By Andrew Joron and Andrew Wenaus
On April 24th at 12:00 a.m., at the coordinates 25°N 71°W, two writers, Andrew Joron and Andrew C. Wenaus, meet one another in a small prop plane; both men are on a sky-diving retreat. Below, floating on the surface of the silvered ocean, is a small wooden platform upon which are affixed two cups of water. Each cup has a small target at its base. The cups are their projected landing pads. From their perspective, the ocean is a perfect reflection of the sky; they cannot determine if they are meant to jump upwards or downwards. Andrew Joron, looking at his wristwatch and admiring the wind’s turbulent chatter, notices, with a mild shock, the time: 12:00 p.m.
Andrew J.: One of my mentors, the surrealist poet Philip Lamantia, once made the assertion that “Everything is strange!” Overlooking the objection that, if everything is strange, then nothing is, I’m tempted to say, in regard to contemporary culture, “Everything is speculative fiction.”
Andrew W.: [Small bird smacks into helmet visor, gathers its dignity, gives a disapproving look, flies off.] I’m inclined to agree with Lamantia that everything is strange. And, yet, as you say, if everything is strange, then nothing is strange. Or, maybe we can agree that once everything is strange, strangeness is simply familiarity. The other day, I was having a conversation with Simon Spiegel about Darko Suvin, Bertold Brecht, and Viktor Shklovsky and the respective processes of cognitive estrangement, alienation, and ostranenie in science fiction. Spiegel pointed my attention to one of his articles where he writes, against Suvin, that “the formal framework of sf is not estrangement, but exactly its opposite, naturalization. On a formal level, sf does not estrange the familiar, but rather makes the strange familiar.”[1] Nuancing this as “everything is speculative fiction,” however, offers a way to look outside the closed-feedback and hauntological loops of 21st century “familiar strangeness.” Speculation, in a sense, allows fiction to conjecture with suspension and, then, to allow deciduous narratives to mature and freefall from those historical and commercial branches from which they originally sprung. I’m wondering if you’d like to say a few more words on your thinking when you say “Everything is speculative fiction” because it resonates and certainly feels accurate…allez-hop! [Jumps.]
Andrew J.: I just meant [Jumps and uses jet-pack to fly loops around Andrew W.’s falling body.] that, as Donna Haraway asserted in her Cyborg Manifesto, speculative fiction is the new realism. In the sense that conventional realism—stories that contain no trace of the fantastic—can no longer reflect the foundationless flux of the reality we’re living in. Can you hear me okay? [Shuts off jet-pack, falls alongside Andrew W.] Even as the very idea of a future seems retro, almost all of culture is currently processed through technology, some of it semi-sentient. At the same time, in this post-Enlightenment era, the very idea of truth has been relativized, so that any given representation of “reality” assumes the status of a speculative fiction. How to defamiliarize this degree of strangeness? Maybe those binaries (strange/familiar; truth/fiction) have collapsed into a new structure of feeling, i.e., “familiar strangeness.” We’re in a state of freefall.
Andrew W.: Speaking of freefall, I seem to have forgotten my chute and grabbed the wrong bag. Luckily, however, in this bag [digs through bag, offers an impatient and apologetic smile, tosses out a pineapple, a pale horse, and a medium-sized anvil], are some books, including your Neo-Surrealism; or, the Sun at Night. On the first page [holding book upside down and struggling with the wind], you write: “ⅎoɹ snɹɹǝɐlᴉsɯ’ ʇɥǝ ʌǝɹʇᴉɓᴉuons sdᴉɹɐl qʎ ʍɥᴉɔɥ ʇɥǝ ɟɐɯᴉlᴉɐɹ ᴉs ǝsʇɹɐuɓǝp ɔɐu uǝʌǝɹ ǝup ᴉu ɹǝɟɐɯᴉlᴉɐɹᴉzɐʇᴉou” [Flips book upright.]…; you continue, “the surrealist struggle has to be waged not only against society but also, scandalously, against nature.”[2] And yet, like you said just a moment ago, that today even reality itself—that is, the ubiquitous context of nature—has either assumed or been supplanted by [Magazine spread about the Kardashians’ charitable work smacks against and sticks to Andrew W.’s face, pages flapping away against the ears…Andrew J. pulls paper off Andrew W.’s face and tosses aside.]—thank you—a speculative fiction. This merger is a chemical reaction—something that cannot be so easily reversed. Realism can never regain its naïveté in good faith. And, yet, perhaps truth is not lost after all. Is it not likely that we never had true access to truth in the first place. Maybe our own neurological merger with surface and spectacle has left us spiraling in circles of (self)representation: we use language but, of course, it uses us [An Albatross lands on Andrew W.’s head for a rest and interrupts his thought.].
