Robert Desnos

    par Man Ray

THE SPACES OF SLEEP

          In the night of course are the seven wonders of the world and grandeur and tragedy and enchantment. 
          Forests with legendary creatures hidden in thickets blindly smack against it. 
          There is you. 
          In the night the footsteps of the walker and the murderer and the policeman and the light of the streetlamp and the ragman’s lantern. 
          There is you. 
          In the night trains pass and boats and the mirage of lands where it’s daylight. The last breaths of twilight and the first shudders of dawn. 
          There is you. 
          A piano melody, a snatch of conversation. 
          A door slams. A clock. 
          And not only beings and things and physical noises. 
          But also me pursuing myself or endlessly passing me by. 
          There is the sacrificial you, the you I wait for. 
          Often strange shapes are born at the instant of sleep and disappear. 
          When I shut my eyes, phosphorescent florescences appear and fade and revive like fleshy fireworks. 
          Unknown lands I cross in the company of creatures. 
          Probably there is you, O lovely and cautious spy. 
          And the tangible spirit of immensity. 
          And the perfumes of the sky and stars and the crowing of the cock 2,000 years ago and the cry of the peacock in flaming parks and kisses. 
          Hands clutching ominously in a pallid light and axles grinding on jellyfish roads. 
          Probably there is you that I don’t recognize, that on the contrary I do recognize. 
          But who, present in my dreams, are opposed to suggesting yourself without appearing there. 
          You who remain beyond reach in reality and in dreams. 
          You who belong to me by my will to possess you in illusion but who bring your face near mine only if my eyes are closed both to dream and to reality. 
          You in defiance of a fluent rhetoric where the wave dies on the shore, where the crow flies in ruined factories, where the forest decays crackling under a sun of lead. 
          You who are at the origin of my dreams and who make my spirit teem with metamorphoses and who leave me holding your glove when I kiss your hand. 
          In the night there are the stars and the shadowy movement of the sea, of the rivers, the forests, the cities, the grass, the lungs of millions and millions of beings. 
          In the night there are the wonders of the world. 
          In the night there are no guardian angels, but there is sleep. 
          In the night there is you. 
          And in the day.

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 Above is his 1926 poem Sleep Spaces, translation by Mary Ann Caws.