What time will it be on the day when what I am waiting for happens?

June 1945: in the Nazi concentration camp Theresienstadt in Czechoslovakia, French writer Robert Desnos lies dying of typhoid fever. His breathing is almost imperceptible although occasionally he rejects enough breath to murmur incoherently. The storm outside is clearing and in the stillness blanket clouds fold back to reveal isolated crystal stars, quivering with cold on the remotest parts of the dome. Someone has found a wildflower by the gate. The distant hum of aeroplanes. Flags. Robert Desnos lies dying.

Born in Paris in 1900, Desnos joined the Surrealists in 1922. His early literary heroes were the nineteenth century French poet Gerard de Nerval, the medieval alchemist Nicholas Flamel, Victor Hugo and Arthur Rimbaud. During the great surrealist period of the 1920s, he was a key participant in surrealist activities in which his specialty was speaking, writing and drawing while in a "hypnotic sleep". In this trance-like state, he poured out poetry, prose and drawings and was said to have communicated with Hugo, the French Revolutionary leader Maximillion Robespierre, and Marcel Duchamp’s alter-ego, Rrose Selavy. When Rrose Selavy spoke to Desnos, he recited numerous poetic word plays, short verbal puzzles that operate through substitution of sounds. Les lois de nos desirs sont des des sans loisir (The laws of our desires are dice without leisure). Between 1922 and 1923, Desnos produced 150 of these pieces, publishing them under the title, Rrose Selavy. Desnos’ compact poetic mechanisms oscillate between two or more meanings through association of sounds and echoes of meaning that disrupt rational sense. While this was a common surrealist strategy, in Desnos’ case, the voice who speaks is no longer his own but that of Rrose Selavy (a voice borrowed from Marcel Duchamp).

Desnos turned his "hypnotic sleep" method of composition to poetry and longer prose, producing two short novels, Mourning for Mourning and Liberty or Love!, in 1924. These longer pieces are a continuation of the surrealist project of psychic automatism, defined by Andre Breton as eruptions of spontaneous creation in which the writer supposedly surrenders his/her ego to chance. In Desnos’ novels, automatic writing becomes pure intoxication. The voice of Robert Desnos summons shipwrecks, tornadoes and rainbows, utilising cinematic techniques to cut spontaneously between scenes, time frames and characters. As in a film, Desnos’ writing moves fluidly between different viewpoints, speeds up to follow a train in flight or slows down to examine the wreckage of its crash, occasionally losing control of the voice, it escapes, leaving Robert Desnos behind. In effect, his vocal chords operate as a regulating mechanism that allows a free flow of voices, images, characters and worlds before beginning to stutter. The voice repeats itself or interrupts itself. Desnos’ novels can be read as the culmination of automatic writing: a collage of varying speeds.

Meanwhile two men are playing chess on a rooftop. The ocean coughs up another mermaid skeleton that begins crawling up the beach, scattering crowds of holidaymakers. The cries of sailors can be heard in the distance. When I reach out to touch the skeleton’s bony hand it disintegrates into a dust cloud that momentarily blurs my vision. The dust settles and I am standing in a desert, the Desert Renaut. After the rumble of traffic fades I can hear only the stretching and vibrating of my own vocal chords resonating a hollow interior across the sand.

André Breton wrote in his 1924 Manifesto of Surrealism: "SURREALISM. Pure psychic automatism by which we propose to express either verbally, or in writing, or in any other manner the real functioning of thought. Dictation of thought, in the absence of all control exercised by reason, outside all aesthetic or moral preoccupation." For Desnos the appeal of automatic writing was not only to throw the mind open to chance. Automatic writing was not just a scientific experiment to discover the secrets of consciousness or operations of the mind but offered access to other selves, other worlds through its transformation of leaden words into golden visions. In 1929, Desnos split with the surrealists over Breton’s insistence that surrealism should align itself with the Communist Party. The restless voice of Robert Desnos could not be arrested and recuperated for utilitarian ends. In his surrealist manifesto of 1930, Desnos accused Breton of being a conservative, authoritarian puritan, long on mystical rhetoric but short on revolutionary action.

Torrents of water poured over the side of the ship while he scrambled for his glasses to see perhaps his final moments but instead of being washed overboard, he was taken by the wind scooped up and tossed over the mast onto the rainbow which formed a path in the sky. Below, the ocean was a rocking surface of flailing limbs. I could hear the voice again, more, a constellation of voices, the ocean trembling with noise competing for my attention. The crowd were speaking, shouting, crying. When I tried to speak, I could only repeat what I’d heard.

Twilight. An incoherent voice. Flows of desire do not take rational paths. Indeed, Desnos could master words ("words are our slaves") even transform and master reality through words but in the end he could not master desire. His novel Liberty or Love! was dedicated to actress and singer Yvonne George who was the obsessive object of his desire for some years. She is always elusive, the mythological heroine who haunts Desnos’ surrealist works. She is l’etoile de mer, star of the sea. She picks up her coat to leave. I, Robert Desnos, am not dead. The one I love does not hear me I have dreamed of you so much you lose your reality. A voice begins to speak, I can’t hear it but I can feel its soft trembling.