Julien Torma

I am also thatshadow which follows me and which I flee.

        Shadow of ashadow, dancing on the ramshackle walls of chance, to the point of preceding me during those moments whenthe heat on my back dissolves me in the sight of that frenzied caricature whichfrightens me too much for me to laugh to my heart’s content.

Dream.  In a telephonebooth in Les Halles.  I’m waiting for acall from who knows whom and who knows where. A tinkling bell, comparable to those altar boys.  I lift the receiver.  At the end of the line, amidst the fizzlingsound of a Bickford fuse (at the same time, the idea of an enormous impendingdanger), I catch the miniscule sound of a kiss imprinted on fingertips.  

 

Dream.  A woman ofabout thirty, brunette, wearing a blood-red suit, is about to pass me on thepavement of a violently sunlit street. Deserted.   I wish to turn back,or at least to cross the street.  But, asit happens, I want to see what’s going to happen.  Suddenly, at the moment she draws level withme, she throws herself upon me, very nimbly, and kisses me on the right side ofmy throat.  A disagreeable sensation Ican’t describe.  For the sake of sayingsomething, I say: “I could really do with a drink.”

Dream.  A labyrinth ofdark corridors spiraling downwards. Intestinal landscape.  Impressionthat I’m going to go on walking like this for eternity.  How to get out?  We carry on downwards (I say we because there’s an absolute crowdthronging in these corridors, but in reality, all the time it’s me).  Luxuriously comfortable cinemas as well asimmense urinal-cathedrals, feebly illuminated by neon open off thesesinuosities.  The ground underfoot givesthe impression of walking on a raft of dropsical bellies.  A whiff of sea breeze reaches me at theprecise moment I realize I am in a penal colony, condemned to forced labor forlife.

        Lighting up the night only makes it more obvious.

        Living is a kind of hide-and-seek.  In seeking out ideas, men, and oneself, onereckons to have a pretext for not getting lost or, at all events, in the maskedball in which we are carried along, to find one’s clothes again in thecloakroom.

        It’s not the light that’s attracting me, but the darknessthat’s driving me on.

  

NOTE:

Julien Torma (April 6, 1902 – February 17, 1933) was a French writer, playwright and poet who was part of the Dadaist movement. He was born in Cambrai, France, and died in Tyrol.

        A friend of Max Jacob and Robert Desnos, he was near the surrealist group without adhering to surrealism. He felt himself nearer to Alfred Jarry's 'pataphysics than André Breton's surrealism. Most of his writings were posthumously revealed by the French College of 'Pataphysique.

        Julien Torma disappeared in the mounts of Tyrol at the age of 30. He possibly committed suicide.

         Due to his elusive behaviour and the impossibility to check his life facts, it has been suggested many times that Julien Torma's existence may be entirely fictional.  His purported birthday, April 6, is marked as "the birthday of pataphysics" in the "pataphysics calendar". Nevertheless, some believe that a real writer eager to create confusion authored the first four publications and Porte battantes.

       Anyway, would the person be real, Torma has to be a pen name: according to the French institute for statistics INSEE, since 1891, only three Torma births have been recorded in France, all of them between 1941 and 1965 in the South-West.


Julien Torma texts excerpted from:  Four Dada Suicides. London, Atlas Press, 1995. 

Link:  Torma 2 (Is This Real? Who Wrote This?)
Link:  Torma 3 (Torma ! Torma!! Torma !!!)