AUTHOR OR MIDWIFE: WHO WROTE I SAW WATER?
Colquhoun’s method raises questions about authorship and originality: Who, exactly, wrote I Saw Water? Colquhoun undoubtedly had the dreams, wrote them down, and ordered them, but if she saw herself as a channel through which a hidden intelligence, or intelligences, communicated, then her task was more that of editor than author. The principles that governed her selection of which dreams to include in the final text are nowhere explicitly stated, but the evidence suggests that she regarded each of the dreams she included as a fragment of a greater whole, and that her task was to piece together a hidden, but gradually revealed, original. Examination of her dream diaries shows that during the period of active composition, she was adding dreams to the narrative as they occurred. In a footnote to one transcription, written when the novel was nearly finished, Colquhoun ruefully added that if the dream had to be included, this would entail a great deal of revision (see fig. 8). She clearly felt that she had limited personal choice in selection, but, in the end, the dream was not required.
One way of approaching the question of authorship is to ask whether I Saw Water is an automatic text. Automatism lay at the heart of surrealism. Indeed, Breton had originally defined surrealism as “psychic automatism in the pure state.”47 In other words, by writing rapidly and without pause or reflection, by drawing or applying paint in a spontaneous, unplanned, and unregulated manner, it was hoped to bypass the mind’s critical faculties and so provide access to deeper, more fundamental levels of the psyche. Some surrealists were happy to accept dreams as automatic phenomena. The argument in favor is clear: to put it at its simplest, conscious and critical control, by definition, cannot be exerted during dreaming sleep. Others were skeptical. The act of translating dream images into words, the unavoidable period of transition from dream state to waking state, and the inevitable passage of time between dream and transcript all increased the likelihood of conscious selection, memory failure, and the imposition of a structure that the original dream may not have possessed.
Approaching the problem from a slightly different angle, I Saw Water, composed almost entirely of material assembled from dreams, is a collage novel. As M. E. Warlick noted in relation to Max Ernst’s collage novels, because of the way in which this kind of text transforms its materials to give birth to a new creation, it is a form of alchemy.48 Ernst’s novels used engravings and woodcuts as their source material, but Warlick’s argument applies equally well to I Saw Water. Colquhoun’s dreams form the prima materia with which the work commences. They are taken apart, recombined, and fused, not by fire in the alchemist’s furnace, nor by adhesive in Ernst’s gluepot, but by Colquhoun’s imposition of a narrative structure. Colquhoun had no doubt that collage, using either words or images, was an automatic technique. To her, it was on equal footing with the “found object,” another surrealist method for stripping an article from its manifest meaning. “Surely,” she wrote, “such objects are found through the use of the automatic faculty.”49 Further, she might have added, the juxtaposition of apparently unrelated objects, which brings out hidden affinities between them, is not far removed from the pursuit of correspondences in occult research. Indeed, the discovery of hidden links is the very stuff of magic.
If we allow that dream transcription is a species of automatism, the problem still remains: where does automatically generated material actually come from? At first, the answer seemed clear: it came from the unconscious. Automatic writing was just like taking dictation from the lower reaches of the mind. As Max Ernst expressed it, the use of automatic methods led to the author being revealed as “a mere spectator at the birth of the work.”50 It was noted, however, that during the surrealists’ early experimental sessions with automatic writing, the participants sometimes entered a trance state, recalling the practice of spiritualists and mediums who claimed to be in communication with the dead. Over time, the explanations for automatically produced material ranged from the occult at one extreme to contemporary physical science, including particle physics, at the other.51
All of this amounted to what Nicolas Calas termed a “crisis of automatism,” leading some to turn away from automatism entirely.52 For Colquhoun, the nature of automatism was clear and unproblematic. She drew out the similarities between surrealist automatism and the attempts of spiritualists to contact noncorporeal entities: “It would seem that the only significant difference in method between the two types of automatism is the fact that the surrealist is his own ‘medium.’ ”53 In other words, the source of the material is external, but another person is not required as an intermediary in order to make contact with the source. If this explanation is accepted, it shifts us away from a narrow consideration of a person’s relationship with their unconscious to a much broader, mystical consideration of humankind’s relationship to nature.54
In fact, some surrealists, including Breton, had always displayed mystical leanings. For a time, this seemed to be the direction that surrealist painting might take, were it not for the disruption of World War II. In the summer of 1939, shortly before the outbreak of war, Colquhoun took part in theoretical discussions with some of the younger surrealist painters in the Rhône Valley, where they had rented the Chateau de Chemillieu. The participants included Roberto Matta, Wolfgang Paalen, and Gordon Onslow Ford, who were developing a style of automatic painting that has become known as “psychological morphology.” The existence of these debates is well known, but Colquhoun’s participation in them, however fleeting, has almost been forgotten. When Matta and Onslow Ford fled to New York at the outbreak of World War II, their ideas and methods helped influence a generation of American artists at the birth of the movement now known as abstract expressionism.55
The paintings produced under the influence of psychological morphology, in particular those of Matta, with their multiple perspectives and deep pools of color, often appear to conquer the limits of space and time. Beings or personages appear that seem to belong not to the known world but to worlds that lie beyond our experience and understanding.56 Perhaps, said Breton, we share the planet with other creatures that, through camouflage or some other means, are able to escape discovery. We cannot begin to imagine the nature of these beings, whose behavior may be as strange to us as ours is “to the mayfly or the whale.”57
Colquhoun responded to Breton’s remarks about the invisible ones with the automatic watercolor Un grand invisible (ca. 1943; fig. 9) and the poem “Les Grandes Transparentes.” In the final line of the poem, “And if they should call, can we answer?,” we hear the voice of the practicing occultist. Establishing contact with spirits, elementals, and other entities is a major aim of the magician. It would be a mistake, however, to assume that all such beings are benign: as Colquhoun recounted in “Wedding of Shades,” they might bite. Through the use of appropriate containing and banishing rituals at the onset and conclusion of their ceremonies, magicians seek to ensure their personal safety. Colquhoun was always alert to the dangers of unwary or unskilled magicians unleashing malign forces that were beyond their competence to contain. She was critical of those surrealists who investigated automatic or occult phenomena from a position of comparative ignorance. They were dipping their toes in dangerous waters. By not paying due regard to protective ceremonies, many paid a great price: “The movement’s approach to esoteric study and experiment was too diffuse and sporadic to impress a naturally sceptical world.