New Issues of "Rêvenance: Hauntings From Underground Histories"

I've got too many websites to keep updated, and I've been derelict here: So now I present not one, but two issues of the Resurrecting blog's de facto magazine, Rêvenance: A Zine of Hauntings From Underground Histories. As for direct Jeunes-France/Bouzingo links, Issue 4 includes a Gautier poem and an essay on translating Gautier, and an article about the complicated situation of the terms Bousingot, Bouzingot, Jeune France, Jeunes-France, and others even more obscure; Issue 5 includes a poem by Philothée O'Neddy, an etching by Célestin Nanteuil, and an 1832 article poking fun at the Bousingots.

Click Here to order physical copies, follow links from there to free e-book versions! (I trade too – email at the address below to set up a trade of zines, research books, or whatever you've got.

A couple of our translators got in touch with me as readers/users of this site – please don't hesitate to send along translations, short essays, transliterations, reviews, suggested public domain texts, letters or pieces responding to articles in past issues, or whatever else you're prompted to contribute! monoclelash@gmail.com

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Rêvenance: A Zine of Hauntings from Underground Histories. Issue 5.
–ed. Olchar E. Lindsann
  

 
This issue is built around a special feature on the multi-generational battle between the concierges of Paris, known as ‘Pipelets’, and the writers and artists of the Bohemian community, with secondary threads investigating poverty, Frenetic Romanticism, Utopian and Syndicalist Socialism.
Featuring: Philothée O’Neddy, Thomas Hood, Marceline Debord-Valmore, John Everett Millais, Sapeck, Célestin Nanteuil, J.-C. Sailer, The Mapah Ganneau, Eugène Sue, Cham, Faustin Betbedder, Gustave Karr, Arthur Verneuil, & J. Grand-Carteret; translations by Olchar E. Lindsann, Harriet Preston & Elizabeth Birdsall.
 
24 pgs on folded 8.5”x14”. July, A.Da. 102/A.H. 188 (2018)
$6.00 + 1.50 s/h or FREE DOWNLOAD
 

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Rêvenance: A Zine of Hauntings from Underground Histories. Issue 4.
–ed. Olchar E. Lindsann

 

This issue is built around a special feature on the dance club micro-culture of the Badouillards (c.1833 – 50), with secondary threads investigating lexicography, neologism and Parisian slang, the naming of subcultures and micro-scenes, and a couple items relating to 19th Century feminism.
Featuring: Théophile Gautier, The Princess de Salm-Dyke, Georges d’Heylli, Albert Giraud, The Grandees of Badouillery, Alexandre Privat d’Anglemont, M. Adolphe, Lucien Rigaut, A.B., and Gustave Morne; translations by Olchar E. Lindsann & Raymond E. André III.
 
24 pgs on folded 8.5”x14”. July, A.Da. 102/A.H. 188 (2018)
$4.00 + 1.50 s/h or FREE DOWNLOAD

Alphonse Brot, "Chat in the Garden" (15 Sept., 1829)

Alphonse Brot, a co-founder of the Jeunes-France, is the earliest poet on record to describe his work as "avant-garde" (employing a recently-coined Saint-Simonian socialist usage of the originally military term), in his manifesto-Preface to the book in which this poem was published. Ironically, his close friend Philothée O'Neddy, (whose unpublished manuscript 'Parisina' is quoted here under his real name Théophile Dondey) recalled that the group considered Brot's work as a whole insufficiently experimental. Brot himself admits this in the Preface, explaining that while he is a moderate in terms of poetic form, he declares himself a member of "the avant-garde of Romanticism" due to its association with leftist politics.

 

This is (in addition to being a bit racy for its day) one of his more experimental texts – pretty interesting, actually, in the way the lines fracture into syntactically vague fragments that force the hemistiches of the lines to drift metrically apart, the ambiguities of the seams between dialogue, speakers, and narration, the jamming together of archaic/formal language with casual and ironic usages, the intense formal mirroring occurring within and between certain lines through repeated words, syntactical formulations, and internal rhyme, etc... I've tried to recreate as much of this as possible.

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Seventh Song of Love.
        15 September 1829.

       Chat in the Garden

It is of gentle moments in this cruel life.
    The count Jules de Rességuier.[1]

’Tis time, when with voice undefiled and alone,
The nightingale beneath the frail boughs moans,
Sensual time when the heart of the lover
At secret rendezvous redoubles its flutters!
             Théophile Dondey.[2]
            Fragment of Parisina.


