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surrealism (n.)
The Blog of Surreal Poetics

Surrealism as Marvelous Nature

4/19/2017

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by ABBIGAIL BALDYS, Editorial Assistant


     HOW do our inherited landscapes shape the way we perceive the natural?

Alejo Carpentier’s conception of lo real maravilloso proposes a surreal inherent quality of nature; the marvelous, the surreal, is an amplification of preexisting magic. As Carpentier asserts, “the marvelous begins to be unmistakably marvelous when it arises from an unexpected alteration of reality…perceived with particular intensity…that leads it to a kind of extreme state [estado limite].”[1]
​If we consider Carpentier's description of an inherent marvelous reality of nature, then each surrealist observes a metamorphosis of nature into an intensified version of itself: its estado limite. The surrealist’s gaze imparts a “particular intensity” with each perceptive, imagistic exploration of the always-already real maravilloso.
Perhaps this is one of the impulses at work in Breton’s “The Forest in the Axe” when he writes:
“Hey, lawn! Hey, rain! I’m the unreal breath of this garden.”[2]
In this same poem, Breton illustrates what occurs “when indifference exposes its voracious methods”:
“the dried leaves move under the glass; they’re not as red as one would think.”[2]
If we read Breton’s lines as a commentary on indifferent looking, then the opposite of indifference—an intense attention—is what would intensify color to its estado limite.

     BUT when attending to the natural in this intense way—Carpentier’s estado limite, Breton’s “rosemary of my extreme pallor”—WHAT does it mean for the surrealist's perception to be marked by extremes?

Elasticity of thought and experience require a space in which they can be pulled, torqued. Extremity, it seems, stretches the relation of those poetic associations. Ideally, to be marked by extremity is to experience all gradations between extremity’s multifaceted poles. Breton’s “Free Union,” for example, explores this kind of gradation; the poem’s associative and fluid image system insists on multiplicity.  Breton describes his wife’s physical nature:
Whose tongue is made out of amber and polished glass
Whose tongue is a stabbed wafer
The tongue of a doll with eyes that open and shut
Whose tongue is an incredible stone [3]
The singular tongue is stretched through varying planes of visceral metaphor. (Well, we would call it metaphor. But surrealism, I’m convinced, is a metonymic process that reaches beyond metaphor’s forceful reliance on categorical separation). This stretching allows the tongue to become itself in its estado limite—in this space, it can exist simultaneously as multiple contrasting objects/images: a “stabbed wafer” AND an “incredible stone.”

When surrealists look out . . .
​

          toward the stone, the leaves, or a fog’s bright shoulders, its gray miles . . .

perhaps we are looking within the already occurring. It is the project of our looking to INTERROGATE what lies there, and its limitations, in order to allow the elasticity of association to both EXALT the inherent magic of the pond and the lake and PULL each further into Nature’s marvelous open mouth.

Abbigail Baldys

Abbigail Baldys
Editorial Assistant

Interact with Abbigail on Twitter: @SP_AbbigailB


NOTES:
​[1] Carpentier, Alejo. “De lo real maravilloses Americano.” Tientos y Diferencias. Montevideo: Arca, 1967. pp 96-112.
[2] Breton, Andre, and Mark Polizzotti. “The Forest in the Axe.” Andre Breton: Selections. Translated by Zack Rogow and Bill Zavatsky. Berkeley: U of California, 2003. 83-84.
[3] Breton, Andre, and Mark Polizzotti. “Free Union.” Andre Breton: Selections. Translated by Zack Rogow and Bill Zavatsky. Berkeley: U of California, 2003. 89-91.


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Surrealism as lived experience

3/25/2017

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by JULIE CYR, Editorial Assistant


     Frida Kahlo embodied Surrealism and the lived experience in her art, political views, eccentric attire, but mostly through her circumstances of constant pain caused by polio and a trolley accident. Experiencing illness and pain from an early age, combined with her rebellious nature, made her open to blend reality with the illogical, creating a fertile environment for the seeds of Surrealism. The persistent misery she experienced caused her to self-medicate with alcohol and drugs, further altering her relationship with common reality, but it also lead her to painting. She's reputed as saying, “I tried to drown my sorrows, but the bastards learned how to swim, and now I am overwhelmed by this decent and good feeling.” Kahlo wasn't attempting to shock with her actions or her artwork, but rather to express the truth of her life in which she touched the Marvelous--her idea of unadulterated beauty.
she often Saw death dancing around her bed
     Kahlo's painting, What the Water Gave Me, exemplifies surrealist art and shows connections between the tragedies in her life as well as her relationships and inability to have children. As one can imagine, being bedridden would lend to the mind’s drifting—from death to relationships and faraway places, as depicted in her paintings. Kahlo's brush with death thinned the veil of real and surreal as she “often saw Death dancing about her bed.”[1] As Death danced about her bed, she kept a papier mâché skeleton laced with fireworks on top of her canopy, bringing other-worldliness and her own mortality into close proximity.
     ​​Kahlo maintained that she wasn't a surrealist since she didn't paint dreams, but her work and her life explored the surreal elements of surprise and juxtaposition. She lived Surrealism: 
Open Quote
​I paint my own reality… and I paint whatever passes through my head without any other consideration.[2]
End Quote
Her atypical life, with her constant pain and brushes with death, resolved the contradiction between dream and reality. So even though Kahlo didn't see herself as a surrealist, many view her as such since she had “a capacity to convoke a whole universe out of the bits and fragments of her own self and out of the persistent traditions of her own culture.”[3]
     ​In the following excerpt from Nicole Cooley's “Self Portrait: Frida Kahlo,” we see Kahlo playing a surrealist game while in the hospital. 
Picture
     In the hospital we fold paper into parts
     for the Exquisite Corpse game. Together we draw
     a body. I sketch a thorn necklace circling a pair
     of breasts, a monkey crouching on a woman's naked
     ​back.[4]
Picture
Kahlo's relationship to pain, Surrealism, and vision of herself as an artist unfold like a game of the Exquisite Corpse, expansive and unexpectedly. 

     ​Whether or not one believes her to have been a Surrealist . . . 
                                                            Frida Kahlo created art and gave us glimpses of the Marvelous.

Julie Cyr

Julie Cyr
Editorial Assistant

Interact with Julie on Twitter: @SP_JulieCyr


NOTES:
[1] Alcantara, Isabel and Egnolff, Sandra. Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera. Munich: Prestel Verlag. 2008, Print. P.18.
[2] Herrrera, Hayden. The Paintings. New York. Harper Collins. 1991, Print. P.4
[3] Rotas, Alas. The Diary of Frida Kahlo: An Intimate Self-Portrait. New York. Abrams Books. 2005, Print. P.15
[4] Cooley, Nicole. Resurrection. Baton Rouge and London: Louisiana State University Press. 1996, Print. P.
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    Daren Berton
    SP Blog Editor

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