Surrealism - Automatic Writing

As Andre Breton states in his Surrealist Manifesto, Surrealism is "pure psychic automatism, by which one proposes to express, either verbally, in writing, or by any other manner, the real functioning of thought. Dictation of thought in the absence of all control exercised by reason, outside of all aesthetic and moral preoccupation." In other words, surrealism is the expression of the subconscious, so much so that everyday thought and reason is not able to tamper with it.

The surrealists had a certain number of exercises that helped aspiring surrealists bring forward the "real functioning of thought." These includes cutting up phrases and words from newspapers and rearranging them into new patterns. They would also write detailed instructions of how to do something that doesn't commonly need instructions. An example of this would be "How to Operate the Human Heart." Of course, exquisite corpse, the most well-known, involves multiple people. Commonly, everyone starts with a piece of paper and writes an article and an adjective. Then the paper is passed to one side. Without looking at the previous article and adjective, write a noun, then pass it again. The exercise continues in this manner with a verb, and article + adjective, and finally another noun. Although no one sees the previous words, there is supposed to be a strange correlation between the words, and the sentence formed may become inspiration for a story idea.

I tried to do an activity called automatic writing. Essentially, it involves writing down whatever ideas come to your mind as soon as they arrive without censoring anything for three minutes. The point is to maintain a constant flow from your subconscious so that nothing can be affected by your conscious mind. Then, I cut out stray words (haha, they're all stray words), broke up lines, and ended up with a very strange poem. Really, it was weird. I don't remember what I was thinking, and I feel like I was choosing words because they were words and they happened to be in my mind, not because of their meaning. Any semi-coherent pieces of thought continued for a short time and then jumped to something else completely unrelated. Maybe I was tired and a little delirious, but maybe it was my actual functioning of thought. That might be a bit disturbing.

Fruitless champagne bottles

Fragments cantering stringently

Sally Ride tiled floor

Pools of its cream

Against the whale knife

Wailing

More than kissing children

At Saturday church

Abandoned to sand, sleet

Minestrone packets into the latches

Silicone and sized

There is none

There is clamor