The Adventures of Telemachus Book

"In my left waistcoat pocket I carry a most faithful likeness of myself: a burnished steel watch. It speaks, indicates time, and does not understand anything about it.

"Everything that is myself is incomprehensible." Louis Aragon, like the other two founders/fathers of Surrealism (Soupault and Breton), was active in Dadaism in the years preceding the Surrealist movement. This book was written/published in 1922, precedes The Surrealist Manifesto(s) by a couple of years, and yet seems to bridge the gap a bit between Dadaism and Surrealism.

Vibrant, philosophical, and Nihilistic, the short work focuses on Telemechus and Mentor/Minerva's stop on Calypso's island, in pursuit of Ulysses. Much of it is focused on Mentor's education of Telemecus, and a system referenced as Dd, which shares touch points with Dadaism. The language is fluid and at times experimental - much of the text is straightforward, but some extended passages are surrealistic and read as if produced by automatic writing (it wasn't).

Really great stuff. I know myself only as rapture, reptilian motion: blood, blood, blood. My hands, leaden spoons, twist and melt. My body is a circled barrel whose bursts will be more beautiful than thunder; it lifts with the dregs, and the hoarseness of my voice. My knees elude immobility like those of machines. Prodigy's missile, dagger I depart and kiss I return. The world put to sack succumbs, a cistern under heaven's cataracts, bursting with my weight hurled down without choice on a random prey: discovery of a toothsome continent, I met the woman, my disease. Exclusive domain of touch, this body unnoticed by eyes preoccupied only with the hair that sprouts in making love, this body spreads out and stiffens against my flesh, deliberate contact. Awkward help steers passion toward delight, makes the couple sway, whale on the back of liquid plains, exchanging embarrassed and naked words, null and come from afar, followed by the streaming noises of clenched teeth, bitten off pieces, sudden vulgarities, precious, piercing. The right word, opened sluice gate, reveals the male's attention, the precise worry, the vital point.