Secrets of GLASS VEAL 5
&
THE fresh dirt excavations
In 1976 it was rumored that deviant youths from the ex-Confederacy proceeded to expose the more recent crimes of oppression from the United States of America. An assortment of students and college drop-outs, they met privately in the dust & smoke laden apartment in an old house on an ex-Confederate Street tucked behind the ignominious home of the Crimson Tide, the national #1 team of butting heads. The territory was rife with the hippies and yuppies of the venerated institution of higher education, scholarship and revisionist history. The deviant youths freed themselves from the vexations of the demands of society without apology. The voice of revolt for the mediocrity of the masses was fed largely by the intellectual influence of Surrealism and the theatrics of the Dada Movement. The neighborhood of “hoodlums” as they may well have been perceived was tight, and at least 15 rampant youth would regularly disturb the peace by their public displays of disgust and impolite interruption of public events. In private they would plan such rude appearances by carrying out intense rituals of exhilaration by blowing their brains out using implements known to music such as saxophones, cornet, trombones, baritone horns, gongs, cymbals, electric guitars, basses, drums, flutes, washboards, sheet metal, whistles, bedsprings, plates, and plastic tubing, loud vocalizations and strident poetics. This was accomplished when we borrowed the instruments from the “Million Dollar Band” of the Crimson Tide at the University of Barbarous Competition in the art of “Butting Heads.”
The fact is, we enjoyed this freedom, our raucous noise making, and as a large group, the result was absolutely savage! If there was ever spoken of the making of a joyful noise in the poetry of David, well, this was it. The tribe became known as Raudelunas and as such we would participate in group exhibitions of artworks, visual endeavors, numerous noises, rants, and raves and theatrics. In one such case, it is well documented that we proceeded in an act of axe chopping up of a naked manikin on a “live” local television broadcast as the 1974 Alabama “home-coming parade” of the University of Barbarous Competition in the Art of Butting Heads strutted past the press box before the likes of the racist governor of Alabama, George Wallace, who was sitting in the press box watching the parade. This heinous axe chopping act of the white naked manikin was accompanied by a marching band of improvising brain blowers and comrades costumed in large papier-mâché vegetables such as carrots, broccoli and tomato. A “borrowed” harp stolen from the halls of the University of Barbarous Competition in the Art of Butting Heads followed through on a cart while a polka accordionist and the brigade of trombones, cornets, baritone horns and numerous other wind instruments (that had also disappeared from the band room of the University of Barbarous Competition in the Art of Butting Heads strutted on by in a joyful effort of hair-raising racket and noise! In the same parade, the group ceremoniously later marched off of the street to drop the harp off before going all the way downtown in Tired Tuscaloosa and the entire parade of Raudelunas participants followed by a fleet of Zamora motorcycles buzzing us the whole time. Unbeknownst to the group, the landlady of the house was watching the parade from a porch across the street and witnessed the parade of “hoodlums” proceed to march the entire group right through her house! She later evicted the leader of the Raudelunas group and the house was torn down thereafter.
Among other activities, some members of the group would meet to play and study, discourse and create together. There was no internet, no one had a television, and so social creative interaction was the way of the day. We would hang together, smoke pot and drink. We read books, argued points, created collective art: paintings, drawings, and writings, and further took part in toasts and cigars, and other indulgences.
Seeking interest in the work of Louis Aragon, Arthur Rimbaud and Andre Breton, we admired the art works of Yves Tanguy, Max Ernst, Rene Magritte, Paul Delvaux, Joan Miro, Marcel Duchamp, Leonora Carrington, Toyen, poet Joyce Mansour and so many other contributors to Surrealism. We actively explored the practice of intuitive automatism in making Exquisite Corpse, in engaging in collective writing, drawing and music-making, to create from Surrealist methods and hone psychic automatism. And in the midst of social isolation in rural Alabama, we grew a group comraderie as Glass Veal.
A sole pilgrim buried in a casket escaped his own wake and found himself in a deep woods behind an abandoned plantation home where his great, great grandfather had fallen to enemy soldiers. As he floated through the great Indian Cigar trees, Live Oaks, and Red Cedar, his consciousness fell on a stream of reflected sunlight projecting from an object partially buried beneath the brush of an enormous Tulip Poplar. Manifesting as himself, he lowered himself for another look and discovered an antique silver pocket-watch. It was still ticking. As he reached to touch, it became a liquid of mercury beads sliding through his fingers. Rummaging through the leaves, and digging his hands in the ground he hit a solid object. His curiosity now on high alert, he madly became obsessed with digging deeper to liberate it. Lo and behold, there was a chest buried underneath the spot where the pocket-watch was ticking as it was melting into the tiny beads of mercury! He continued his digging until he had fully excavated the tiny wooden and leather chest. He lifted it from the dirt, concealed it in a cloth and walked back to the plantation home, where his body had lied in state on green velvet. When he entered the room that held his own casket, he was startled as there were Angels shrieking and screaming at him for leaving his state of human death. They were severely annoyed at his behavior leaving the casket, as it were. He flipped them off and hurriedly tucked the small chest under the pillows of the antique sofa. The Angels again manifested immediately, bitching and mumbling about his inexcusable behavior as a dead body.