Albatross: I happened to overhear your conversation. Might I add that this crisis of representation, however, lets you realize that your most essential technology, language, is—and perhaps always was—broken. What if you were to, rather than try to represent reality, seek to represent the ratio of language’s circumference to its diameter? Sure, I’m being a bit cheeky but, maybe the task of the writer today is, similar to what David and Gregory Chudnovsky did with π [Andrew W. reaches in bag and passes Andrew J. a slice of apple pie, grabs one for himself.], not necessarily calculate, but articulate with extreme precision a literature that refuses to repeat what came before it and, in doing so, endlessly raises elegant questions rather than seeking to offer comforting answers? [Andrew J. urges Andrew W. to offer Albatross a slice of apple pie.] No, thank you. Do you have pumpkin? [Andrew W. digs through the bag and, somewhat surprised, does have a slice of pumpkin pie, and offers it to Albatross.] Thank you. What you humans need is a better unit of measurement. You’ve over privileged the act of recounting reality in fiction and have neglected counting. Your tendency is to turn to the letter for storytelling, but as your society becomes increasingly mathematicized, I suggest it’s time to consider the service number, or at least its metaphorical import, can offer to narrative. After all, reality is, as your physicists seem to agree, very strange even without narrative representation. So, perhaps a genuine alphanumeric surrealism or speculative literature is in order to help with this crisis? [Flies off.]
Andrew J.: [Indignant.] Why, of all the—I’ve got a mind to shoot that bird right out of the sky! [Rummages in pockets.] Where’s my blaster? [Stops as he hears the bird emitting a cry: Tekeli-li, tekeli-li!] Oh well, forget it. Go back to your polar ridge, you symbol of fate! [Looks at Andrew W.] As for you, do you realize that bird was trying to trick us? Counting stuff gets us no closer to the truth than recounting it. Words or numbers, they’re all just slices of pi! Either way, we’re faced with an infinite regression. But thank you, that slice of pie was very tasty. And I don’t need to seek beyond the immediate phenomenon—of taste, for example—for some eternal essence. It’s surfaces all the way down! Speaking of which: we’re falling, but the ground doesn’t seem to be getting any closer. Nature is a trickster, as post-Newtonian science has discovered. Any future philosophy of science has got to come to grips, as surrealism has, with the novum, the tendency of nature to overthrow its own regimes by way of vertiginous phase transitions, self-organizing emergencies within material systems. Thus life. Thus language. I suspect the Chudnovsky brothers, in building a supercomputer to calculate the nth iteration of pi, were secretly hoping to arrive at a revelatory number-story hiding just over the horizon of all previous attempts to iterate the sequence. Could be they’ve found it. Has anyone heard from them recently?
Andrew W.: You’re very welcome for the pie! And you’re welcome to another piece. If neither counting nor recounting will get us any closer to the truth, then we’re dealing with both number and language as [Nom, nom, noming away at a delicious slice of surrealist pi?] nominalist enterprises. As you say in The Absolute Letter, “the world itself is composed of the letters of the Absolute” and “anything, real or ideal, that undergoes a self-complicating…form of motion becomes a sign of the processual emergence of the Infinite within the finite.”[3] The German Romantic poet Novalis, as you mention, thought that he might’ve discovered “a priori letters”[4] in the patterns of early cymatics experiments; Velimir Khlebnikov too sought patterns in historical events as direct analogues to the peaks and valleys of a sound wave. The word, the letter, the musical frequency could all offer a kind of philosopher’s stone to a new kind of endlessly emergent story. And, yet this Absolute is itself also nominalist. Just as our unfathomable plummeting doesn’t seem to be getting us any closer to the ground, language and number are only infinitesimally relative to the truth. This fall, itself a self-complicating form of motion, is an infinite movement despite our apparent finite distance from the ground below; perhaps there is no fall at all, simply a stochastic unfolding of potential engagements with direct experience, a pause for endless combinatorial possibilities. [Picks a fragment of…751…from between two molars.] Ah, right, that reminds me: pi. Returning to the Chudnovskys for a moment, perhaps they were indeed seeking that hidden story in the nth iterations of pi—pi, like language, has no relation to reality and is simply a construct. But, like language, pi offers us a way to measure and construct meaning. It is as if the more complex a system, the more likely the novum will emerge. Speaking of complex systems and the Chudnovskys, the last I heard of them, or some variation of them both divided and multiplied, was in your novel O0 (Black Square Editions, 2022). Here some reflected and refracted version of the Chudnovsky brothers have found the key to the number-story with wild results. I’m wondering if you might want to say more about the infinite potencies of the dialectic between story (O) and number (0)? If we can’t articulate the truth, then maybe the aim is to generate speculative narrative emergence through complexity?
