Part Two: The Surrealists Were Even Cooler Than You Thought

Unwomen did our theme music? And this is part two in our Derive through Surrealism, which will piss off some situation as somewhere because the situations didn't like the surrealists, and then the ones who invented the concept of derief, but it was based on the surrealists. That's not what we're talking about today. Last time we talked about a bunch of shit THEYD in World War Two, because I figured i'd start with some of the action. This time,

I'm going to start with their precursors. I'm actually not gonna I'm just gonna talk about some people who inspired them because they some of them inspire me too. Some of them I don't like. Yeah, so let's do it.

I have this pet theory that I'm working on, which is that basically everything to cool, everything cool that comes out of is based on coo Europeans looking around and being like, oh God, our society is evil and shitty, what is better and finding inspiration from colonized people, indigenous people,

enslave people, and their descendants. These Western folks are desperately trying to counteract the shittiest parts of their society, which plays into the history of appropriation, capitalism and blah blah blah blah blah. But it's also really interesting and so this is my way of saying, a bunch of the people who inspired the surrealists were black, and even though actually there were a ton of black surrealists, and we'll talk about them later, but they're not the face of

the movement. I want to talk about this guy named Pascal Beverly Randolph. I'm just gonna assume you haven't heard of him, because I hadn't heard of him, and no one I know has probably heard him unless you're into like specific occultist stuff. I have not. He is fucking wild. He is one of the forefathers of American occultism. He was a sex magician and a spiritualist.

speaking of things that are very con manny. He if I had known about him before I started this four parter, he might have gotten some episodes on his own. He's just really fucking cool.

then he got involved in the spiritualist movement. I assume everyone has heard Jamie Loftus's series Ghost Church, but in case you haven't, have you ever heard of Jamie Loftus Klein.

of the world. He studies at least somewhere between being a deckhand and be working with the spiritualists. He goes to at least Cuba, France, England, Syria, Turkey, and Egypt. And you wouldn't believe how hard I had to work. You might believe how hard I had to work to dig up more than just traveled in Africa and find an actual name of a specific country, right if Africa

is a country, which it's not. Along the way, probably when he was about twenty five, Pascal married a black woman and had three kids with her, though it's the nineteenth century, so only one survives to adulthood. Fourteen years later, they get divorced, and he marries a white Irish woman with whom he had another kid. And both of his wives were his actual partners and spiritual practitioners of their own and he I think kept up with all the kids, and he didn't do what his dad had done. And

also I had to look this up. I was like, how did he marry a New York State is one of the very few states in the US that has never outlawed interracial marriage, so it was even legal for him to marry that Irish woman. But he didn't last long in a spiritualist movement because he wasn't a con man. He was probably lying here and there about his past. His black wife may or may not have been an indigenous, but was absolutely selling Native American medicine for a living.

But he he wasn't a con man because he wasn't He was seeking actual trances, right, And he was like, Oh, you all are just doing weird shit on stage or stage magicians. This is not of interest to me. You know. He was specifically into being mixed race. He didn't love he didn't love the way that people exoticized him. But he talked about how he channeled multiple racial identities and it helped him channel the spirits. He said, quote, I owe my successes to my conglomerate blood, my troubles and

poverty to the same source. And by eighteen fifty eight he leaves a spiritualist movement. He's like, y'all's trances are bullshit. You're faking, and you're a bunch of racists, and you're claiming to be activists trying to make the world better, but you're just doing it for clout and money and fuck you. He also, in contrast to spiritualist teachings, he was basically a universalist. Instead of believing that only select souls are immortal, he was like, every soul is equal,

every soul is immortal. At one point he moved to Boston and declared himself a medical doctor because he'd read lots of books on the subject. So he's shaking her head now the hand is on the face. I like how this just as easily could be a setup for someone who just turns into a terrible cult leader, right, Oh, for sure. But he's like the good person one as far as I can tell, you know. He set up the first Resicrucian societies in the US, which I had

to look up. It's an occultist movement that goes back to the early seventeenth century in Europe. Basically, they're like, oh, there's like a secret order of like secret knowledge that's going to like set the world right. He labeled his shit as resacrution. He said that he admitted this later because he had a lot of spiritual teachings and since he was black, no one was going to take him seriously unless he gave it a label that like white

people were already like new and we're familiar with. And the current order that he started doesn't like to talk about their founder's sex magic. But he goes around and he's traveling. He's forming secret societies all over the place, or at least claiming to some of them. Might have been like I set one up in Denver and it was me and I swear there was like fifty guys there, you know. But he had all these spiritual teachings. It was the sex, drugs and rock and roll type thing.

