Also "For how long, sleeping logicians, philosophers? I would like to sleep in order to enable myself to surrender to sleepers, as I surrender to those who read me with their eyes open, in order to stop the conscious rhythm of my thought from prevailing over this material."
Leads me to the movie favored among college students- Waking Life.
"Could not the dreams as well be applied to the solution of life's fundamental problems? Are these problems the same in one case as in the other, and do they already exist in the dream? Is the dream less oppressed by sanctions than the rest? I am growing old and, perhaps more than this reality to which I believe myself confined, it is the dream, and the detachment that I owe to it, which is ageing me."
This alliance, dreams and reality becoming equvial is still a radical notion.
Surrealist pieces still strike us, the modern day viewers, as "out of sync", almost 85 years later. Why?
I always had a difficult time grasping surrealism as an art/literary movement. I can pop out flash card trivia like who was in the movement and when...etc but it’s something that I could never recreate. Anybody with bad eye site can recreate Impressionism, anyone with a hard jaw line and scissors and attempt to make deconstructivism, people with a grasp of metallurgy or graphic design can install huge constructist pieces, but surrealism takes something, someone removed.
This is because in order to be surrealist, you have to forsake all logical thought.
"We are still living under the reign of logic: this, of course, is what I have been driving at. But in this day and age logical methods are applicable only to solving problems of secondary interest."
2 comments:
I'm wondering what constitutes as a "problem of secondary interest." Whether I should have the pork or the beef ramen today, as opposed to whether I should be eating those poor pork and beef animals at all? I thought he might get into it later but he never seemed to.
Does he want surrealists to forsake all logical thought? It really sounds like it most of the time, and then every once in a while there's this comment about how surrealism is blending logical reality and dream or illusion or whatnot. Those statements and his general attitude seem so contradictory, maybe I must be misunderstanding them? But yeah, if it's the forsake all option only, I just don't get it. Our minds may not JUST be logic, but it's a big part of them. If there's not enough logic to something, the mind can't grab hold, and if it can't hold...what is a surrealist even doing?
I might be wrong, but my interpretation of abandoning all logical thought more referred to socially constructed logical thought. Thus we would resort to a more instinctive, naturalistic way of thinking.
Also, I think it may be a mistake to equate logic with reality. Though they can intercept, that has not been my general experience.
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