Speak to me, speak to me of those ravishing balls,
Of those charming soirées, for whose delights we yearn;
Oh, speak to me in main of those so-sprightly waltzes
Be they in lovely halls or all upon the ferns;
Speak to me of rebuffs, diplomatic approaches,
Of kisses, of pledges in sighs heeded and broached;
Speak of pleasures of the treacherous cavalier
Who in his palm so long a timid palm clasps near,
Whose stare of fire captivates a trembling stare,
Who feels pressed to his heaving breast a burning breast,
Who may, mother’s keen gaze being far from there,
Pry questioning in whispers his shy waltzess,
Praising all her fine traits, in soft murmurs to share
Those words almost unknown to lasting tenderness.
Speak to me, speak to me, of bowers, of shadows,
Of the overgrown boughs and meandering groves,
Where one may be ensconced for hatching passion’s plans.
Here’s what I overheard in the garden one eve,
When, worn out by the waltz and worn out by the dance,
Desiring silence all alone I took leave:
– Two years since at the ball, back in times long-flown,
Madame, I last listened to your voice’s tones,
I spoke to you of love and of soft tenderness,
For that you were, madame, and yet still……. your mistress,
And nuptials…… – oh my friend, hush yourself, for pity;
We’ll speak no more of love, but speak……. of amity!
– Back then, like tonight, were you young and pretty,
The thing is, you seemed less plain and more rebellious,
You’ve a noble demeanor, and more glowing discourse,
Tonality and mien than one can find at court,
You have rubies galore, an opulent escort,
And titles, distinction, your valets and flunkies;
But no, your heart has lost that boldness unalloyed
Which for so long a span constituted our joy!
For the love that your soul now no longer understands,
You coldly proffer me . . . your companionship, madame!
To me, your companionship, me who adores you so,
Me! me, for whom a trice far from you’s a fatal blow;
Yet does paltry friendship, friendship guerdon[3] bestow
For remorse, a sempiternal fire’s ennuis?
– Oh, speak of something else! – No, . . . keep thee memories
Of celestial moments kneeling at your knees?
Back then, just as today, the forest, ferns loomed near;
But then your glances were not nearly so severe;
You didn’t drive me off, you welcomed all my vows,
And my hair by your hands was softly ruffled through;
Have you even forgotten that memory now
Of that day when two times you told me I love you!
 .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .   .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .   .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  . 
And the voice was snuffed out, and ‘neath the citrus branches
Then the sound of sighed moans, soft rustling met my senses,
Of faint words of love, and not-quite silences!
There we’ll shut up….., and me, I returned to the dances.
Speak to me, speak to me of those ravishing balls,
Of those charming soirées, for whose delights we yearn;
Oh, speak to me in main of those so-sprightly waltzes
Be they in lovely halls or all upon the ferns.




Translated by Olchar E. Lindsann
 
from Chants d’Amour, et poésies diverses. 1829. Dureuil / Janet: Paris. pp. 43–49.

NOTES

[1] The poet Rességuier was relatively obscure, but exercised a considerable influence on the younger Romanticists.

[2] Soon to become Philothée O’Neddy. Dondey/O’Neddy and Brot seem to have been particularly close prior the formation of the Petit-Cénacle/Jeunes-France, and probably became involved with the Romanticist underground community together, developing some of their theories and poetic processes collaboratively until O’Neddy continued onto more radical paths than Brot was prepared to tread.

[3] paîraît. An extremely rare word (thus my choice of translation), apparently a variant, slang or very archaic conjugation of payer, to pay/repay. Although appearing in no lexicographic source I can find, his spelling seems to have taken on some currency within Romanticist circles specifically, cf. Hugo in The Burgraves, Debordes-Valmore’s ‘Un ruisseau de la scarpe’, Hégésippe Moreau’s ‘La princesse’, Dumas’ Charles XVII, etc..

Text on the Kabbala by Gérard de Nerval & Henri Delaage

New AVANT-OCCULT TRANSLATION – I've translated the Gematria chart printed in Gérard de Nerval's and Henri Delaage's hermetic anthology, "The Red Devil: Cabalistic Almanac for 1850". (I discussed this in part 1 of my lecture on 19th Century avant-garde occultism this summer.)

In the original, this was accompanied by numerological findings regarding prominent political and cultural figures; if anybody wants to do the math for some names of international and/or avant-underground people, I'll publish them in Issue 5 of Rêvenance (#4 is already in preparation) and/or a separate chapbook . . . just send them along to olindsann@gmail.com.

Click Here for the PDF.

