One hundred years ago this month André Breton first
published his Manifesto of Surrealism. Someone needed to explain why
there were buffalo riding the subway. Why childhood arches over our lives with
its unobtainable trinkets and drowns in the slavish timidity of adulthood.
The manifesto begins: “So strong is the belief in
life, in what is most fragile in life – real life, I mean – that in the end
this belief is lost.”
This is a powerful statement, one that resounds with
the pangs of Tantalus, the Greek mythological figure who was punished for
revealing many of the secrets of the gods. His punishment consisted of standing
in a pool of water beneath a fruit tree with low branches, always just a little
out of reach, and to make matters worse whenever he went to take a drink, the
water receded. This is, in many ways, a metaphor for the human condition. Man,
Breton continues, that inveterate dreamer, daily more discontent with his
destiny, has trouble assessing the objects he has been let to use, objects that
his nonchalance has brought his way, or that he has earned through his own
efforts, almost always through his own efforts…
I find it fascinating that a book that delves so
profoundly into the mysteries of human consciousness aligns its agitations with
the hard realities of existence, the yearning for what is unobtainable, the yearning
for what is ill-defined and maddeningly Orphic, the yearning for beauty, for
the marvelous. “This is because,” Breton writes, “he henceforth belongs body
and soul to an imperative practical necessity which demands his constant
attention. None of his gestures will be expansive, none of his ideas generous
or far-reaching. In his mind’s eye, events real or imagined will be seen only
as they relate to a welter of similar events, events in which he has not
participated, abortive events. What am I saying: he will judge them in
relationship to one of these events whose consequences are more reassuring than
the others. On no account will he view them as his salvation.”
We now inhabit a technocratic dystopia of disembodied
sidewalk zombies hopelessly riveted to handheld gadgets, electronic screens
dominated by a commercial holocaust of satisfactions that are incapable of
satisfying, but whose true achievement is the death of critical thinking,
assaults on the imagination and a diminished capacity for idle speculation. Salvation
is critical. We live in a panopticon of technocratic surveillance, the death of
solitude, oligarchic rapacity, Goya’s Saturn Devouring His Son.
Breton’s manifestation appeared at a time of counterfeit
splendors, cars and airplanes, the fruits of technology, exultations of empirical
totality and industrial giants encoding human experience with false goals and
alluring seductions. Breton masterfully and ingeniously borrows the language of
science (he had practiced psychiatry during WWI, which is where he discovered
the liberating force of free association, the free flow of speech, by way of
Sigmund Freud, for whom he had enormous respect) in order to reenchant the
world.
“Today is the crisis in consciousness.” Mina Loy,
1914.
In science, truth is that which gives us the maximum
sum of our tastes, but its coherence with respect to previous truth as well as
with respect to the new fact remains the most imperative requirement.
Said William James on the subject of pragmatism.
Pragmatism has little to do with surrealism, which makes it the perfect
candidate for the demon of analogy. The less two things have to do with another
the more they attract, the more they broaden the scope of what is possible. There
is a magnetism in things that draws us to an overflow of sensation, vast magnetic
fields of fragrant affiliation, mountains of rocky correlation, diaphanous waves
of Being, silky convulsions of voluptuous interaction, of illuminating
frictions, of opposing charges creating sparks of revelatory heat, dilations of
plasmatic space, the opening of an astronomy of dreams.
Surrealism isn’t a theory, it’s a discovery. The
French have a word – dépaysement – which means to disorient, to be
disorientated, quite generally by finding oneself in another country, another
territory or zone, à la Tarkovsky’s 1979 film Stalker. In this case, the
region, the territory, the zone is surrealism, not just as an aesthetic, a
treatment of paint or language, but a philosophy, an approach to life that
claws at reality for a more vivid reading of the sidewalk, a deeper
understanding of the metaphysics of light, or the thousand and more miracles in
the intricacies of milk; the beauty of the semicolon, the splendor of feathers,
the genius of orchids, the fleshy aerial roots of Vanilla planifolia or tart
suggestions of paradise in a pint of ale.
Surrealism, Dr. Breton warns us, “does not allow those
who devote themselves to it to forsake it whenever they like.” A driver license
test, for example, or a conference on the emergence of narrative in the cinema
in which some modicum of sobriety might be recommended. Not all situations in
life are amenable to the impulses of surrealism and the impish whimsies of the notorious
Id, which Edgar Allan Poe termed “the imp of the perverse.” He refers to it
(somewhat jokingly I hope) as a disorder, and something to be concealed
temporarily so that we may pursue a career or social life.