Andrew J.: Wait—give me that fragment you picked from your teeth! Don’t toss it away, give it here! Thank you. Ah, it’s a fine piece, a prime number: 751. I have a special fondness for primes (see my poem “The Sonic Flowerfall of Primes,” which appeared in the final issue of New Worlds, the British science-fiction magazine). Now, 751, being a prime number, resists decomposition: it cannot be expressed as the product of two smaller numbers. That’s probably why it got stuck in your teeth! And, let’s see, 751 is the 133rd prime number. Maybe we can use that fact to decompose 751. If we impulsively, playfully divide 751 by 133, we get an irrational number, a non-terminating continued fraction that tastes like pi! [Begins to sing the flowerfall of 751, but stops when he sees the look on Andrew W.’s face,] Sorry, sorry. I love it when numbers break open like that, giving birth to infinities. And who knows? Numbers that run away with themselves may smack into a novum—an ontological emergency, a combination that would unlock a new realm—somewhere down the line. Now, we can tell stories with both numbers and letters or, experimentally, we can let them tell us their stories. The junction between letters and numbers is the grapheme O, denoting a cry or crisis, an absolute Opening in the order of things. There’s the truth that lies beyond articulation. O—did I say “the truth that lies”? That’s one definition of the speculative imagination. Hey, I notice you’re starting to drift away. Either that, or space is expanding between us. [Raises his voice to a shout.] Words attract other words! What attracts you to speculative narrative? Is there something other than the novum that could define it?
Andrew W.: [Rummages through bag; tosses out another anvil, finds smaller though otherwise identical iteration of Andrew W., tosses it/mini-himself out too; finds cheer-cone. Shouting into cheer-cone.] It appears we’re falling through Symbolist Space—an absence referring only to itself, expanding and reiterating itself and [Voice of little Andrew W. replete with Doppler effect.] “Go onnnnnnnn!!!!!!!!!!”…anyhow, this absolute Opening or site of an ontological crisis indeed offers a truth that lies! Whether this truth is simply guilty of some kind of recumbency, sleepily ignoring the electric dings of an alarm, or whether it chips away at the denotative restraints of what we might call (or should I say “name”) materially verifiable fact, may not be such a distinction after all. Let me think. What attracts me to speculative narrative? Well…
Little Andrew W. [Flapping arms and rising up, grabs Andrew W.’s shoe, clambers up and sits on Andrew W.’s shoulder. Somewhat annoyed.]: allow me to say a word or two before my biathanatotic bigger bully self blunders any further. What he, or I for that matter, wonders is whether indeed turning to number can, like the word or the letter, tell us its infinite stories. I’m thinking of Khlebnikov and Kruchenykh here: “The Word as Such” and “The Letter as Such”—those two evocative 1914 essays that propound that an entire narrative or poem can be developed by a single letter or single word (like Khlebnikov’s famous “Invocation by Laughter” in the latter case)—is there possibly a “The Number as Such” manifesto waiting to be written? Perhaps this is agghhhhg [Andrew W. shoves Little Andrew W. back into bag.].