(Must click on PDF to access chart of Letter-Number correspondences; formatting does not support it here)

 Cabalistic Calculus

on family and given names

    These calculations have always been carried out by the magi, sooth-sayers and philosophers of antiquity. The Chaldeans transmitted them to the Hebrews; moreover did the greater part of the predictions in the Bible and the Talmud adopt the science of numbers. The rotation of the starts  gave them the initial foundation. Oriental fatalism found in the traditional combinations, which were thus transmitted from people to people, a way to explain all of the fatalities attached to the life of nations and those of individuals. Pythagorus, Plato, Porphery[1], Ptolemy, Philo were just as attached to these adroit combinations as was one camp of the apostles and Church Fathers. According to the opinion of the mystics, every being, from God to the tiniest atom, has a particular number which distinguish them and become the source of their traits as well as their destiny. According to Cornelius Arippa, “chance is only in essence an unrecognised progression, and time only a succession of numbers.” However, the future being a composite of chance and time, it should not be more difficult to discover by this means the outcome of an event of the future of a destiny than to carry twice the same roll of the dice, or to  often make fifth and fourteen.[2]
 

___________

    Note. – It is important to be assured of the exactitude of of names inscribed on the baptismal documents. The mystery that make people choose on or the other of these names gives way to errors. One must inscribe the [family] name and given names of the person whose number one seeks, and take for all letters that compose the the numbers indicated in the following alphabet:
[INSERT TABLE HERE]
     One must add the numbers of each letter to obtain a total. In order to obtain the meaning of it, the following table must be consulted, while taking care to count the thousand separately and afterward seek the meaning of hundreds, tens, and singles.

___________

Tables of Numbers – Their Power and their Meaning

1.   Passion, ambition, desire.
2.   Destruction, catastrophe.
3.   Religion, destiny, soul, charm.
4.   Solidity, wisdom, power.
5.   Stars, good fortune, grace, marriage.
6.   Accomplishment, redemption, labour.
7.   Imperfection, diminution, attempting an attack.[3]
8.   Justice, plenitude, conservation.
9.   Course of life, repose, liberty, divinity, virgin, Minerva.
10.  Accomplishment, reason, unity of the soul and body, future good fortune.
11.  Defaults, penitence, discord, prevarication.
12.  Town[4], good omen.
13.  Impiety, Incredulity.
14.  Sacrifice, purification.
15.  Piety, contemplation.
16.  Good fortune, hedonism, love.
17.  Forgetfulness, ill-fortune.
18.  Hardening.[5]
19.  Nothing.[6]
20.  Dignity, sadness.
21.  Love of people, sympathy.
22.  Creation, mystery, wisdom.
23.  Scourge, divine vengeance.
24.  Education, desire for the good.
25.  Intelligence, birth.
26.  Useful labours.
27.  Firmness, courage.
28.  Amorous favours.
29.  Nothing.
30.  Receptions,[7] celebrity.
31.  Love of glory, virtue.
32.  Hymen, chastity.
33.  Purity, childbirth.
34.  Suffering, spiritual pain.
35.  Harmony, holiness.
36.  Universe, genius, vast conception.
37. Soft virtues, conjugal love.
38.  Imperfection, envy.
39.  Nothing.
40.  Parties, receptions, satisfaction.
41.  Disagreement, ennui.
42.  Voyage, well-traveled life.[8]
43.  Religious ceremonies, priest.
44.  Power, pomp, energy.
45.  Conception, loss of virginity.
46.  Population, fertility.
47.  Long and happy life.
48.  Tribunal, judgement, judge.
49.  Nothing.
50.  Pardon, redemption.
60.  Widowhood.[9]
70.  Initiated, science, charms
73.  Nature, understanding.
75.  Sensitivity.
77.  Pardon, repenting, charm.
80.  Healing, enlightenment.
81.  Adept, belief.
90.  Blindness, error, to repent.
100. Election, political virtue.
120. Divine love, patriotism.
150. Praise.
200. Irresolution.
300. Salvation, belief, faith, philosophy.
315. Calamity.
318. Divine messenger, new man.
350. Hope, justice.
365. Tough and grueling journey.
400. Astronomy.
490. Priests, theology.
500. Love of mankind.
600. Success
666. Infernal spirit, plot,[10] conspiracy, ennemies.
700. Force, control.
800. Empire, catastrophe.
900. War, combat.
1000. Character, kindness.
1095. Aloofness.
1260. Torment.
1390. Persecution.
 