Too early for rock and roll, but sex and drugs, especially hashish, could lead to spiritual enlightenment when paired with study,

according to him. And he's selling all this shit through mail order, Like really, I'm setting it all up, right, But half of the shit that he's selling through a mail order is free, and all of his prices are like rock bottom, like barely breaking even because he's not a grifter, and he seemed to be into free love, not as I want to be a cult leader and have a million lover's way, but an actual women's liberation

way like we were talking about last time. Right, It's so funny that I'm so skeptical of like free love and all that shit, even though like polyamory is like a fairly major part of modern queer culture, you know, right, but also as many of the same problems.

these okay, between the y Yeah, I love it. I know that was non binary, Like, no, I'm not non binary, I'm a between.

eye to drinkrom the pool of knowledge. He learned satyr, which is women's magic and is also the magic of men who take the submissive role with other men, because all throughout history running this thing where instead of like there being a stigma against men being gay, there's a stigma against men being the receptive partner in sex. This

tangent brought to you by Margaret's Adhd the Pascal. He also wrote, quote, it don't follow that all who wear the penis are in soul true males, or that a vagina is the sign of womanness, which pushes him so the fuck far ahead of his time from a sexology point of view. Seriously, he skipped several steps. I was like reading like some people were like, oh, he like predated the inversion theory of late nineteenth century stuff. He didn't.

He skipped that entirely. He went to fucking modern trans theory. Yeah, he rules.

my inference. I don't actually wrote like forty some books, and I mostly just read about him instead of like reading his books.

same things that conman do. And then also he was an abolitionist and he was involved in political stuff, and like largely the two didn't affect each other, right, Like he didn't hide them, I don't think. But he was all about abolition as a pre Civil war, He's going around touring the South talking about abolition, spending a lot of time in New Orleans, hanging out with voodoo priestesses, and like being a free black man from New York and voluntarily going to the South is like braves shit,

very dangerous. He took a gradualist rather than revolutionary stance, which tended to offend his fellow abolitionists for good reason. But whatever, he had more skin of the game than I did do or whatever. You know, I'm not trying to Some people didn't like him in the abolitionist movement. During the Civil War, he spent his time recruiting black soldiers for the war. He was already in his forties,

and I don't think he fought directly himself. After the war, he spent a lot of his time in Louisiana teaching thousands of black people how to read and write through the Freedmen's Bureau schools during a time when white racists were attacking every black person and white Republican they could find.

He lived there during the New Orleans Massacre of eighteen sixty six, in which probably fifty black people and three white allies were killed by a racist mob, so he slept with pistols under his bed as the death threats came in for his daring to teach black people how to read. He wrote quote, if Hell is any worse than New Orleans, I pity the damned. He was a good writer. Yeah, he got a little millenarian after that.

He predicted a great apocalypse was coming, that the white people would give the Southwest to black people and he would march off towards their Zion with them. He lectured and wrote extensively about black rights. Unrelated to his occultism, he formed the National Equal Rights League. His other personal motto was we may be happy yet, and it applied

to both of his interests, magic and emancipation. And one of the reasons I like him so much is he's like a he's a seeker, right, He's someone who wasn't convinced there was He wasn't convinced he was right, but he explored spirituality to the best of his knowledge, and he wrote. He wrote shit that contradicted his previous shit as he changed his mind as he learned new things. Right, And that's cool. I think that's a good thing.

human souls. Then when you die, your soul returns not to the dust, but instead travels to the spirit realms, which are Sometimes he writes it about them as being around planets, galaxies, or beyond space itself, and it depends on how enlighten this particular soul is where you end up. In his earliest writings with his internalized racism, he says that the white souls are the most developed and they're going to end up like in the coolest spirit realms.

