
Your tongue
The red fish in the aquarium
Of your mouth
— APOLLINAIRE
We passed along an avenue planted with blue breasts where day no longer differentiated itself from night except by a comma, and the sardine from the grasshopper by a scratching hair.
—- BENJAMIN PERET
The best light on the general, obligatory sense that the image worthy of the name must have is furnished by a Zen writer: ‘Out of Buddhist kindness, Basho one day ingeniously changed a cruel haiku composed by his humorous disciple, Kikaku. The latter having written, “A red dragonfly - tear off its wings —- a pimento”’, Basho substituted “‘A pimento — add wings —a red dragonfly.”
Rising Sign
The desire the female feels for the male
resembles the mists which rise from earth
to the sky so that having formed clouds
the sky might water the earth.
— ZOHAR
I never have experienced intellectual pleasure except on the analogical plane. For me the only evidence in the world is commanded by the spontaneous, extralucid, insolent rapport which establishes itself, under certain conditions, between one thing and another, and which common sense hesitates to confront. True as it is that the most execrable word I know is the word therefore, with all it bears in terms of vanity and morose delectation, I madly love everything that adventurously breaks the thread of discursive thought and suddenly ignites a flare illuminating a life of relations fecund in another way. Everything indicates that men of an earlier time possessed the secret of these relations. And the flare, though it quickly dies, hardly needs to be measured on the dismal scale of exchange values prevailing today: No answers except to immediate utilitarian questions. Indifferent to anything that does not approach from very near, more and more insensible to anything that can deliver him (provided he has some amplitude) an interrogation of nature, the man we shun gives himself hardly any other task than to float. The millenarian conviction which maintains that nothing exists gratuitously and that, on the contrary, there can be neither beings nor natural phenomena deprived of a ciphered communication with us - the conviction animating the majority of cosmogonies — has lost its position to the most obtuse of detachments; we have thrown away the axehead with its handle. We stop and ask ourselves: ‘Where do we come from? Why am I here? Where am I going?’
But is it not an aberration, and impudent, to wish to transform a world which one no longer cares to interpret in any permanent sense? Primordial links are broken. I say only analogical tools reach fleetingly towards their re-establishment. Whence the importance assumed, at long intervals, by these brief flashes from a lost mirror.
On the bed of the whites of the eyes, the
iris is the base for the mattress of the
pupil, where a phantom of ourselves lies
down in a dream.
— MALCOLM DE CHAZAL
Poetic analogy has in common with mystical analogy that it transgresses the deductive laws in order to make the mind apprehend the interdependence of two objects of thought situated on different planes, between which the logical functioning of the mind is unlikely to throw a bridge, in fact opposes a priori any bridge which might be thrown. Poetic analogy differs profoundly from mystical analogy in that it never presupposes, beyond the bounds of the visible world, an invisible universe tending to make itself manifest. It is entirely empirical in its movement forward, except that the empiricism assures it the total liberty of motion necessary for the leap it must provide. Considered in its effects, it is true that poetic analogy seems, like mystical analogy, to militate in favour of the conception of a world ramified as far as the eye can see and entirely filled with the same sap, but it maintains itself without any constraints in the sensible or even the sensual structure and without displaying any propensity to orient itself towards the supernatural. It tends to hint at and bring to account truly ‘absent’ life. And, just as it cannot lose its substance in metaphysical reverie, so it cannot for an instant dream of turning its conquests to the greater glory of some ‘beyond’.
The dream is a heavy
Ham
Which hangs from the ceiling
— PIERRE REVERDY
I arrive a sparrow hawk and depart a phoenix.
— VOICE OF THE THIRD SOUL, EGYPTIAN BOOK OF THE DEAD
Given the present state of poetic research, little should be made of the purely formal distinction which might be established between metaphor and comparison. It suffices that both constitute interchangeable vehicles of analogical thought and that if the first offers flashing resources, the second, which one must judge by Lautréamont’s ‘beautiful as’, presents considerable advantages of suspension. It is understood that beside these the other ‘figures’ which rhetoric persists in enumerating are absolutely devoid of interest. Only the analogical switch arouses our passion; only by it can we start the world’s motor. The word like is the most exalting at our command when it is pronounced familiarly. Through it human imagination fulfils itself and the highest destiny of the mind comes into play. Likewise, we reject disdainfully the grievously ignorant abuses of the image in today’s poetry and we appeal to it, in this regard, for an always-great luxuriance.
Your throat which advances and which pushes the silk
Your triumphant throat is a beautiful armoire
— CHARLES BAUDELAIRE
The analogical method, though held in honour in antiquity and the Middle Ages, was thereafter grossly supplanted by the ‘logical’ method which has led us to our well-known impasse. The first duty of poets and artists is to re-establish analogy in all its prerogatives, taking care to uproot all the rear-guard spiritualist thought, always carried along parasitically, which vitiates or paralyses its functioning.
Your teeth are like a flock of sheep leaving the washpen.
— SONG OF SONGS
It should be remembered that thirty years ago Pierre Reverdy, first approaching the source of the image, was led to formulate this capital law: “The greater and truer the distance between two juxtaposed realities, the stronger will be the image and the greater its emotive power and poetic reality.’ This absolutely necessary condition never can be taken as sufficient. Another exigency which, in the final analysis, could well be of an ethical order, takes its place beside it. Let notice be taken: The analogical image, to the degree that it illuminates in the brightest way partial similarities, will not be traduced in terms of equation. It moves between the two realities present in a determined way which is never reversible. From the first of these realities to the second, it marks a vital tension turned possibly towards health, pleasure, quietude, given thanks, consented usages. It has as its mortal enemies the deprecative and the depressing. If noble words no longer exist, false poets cannot avoid identifying themselves by ignoble rapprochements. The classic example is the ‘Guitar - a bidet that sings’, by an author [Cocteau] who abounds in such ‘discoveries’.
I see the spirits assembled; they have their hats on.
— SWEDENBORG
Your tongue
The red fish in the aquarium
Of your mouth
— APOLLINAIRE
We passed along an avenue planted with blue breasts where day no longer differentiated itself from night except by a comma, and the sardine from the grasshopper by a scratching hair.
—- BENJAMIN PERET
The best light on the general, obligatory sense that the image worthy of the name must have is furnished by a Zen writer: ‘Out of Buddhist kindness, Basho one day ingeniously changed a cruel haiku composed by his humorous disciple, Kikaku. The latter having written, “A red dragonfly - tear off its wings —- a pimento”’, Basho substituted “‘A pimento — add wings —a red dragonfly.”
