Roger Gilbert-Lecomte is considered one of the eminent poets of the Surrealist period. The visionary, sardonic, and often outrageous poems in this bilingual edition represent the first presentation of his work in English

Roger Gilbert-Lecomte, Black Mirror: The Selected Poems, Trans. by David Rattray, Barrytown, 1991.

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Roger Gilbert-Lecomte (1907-1943) is considered one of the eminent poets of the Surrealist period. The visionary, sardonic, and often outrageous poems in this bilingual edition represent the first presentation of his work in English. With René Daumal he was the founder of the literary movement and magazine "Le Grand Jeu", the essence of which he defined as "the impersonal instant of eternity in emptiness". "The glimpse of eternity in the void", writes Rattray in the Introduction, "was to send Daumal to Hinduism, the study of Yoga philosophy, and Sanskrit. It sent Lecomte on an exploration of what he called a metaphysics of absence". Rattray, a poet acclaimed for his translations of Artaud, keeps intact the power and originality of Gilbert-Lecomte's work

 

On December 31, 1943 Robert Gilbert-Lecomte died at age 36 in a Paris hospital from tetanus caused by a dirty needle. His possessions were all in one small briefcase in the room where he had been living, the back room of a working-class bar whose owner Mme. Firmat had taken him in three years before out of kindness. To Lecomte's friend the playwright Arthur Adamov she gave the briefcase. It was filled with letters, prose writings, and a hundred poems. A morphine addict, Lecomte had been jabbing the needle into a high muscle through a pair of dirty trousers.

Born in Reims, France in 1907, Lecomte was the co-founder, with René Daumal and Roger Vailland, of the literary and artistic movement Le Grand Jeu. Three issues of the group's magazine, Le Grand Jeu, appeared between 1928 and 1930. The Surrealist reacted too Le Grand Jeu with hostility. The group fell apart in 1932.

Central to Le Grand Jeu was a vision of the unity of everything in the universe that resulted from experiments with carbon tetrachloride performed by Lecomte with his friend René Daumal when they were teenagers. Daumal later wrote about the experience in his essay, "A Fundament Experiment." Lecomte defined its essence as "the impersonal instant of eternity in emptiness." This glimpse of eternity in the void was to send Daumal to Hinduism, the study of Yoga philosophy, and Sanskrit. It sent Lecomte on an exploration of what he called a "metaphysics of absence." In imagination he returned to a pre-natal state, "a wondrous prior existence."

In 1933 Lecomte published a volume titled Le Miroir Noir (Black Mirror), privately printed in a limited edition of 1938. The last half-dozen poems appearing in the present volume [for which this piece was an introduction] appeared in Le Miroir Noir. Lecomte never explained what he meant by the title. He may have been thinking of the obsidian mirrors of the Aztecs, or perhaps of the black mirrors some painters are said to use to study tonal relationships of colors seen in nature, a kind of mirror that his contemporary Francis Ponge was soon to compare to a summer sky in which he imagined he could glimpse the blackness of interstellar space. No doubt Lecomte was also thinking of how own exploration in Le Miroir Noir of the mind's dark side, "the dark on the blind side of mirrors."

In later years Lecomte lived on and off with a German Jewish refugee named Ruth Kroneberg whom he had met on her arrival in Paris in 1934. She was arrested in 1940 after the Fall of France, but got out of jail, obtained false I.D., and emigrated to the Unoccupied Zone in hope of finding safety there. In 1942 she was arrested by the collaborationist military near Carcassone, transported to the concentration camp of Drancy in the German-occupied North, and from there to Auschwitz, where she died. One of Lecomte's last publications in his lifetime was in the nature of a poignant afterthought: a twelve-line poem, "Vacancy in glass," which he retitled "Palace of the void" for publication in the Nouvelle Revue Française, where it appeared shortly after Ruth was deported. It seems possible that the retitled poem in its new context may reflect this personal loss.

Lecomte himself never left Paris after the early 1930s. His life was a succession of jail and hospital confinements. Very few old friends would have anything to do with him during the last years. Over the generation following his death, Lecomte's oeuvre acquired the status of an underground classic. His friend Adamov published a selection of his poetry, and leading French literary magazines devoted space to him. The complete works were issued in three volumes during the 1970's by Gallimard. They consist of approximately 100 poems, a booklength collection of prose texts, including essays setting forth the principles of the Grand Jeu movement and various pieces of literary criticism, and, finally, a volume of letters.