By the end of his life, it's people of color, not just black people, who are the most developed and are in the coolest parts of space, and white people who are damned mm hmm or have more to more development to do, just not inherently wrong. Through study and drugs and sex, one could drop through the outer world into the world below, into the spirit realm, which he sometimes conceptualizes under the earth and other times is the interior of one's own soul because inside of us microcosms

of the universe. And yeah, he lived his life and he did that shit nice. In July eighteen seventy five, at the age of forty nine he died. He most likely shot himself in the head with a revolver. He was destitute, and he was resentful of the white occultist world continuing to ignore him. A friend and fellow occultist on his deathbed claimed to have killed Pascal during a fit of temporary insanity, but it's likely that this later confession is a lie. It's likely that he took his

own life. And yeah, his wife continued to publish his works. He published forty five books and pamphlets while he was alive, and all of the big occult groups after he died. It drew on his legacy because black people have been everything, and the Surrealists also drew on this. His writing about the unconscious world seeping into the conscious world and particular

influence them. But a lot of the influence information about black influences on the Surrealists didn't start being acknowledged until the later incarnation of the Surrealists and like the sixties or whatever. And we'll get to that at some point. But what we're going to get to first is, uh, what's something good? We can be sponsored by books, but libraries lost books. Yeah, yeah, everyone listening should write at least forty books in their life.

like jazz jazz, that's not a coincidence. As far as I can tell history, the West is like the only place that's ever been really super whatever's only plays I've found that has been super obsessed with, like music should be written down and performed exactly as it's written. And this is even only the recent West, which leads me to a tangent. Okay, there's this finished instrument called the contelee. It's a kind of zither. I've made a couple of them.

I think they're really cool and I like playing them. And I listened to an interview with the traditional contelet player and he was like, well, the traditional way to play this instrument this is sit in the corner of the house, probably drink, have your dog, sleep on your feet, let that rest of the house do their own thing, and then make up whatever you want as you and just like suck around on it. Yeah, And it's not about playing specific compositions. It's about channeling, right, It's about

improvisational music. Everyone has known this forever, with the exception of Western Europe during some certain time period. But the Surrealists are from Western Europe in that certain time period. So improvisational plane. This is like a fucking epiphany, right.

Jazz is imported from the US, in part by black soldiers from the US or in World War One, and the Surrealists are super into veteran of the pad Josephine Baker, the black superstar who moved to the France, moved to France, fought Nazis and had a pet cheetah whoa Yes, she's a real quote. You should check out that episodes.

piano ain't got no wrong notes. And he revolutionized piano plane. He also got involved in the civil rights movement, and he inspired the fuck out of the surrealists more influences. What's your take on edge lords?

different times, and like wildly differently. It has been used by like aggressive shitty centrists, the far right and the far left, and not often at the same time. They seem to like pass it back and forth like a hot potato. You know, right now the potato is in the right wings hands, I think, and I don't so. One of the original Edgelords in literature is a character named Malderour, and he is a protagonist of a book from the eighteen sixties called La Chanton about Malderoor The

Songs of Maldour. I have tried to read it. I hope one day to succeed. My god, it is dense.

Like think, he's like sometimes like a precursor of the modern graphic novel because he'd like write really weird theological shit and then draw it too. And he was a printmaker and he like so he engraved it all by hand. He basically made zenes. He was a weird fucking zineester who I like a lot. Rintrall's the name of a character who represents the just rage of the prophet. The first line from his book The Marriage of Heaven and Hell is Rintraw roars and shakes his fires in the

burdened air. And no, I can't tell you what that means because I don't understand it, but it's pretty mm hmm. And I understand a lot of the rest of that book.