I shall now revert to the first person as it is so tedious to continue this story as a third person narrative, albeit I was probably the fourth or fifth person to which this knowledge was revealed. Our comrade, Mitchell Cashion, himself was a despicable character. He had his moments, but mostly he was highly unpleasant. Nevertheless, it was he along with our venerable comrade, Davey Williams, who among us was present for the finding of the secret. We used to go on outings in the rural county to hang around the grounds of ruined antebellum mansions in abandoned fields of Alabama. On one such occasion, Davey and Johnny P Williams were in the outback indulging in one of the favorite southern past-times shooting canned corn and English peas with their rifles. Ms. Hathaway was off shooting objects with her camera. I was in my normal state of nose to the ground indulging in deep breathing of fresh moss, ferns & lichen anxious not to get hit by a stray bullet. Suddenly Mitchell called to us loudly from a bullhorn. I’ve got it! I’ve got it! I was internally hoping it was terminal leprosy or something, due to the way he had spoken to me earlier, and also for his nasty tendency of ignoring Ms. Hathaway. As it turns out, he wouldn’t tell us. That is not until much later.
A few months passed and we were sitting around a gas heater in his tiny dilapidated one room apartment. It had been close to an hour enduring another one of his rants or lectures, when his tone of voice changed to a raspy whisper. He told us we must keep secret the origin of the object he had stolen that day we were entertaining ourselves on the grounds of the old abandoned Antebellum house by the edge of the woods.
Mitchell Cashion frequently dressed like a 19th century Soldier. He wore tall black boots, a vest and waistcoat and frequently carried a sword. This day, he took out a silver pocket watch that was attached across his vest by a chain. He looked at it and quite firmly announced that it he had found it! Found what? He kneeled down to the floor where we were sitting in a circle hunkered in front of the old gas heater. He then placed in front of us a tiny wood and leather chest. Carefully and slowly he took out a mysterious velvet bag, and then finally unwrapping it, revealed a small crystal object, a tiny glass bull.
“This is magic,” he said. “And we shall call our group Glass Veal.” And so, from that day we carried on with our activities, our creative projects, our drinking and smoking, and rose together in the shadows of the Iron Tortoise as a surrealist alliance, and published the first anthology of Alabama Surrealist poetry as Glass Veal. That’s the story!
The Glass Veal group consisted of a rotation of primary members: Mitchell B Cashion, Davey Williams, LaDonna Smith, Johnny P Williams, Thomas Lee Falkner, Janice Hathaway, and a potential guest. If Guest was not with us, then it would be ghost. Depending on what year’s time, group collaborations included various alternate comrades: Redoka, Glenn Engstrand, Dorah Rosen, John Burns, and the brilliant quadriplegic actress Lyn Spotswood. She was our Antonin Artaud! Thus dictated by the presence of fresh blood our lives morphed and changed as life does, as consciousness will transmute in bartered time. In our travels we shared personal visits with living surrealists: Jose Pierre, Eugenio Granell, A.K. El Janaby, Philip Lamantia & Nancy Joyce Peters, Franklin & Penelope Rosemont, Robert Green & Debra Taub, Hal Rammel, Alan Graubard, and Alice Farley among others. We engaged in surrealist collaborations with Johannes Bergmark, Anthony Redmond, Yurij Zmorovich and early practitioners of free improvisation. For us, the veal is untapped potential. Glass is transience. And like the present which passes, we float like ghosts in the service of hypnogogic hallucinations.
The crystal glass veal became our mascot of magic of mind, liberation from banality seekers of mystery, presence, imagination and potency, the shards of broken pieces, the shattered goblets of dreams, and the delicate transmissions and transmutations of transitions. And so, we must always go digging for fresh dirt.
From a magical appearance in Alabama, the land of the Mosasaur where sharks teeth are found, to the sonic frequency in the belly of the Iron Tortoise, (Birmingham) Again breathing and rising from loss of dear comrades, from the coffins of reality, death, and sanity, we are digging. This time, by our will, surviving women rise to greet you anew as we dig for fresh dirt. For the lost armadillo sandwich, imminent celestial vicinities and the ice melt of ideas & visionary hallucinations we speak through the languages of the subconscious: music, visual specter, and verbal revelation. We feel deeply and bask in the soft green undergrowth that is the blanket which covers the shell of the iron tortoise, our home and dwelling place. The shell from which we emerge to draw breath and eke out an existence is the stone of our mountain. The flesh inside is sweet and full of red ore from which we taste the delicacies of imagination. Our eyes search for light openings in the crevices of the coal mines of the deep. We bathe in caves full of water dripping from stone. All around the Iron Tortoise lay a network of underground rivers, the veins and arteries of flowing energies and returning visualizations.
The waters become the mind from which we mine our ores. We sleep to dream, and dream to finesse our psychic fitness. Woe to those who dodge the power of imagination for a stream of canned entertainment and unconscious scrolling. They are dead, but we shall continue digging. Collectively, we are Fresh Dirt.
Fresh Dirt is Janice Hathaway, LaDonna Smith, Neko Linda Williams, Johnny Williams, Clifford McPeek, Davey Williams (our ghost leader) & various sympatico collaborators.
LaDonna Smith
12/12/23
Good Eggs by Johnny P Williams
For Penelope Rosemont, Chicago Surrealist publication, 2023
Alabama Surrealism story in conjunction with articles by Echoes Surrealistes Contemporains
submitted with two Janice Hathaway prints & thumb drive for digital transmission of material
Original Transmographs(2) by Janice Hathaway Titles: 1.
thumb drive: article & digital images 2.
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