—David Rattray (from Black Mirror: The Selected Poems of Roger Gilbert-Lecomte, 1991)

 

Le Grand Jeu (The Great Game), a group of young men, Roger Gilbert-Lecomte, René Daumal, Roger Vailland and others, intutively knowing the ridiculous absurdity and ultimately useless way of life currently sought and valued, seeking chaos to seek a higher order, to attain a higher state. They refused to be incorporated into the Surrealists, Daumal describing the Surrealist approach as "confusion, trickery, diversion," whereas Le Grand Jeu is an "initiatic community; each of the members, whatever he may do does it with the desire to maintain and reinforce the spiritual unity of the group." The Surrealists sought to shock and disorder, but Le Grand Jeu sought to shock and disorder to find what was beyond the shock and disorder, the higher meaning, the higher order, pushing much harder and more extremely with great desperation to leave the cage of usual human perception. Le Grand Jeu published 3 literary reviews between 1928 and 1930, the 4th did not come out at the time, but has been published since in the 1977 compliation of their work. Le Grand Jeu was a flash of light, an invitation, a quest for what is essential.

Born in Reims in 1907, Lecomte was the co-founder, with René Daumal and Roger Vailland, of the literary and artistic movement Le Grand Jeu. Three issues of the group s magazine, Le Grand Jeu, appeared between 1928 and 1930. The Surrealists reacted to Le Grand Jeu with hostility. The group fell apart in 1932. Central to Le Grand Jeu was a vision of the unity of everything in the universe that resulted from experiments with carbon tetrachloride performed by Lecomte with his friend René Daumal when they were teenagers. Daumal later wrote about the experience in his essay, "A Fundamental Experiment". Lecomte defined its essence as "the impersonal instant of eternity in emptiness". This glimpse of eternity in the void was to send Daumal to Hinduism, the study of Yoga philosophy, and Sanskrit. It sent Lecomte on an exploration of what he called a "metaphysics of absence". In imagination he returned to a pre-natal state, a "wondrous prior existence". In 1933 Lecomte published a volume titled La Vie l Amour la Mort le Vide et le Vent (Life Love Death Void and Wind), which went unnoticed by the press, save for a rave review by Antonin Artaud in the Nouvelle Revue Française, which is reprinted as a forward in our published work of Lecomte s Le Miroir Noir which was originally privately printed in a limited edition in 1938. Lecomte never left Paris after the early 1930's. His life was a succession of jail and hospital confinements. Very few old friends would have anything to do with him during the last years. Over the generation following his death, Lecomte's oeuvre acquired the status of an underground classic. His friend Adamov published a selection of his poetry, and leading French literary magazines devoted space to him. The complete works were issued in three volumes during the 1970's by Gallimard. They consist of approximately 100 poems, a booklength collection of prose texts, including essays setting forth the principles of the Grand Jeu movement and various pieces of literary criticism, and, finally, a volume of letters.

These are English translations of some of Roger's writings. Click on the link to view the translation.
 

POEMS
the borders of love
the great and little puppet theatre
Consecration and Massacre of Love
The Good Life
French Song
continual coming and going of the coma
The Prisoner's Song
mourning of azure
I want to be confused...
the holy childhood
the four elements
eternity in the twinkling of an eye
The Crowned Head

FRAGMENTS
Act of Dispossession
It's nothing, I am here...
And the need to create...
Watching to put out...
Among the backwash of tears...
In a fragile chance...
Yes and No
Flashback
Notes For the Universe of Myths
Log Book of a Dead Man
Lament of a Cartesian Diver

 

Roger Gilbert-Lecomte, The Book is a Ghost: Thoughts & Paroxysms for Going Beyond, Trans. by Michael Tweed, Solar Luxuriance, 2015.

The Alchemy of the Eye Cinema, form of the mind

After the dissolution of Le Grand Jeu, Roger Gilbert-Lecomte, in an autonomous capacity, carried on the mission that had been established by his now estranged fellow travelers. Collecting thoughts, essays,fragments and paroxysms on the revolutionary impulse of poetry, art, and life, THE BOOK IS A GHOST presents an image of Gilbert-Lecomte as a visionary writer whose impulse to transcend the banality of the everyday has been matched by few since Antonin Artaud.
In considering the revolutionary spirit within the context of a mysticism (a term that is still functionally a dirty word for intellectuals), the texts gathered in this two-volume set strive to present alternative considerations of the intellectual & artistic concerns of Gilbert-Lecomte's day—concerns which still grip us a century later: the cinema, the value of art, the metaphysics of absence, a speculative consideration of vision through the pineal gland, a refusal to posit the high and the low as binary opposites, the limiting nature of expression & representation, and the ever pervasive question of death. In his consideration of poetry & the way language can shape thought, these essays reveal that Gilbert-Lecomte predated the structuralists & post-structuralists that would rise to prominence in the second half of the 20th century.
In this volume, deftly translated by Michael Tweed, Gilbert-Lecomte's constant striving for revelation and revolution, his desire to refuse (and transcend) the corporeal limits one inhabits by being human, are finally revealed to English language readers.