In gill little like small flag that you like, you know, like this book is attributed to Comte de la trement, which is the pen name of a poet named Isidore Lucien Dakau isidor read all the Romantics or another influence about the Surrealists I'll get to one day. And he was a depressed trust fund kid, so very like the surrealists, who wrote furiously late at night and self published the book with his dad's money. It's just very surrealist of it. Again,

I'm kind of talking shit. I don't know what percentage of the I don't know what percentage of the surrealist or trust fund kids, but art world early twentieth century was a lot of them. Otherwise weren't. And so he wrote this book and he was like, oh, look how I jam. But then he started an inversion of it called Songs of the Good that was built on courage and hope and faith, which is the kind of thing

that a modern edgelord would not do. Because I think he actually was like I want to explore different parts of the human psyche. Right, But before he could do that, Prussia besieged Paris in eighteen seventy and the conditions of the city got worse, and Isodor died at age twenty four in eighteen seventy. So that was the other reason

I forgive him or whatever. Anyway, So this Edgeloord's thing is honestly part of the core of surrealism, the idea of tapping into the unconscious and writing things that up end the values we assume have it like, it has its own value from the surrealist point of view, right, Yeah, and this is like part of this how the concept of being edgy and up ending values and morality and

all this stuff is like goes back and forth. The far left was doing it in the sixties and early seventies, centered around Michael Moorcock and creating the concept of the anti hero, or rather popularizing the concept of the anti hero. But now it's like the concept of the anti hero is this like really interesting thing? And now it's just like, of course, your detective smokes cigarettes and hates women, Like, congratulations, who's an edgy boy, You're an edgyp boy.

We're just like and everyone gets to participate. So all of these culture things, cultural things like happen so fast and like you know, and they're not less good or less important or less interesting than like the Surrealists, just because like the surrealisted certain things first, but they didn't really right, but they like you know, and like I

really like the Surrealists. But we live in a beautiful, strange, absurd time where culture happens really quickly, and Evil Paddington is like the kind of thing that would have broken these people's minds.

the character becomes their icon. Here's the person who's like against everything, right, you know, he's their prophet alongside Baldiire who wrote the book the Flowers of Evil, just poetry book, and who also fought in the eighteen forty eight revolutions. And then Arthur Rimbaud, who is a gay author who wrote a Season in Hell and fought in the early Paris Commune but got out before everything went to shit and everyone died, who also wrote poems about Louis Michelle,

the anarchists here of the Commune. Anyway, what I'm trying to say is, all though cool old edge Lord's actually like threw down in all these revolutions. If you're an edgelord, now one, cut it out. It's not as interesting anymore to get into Paddington, I guess. And three all your heroes were leftists. Get with a program. Okay, yes, all of this pushing traditional morality had a limit even to them, right, They're like, oh, we like Maldoror who like and we

like people imagining evil and all this shit. And then fucking Dolly starts putting out paintings of like Hitler naked and sexy and the other surrealists. He has a bunch of paintings, including like more recent paintings that are like

Hitler masturbating or whatever. It's like what they're called they're too surreal for whatever anyway, and the other surrealists are like, are you fucking serious, my man, And so they ran him out of the surrealist group in nineteen thirty four for a while, and then for good they like put him on trial and then decided not to kick him out, and then in for good in nineteen thirty nine, when DOLLI was like, yeah, but I like Franco but like for real, and they were like, you gotta go, like

you're a fascist. For some straight Dolly quotes, just to fucking clear the air for anyone listening, Dolly said, quote, we don't want happiness for all men, rather the happiness of some to the detriment of others, since oppression and suffering are primordial psychological, biological, and physical conditions for the happiness of the rest. And then I'm going to read an even worse one. Okay. So first he wrote about how the death penalty was like human sacrifice, but it

was a good thing, oh my god. And then he wrote that Nazism was a surrealist government and the swastika is a surrealist symbolo. He also like vaguely got involved in the Allies trying to fight the Nazis, but not in a useful way, and he wrote, quote the domination or submission of all colored races was possible if quote all the whites united fanatically like he's just like actually

the worst. And I'm going to read one more quote a bit more brutal than I usually read on the show, because I fucking hate Dolly, he wrote in a letter to Britton, the surrealist leadery guy who I actually really like, Dolly wrote quote, I declare that even though I may have pity and a negative opinion of the cruel lynchings and bonfires, I admit to feeling real pleasure and considerable sexual excitement in reading about such things, and do not

intend to censure those who burn blacks alive and lynch them. I consider I have to consider the legitimate pleasure that drives these people. Yuck. Yeah, these are fucking monster Yeah. And I think that that like shows the like limits of the like edginess that they're sort of interested in, right in the same way that Magree's started like painting flowers and shit. When the Nazis occupied things, you know, right, they're like evil is a really interesting concept. And then

when evil is like personified in the world. They're like, Nope, not that that's the enemy.

