Dreams and Surrealism

[Fascinan]

Objective "reality" is a description. Metaphysical paradigms provide
explanations of reality--but the only truth manifested is a preponderance
of theories that vanish with the wind of the next "absolutely authentic
truth." The movement inherent in say a rock or bush is tremendous at an
atomic/quantum level. What lies on the surface seems impassive and dull,
yet the levels beyond the surface are full of activity and chaotic
fluctuations.
Dreams seem so fascinating because there is no surface reality to them.
They are psychic/mental images and sensory phenomena that change as neural
networks are activated, strengthened, or de-activated. There are places
and spaces between the interior mind and the exterior matter that effect
each other, evoking the surreal, grey areas of being.
Thanks to Richard Wilkerson for some context and some interesting passages
concerning dreams and surrealism. I hope to see some more information
passed on about the historical context of surrealism, current surrealists,
and masters working in different mediums of art.

and now a poem, of course:

to find that I woke from a dream
confused by my dulled senses
fences around my slow
capacities
light as air, the same molecules that comprised
the water that passed as urine on 5th street--PH balanced to the alcohol's
yellow sting flavor.
Were I to try and adorn myself against the
wishes of my battleground society,
I would fall back again, returning to
Morpheus and the magic carpet rides of mind.

[dbo...@fas.harvard.edu]

These are only a few notes; there is much more wrong with this I could write about.
RCWilk wrote:
>
> o Dreams and Surrealism - Richard Wilkerson rcw...@aol.com
>
> "Whoever wants to be creative in good and evil, he must first be an
> annihilator and destroy values." - Friedreich Nietzsche
>
> For many of us, when Surrealism is mentioned the image that generally
> come to mind is the liquid melting clocks of Salvador Dali. But In
> Europe, Surrealism was also a social , political, and poetic human
> liberation movement that championed the dream.
>There are two problems with this paragraph -- the past tense, and the limitation to Europe. "Surrealism
continues," as it is apparently necessary for surrealists, beset by liars who pretend that the movement is
"finished," "historically" or whatever other turn of phrase they use to justify their dishonesty. Surrealist
groups, many stretching back to the period such liars are prepared to accept, continue to this day on several
continents, and new ones have been formed since such period, including, in 1966, the Surrealist Movement of the
United States. Surrealism has never been an artistic movement; indeed, at the outset Pierre Naville,
then-editor of _La Revolution Surrealiste_, insisted there was no such thing as surrealist painting. The
suggestion surrealism "was" only artistic elsewhere, and "also... social , political, and poetic" in Europe is
a ludicrous falsification.
> "Man is born free, and everywhere he is in chains." -Rousseau in _Social
> Contract_
>
> Like the Romantics before them, the Surrealists saw that the reasonable
> and rational held out a limited view for mankind, and that rationality,
> reality and religion had so choked our options for experience that all the
> marvels and significance of being were missed. Andre Breton, the father
> of Surrealism within the Modernist movement, drew together this Romantic
> spirit with the new leftist politics and the discoveries of
> psychoanalysis. "(Reality) revolves in a cage from which from which
> release is becoming increasingly difficult." (Brenton as quoted by Kelly,
> 1994)
>
> The solution was the development of practices that challenged the old
> order and offered the new in the cast out forms of madness, social
> anarchy, disobedience, the shocking and the absurd. However, this anarchy
> was never anything more than a temporary technique for merging the social
> and the aesthetic, the dayworld and the nightworld the sane with the
> insane. Waking and dreaming reality were to come together in Surreality.
> Suggesting that surrealist rebellion is temporary is blatantly untrue. It is in the theory of _permanent
revolution_, as one can read in many surrealist theoretical writings.
> In Surreality, the role of dreams was to usher in the astonishing and open
> up to new possibilities. As Breton once said considering the amount of
> time we spend in dreams and waking like, that there is "disproportionate
> attention to waking life." (Kelly, pg 37) The dream is seen as offering
> a challenge in ushering in the marvelous. The search was to be a synthesis
> of dream and waking in Surreality, neither a compliance to conventional
> reality nor a retreat into dreamland.
>
> Sadly, Surrealism itself went the way of many Modernist movements, it
> became formalized and choked in its own institutions. Breton's contacts
> with Freud were not particularly productive and Breton's analysis of his
> own dreams fail to bring to bear the wonderful spirit of surreality
> offered in other realms.
> Wilk denies the continued vitality and expansion of surrealism and the surrealist project either because of
extreme ignorance or self-imposed blinders. Perhaps there have been moments when the activities of some
surrealist groups have wandered into formalization, but surrealism has never and can never be
institutionalized; this is contrary to its very nature, which is antidogmatic, supremely adventurous, willing
to risk everything. Invariably present in real surrealist works, writings, and action is the very core of
daring. Surrealism is thrilling or it is nothing, and it is only those who have been brainwashed by realism,
have deadened hearts, have a position to protect, who find it passe, for it can never be passe. Realism takes
aim, but the target is always two steps, no, a thousand miles, ahead.
> But the spirit of the movement has endured and has widely influenced not
> only postmodern philosophy and practice in Europe but offered itself as
> a kindred spirit of the human potential movements in the Americas in the
> 1960's that also began to see the reality being served by the mainstream
> culture as limiting, repressive and dangerous.
> Eager to be rid of surrealism, realist-bourgeois writers are more interested in the "influence" of surrealism
on this or that (often reactionary) movement -- some of this is significant, some irrelevant -- than the
trajectory of surrealist development today.
> How then can we approach the dream so as to liberate the marvelous on one
> hand without sinking into complete unreality on the other? Akhter Ahsen,
> a contemporary proponent of Surrealism, offers some modern perspectives
> and techniques on dreams and imagery that may begin to give up a clue to
> the Surrealist Experiment.
> Who the hell is Akhter Ahsen?
> From Ahsen in _New Surrealism, The Liberation of Images In Consciousness_
> :
>
> "One gets up in the morning and the eyes are still heavy with sleep. One
> opens up the eyes and the light comes in so strong that one dives back
> into sleep to avoid the traumatic impact of impassive reality.
> The impassive reality can be so traumatic that the mind learns to
> withdraw from it. The passivity of an unmoving reality is anti-mind. When
> you look, the things stay there, nothing moves. But the mind wants to
> move. That is the contradiction. And if the mind has already been
> bombarded and constrained by replicas of immovable mental objects, dogmas
> and frozen belief systems, then where is the original movements of the
> mind manifested? Where is the original face of reality and its strength
> revealed? Where is the original face of reality and its strength revealed?
> How can we get there?" (p118-119)
>
> Daniel C. Boyer
participant, Surrealist Movement in the United States.

[Phlegm8907]

beware of movements with official-sounding names... i'm paranoid they
mated breton, tzara, stalin, and farrakhan off in a lab somewhere.

phlegmmi
in the valley of mortville
interzone blooz

[dbo...@fas.harvard.edu]

> interzone bloozIf this is the best you can do ites pretty sad. It shows you know nothing about the Surrealist Movement in the
United States, which is completely anti-hierarchical, anti-compulsory, and anti-authoritarian. I suppose,
however, the caricatures of Breton as a "dictator" because the Paris Surrealist Group collectively resisted
obvious attempts at liquidation, are going to be reincarnated as charges against the Surrealist Movement in the
United States. As for having something to do with Stalin and Farrakhan, this feeble attempt at humour
obviously has no basis in fact, so I will leave it alone.