I became interested in the ideas of surrealism, and its aim of enabling practitioners to escape the control of reason and the imperatives of the moral order, to become mediums of a wider self. Surrealism suggests using the experiences of dreams, automatic texts, playful and unrestrained investigations, and questioning the prevailing social standards and tastes, in the attempt to minimize and heal the fragmentation of consciousness and to restore more of the totality of a human being’s lived experience. It proposes that the true function of thought can only be attained in the absence of control exerted by reason, and beyond moral and aesthetic preoccupations.
It was revolutionary for attacking and attempting to overcome the crude and restrictive divisions and barriers of Western thought and logic, which operates in dutiful procedures according to clock-time and social conventionalism and protocol. It wanted to lay waste to the ideas of family, nation, and religion, and stated that “there is no room for compromise.” The subject in these previous sentences not only refers to surrealism, but also the thinking of Andre Breton, the main proponent of surrealism. Andre Breton was calling for a widening of the notion of reality, so that our concept of the Real would not suffer a logical reduction down to the simple and mundane, the practical and observable, but rather so our conception of the Real could expand to include the dream, the subconscious, flights of fancy, musings of the absurd, and other strange and marvelous imaginings. If we understand this then we are filled with the knowledge that reality is permeated with imaginative, transformative power. The Real is always open to what is unknown, mysterious, and not commensurate with rationality, and it offers outlets to the marvelous, to dreams of love, ecstasy, revery, to parades of bizarre superstitions, to a space that can be explored with the fanciful play of thought tracing the extraordinary and inexplicable movements of fantasy and dream.
Surrealism calls for the reassertion of Imagination, and a transformation of the World. A practitioner of surrealism or a surrealist is one who makes a piece of writing or artwork or related artifact, or performs an act of some kind, which can cause a kind of surprise, a convulsive shock between the piece/work and the spectator. This convulsive shock (which may, I think, be very subtle, almost imperceptible) originates from the perception/reception of a current of transformative power, a transformative power which moves between the piece and the spectator’s consciousness and enables her or him to see beyond some barrier, to imagine a larger realm. The current or charge of the piece is borne from a kind of desire or turmoil on the part of the surrealist to change or enchant, to affect, the spectator and the world. And the larger realm that the charge points to is surreality or the surreal.