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Magnetic Revelations of the Marvelous

A post-surrealist blackout of the 1924 Manifesto of Surrealism

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So strong is the belief in fragile life that in the end: destiny has been led to nonchalance. He has agreed to what he calls his luck. He is unimpressed by newborn lucidity. All he can do is botch restrictions. This illusion, firmly rooted, he is only interested in the fleeting extremity of everything.

Everything is a threat to be conquered, this imagination which knows no laws. Incapable of inferiority, preferring to love his mind's eye. Relationships are not his salvation.

Imagination: what I most like in you is your madness, that reprehensible freedom. I, a willing victim of imagination, respect indifference—in which we punish comfort and consolation sufficiently to endure thought beyond hallucination.

Illusions are a source of pleasure. The best control sensuality. That pretty hand which indulges in the secrets of the insane. Columbus should have set out to discover American madness.

It is not the fear of madness which will lead the realistic against the poetic. In fact the former implies certain ridiculous tendencies of spiritualism. Intellectual mediocrity hates this science: art. Flattering clarity, literature is an antidote to insanity. Famous novels assure sentences that are circumstantial, superimposed stock catalogues more and more cliche.

The young man was nothing special. (I'm a Pun)

I am in no mood to occupy fleeting school-boy reason. Wasting laziness does not interest me. When one ceases to feel, one should condemn empty Man. I attack heroes. These predictable objects belong to readymade chess. Mediocre discussions serve so vast a cluster of brains, niceties conceal the person. Gloss ceases glory.

Logic paces back and forth in a cage. Superstition is truth. Pure chance is opinion. Imagination is reason a priori. Freud, in fact, offers no solution of continuity. He is inferior to the sum of dream. Man, plaything of his pleasure, hopes dream will open the possible, as the saying goes. The state of dream immemorial should refuse certainty its daily questions. Questions that grow old.

Let me come back again to choice: a phenomena of interference. Not only does this strange mistake of suggestion come from the depths of conditioning, it reveals the degree of subjectivity the mind ascribes to fact. The key to Man fully satisfied should die. Interference is so much vaster than dreams.

If this spell succeeds, dream will expand into a kind of absolute reality. A story is told according to sleep, which read: THE POET IS a very long and detailed rage in certain men that try to bury the marvelous in temporal constraints. With unprecedented pride, they exalt that part of the mind which tempts the impossible. Like the religious taint children with fairy tales, we call deception for adults: history.

Moderns endure enormous metaphors, a castle half in ruins: this castle not far from time, the stars, ancient equations, and gorgeous Nothing. Poetic dishonesty flows from this castle. Sentimental pursuit is Man—master of desire, of anarchy. Poetry teaches him misery.

The end of money will gather the public in the dark abyss, artificial danger incumbent upon a certain disproportion between sources of fortitude and regions where everything seems awkward. One is never sure of really being there. To endure the road concentrate on falling asleep. The mind without poetic risk aspires towards modesty.

Vestiges of virtue seem to derive from Rimbaud. He managed to keep hidden a love of complicity. Countless poems stem from stupid confession. Dull as Dada waiting to advertise man as boring. There is Man, cut in two by ambiguity. The roughest sketch would convince a maze to go nowhere. Fragments never written pick up a pencil and adapt to the situation.

Freud resolved to obtain the speed of literary overconstruction, the illusion of emotion, images of static mystification. Inexcusable blame must be placed on him. One may even go so far as to say, the Absurd upon scrutiny gives the world objectivity.

Invent the Revolution. Glue the dream-state to you. Hegel charmed that dishonest automatism which expresses the written word, the superior reality of omnipotent ruin. Breton lacks genius as a priest. Sade is in love with the naive. Picasso by far the most mesmerized by the mirror. Destroy the tallest cities. Burn to a crisp the scarecrow for carnivores. Sweep the coral from the sea. The virtue of the flaming tree is in the serpentine truths.

Passive genius is one of the saddest preconceived subjects for perception. This should be of no importance to you, for the absolute knots you in inexhaustible carelessness. How not to be bored is a force that is indefensible. Simplicity is banality.

Multicolored poverty carves us the ludicrous vote. The bitterest secrets will blow up all failures to write false novels. Novels that rest on active verbs such as to reflect, to rest, and to deviate. Not one iota will comfort your guts.

Literary criticism is against surrealism. Secret societies destroy reality. Language has been given to man so that he may express vulgar pleasures. Words are others. Opinions are relationships. There is no subject about which he should refuse to write. That is what the occult is—I shall always understand myself and disappoint groups. The greatest solidarity is with the self.

 

Obscurity is the mask

of joy

A new oracle evokes

destiny as impossible

to find

This modern world disappeared

alone

one day

And ever since, desire wars

with the machine

and scholars

of indifference.

Žana Brankovic

Original 1924 Surrealist Manifesto

Berlin, DE

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