danger having edge lord heroes. But there's still something interesting about Maldaurar. And we're gonna talk about one more precursor, and it's the need to eat food and therefore advertise stuff. Food is a type of stuff. They call it food stuff. Yell me, here's the meds and we're back. We're going to talk about one more actual precursor. Germenberto was a French anarchist lady. She was raised in a working class,

Republican like left wing family. She wanted to get into drawing and shit, she went to art school when she was like ten because she was like winning all these awards for a drawing. Then her dad died and she had to as a pre teen leave school to go work in the factory. Because this is I mean, like, frankly, this is why so many of the artists back then were fucking like trust fund kids, you know, because German wanted to be an artist and had to not die instead. I mean it.

war is bad. And then in a factory she joined the union and pretty much immediately got arrested for giving a speech that was like I think she's like probably like you know this, like teen girls given a speech. It's like, hey, what about violence, guys, And we tried violence. That might solve some shit, help things get better around here, you know. So they were in jail. She got arrested

multiple times for writing different insundiary things. By the time she was eighteen or so, the Anarchist Union of Paris, and she wrote about how soldiers should dessert, presaging that great surrealist activity being the coolest fuck lady, you tell soldiers to dessert? She oh, you'll appreciate this part. She took on a lot of debt from rich banks with no intention of repaying it as like a specific class war thing, like as a way to rob the rich, right,

hell yeah. She also lost a lover to suicide, a guy who had been drafted and was like, oh no, I can't, I don't want to be drafted killed himself. She had a not fucking easy chunk of life. Actually, it never gets less rough, unfortunately. But she's interesting. This fascist thing starts happening in the early nineteen twenties, like it hits France, like not long after it hits Italy, you know, it doesn't take over quite as hard. She's like, well,

until it does, I guess during World War Two. But whatever, She's like, I don't like this. This fascist thing is not my style. And there's this guy, his name's Marius Platau, who runs a far right newspaper and also the National Federation of the Night's Camelot, which is the far right youth organization of the time, and they're trying to bring back the monarchy much like today's. Wow, it's almost exactly

one hundred years ago. Is exactly one hundred years ago the thing we're talking about today, and we are now dealing with people who are trying to set up far right night organizations to bring back the monarchy. So Jermn was like, well, I have a problem, and I have a revolver. So that far right newspaper he runs, it has an office. On the twenty second of January nineteen twenty three, she walked into the building and shot him

five times and killed him. She spent eleven months of waiting trial in jail, and the whole time she maintained her guilt. At no point did she'd make any other claim other than I shot and killed that man because he was.

fucking thing. And this is like right before the Surrealists announced themselves by being like we're the Surrealists, right, And the jury is like, you know, carefully considering the evidence, and the jury is like, well, she says she's guilty, but I don't think she did anything wrong. Fuck that guy, and they fucking let her off. She's found not guilty.

or the greatest light in our dreams. And so it's like this is them being like, we are obsessed with the woman as muse, but the woman as muse isn't like check out her tits. It's like this woman had a revolver and put five shots into the head of the monarchist movement.

not gonna bother. We're not done with this derive. When we come back next week, we're going to talk about the dataists, the early Surrealists, and then the living movement that gives the hippies the phrase. Oh yeah, it's surrealists who came up with the phrase make love not War in the sixties. And probably, but I can't promise we'll find more ways to talk shit on Dolli as well

as the surrealists who went over to Stalin. Okay, Cliffhanger, Eh, thank you, thanks for Why are you always drawing attention to my Cliffhangers. I'm acknowledging, I'm acknowledging You're brilliance. Oh thanks, thanks. It's important. But if people are interested in you're brilliance, not you, Sophie, but you, Caitlin. I mean, if you're interested in Sophie's brilliant, then.

follow me online. I guess at Caitlin Dorante.

But then every other week is free content. I write more about history, I write more about politics. I write about preparedness. I swear it's more entertaining than those three. Well whatever you hear me. Listen to talk about history. If you made it this far you think I'm not boring, I hope, And if you do, also you should like if you hate, listen to podcasts like that's interesting but not good?