@eduardmsmr

Happy Surrealist Saturday!! The time has come to discover something that makes me proud of my country. I’m not often proud of it, but today’s exploration reminded me that Romania played an essential role in shaping surrealism through Gherasim Luca Born in 1913 in Bucharest as Salman Locker (he was also known as Costea Sar and Petre Malcoci) Luca chose his name from an obituary: "Gherasim Luca, Archimandrite of Mount Athos and linguist emeritus." He decided to write as a linguist from beyond the grave, making his work truly feel like words coming from somewhere between life and death In 1938, Luca traveled to Paris where he met André Breton (founder of Surrealism) and the French Surrealist circles. But World War II and Romania's brutal antisemitism forced him back to Bucharest, where survival itself became an act of resistance During this period, he founded the Bucharest Surrealist group with Gellu Naum (Romanian poet), Paul Păun (poet and visual artist), Virgil Teodorescu (avant-garde poet), and Dolfi Trost (painter and theorist). Together, they became known as Infra-Noir, active between 1940-1947, and they represented one of the most passionate, and least known, chapters in international Surrealism Around 1944, while working as a street cleaner scrubbing away the remains of war, he invented cubomania. It's a technique where you take an image, often masterworks by Leonardo da Vinci, Van Eyck, Caravaggio, or Holbein, cut it into equal squares, and reassemble it randomly. He said "everything must be reinvented, nothing exists anymore," and he meant it. He was literally deconstructing the faces of history while fascism was destroying his world But Luca's real genius was linguistic. He developed what he called "non-oedipal" thought, a complete rejection of fixed identity, family structures, and social categories. This was 1945. He was anticipating Gilles Deleuze (French philosopher) and Félix Guattari's (psychoanalyst and philosopher) Anti-Oedipus by 25 years. With Dolfi Trost, he co-authored "Dialectic of Dialectic” challenging even Breton's Parisian Surrealists for abandoning revolution for formulaic techniques Deleuze, who called Luca "the greatest poet in the French language," said he invented a "prodigious stutter", not stammering in speech, but making language itself stammer. Being like a foreigner in your own tongue. And that's exactly what Luca was. He was a Romanian Jew writing in French, calling himself an "apatrid" (stateless person) and "étran-juif" (StranJew) In 1952, after being harassed and caught trying to flee, Luca finally escaped Romania through Israel and settled in Paris. There, he collaborated with Jean Arp (sculptor and poet), Paul Celan (poet), Max Ernst (painter), Wifredo Lam (painter), Victor Brauner (painter), and his wife Micheline Catti (artist). He performed his poetry as if it were a physical act and this is best visible in the 1988 film "Comment s'en sortir sans sortir" showing him reciting eight poems, and it's mesmerizing. His mouth becomes a theater while the language becomes his body Luca made me understand that Surrealism was about total transformation. The Bucharest Surrealists advocated for "eroticizing the proletariat," maintaining revolutionary ideals when everyone else had given up. They critiqued Breton for turning a revolution into style But there is a part in Luca’s story that got me really emotional. Luca spent 40 years in France without papers. In 1994, facing eviction from his Montmartre apartment, he jumped from the Pont Mirabeau into the Seine. He was 80 years old. His suicide note said "there is no place in the world for the poet anymore” And yet, his funeral at Père Lachaise crematorium was more attended than Baudelaire's (French poet). His influence keeps growing. In 2012, Arthur H set his poems to music. Exhibitions of his cubomanias continue. Deleuze visited him multiple times, cited him alongside Kafka and Beckett. Luca may have believed there was no place in the world for poets. But he carved one out anyway, in the stammer, in the void, and in the language that refuses to behave Thank you for reading!🌹

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