Robert Desnos in the Desert
“The desert which stretched out around me was peopled with echoes whose cruelty forced me into the presence of my own image reflected in the mirror of images.”
— Robert Desnos
1
The image is one of a Mexican man drowning in the Rio Grande near downtown El Paso. I have used this image before. I want to revisit it and adjust the mirror that keeps getting swept away by the current rushing through the concrete channel the river has become — a crossing point where Robert Desnos paused and refused to enter the water, his exile in Juarez not assured.
2
What happens when you discover that a French poet of the surrealist movement of the early 20th century may have wandered the U.S.—Mexican border a few years before he died in a Nazi concentration camp in Europe? How can this be? What are the sources of the cruel echoes he is referring to? Can poetry extend across time and exile? Perhaps image equals voice and all that is needed is the sound of Desnos writing and reciting, falling into his famous dream states to find his way down from the Franklin Mountains that surround my hometown of El Paso. Thinking about mirrors flashing in the desert sun, I grant permission to Desnos to visit me.
3
Image must be self-created in treks across the Chihuahua desert of northern Mexico, southern New Mexico, and west Texas. I have known this for a lifetime. Perhaps I have been gazing into the wrong mirror because Desnos’ poetic presence on the border where I grew up is a revelation. It adds to poet Andre Breton’s journeys to the Hopi villages of eastern New Mexico and surrealist painter Max Ernst’s years in Sedona, Arizona.
The surrealists were here? Did they honor me by creating a little-known tradition that melted into the desolated rock caverns, until the red and purple marks on the faces of the mountains were experiments in painting, writing, and the mind dreams that sent Desnos from France to the Southwest? This is impossible, but Desnos is standing on the Mexican side of the Stanton Street Bridge, facing downtown El Paso. He is waiting for me to close the distance from one side of the international border to the other.
4
Max Ernst didn’t come to Sedona until 1946, living in New York City during the first few years of his exile from Nazi controlled Europe. Desnos died in 1945, shortly after being released from the concentration camp at Buchenwald. I first saw him standing in the El Paso Train Station in 1958, when I was six years old. I didn’t see him again for 50 years until the summer of 2008, when the mirror blinded me as it fell into the Rio Grande.
5
“The four best known vortexes in the Sedona area are found on some of the local red-rock mountains. Several people lead guided tours of vortexes.” The Lonely Planet Guide to The Southwest.
The vortex in Robert Desnos’s poem, “Apparition,” created the lines that read, “And a heart, it goes without saying, and everything said thus far / And sleep, lovely sleep, good sleep, / A good sleep of mud / So that at last, recovering the universe, / There may blaze / A bouquet, an immense bouquet of red roses.”
Sedona and its vortexes were part of Max Ernst’s life as a painter. The official record shows they had nothing to do with Desnos. I don’t know if Ernst ever paid homage to his dead poet friend after he left Europe for the U.S. The immense bouquet of red roses may be the bridge between Desnos’s death after Buchenwald and the twisted shapes of desert rock bent in silent agony by vortexes. The entire desert of the southwestern U.S. joins the image of a mutated landscape and convinces me that, while he slept, Desnos wrote a number of poems among the rocks of Arizona, New Mexico, and west Texas. If Max Ernst was drawn to Sedona because of powerful and mysterious forces, those same dimensions brought Desnos with him. The desert sands created his mirror by extracting the universal image of red roses from the barren rocks. Healthy and colorful roses in the dry land — image upon image and a need for the poet to deliver the gift of a bouquet that would turn as red as the twisted rocks in Sedona.
I see the bouquet of red roses each time I drive through the desert and swallow the fact I have been gone from my native, mutated land for over thirty years. My absence is the reason why Desnos waits on the Mexican side for me. I have no idea how I will bring him across.
6
Desnos spent his childhood wandering the labyrinthine streets of the medieval quarter of Paris, where his father worked. His poems are about physical space and how they twist reality with the imagination — the crossroads formula where poetry binds the child to the landscape of home for an eternity. Desnos walked past giant walls of ancient city brick, the canyons and mountains of the Southwest embedded somewhere in the labyrinth that marks the union between past tradition and modern experimentation that leads away from it.
Desert and the ancient city underground.
Desnos and his dream states originating in the suffocating maze of ancient buildings.
The canyon below Cottonwood Springs in the Franklin Mountains above El Paso.
Falling boulders, pictographs, strangely colored elements and hand painted signs, broken cliffs of red and green, ocotillo and sagebrush, barrel cactus and Spanish daggers, the way up always the way down and the confining walls of rock standing straight up to protect the boy as he rises, the possibility of lying down among the sharp fragments of broken stone to sleep and dream broken by the sound of falling rock, the walls revealing life from centuries ago — the dirt stream of a poem floating in the dusty mid-air to make the noise of eternal speech that builds poetry out of isolation and the struggle to emerge in the desert.
7
“I am tired of struggling against a fate that keeps escaping me/ Tired of attempting to lose myself in forgetting, tired of remembering.” Desnos
I remember the dirty streets of south El Paso and the concrete bridge leading to Juarez. I went there many times with my high school friends and got drunk, though I never drank as much as they did and I was the one who always guided us back across the bridge to the parking lot on the U.S. side, where our car waited safely. I was the cautious one when we went across the border into the exciting dangers of Juarez. I passed out once over there. Forty years later, I want to believe it was a Desnos-like trance that found me in a dark little bar in the red light district of Juarez, my friends in charge of me for the first time as they dragged me across the bridge to El Paso. I don’t recall much about that night, but the trance led to a dream. I made it back because Desnos’ dream shattered years before I would start writing poetry.
8
Desnos waits somewhere in Juarez for me. The connection between my belief in that fact, his bouquet of red roses, and our childhood labyrinths rises beyond coincidence until the “echoes of cruelty,” as Desnos says, are the guide to the mirror of childhood, awareness of home and its landscape — the knot between the past and the poetics of survival in the present.
Desnos did not survive World War II. Andre Breton stared at Andre Breton as the second figure of himself stared back in the tiny doorway of an adobe hut in a Zuni village, Breton slowly making his way to Mexico to encounter the famous Diego Rivera and Leon Trotsky. Max Ernst was over a year away from crashing into the vortexes in Sedona and creating some of his greatest paintings and enormous sculptures — the forces of escape and exile, and the tragic curtains of suffering and dying in the death camps, rolling down the desert mountain to explode into a future poetic guide to the fate of these men.
Desnos waits in Juarez. He refuses the slice of lime when someone places a shot glass of pulque before him — the milky hallucogenic rejected because Desnos is already in a sleep-state that lifts him above the plaza and across the Rio Grande into the sleeping streets of El Paso. Someone writes a poem about this.
After Desnos died, friends and his widow managed to have his body cremated and his ashes sent to the French embassy in Prague. A few days later, there was a ceremony between a delegation of Czech writers and the French National Committee of Writers. Speeches were made and the urn containing Desnos’ ashes was presented by the Czechs to the French.
The urn containing Desnos’ ashes.
In the Chihuahua desert, cremation is rare because tremendous sandstorms cover the earth a few times each year.
What happened to the urn containing Robert Desnos’ ashes?