30 Surreal Days (retrospective)

              Surrealism is dead.

Actually, that sentence is pretty funny to me. The entire idea of surrealism is to tap into a level of thinking devoid of getting in our own way, through processes like automatic writing and mediation. Basically, that the words exist in the world and our thinking about the words clouds these thoughts until they’ve lost some truth of what we are trying to say, some important aspect of the text because we had too much forethought. All the things we think of as surrealism- melting clocks, stretched out elephants, eyes floating in the sky- are all just symbols which our minds interpret once we stop trying to shape these into coherent thoughts.

In a way, surrealism was never alive. No matter how hard we try, there’s no way to entirely remove thought from our brains. No matter how many drugs you use, how much meditation you fall into, automatic writing will always be colored, somehow, by our minds.

As such, surrealism is less of an end product and more the act of attempting to remove the mind through some way. David Lynch called this “Catching the big fish.” Burroughs said that Naked Lunch was “automatic writing gone wrong.” Rene Magritte said “Everything we see hides another thing, we always want to see what is hidden by what we see.” It’s turtles all the way down.

But art isn’t about the final product. That’s just capitalism. Art is about the active search, and here is where surrealism thrives. We know that we aren’t seeing the miasma of the universe, we’re seeing it filtered through minds doing their best to get out of their own way. And within that we can find the aspects of the universe that are universal, that connect us all.

 To that end, I began my 30 Surreal Days writing challenge to get out of my own way, to force myself to write something every day without worrying about it being “perfect” or to fit a certain aesthetic for publication, outside of something I was “proud” of creating. I did this for no other reason than to create.

And create I did. Not only did I post every day (and in several cases, several), I wrote many more that never saw the light of day. Whether these were poems I didn’t think got to a root of something important, or ones that sat half finished, I now have over 50 different documents written in the last month. Some of these will be scrapped for parts for other poems. Some will be refined and find new life. And some will remain rotting in my poorly organized writing folder. C’est la vie.

I learned some truths about my writing (and about myself) while completing this challenge. The first is that it got easier as I went. The more that I was sitting down consistently, even if it wasn’t the same time of day, the faster the words would come. I also found that the poems where I tried being less weird always ended up being the weirdest…I did not plan to write a poem about a baby crawling out of a birthday cake, yet here we are. In fact, I was trying to meditate on identity in that moment and a baby emerged…clearly my parents gave me the wrong sex-ed talk, a symptom of public schooling, I’m sure.

I also started exploring more of the imagery associated with the text, something which I am doing a lot of research on as I step into my thesis project this year. Photos are funny things, on the surface they are the opposite of truth, a controlled eye telling you what to look at as opposed to what is, neatly manicured to only show what the artist wants you to see. So in many ways, the image from a camera becomes the antithesis of surrealism, something that proports truth but is highly curated. But my digital art isn’t photography, rather using existing images and manipulating them, often created within minutes with as little thought as possible. Since they relate to the text, I’m sure some would say it’s not truly surrealist for there is obvious thought connecting them…but fuck those people.

The poems that I released held a lot of truth about myself and the world right now. True story, my mom called me about halfway through the month to ask if I was doing alright mentally (you try killing yourself ONE TIME and everyone freaks out). But the truth is that I was mostly feeling a physical reaction to the things happening around me: politically in the United States, some anxieties I was feeling about my career, complaints the students I work with had. Because this was the miasma I was in, it was what made it through the filter onto the page. I promise I’m okay! Stressed, sure, but who isn’t these days?

In a lot of ways, I am sad to see the challenge end. I know it’s a self-imposed timeframe, so I could just keep it going, but I do have other projects I need to focus on (more on those later). But it was incredible to force myself to get something on the page without the expectation of perfection, without a goal in mind. The issue with art is that artists care about the process, but our landlords care about rent. This was a month of me focusing on process and reaping incredible rewards.

A lot of these poems are great, and I’ll do a bit more fine tuning and see where they might find a home. A lot of these images are awesome and some I want to improve slightly with more time (for instance, I love the Moth image I created, but I think adding in a couple of different moth images to the picture will make it pop a bit more). I’m also thinking of maybe setting up a store where some of these images will be available for purchase, but we’ll see.

I would recommend a writing challenge to every writer (and honestly any creative). It doesn’t have to be this one. It’s not about perfection, it’s about getting you out of your way. When was the last time you shared something you wrote? It’s not about publicity (well, not just about it). It’s about connection. It’s about the craft. It’s about realizing you’re a badass.

So go do it.