this week I’m practicing what Julia Cameron in The Artist’s Way calls “reading deprivation.” a while back my therapist half jokingly recommended that I take a break from reading, because while it is important for an artist and especially a writer to read a lot and widely, reading also has a narcotizing effect, or maybe more like a benzodiazepinizing effect. too much engagement with what others have written tends to cloud the awareness, and to write with anything like power requires acute awareness with what’s going on in my own psyche. plus, I’m trying to get out more, and cultivate experiences, and the time I use to read amounts to plenty of opportunity to fuck around IRL.
but w/r/t delving into the material of my own psyche, I’ve been thinking a lot about surrealism lately. if you’ve read my newsletter essays, you know I’m pretty good at clearly articulating information; in a different life I would have been a very good technical writer. but all my fiction writing efforts in the past few months have left me cold, because what I’m writing isn’t very evocative, and the narration is boring, and the plotting is plodding. there’s no energy in any of it. literature gets its power when it’s dug out of the writer’s soul, when it deals with those aspects that don’t lend themselves to “explanation”—what can’t be articulated via technical writing. (though I’d argue even technical writing betrays itself and can suggest Mystery, but that’s a different subject). plus, dealing with reality by means of Techne is why we find ourselves in the dire straits of Modernity in the first place; privileging Magic and Mystery and Poetry is an existential necessity at this moment in history.
surrealism, in theory, offers a method for devaluing the rational in favor of the irrational, a rebalancing of the scales between the ego and the subconscious. complicating this, though, is that surrealism as it was practiced by many of the official Surrealists was boring, contrived, an evasion of the actual potential of the movement. Breton was a coward, Dalí was a fascist lapdog, Magritte treated art as a parlor game.
that being said, Dalí’s method for surrealist creation, the paranoiac-critical method, nonetheless promises a way of evoking the situation of terror that the postmodern subject finds themselves in. Rem Koolhaas describes it thus:
Dali’s Paranoid-Critical Method is a sequence of two consecutive but discrete operations:
1. the synthetic reproduction of the paranoiac’s way of seeing the world in a new light — with its rich harvest of unsuspected correspondences, analogies and patterns; and
2. the compression of these gaseous speculations to a critical point where they achieve the density of fact….
imagining that there are connections unseen by the everyday person and striving to convey those connections on a level beneath (or sur-, ie “above”) the perfectly rational is the task of any artist, even ones who believe themselves to be depicting “reality.” if you wanted to be perfectly rational, you would write journalism, not fiction.
it is here that I admit I miss the practical use of marijuana for inducing such a paranoid state of mind, but before I get back to smoking fat doinks, it would benefit me to first cultivate the skills for creating from this perspective on the natch, because back when I smoked too much weed I often mistakenly thought doing so would help inspire me, when more often than not it only inspired distraction and horniness. so having practice and discipline with writing while sober would set me up to actually seize upon weed’s ability to help its users be taken by surprise by unexpected connections: exactly what the act of writing does for me, at its most potent.
what I’m doing now to try and get at that is “automatic writing,” another surrealist method. for a set period of time, 25 minutes in my case, I try to write nonstop, as quickly as possible, in an effort to bypass or short circuit the conscious reasoning faculty and give vent to the process of thought unfiltered. it is a good exercise, but it doesn’t necessarily lead to anything effective as art. sometimes it does, sometimes an image or a striking juxtaposition emerges, but this is the trouble with a lot of surrealism: it’s not enough to throw together at random elements for the sake of weirdness. in an interview about Inland Empire (the one Lynch movie I haven’t seen), David Lynch says:
[You] need to have ideas. You can’t sit down and start writing—I guess the Surrealists did, they’d just start writing anything: you, know, “The kiln is silver, and it has red.” Or whatever you see, you write down, or whatever just starts flowing. But when it starts flowing, that’s the flow of ideas, just a flow, but it may be total baloney. So, yeah, you can write pages of baloney, but you need ideas.
(interestingly, despite his status as the most widely popular Surrealist in film history, David Lynch doesn’t much care for Surrealism as such. elsewhere he admits to not even having seen many of Luis Buñuel’s films.)
compare Thomas Pynchon on surrealism:
Having as yet virtually no access to my dream life, I missed the main point of [Surrealism], and became fascinated instead with the simple idea that one could combine inside the same frame elements not normally found together to produce illogical and startling effects. What I had to learn later on was the necessity of managing this procedure with some degree of care and skill: any old combination of details will not do.
all of which is to say that automatic writing can be a useful exercise (David Lynch says as much elsewhere), but it’s only useful as an exercise. what’s produced by it can be mined for “ideas,” or can provide “access to my dream life,” but it won’t in itself create anything with power or energy. power and energy being somewhat mystical concepts I’m using to describe writing that I think taps into whatever it is that feeds the greatest works of art.
the utility (or necessity) of surrealism is something of an open question for me still: the world we live in now, with the media landscape acting as a kind of electrified miasma permeating the ether, schizophrenizing reality, makes us all paranoid subjects locked in personalized solipsistic hells. here’s Rob Horning on the matter:
The “false facts” we might spontaneously generate in interacting with social media — whether we are feeding our paranoid fears or indulging in their flip side, unrepentant self-aggrandizement — are no more or less false than the ideological interpretations of reality that pass as “real facts,” the ones convenient to power and the reproduction of existing distributions of privilege and so on. In fact, they fit that ideology’s individualist bias, the belief that it is our duty to aspire to fashion a private reality for ourselves and that our social status hinges on the success of that project.
a reactionary tact to take against the individualized surrealist thrust of electronic mass media would be to reassert, in a High Modernist way, some contrived metanarrative, to derive from Tradition the Source of Ultimate Meaning despite the waste lands created by a fractured reality field. surely there’s value in seeking new meaning from sources of old meaning. but rather than turn away, paranoiacally, from the general motion of the world as it futher splinters, is there not the possibility that running with that trend might lead to some hitherto unglimpsed wholeness? perhaps ahead lies only disintegration: it’s what the laws of thermodynamics suggest anyway. I have no answers, and I no longer wish to provide coherent analysis. instead I’ll skip above the widening cracks in the melting ice of reality until I inevitably slip down into whatever abyss lies beneath.
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