Saturday, April 29, 2023

It Comes to a Certain Point in a Quote by Andre Breton

 


"Everything tends to make us believe that there exists a certain point of the mind at which life and death, the real and the imagined, past and future, the communicable and the incommunicable, high and low, cease to be perceived as contradictions."

--André Breton, Manifestoes of Surrealism.

Sounds Jungian, as if surrealism is a transcendent function. Sur also implies sub. Like subconscious, a popular cultural term for the unconscious. Often people think of trans to mean rise above, but as the I Ching hexogram of 'The Tower' tells us (Wilhelm edition), 'trans' means across and does not mean only up. The tower affords a wide view because of its height.

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This does remind me of a poem I wrote a long time ago about Indeterminism in poetry. It is all a vantage point but indeterminant poems do not exactly or quite have a vantage point. I wonder just how much of that began with the Language Poets when nothing else mattered much except for the language sounds. The Cocteau Twins songs have mastered the language poetry in their verses. The voice becomes an instrument. It conveys sounds, emotions, but no "real" or distinguishable meaning.

But this is different, this is transcendence. I guess that one way transcendence can be identified and then discerned in an indeterminatnt poem is when you have to ask transcendeing what? Whatever the symbol is even if you cannot quite put a finger on it. Then diuscern what in it is "real."

The main point here is, before I digressed, that Breton spoke of the poles of opposites as did Jung.

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