In our rush to amend or forget the disasters of the 20th century, its liminal realms were purged and many doors to possible futures were locked and abandoned. Not just the consumption of art, but also its production was rationalized under capitalist models and for-profit education systems. At the end of the 1970s, a long era of openness to mysticism and spiritual inquiry (connecting the Romantics to the Surrealists to even Modernists like Buckminster Fuller) ended with its bitter commodification under the New Age banner. Then, briefly, a new digital frontier appeared. The Internet, which seemed like a realm of infinite possibility in the 1990s, has since been shaped by a small handful of technocrats, staunchly aligning itself (in terms of dollars and bandwidth) with the mundane. The artist today exists in an ecosystem that is friendly to list makers and traditional storytellers, but hostile to any inquiry or movement that does not prioritize the real or honor the preexisting. The holiday box office champion received widespread acclaim for its studied, scene-for-scene imitation of its forebear. It’s a “golden age” for television largely because producers now do a much better job of conforming to audience expectations. In this environment, where there is scarcely room for the possible (let alone the impossible), the abandoned doors of the last century deserve another look.

Behind one such door is Roger Gilbert-Lecomte (1907-1943), a French poet and co-founder of Le Grand Jeu (The Great Game), a group and journal that published three issues between 1928 and 1930. Invited to join the Surrealists, they declined—perhaps because, in consideration of some of their more extreme ideas, Surrealism seemed like a retreat. For Gilbert-Lecomte, the magazine was a weapon for spiritual, social, and political change.
In the essays and fragments collected (for the first time in English) in The Book is a Ghost: Thoughts & Paroxysms for Going Beyond, Gilbert-Lecomte positions himself outside the rational and spiritual camps that divided artists of the era, somewhere beyond dualism. He aims for what translator Michael Tweed calls “a godless kenosis.” Describing the goal common to all of his work, Gilbert-Lecomte says: “I will try to illuminate, with every light possible, this untranslatable revelation that I bear deep within my inner darkness. No doubt I will die before I make myself understood, but that lucid despair does not resign me to pessimism. Patiently, I will speak with everyone on every level.” In part, this revelation included the notion that “one can experimentally escape the duration of the flow of the will-to-live until becoming eternal.”
Aspiring to “a metaphysics of absence,” the body was not explicitly an obstacle for Gilbert-Lecomte as it might be in ascetic religious practice, though addiction did become a problem for him. Beginning as a teenager with his friend René Daumal, he experimented with automatic writing, yogic practices, and drugs. According to Tweed, “any so-called extra-sensory experiences which might arise were not artistic fodder but signs, heralds of the possibilities that lie beyond the common acceptance of the limits imposed by life and society.”
Gilbert-Lecomte is somewhat indifferent to the actual results of the artistic process. Art does not exist for society or for its own sake but as a means toward an ultimate transformation. Once a novel has been written and read by its author, it might as well be burned, because it persists eternally, in his view, in the cosmic record. The entire field of human endeavor remains accessible via some subconscious mechanism similar to instinct, “that ghostly cloud in the shape of a dog that connects all dogs and through which all dogs communicate.” In another essay, he defines poetry as “a specific state of consciousness engendered by an emotional shock” and the transmission and study of this state. Here, too, the poem-as-object is subservient to the effect of the shock that produces it. It’s a bonus if the poem, like a zen koan, produces a similar shock in the reader.
Despite his deep pessimism about the state of cinema (an after-dinner opiate subject to the “absolute dictatorship of capital”), he predicted that, as a “mediator between mind and nature,” it would eventually become “a mode of knowledge, an actual form of the mind.” In this future cinema, the filmmaker’s task would be “to adapt one’s entire mental life to the screen,” including both forms that can be illustrated with sound and image (such as dreams) and forms that cannot, with the goal of granting access via the screen to new states of consciousness. The drawings reprinted here might give the reader a better idea of what he is after. It’s impossible to guess what Gilbert-Lecomte would think of the films made in the decades since his death (Brakhage or Denis or Lynch), but it’s not hard to imagine a similar essay on today’s video games and virtual worlds, which have perhaps even greater potential as a form of mind, but are no less subservient to capital.
Gilbert-Lecomte published two collections of poetry in 1933 and 1938, but gradually succumbed to morphine addiction. His girlfriend, whom he had intended to marry, was sent to Auschwitz in 1942. He died of tetanus the following year, leaving a slim briefcase full of essays, letters, drawings, and notes. Without the explicit sanction of Breton’s Surrealists, Gilbert-Lecomte was on his own journey from the beginning—more direct and in some ways more ambitious than his contemporaries. The Book is a Ghost is both a record of abandoned possibilities and a set of incomplete formulas from which to set out once again. - Christopher Kelly