    We have given above the mystical table of holy books to which one can avail oneself when writing the hebrew names and letters. What we reproduce here was composed in the seventeenth century upon the principles of the other [hebrew system]. We can seek here for any name without attaching an absolute importance to the result, due to the vagueness of ancient correspondences. At the same time it does often offer curious serendipities; for example, Napoléon Bonaparte yields the numbers 755, which give us for 700 force, domination; for 50, pardon, redemption; and for 5, stars, etc.

from Henry Delaage, Gérard de Nerval, et. al. Le Diable Rouge: Almanach Cabalistique pour 1850. 1850. Aubert: Paris. (see Re-issue with introduction, ed. Michel Brix, 2013. Plein Chant: Bassac.)

NOTES
[1] find English spelling
[2] faire quinte et quatorze. I sense that this is a reference to playing cards (quinte is also a “flush” in cards), but can’t nail down what exactly it means, maybe because I don’t play card games . . .
[3] Attentant.
[4] Ville.
[5] Endurcissement.
[6] Nul.
[7] Noces.
[8] Vie traversée.
[9] Viduité.
[10] trame.

Lecture Notes: Occultism, Politics, and the Decadent Avant-Garde, Part 2: 1850–1900.

Here are the outline and powerpoint for Part 2 of Olchar Lindsann's lecture on Occultism, Politics, and the Romanticist Avant-Garde at the AfterMAF Festival in Roanoke, Virginia, 14 July 2018. (Part 1 is HERE.) The recording of Part 1 was lost; here is the video of Part II:
 

  
 

This is less concerned with explaining proto-socialist and hermetic concepts themselves (a doomed attempt of hubris in two 2-hour lectures), than with exploring precisely how the social fabric of the Parisian intellectual underground became permeated with hermetic ideas and practices – tracing the avant-occultist practitioners and groups who planted and cultivated the first seeds of what would later blossom as the Rose+Cross, the Golden Dawn, Dada and Surrealism, the Grand-Jeu, Acéphale, Vienna Aktionism, Chaos Magic, the Church of the Sub-Genius, ToPY, etc. etc. –

Full Outline of Both Parts  /  Slides (large file) / Slides (small file)

Lecture Notes: Occultism, Politics, and the Romanticist Avant-Garde, 1800–1850.

Here are the outline and powerpoint for Olchar Lindsann's lecture on Occultism, Politics, and the Romanticist Avant-Garde at the AfterMAF Festival in Roanoke, Virginia, 14 July 2018. Unfortunately, the footage of this part of the presentation was lost so the following materials must suffice. The video is available for Part 2 of the lecture HERE, which carries us from 1850 up to 1900 and the modernist avant-gardes.

 This is less concerned with explaining proto-socialist and hermetic concepts themselves (a doomed attempt of hubris in a 90-minute lecture), than with exploring precisely how the social fabric of the Parisian intellectual underground became permeated with hermetic ideas and practices – tracing the avant-occultist practitioners and groups who planted and cultivated the first seeds of what would later blossom as the Rose+Cross, the Golden Dawn, Dada and Surrealism, the Grand-Jeu, Acéphale, Vienna Aktionism, Chaos Magic, the Church of the Sub-Genius, ToPY, etc. etc. –

Outline  /  Slides (large file) / Slides (small file)

The Archive of the Revenant Avant-Garde: Major New Collection: Célestin Nanteuil & three ge...

The Archive of the Revenant Avant-Garde: Major New Collection: Célestin Nanteuil & three ge...: This major new collection of 94 items consists of a massive, lavishly produced, DIY folio of over 80 lithograph reproductions of an indepe...

Incantation, by Philothée O'Neddy

Ninth Night.

Incantation.

My hardships and my blood determine my career;
My blood speaks to me, to me, ’tis my blood that I hear:
I do not think, me, I have sensations,
And my simple desires merit my passions!
        Victor Escousse.

To his palace abhorred beneath boulders deep-bored,
Itobal comes alone; underneath the low lintel,
He snatches up his gun and his bronze-tinted sword;
Then, on a bed of rushes, branch dead and brittle,
His spent height allows to tumble soil-ward.
But in vain this throatslicer,[1] whom fatigue so exceeds,
Ceasing three days of marching and bloodspattered fight,
Seeks slumber here within his cavern’s frigid bite:
Profound vertigo on his obsession feeds.