Andrew W. [Embarrassed.] Sorry about that, it’s been a long day…but, my little self may have a point: perhaps this is what attracts me to speculative narrative: the possibility of “The Number as Such” speaking its own infinite—and infinitely defamiliarizing—stories. And, I wonder if these stories would be either truths that lies in a nominalist or fictionalist sense, or if, big if, they were truths that were true in the Platonic numerical sense. Could the “The Number as Such,” as a narratological device, literalize an ontological crisis? Here I’ll borrow two ideas from philosopher Quentin Meillassoux: that of hyper-chaos and of “extro-science fiction.” While I don’t have a copy of Meillassoux’s writing with me, I did tattoo a couple passages on the back-interior of my skull…[Looks with one eye inward.]: Meillassoux writes of hyper-chaos that: “Our absolute, in effect, is nothing other than an extreme form of chaos, a hyper-Chaos, for which nothing is or would seem to be, impossible, not even the unthinkable. This absolute lies at the furthest remove from the absolutization we sought: the one that would allow mathematical science to describe the in-itself. We claimed that our absolutization of mathematics would conform to the Cartesian model and would proceed by identifying a primary absolute (the analogue of God), from which we would derive a secondary absolute, which is to say, a mathematical absolute (the analogue of extended substance). We have succeeded in identifying a primary absolute (Chaos), but contrary to the veracious God, the former would seem to be incapable of guaranteeing the absoluteness of scientific discourse, since, far from guaranteeing order, it guarantees only the possible destruction of every order.”[5] If hyper-chaos is the case, then the most appropriate storytelling would be what Meillassoux elsewhere called extro-science fiction. He considers extro-science fiction as a type of narrative whose epistemology absolutely resists the logic of science. Rather than verifiable, extro-science fiction is the realm of hyper-chaos, the absolutely unpredictable. Unlike science fiction that assumes, even in distant futures, that it is science that is a constant, extro-science fiction (in a way, just a synonym for speculative narrative) would offer a complete break from all established, verifiable sense. This wouldn’t mean that these narratives would represent worlds without science, but would indicate worlds where scientific experimentation (reliability based on verifiability) is impossible, a world that is forever unavailable to scientific inquiry. If not scientifically known, then perhaps it can be modeled mathematically? I’m not so sure, to be honest, but it is an avenue worth pursuing. I’m at a loss from a critical perspective, which is why I’ve moved to creative writing as a way to investigate instead. In my play Declaration of the Technical Word as Such (Sweat Drenched Press, 2023) I introduce patamathematical poetry: the use of mathematical formulae as a way of organizing relations between poetic phrases in ways both profound and profoundly impossible, hilarious and tragic. Or, in my recent book Ω—1 CHRONOTOPOLOGIC WORKINGS (Schism Press 2023), I offer 777 pages of redacted morse code that is largely untranslatable (i.e., its infinite permutational potencies without any certain reference is why I consider it a work of High Realism). Whether these are works of extro-science fiction, I’m not sure but they are certainly speculative pieces. I do, however, think O0 certainly qualifies as extro-science fiction. Perhaps extro-science fiction, numerical writing, or patamathematical poetry are among a few new avenues to the novum? Is the novum a conceptual locus, or, instead a limitless line upon which we can demarcate narrative points here and there? Might this line be an extended cabinet from which infinitely more slivers and drawers of irrational divisions can be drawn? What stories might they tell? Maybe Donald Knuth’s Surreal Numbers have more to do with surrealism, speculative writing, and the novum after all? Andrew J., we’ve moved so far apart that you’re disappearing into a single point…[Andrew J. bumps into Andrew W. from behind…both men spiral a bit in the sky only to level out.]…oh, hi!…I thought you’d disappeared into the distance, but I suppose that this Symbolist space might be a bit more literally self-referential than I’d anticipated…
Andrew J.: Sir, you appear to recognize me, but from my perspective I am meeting you for the first time. How do you do? Well, it’s a fine day, out here in this wilderness of air. I feel that we are falling, but also that we might be rising. What’s that? Of course I remember who I am! I’m Andrew J., author of such works as Ω—1 and O0! Why, just a moment ago, I was having a discussion about these works with—with—oh, maybe I was only talking to myself. Never mind, I’m happy to pick up the discussion with you. Excuse me, what did you say your name was? Oh, that’s funny—what a coincidence that our names are similar! Coincidence, contingency—yes, that’s precisely what I was just talking about! Let’s, for a moment, posit a realm of pure contingency. You’d have to call it a hyper-Chaos, or something like that. Which subverts or inverts the usual idea of an Absolute that functions as the ultimate ground of everything. If we take hyper-Chaos to be the Absolute, then our existence becomes groundless. We’d be in freefall all the time! Which seems to be the situation in which we find ourselves right now. I hope it’s not a metaphor. [Rips off his face mask to reveal the same face beneath.] Metaphors are so boring. But let’s admit: it’s not all chaos all the time. Things do settle into patterns that persist a while before dissolving. What I like best are those systems that engage with chaos without immediately succumbing to it—complex systems like life and language. Numbers are a different story—unlike material systems, they don’t usually develop their patterns through contingency. [Rips off face mask to reveal an alien visage, then rips off that visage to reveal his original face.] That’s why some mathematicians want to pursue an infinite decimal like pi all the way down, to see if a novum erupts somewhere along the line. Maybe transfinite numbers are also capable of producing novums at some point—but who wants to wait around for that? Can you show me a “number as such”? I’m distracted by a material reality that is constantly convulsing with novums! Somebody’s name was floating in the air just now—ah yes! [Plucks a struggling homunculus out of a cloud.] Meillassoux, right? Quite a name! [Shakes the homunculus.] Hey, Meillassoux! Mister Contingency! Even you must recognize that patterns arise within an encompassing super-Chaos, a term which you now say you prefer to “hyper-Chaos.” Read to us what you wrote in your still-unpublished dissertation, The Divine Inexistence.
