Remedios Varo (w/ Benjamin Peret, photomontage)

Celestial Pablum: To Induce Erotic Dreams

close the window and place red brick under the left-hand leg at the head of the bed


Ingredients

1 kilo horseradish

3 white hens

1 head garlic

4 kilos honey

1 mirror

2 calves’ livers

1 brick

2 clothespins

1 whalebone corset

2 false mustaches

Hats to taste

Pluck hens, carefully reserving feathers. Set hens to boil in two liters unsalted distilled water or rainwater, along with the head of garlic, peeled and mashed. Let it boil on low heat. While the fowl are boiling, place the eastern bed northwest to southeast and let rest with the window open. After one half hour, close the window and place red brick under the left-hand leg at the head of the bed, which must face northwest. Let rest. While the bed is resting, grate horseradish directly over the broth, taking care that your hands are constantly steeped in the steam. Stir and let boil. Take the four kilos of honey and with a spatula spread on the bedsheets. Take the hens’ feathers and scatter them over the honey-smeared sheets. Make bed with care.

It is not essential for the feathers to be white, coloured ones can be used as well, but so-called guinea hens must be avoided, for these at times bring on a prolonged state of nymphomania or severe cases of priapism. Put on corset and lace tightly. Sit in front of the mirror, calm your nerves, smile, try on mustaches and hats according to your tastes (tricorne, bicorne, cardinal’s biretta, mob cap, Basque beret, et cetera). Put the two clothespins on a saucer and place beside the bed. Warm calves’ livers in a bain-marie, taking great care they don’t come to a boil. Place the warm livers in lieu of a pillow (in cases of masochism) or on both sides of the bed, within hands’ reach (in cases of sadism). From that moment on, everything must get done at high speed, to prevent the livers from cooling off. Run and quickly pour the broth (which must be very reduced) into a cup. Quickly return with it to the mirror, smile, take a sip of broth, try on a mustache, take another sip, try on a hat, drink, try on everything, take little sips between one trying-on and the next, and do all of it as quickly as you can. Once the broth is consumed, run to the bed, lie down between the prepared sheets, quickly take up the clothespins and insert into each of them your big toe. These clothespins must remain on all night long and be placed at a 45-degree angle to the toe, pressing firmly on the nail.

This simple recipe always gives good results and ordinary people can pleasurably go from kiss to strangulation, from rape to incest, et cetera, et cetera. Recipes for more complicated cases, such as necrophilia, autophagy, tauromachy, alpinism, and others, are to be found in a special volume from our collection: Discreetly Healthful Advice.

 


Dream of the Drawing for Everything alchemies dream-like things: images and texts and films and sketches and philosophy and half-thoughts and visions and moments and fragments of all kinds. Resting and exploring here may deepen your relationship with the oneiric and, therefore, all apparent reality. Resting and exploring here may augment your psyche’s healing tendency—as Jung called it—through highlighting and delighting in humanity’s hallucinatory creations. (Without them, after all, neurologists assure us we would go starkers.) It is time there was a potentially infinite, intimate museum to what cannot be seen. Welcome to the museum.

Dream of the Drawing for Everything is some of the collaboration between artist Nuala Clarke & writer Crystal Gandrud. Our work arises out of what dances on the edges of perception and our collective attention gravitates to the dream-like nature of human experience. We have been in collaboration since 2010. Our merged practices of visual and textual art unfold on a continuum, as part of an interconnected series evolving over time. Both performed “Fair Shouldered One” (a book which is not a book) at the &Now Literary Festival in Paris, 2012 and installed “Between Spaces”, a Yeats inspired dreamscape at the Hamilton Gallery, Sligo, 2013. Most recently participated in the Find Arts Project in Castlebar, Ireland. Our public art installation of words and images printed on linen, “Woven Found”, hung on Castle Street. The project won the best commissioning practice award from Allianz Business to Arts, 2014.

Nuala Clarke

Nuala Clarke, visual artist, lives and works between Co. Mayo and New York City. Educated at the National College of Art and Design in Dublin, she moved to New York City in 1993. In September 2007, she received a fellowship to the Ballinglen Arts Foundation, Mayo and began returning to Ireland from NY to work every year. Clarke has been represented by Boltax Gallery, NY since 2005. Recent shows include, Amid a Space Between: Irish Artists in America at the SFMoMa Artists Gallery, San Francisco, (2012); to Tremble into Stillness, a WB Yeats related show at Hamilton Gallery, Sligo; RHA invited artist; and A drawing for Everything, Ballinglen Arts Foundation (2013). BLINK, a public art installation at the Westport Arts Festival, Co. Mayo (2014). Upcoming shows (2015): Impressions of Yeats, Hamilton Gallery, Sligo; Of this place, Sligo and Madrid.

nualaclarke@gmail.com

Crystal Gandrud

Crystal Gandrud, writer, lives in New York City and Normandy, France. She holds an MFA, Creative Writing and a BFA, Classical Theatre. Recent publications include “Yeatsian: Numberless Dreamers,” The Encyclopedia Project, 2014, “Here,” Lost Magazine, and “Idiom: Woodbird Flies Early,” The Encyclopedia Project. Her dissertation, “Murdoch: the Mandala Maker,” was presented at Kingston University’s Iris Murdoch Conference (2006), London. At the most recent Murdoch Conference, she performed a multi-media excerpt from a work-in-progress entitled “The Forgotten Man,” inspired by Murdoch’s philosophical writings. She is under contract for a memoire entitled “Astonishment: A Litany of the Uncanny.”

gandrud@actuallyorange.com

Tell us your dreams. Dreams are accepted by the editorial staff on the basis of aesthetics. That said, there are certain topics that will not be considered. Extremely violent or pornographic dreams will not be accepted on any basis so please do not submit them.

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