– A thousand curses! quoth he behind his bite:
There, close upon my ear, a swarm musters and roils;
My spasming muscles convulse, my lifeblood boils;
You would think I was on rageous[2] anthracite!
I know not which cruel sprite is so spitefully frantic
To thus strip an old wolf of the slumber he’s won:
So what? Do I not own an arcane magic,
To souse my senses with a balm lethargic,
For three entire reigns of night and of the sun? . . .
– Hey there! Do you stir, dull and vacant skulls
Of all the craven viles[3] whom my knife-hand has splayed!
Skulls, who slumber longside broad well-trampled ways,
In the water of wells, in the forests baleful,
Bring it on! Bring it on! Upon the winds take wing.
Profit then from the dark, in your advent aerial;
Then, alongside faint screams, with wheezings funereal,
Around my bedside valence dance, dance madly circling![4]

He’d scarcely dared to issue these demonic bulls,
Than, through the cloven rocks, boistrously in there bound,
Upon amber rays, a cortege of skulls,
By whom swiftly the bloodspattered bedside is crowned.
The dance tightens round, tis convulsed and whirled amiss;
And beguiled, mesmerised by the arhythmic course
Of psalms that the ball is buzzing in its bliss,
Fervently our highwayman to slumber deep is forced.
Yo! all you moralists, what’s that about remorse?

–trans. Olchar E. Lindsann

NOTES:
[1] égorgeur. A neologism when O’Neddy used it, the word has only rarely appeared since then, hence I’ve chosen a less familiar phrase than the common English “cutthroat”

[2] ardens in the original, a distortion of ardents, raging.

[3] O’Neddy is employing an adjective, vils, as a noun. His love for such grammatical disruptions and transpositions was a large part of the reason that his verse remained nearly unpublishable even in sympathetic Romanticist publications. (His only collection was self-published.)

[4] en rond, i.e., in a ring. In frenetic Romanticist circles, this was understood to refer to the dionysian rond de sabbat, or witches’ dance – which in turn was related to the Infernal Gallop, the favourite dance of the frenetics, which was essentially the same as contemporary punk circle-pits, and in which dancers who tripped were routinely trampled.

The Archive of the Revenant Avant-Garde: Great new addition: 1830 Anti-Romanticist satire, ...

The Revenant Archive has added the following . . .

Antoine Jay, La Conversion d'un romantique, manuscrit de Jacques Delorme [The Conversion of a Romanticist, manuscript of Jacques Delorme]. 1830. First Edition. Moutardier, Librairie-Éditeur: Paris. Hardbound Octavo, 431 pp. Inscribed in Red Pen: [cf]. So. / Paris 8[?] 16  1848" & "A. [O?eg?es?]".

From the early 1820s until the "Battle of Hernani" in February of 1830, French Romanticist subculture became increasingly eccentric, militant, and visible to the public eye, at least in Paris. The resistance of the Classicist mainstream was ramped-up apace, and found its most forceful expression in this harsh anti-Romanticist satire by Antoine Jay, which rallied and catalyzed the Classicist opposition. 

 

Like many on the left in the 1820s and early '30s, Jay was progressive in political matters but deeply reactionary in linguistic and cultural matters. This book made him one of the most prominent critics of "The New Literature" as Romanticism was often called. Two years after its publication, Jay was elected to the Académie Française, where he militated against the admission of Victor Hugo in 1841; though Hugo was admitted, Jay saw his revenge the following year when Classicist audiences organised riots at the first performances of Hugo's play The Burgaves, spelling the end of the Romanticists' dominance of the popular stage since Hernani premiered within months of this novel.

The satire claims to have been written by Jacques Delorme, parodic brother of Saint-Beuve's arch-romanticist nom-de-plume Joseph Delorme. Jay parodies the "excesses" of the emerging avant-garde's lifestyle (attacking the Jeunes-France group by name), skewers Romanticist poetics, insults the movement's leaders and canon, and argues its literary principles. He spreads rumours about the subculture, exaggerates them, and invents others. He criticizes their experimental language, the distortion of grammar in their work, their use of neologisms, their employment of bizarre and inscrutable figurative language, even reprinting large passages of Romanticist verse and drama in order to ridicule it.

The book thus swiftly entered the Romanticist canon as a favoured target of invective and ridicule, and probably exercised some reciprocal influence on the radicalization of the movement's extreme fringes into the avant-garde, which was accelerating just as the book was published. It certainly affected the movement's representation of itself to the public, for the avant-garde Romanticists typically portrayed themselves in satirical form, as a function of their generally destabalising project. Gautier's roman-à-clef The Jeunes-France is, in one dimension, a parody of Jay's satire, as explicitly signaled in the tale, "Daniel Jovard; or, the Conversion of a Classicist".

This first-edition copy has been well-read but also well cared-for by at least one generation already, and probably at least two; the binding is tight and the pages clean, but the spine and edges are worn from use. The book's first owner has left no discernible trace, but an inscription in red ink, which I can only read in part, records its purchase in Paris during the 1848 revolution. A descriptive note in pencil, written on the back of a scrap of paper torn from an advert for fountain pens, has been tipped in as a bookmark by a subsequent owner, probably in the 1920s.