Meillassoux homunculus [In a thin reedy little voice.]: Va faire foutre for waking me from my dogmatic slumber! But because I cherish these, mes mots fascinants, I give them to you. “I call ‘worlds,’ or ‘orders,’ the three categories of advent known as matter, life, and thought. I call ‘intra-worldly advents’ those that are capable of occurring in the midst of a determinate World.”
Andrew X: Okay, thanks. Now go back to bed. [Flings the homunculus away.] Did you hear that, my coincidental friend? Advent. A religious term, but Meillassoux seems to be using it in a way that’s comparable to our use of novum. Meaning an ontological revolution that interrupts and transforms the normal workings of a system. Other terms have been used to designate this turn: in Deleuzean philosophy, the Event; in biology, punctuated equilibrium; in physics, symmetry-breaking; in complexity theory, emergence and phase transition. These terms all refer to breakthrough moments—where what breaks through is not chaos, but a new order, a new way of organizing the flow of becoming. If what broke through was only chaos, that would indicate that the noise of increasing entropy had gotten the upper hand in a given system. That system would then devolve toward a repetition of sameness. Which may be inevitable for all systems eventually. But what’s interesting, especially from a narrative standpoint, is the possibility of conducting chaos toward different, increasingly complex patterns of interaction. How can we break this symmetry between us?
Andrew Xn!: The Event, punctuated equilibrium, and symmetry-breaking seem to be to reality what Toyotathon is to the spectacle. The difference perhaps is one where the spectacle seeks to cease repetitions of sameness [Notices an infinity of Andrew Xs spiraling fractally away behind Andrew X, while also noting ten little Andrew Xn!s replacing Andrew Xn!’s fingers.]. Because a spectacle of sameness cannot offer an intra-worldly advent in the sense that it simply replicates the spectacle with more of itself, I suppose one way to seek narrative pathways to breaking the symmetry would be to sever ties with the Toyotathonification of storytelling. Would this better permit instances of symmetry-breaking to crystalize and assert their own tendentiousness? If we try hard enough [Squinches face.], perhaps that novum is awaiting simply to be articulated [Recursive iterations of Andrew Xs and Andrew Xn!s suddenly disappear. Andrew Xn!’s stomach grumbles, he lifts shirt to reveal another Andrew Xn!’s face chomping in lieu of his belly, chomping away at another piece of pie…Andrew Xn! shrugs apologetically…]. I’m wondering what you/we/I think on this point, Andrew X: will the symmetry break on its own as a sudden shock? Will it emerge from cultural complexity with no concrete origin? Or do you think the novum must be engineered? If the latter, will it be the novelists and poets, dancers and actors, musicians, acrobats, and mystics? Or, perhaps the mathematicians, scientists, agriculturalists, and programmers? It almost most certainly won’t be the politicians or PR firms. What do you/we/I think? Will the novum be a collective enterprise, a massive merger of cacophonous narrative crafting that will suddenly crystalize as a mass act of engineering an entirely new kind of story?