“There is every reason to believe,” André continues, “that
it acts on the mind very much as drugs do” (aha, I think to myself, no wonder
I’m so drawn to this odd manifestation of the literary arts), “like drugs, it
creates a certain state of need and can push man to frightful revolts. It also
is, if you like, an artificial paradise, and the taste one has for it derives
from Baudelaire’s criticism for the same reason as the others. Thus the
analysis of the mysterious effects and special pleasures it can produce – in
many respects Surrealism occurs as a new vice which does not necessarily seem
to be restricted to the happy few; like hashish, it has the ability to satisfy
all manner of tastes – such an analysis has to be included in the present
study.”
It's helpful to remember that in 1924 the public and
literary worlds hadn’t completely severed; an artistic movement was often
anticipated to have observable effects on society, and sometimes it did. The
din of machinery paused and angels shook their hair over our roofs. Poetry’s wildly
erratic alphabet beaded on the windows. Or, at the very least, it consorted
with the zeitgeist. Today’s bleak tendencies are less accommodating. The tide
has ebbed, revealing the suck of the estuary. The literary scenes in the U.S.
and England, if not the rest of Europe, could comfortably inhabit a tiny island
in the ocean of your choice. Fahrenheit 451 has become a reality. Energy,
however, cannot be created or destroyed. There persist qualia that resist the juggernauts
of commodity. Surrealism, like a mycorrhizal fungi, persists in the forest
understory. People make one of two comments when interviewed after a
catastrophe, either “it was like a movie,” or “it was surreal.”
Poetry, Breton declares, “bears within itself the
perfect compensation for the miseries we endure…The time is coming when it
decrees the end of money and by itself will break the bread of heaven for the
earth! There will still be gatherings on the public squares, and movements you
never dared hope participate in.” This is, of course, the inflammatory Breton
sounding very manifesto-ish. But wait. There’s more: “Farewell to absurd
choices, the dreams of dark abyss, rivalries, the prolonged patience, the
flight of the seasons, the artificial order of ideas, the ramp of danger, time
for everything. May you only take the trouble to practice poetry. Is it
not incumbent upon us, who are already living off it, to try and impose what we
hold to be our case for further inquiry?”
It’s a fair question. Despite the madness, the folly,
the fights, the extravagances, the prodigious gravitations, the prodigal éclats of unabashed
absurdity, the self-imposed poverty, the cold and flickering candles of the
attic, or the chaos and inebriations of the loft, the race to get to heaven
before they close the door, the panic to patch a leaking sanity, the uncommon
bouts with reality, those blows to the ego, those marvelous procrastinations in
which fallow fields grew fertile, alchemical sublimations of massa confusa
performed in delicate solitudes, purification in albedo, voices crying on a
table, soon there won’t be anything but snow on the sea, despite this, despite
these strange, beautiful, alienating gifts, is the urgency justified? Is the effort
worth the wounds and injuries? What is meant by ‘incumbent.’ How is anything
this seemingly immaterial in any way incumbent? What is my responsibility as a
poet? Responsibility and poetry seem like very odd bedfellows. But I see his
point. The intensity is obvious, a little more subtle, perhaps, are the efforts
to contain it, to give it a grounded and cogent prose.
“Surrealism, such as I conceive of it, asserts our
complete nonconformism clearly enough so that there can be no question of
translating it, at the trial of the real world, as evidence for the defense,”
Breton writes in the final paragraph of the manifesto. “This world is only very
relatively in tune with thought, and incidents of this kind are only the most
obvious episodes of a war in which I am proud to be participating.” Lovely, the
way he refers to surrealist practice as “this world.” A world that runs
parallel and invisibly aside the world of commerce, daunting high-rises full of
brokers and bankers and lawyers and fish. Beautiful aquariums in the palaces of
capital and finance. Is this reality? It is for many.
They used to be everywhere in the 60s: people. Flesh
and blood people. Readers. Dreamers. People who read Rimbaud and Mallarmé,
McClure and Kerouac, Lamantia and Dianne di Prima. Gwendolyn Brooks and Joanne
Kyger. Richard Brautigan. Bob Kaufman. Gertrude Stein. The Doors of
Perception by Aldous Huxley. Been Down So Long It Looks Like Up To Me,
by Richard Farina. The Society of the Spectacle, by Guy Debord. The
Discourse on Voluntary Servitude by Étienne de La Boétie. Their names bring
it back to me, make it palpable again, make it immediate. It’s a trick of the
mind. A sacred fever. “The earth,” muses Breton, “draped in its verdant cloak,
makes as little impression upon me as a ghost.”
I know that feeling. I both love it and respect it.
Whenever I’m given to a troubling urgency, whenever I surrender to impulses of
otherworldly hue, I’m there. I’m here. I’m nowhere. “It is living and ceasing
to live that are imaginary solutions. Existence is elsewhere.”
Thank you, Monsieur Breton, for the many rebellions
and that page by page house insanely glazed in the wide open sky. For
earthlight and soluble fish. For surrealism and mesmerism and horsehair massage
gloves and a door to the universe and the chandeliers in the lobby of the Hotel
Elsewhere. Who needs money when your pockets are full of typhoons?