The Surrealist Manifesto

"Surrealism will lead you to death. Which is a secret society." Andre Breton

Those who posit that we can "confirm" the reality of our physical, workaday, conscious existences would do well to remember that logic is no facilitator of truth in this regard, as a dream narrative operates on its own internal logic as well. In the midst of the Dream, we find ourselves living as if dropped into the midst of a world we completely accept as the "Real World," at least in the context of the dream. I was the other night holding a coconut over the edge of the top story of what I took to be a car park (one that might have obsessed the late, great J.G. Ballard, a student of subconscious mechanisms). I let it drop, watching as it descended to the pavement below, expecting it to disintegrate. Instead, like a rubber ball, it bounced upward, just out of my grasp. What is to be implied here? Obviously a metaphor for thinking from the subconscious mind. My coconut didn't bust on the ground after a hard fall but is projected, like the little ball belonging to the princess in the story of the "Frog Prince" upward, returning from the recesses below--but just out of my grasp. Is my mind then, as a developed entity, just beyond the reach of my fingers? (Of course the "nut," and the fact that it didn't "bust," brings to mind the act of copulation, marred by impotence, and out of the masturbatory "prying fingers" of the Dreamer, calling to mind a common vulgarity popularly used which I won't repeat here.) [1]

Andre Breton speaks of Freud and the vast psychic mechanisms or interplay between the dreaming life and the waking--the psychic experience is one in which the Dreaming Mind will cogitate an image, keeping it held firmly while other aspects of the dream fade--and then reevaluate or simply remember what that image is, in light of a similar or exact duplicate or replica of it in the Waking State. Which is more reliable? Why does one image cross the barrier between worlds? Why does Clint Eastwood appear in a dream, only to moments later, appear as the first image the Dreamer sees in the waking world? Breton seems to suggest that the randomness of occurrences, and the reordering of chaos by dint of psychic mechanisms bring structure to the Universal Chaos of the outpouring of our subconscious experiences. Hence, the development of surrealist poetry is free of conscious considerations; i.e. you cut words at random from a newspaper or magazine, place them in a paper bag, shake them, and --voila! a surrealist poem.

"Only the marvelous is beautiful!" is Breton's rallying cry. And he's correct. The first few pages of The Surrealist Manifesto give a brief description of the existential angst of man as he loses the faculty to envision the sublimely absurd, the marvelous, fantastic, and dream-like. It laments the boring, prosaic, glut of bourgeois literature, and is seeking, with its strange, unsettling prose and its incantatory, cryptic phrases, such as "A man is cut in half by the window...a man is CUT IN HALF by the window..." (The emphasis could be placed anywhere one supposes.) Is this directly implying a metaphor for the crystal clarity of vision rendering the Dreamer an individual, quite literally, "torn apart"? That would be a simplistic, trite reading. But then, everything outside of ourselves speaks the coded language of the dream, with the interplay, as Breton observes, between the waking and dreaming states not a thing easily defined, but one which, as he notes, fades with the coming of the dawn. yet, as we are transported again, night after night, to that annex of mercurial delights, of potentialities and possibilities, we are always born to a dream world we seem to "already know." It is no mystery, while we are there, as to who we are, what we are doing, how we came to be. We already "understand." That is our reality while we dream.

Now, we have, in the form of AI, a vast electronic, and what has been described as an "alien brain," a hive-mind, an alternate Dreamer whose provenance, at one time, would have seemed too vastly absurd and nightmarish to even contemplate. Yet is feared that it is rapidly gaining sentience. Are conscious processes, like China boxes or those wooden Russian dolls that fit, one inside another, mirroring each other from the subconscious or dreaming state, opening up alternate doorways into our subjective reality? And what is "reality"? Once again, we live in a world of marvels we quickly learn to acquiesce to, to nod at in utter boredom. We exist beyond essence when we denude ourselves of the conscious "I", and begin to accept the world about us as the "marvelous" that Breton was exulting over. Only the fool, he suggests, takes stock of what silly affairs he has had, what trivialities tie him (rather cement him) into appraising one side of the consciousness coin as "real" and the other as delusion or Dream.

Note.

[1] "The Concrete Womb." I thought I was finished with this article. Here are a few more thoughts. To begin with, In Poe's "Fall of the House of Usher," we have the example of the literal house occupied by Roderick Usher, the incestuous madman locked in a necrophiliac love affair with the rotting, accusatory revenant of his violated sister, Madeleine, who returns from the grave to enact the doom of the psychologically castrated Roderick. Thus, doom, in the form of Poe's ubiquitous "Red Death" (taint of the incestuous bloodline, here represented as an apocalyptic moon) comes down to destroy the house, the material representation of physical and spiritual decay; incest and cursed blood made brick and mortar; a convenient stand-in for Madeleine's cursed womb.

J.G. Ballard, in his book The Atrocity Exhibition, a surrealistic collection of "mini-novels" or vignettes centered around the same themes of global catastrophe, media hyper-eroticization of violence and tragedy, highly abstract and Freudian sexual symbolism, and post-modern, Dadaist absurdity and shock, the peculiar obsessive poetry of Ballard zooms in on a fascination with airport terminals, hospitals, test ranges, and multi-story car parks, the "liminal spaces" of egress and departure; coming and going on a grand and significant scale.

Representative of transition. In the context of MY dream of dropping a coconut down the central space of a rectangular opening, a kind of courtyard yawning on the concrete below, and of having impact return it to me, I was projecting a symbolic "seed," or sperm cell into the empty, sickening drop below, and having it just as assuredly rejected. Why i took this place to be a car park is only a piece of logic that can be understood in the context of a dream perspective: it must be a metaphor for being stalled or "parked," the mode of transport being in a state of suspension, the seed unable to make an impact, to fertilize, to gestate in the womb below, which was a dead, flat surface, the impact of which should have shattered the thick brown ball like an egg. But it remains unfertilized, rejected in the middle realm, the liminal space where nothing is either going out, or coming in.

No pun.

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Below are various readings I have done for different translations of The Surrealist Manifesto. A document that, I might add, much like a few other books I virtually revere, holds a persistent fascination for me.

Surrealist Manifesto - Andre Breton (1924) Audiobook

Surrealist Manifesto - Andre Breton - 1924 - Part 1

Surrealist Manifesto - Andre Breton - 1924 - Part 2

Surrealist Manifesto - Andre Breton - 1924 - Part 3