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Note on Bad Dreams

I’ve little patience with those who condemn surrealism out of hand. There are subtle degrees, and surrealism is involved in the cut of all metaphors. Automatism, regarded originally as a pure act which established a rapport between a reader’s subconscious and a writer’s unpremeditated inner commotion, got itself a bad name. ‘Random!’ ‘Incomprehensible!’ have been the common rebukes. And I don’t deny that automatism is a failure, in writing, when it comes to large works, say of more than ten words. I doubt if the response of even a sympathetic reader ever truly justified the word ‘rapport’. However, I do have a lot of time for mediated semi-automatism. Things emerge from the subconscious which a writer just has to get down. My own practice is to look at a draft to see what it seems to be doing, once translated from whatever stylistic code it’s in. I reject what’s mere personal therapy. But if there’s a trail to a familiar stockpile, I go there. That’s the theory. At times it takes a skilled reader of poetry to decipher surrealism, mine or anyone else’s, even when it’s been filtered, mediated, lightened.

Whether my daughter, when little, really did have a nightmare about me I don’t recall. I assume this poem had an origin of that sort. It’s a common fear-dream to imagine a loved one hurt. This thought of ‘lacerations’ leads, in a surreal fashion, one image breeding the next, to a ‘ridged shell’, and that to a trilobite, ‘with nowhere to evolve to’. I was not optimistic at the time, any more than now, about what humans might evolve into, though I did think it likely that we’d breed a successor. It looks like we might soon do that, almost without realising it. I’ve read that a genetically altered alpha-class could be fashioned unable to breed with the beta-gamma-delta residue. In section (2) I speak of my fears for my daughter, for what she will have to witness of the monstrosities evolved by Nature,

the sea caesáreaned

by the moon’s knife

and the evidence of man’s inhumanity to man. I see her

. . . scream at the bones

of Seminoles in the palm-roots.

It’s odd to me when Anglo-Saxons, English or American, sound morally superior about the ugly business of ‘ethnic cleansing’. In 1819, Andrew Jackson, as territorial governor, initiated the removal of Indians from Florida to make way for white settlers. The Seminole wars were among the most fierce and costly of the U.S. Indian wars. I’ve mentioned elsewhere what the first English did to the Celts: see notes on Kosovo 1999 on page 184.

Before writing this poem, I’d spent six weeks in St Augustine Beach, in North Florida, as the guest of Jim Donalson. I’d read about the Seminoles. What my daughter will scream at is the human propensity to wipe out the opposition. Life is terrifying, even down to the pre-organic stones. As for

we go back through our dreams

—in dreams we see, as they say, where we’re coming from.

Alan Marshfield

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