Andrew X [Spontaneously collapsing into a lower energy state known as Andrew J.]: Whoops, how rude of me. But I guess that’s my answer. I seem to have broken my own symmetry here. Or maybe it was our symmetry. In any case, I have bifurcated, I have re-individuated, and I see that you’ve done likewise. Re-greetings, Andrew W., and no regrettings. We’re back to our old free-floating selves. A good thing too. Sameness is closer to nothingness than difference is. Yet absolute difference is also self-annihilating. In order to exist, we’ve got to remain poised on the cusp between sameness and difference. The operative word here is neither sameness nor difference, but between. You and I are the twins of between. [Old-fashioned ringtone sounds.] Excuse me, that’s my mirror calling. [Takes out a small mirror.] Hello? Oh, it’s you, Andrew W.! What’s that? You’re floating right next to me? And you were asking if the novum emerges as a “sudden shock . . . with no concrete origin”? Or asking if “it must be engineered,” perhaps as a “collective enterprise”? Yes, I know I’m just repeating your words. I know I’m just performing a repetition of sameness. Okay, bye. [Tosses mirror into a cloud.] You have posed a key question, mon semblable! I will answer: To the extent that a novum is emergent, its properties are unprecedented with respect to the properties of the system from which it emerges. Atoms of hydrogen and oxygen are not wet, but their interaction produces water, which can possess the property of wetness. Organic molecules are not alive, but their interaction produces life. The novum emerges not at the level of the parts, but at the level of their interaction. That’s what I meant by the significance of between. It’s neither this A nor that A that matters, but the nature of their interaction. This is not a top-down, but a bottom-up process. In systems poised on the cusp between order and chaos—complex, nonlinear systems—the interactions of the parts can throw the system into a new state of being: a revolution. A new kind of story. A collective enterprise, certainly, but if “engineered” at all, then by the unconscious of a given system, which is synonymous with chaos.
Andrew W.: This is all very interesting, and I will return to it in a moment…but [looks around] I think that cloud you tossed the mirror into was a nebula. I’m not sure when it happened, but it turns out that, at some point, we started falling upwards [tries to light cigarette but lighter won’t work]. Hmm, [To self.] no oxygen. [To Andrew J.] Anyway, back to what is interesting: the novum occurs via interstices. Similar to a spinning magnet of spin-stabilized magnetic levitation, the novum emerges between steady forces, infinitely restless and ineffably energetic. Unlike the spinning magnet; however, its appearance, with each rotation, changes unpredictably, chaotically, affecting its former appearance by appearing again and again as an error or noise into the signal of sameness or stability. So, the novum requires communication and the collaboration of variable forces, but should not be mistaken for communication or collaboration between people, objects, perhaps even conceptual abstractions. Instead, it emerges both within and as the complexity of an interaction. Its articulation as an art object then permits it to stand or make firm, but its sudden appearance also initiates new, previously unthinkable vectors as monuments to finite potency and [BAM…THUD…Andrew W. and Andrew J. crash on an impossible surface. Andrew W., popping some ibuprofen while also offering one to Andrew J.] …possibility. Other Andrew, it seems like we’ve crashed upon an infinite floor or wall of some kind. And look! It’s entirely made from Einstein tiles. Real Estate Ponzi schemes even way out here…but, not to worry, looks like it’s a slapdash job at best, no surprise there [Attempts to take puff of unlit cigarette and *pop* accidentally swallows it.], and we can chip through to the other side of infinity. [Grabs two jackhammers from bag. Handing one to Andrew J.] If you’ll kindly help me with [Construction noises, glass breaking, pots and pans clanging, etc.]…Good. What do you say, should we go find what’s over here in this bigger infinity?
Notes:
[1] Spiegel, Simon. “Things Made Strange: On the Concept of ‘Estrangement in Science Fiction Theory.” Science Fiction Studies 35.3, (2008), 372.
[2] Joron, Andrew. Neo-Surrealism or the Sun at Night: Transformation of Surrealism in American Poetry 1966-1999. Kolourmeim Press, 2010. pps. 1-2.
[3] Joron, Andrew. “The Argument; or, My Novalis.” The Absolute Letter.(Chicago: Flood Editions), 2017.
[4] Ibid.
[5] Meillassoux, Quentin. (2014). After Finitude: An Essay on the Necessity of Contingency. Trans. Ray Brassier. London: Bloomsbury, p. 64.
(Image: Roberto Matta’s Galaxies (Mysticism of Infinity), 1940-44)
