BOOK REVIEW by GENESIS BREYER P-ORRIDGE :“MAD LOVE” - by ANDRE BRETON

BOOK REVIEW by GENESIS BREYER P-ORRIDGE :“MAD LOVE” - by ANDRE BRETON

I recall sitting more than once with Brion Gysin in his Paris apartment discussing so, so extremely earnestly, the implications of his exploration and proseletisation of “Cut-Ups” as a metaphorical direction for the creative arts to follow in the parallel wake of splitting the atom. It seemed then, and continues to seem to me now, that this entire post-war, post-modern era can only begin to make sense, and through that making sense, function as a necessary “circumstantial magick”, in relation to an all pervading awareness
of the incisive cultural fragmentation grenade that “cutting-up” the matter of consensus reality has lobbed into our exterior and interior cultural immune systems.

Gysin knew Breton in the earliest surrealist group times. In fact Breton kicked him out of the very First Surrealist Show of drawings held in Paris in 1935, supposedly for an imaginal decadence and apolitical artistic approach.

I can only assume today, with hindsight, that Brion at some point early on read “MAD LOVE”. He was certainly in proximity to it, and fluent in French, unlike most of us probably on both counts. In fact, he often hinted to me that the radical structural seed, scattered with such abandon by Breton throughout “Mad Love”, could well have been the fecund source of what germinated within Gysin’s fertile first, second, and third minds in a direct line of genetic descent from this text.

Well, here is the other amazingly good news! This book is not the dogmatic surrealist stream of consciousness satirizing romantic love you might expect.

It is actually a deeply sentimental treatment of the chivalrous search for the biggest love possible. A love that explodes with “convulsive beauty” and represents from the depths of “ the human crucible” a preordained
demonstration at its most ecstatic and passionate vibrancy, decanted directly from the joyous melting pot of memory.

Mad Love moves anecdotally between Breton’s passionate search for ideal love; ideal art and ideal chance as a unifying factor and valediction of everything. This is dense and charming, clarifying and inspiring. It is so
refreshing to see romantic love included in the philosophy of revelation through “random chance”.

I always wondered about the artistic lineage of the “Cut-Up” for I felt sure there truly must be an essential missing-link between Gysin’s “Cut-Ups” and Breton’s Surrealist “fortuitous” automatism. Well, here, at long, long last we have it confirmed. “MAD LOVE”, therefore, absolutely insists that it is filed, well-thumbed, on your “Cut-Up” reference bookshelves right next to Brion Gysin’s “THE THIRD MIND”; “LET THE MICE IN” and “HERE TO GO”. These are the foundation stones of any and all credible past, present and future investigations of romantic art, romantic life, and romantic love; which are, you see, quite incontrovertibly and sacredly insisting that they are one and the same quest and process.

Anything built from or for less than total love, total gender and total war on any thing habituated as culture or character by our mindlessly billowing species is simply littering existence with cheap distractions that pointlessly extol built in obsolescence with the sole, paltry function of consuming forever the last traces of nobility and purpose.

As Brion Gysin, Andre Breton and the debacle of contemporary semantics so invitingly invite us to... ”Let’s cut it up, to see what it really says.”
FOREVER!

Genesis P-Orridge