Preface to the "Manifesto of Surrealism" by Andre Breton (1924)

Dreams form an inscrutable language in which only the perception of our knowledge, though it is futile and false, can ever hope to translate. Though dreams are said to prefigure future events, can this be true? Only a mystic or a madman could ever hope to glean the answer.

The titanic significance of subconscious or unconscious mechanisms, the interplay between the absurdism of the nightly sojourn, and the absurdism of the so-called 'reality" we experience as our mundane "lives" (though the meaning of what that term entails is far more subjective than anyone cares to admit) cannot be overstated. We live in an elastic universe, one that is defined by our perception of events relative to our understanding, learning, conditioning, fantasizing--our topography of erotic stimuli; our fear of looking too deeply into the Void. We live an illusion that Life, as we experience it, is defined by permanent and fixed parameters; when, suddenly, it can and will be ripped away, either to leave us in darkness we can never know, or to deliver us to a New Realm, a New World of possibilities; one in which, the ever-shifting interplay between the definitions we use to mark the landscape of solid life, REAL life (although there can finally be no definition upon it settled by any one intellectual authority), and our dream life, are mutable.

Life is a flow in and out, fed by different consciousness streams, our ego as defined by the knowledge of our mortality, which we are at continual pains to stave off; religion, conditioning, lust, fear, desire, longing for the ineffable and inexpressible, fantasy, and toilet training all collide in a dark room, where a woman in an 1897 dress is snapping pictures of a young man in a white linen suit with a red bow tie. He has a haircut that looks as if someone put a bowl over his head and began clipping. Long, dark beautiful, and straight hair, a swarthy face, slightly embarrassed, and a paunchy gut. He could be a waiter at a bodega in Marseilles. If indeed, such a place existed.

Beside the woman, is a thin, dark (as if tanned) young man with short dark hair clinging expectantly to his scalp. He has an inscrutable look on his face, as if slightly surprised and slightly expectant, and slightly disgusted. He turns to the woman, says she'll be able to capture her pictures of ghosts by Polaroid, and then looks over to a weird, incongruous corner of the room that is like a dining room. There is a table there.

Around the table are seated, dead men. Or, men that look as if they have a sickening, wasting illness rendering them living skeletons, with white and grey locks wildly spilling out of desiccated scalps. Empty black holes where the eyes have rotted away. They will never eat the vermin-picked banquet before them. But, wait. One of them still seems to be alive.

He turns to the man on the platform, the linen-suited young waiter, and smiles a hideous, corpse grin. Before him, he has a decanter of wine. He lifts a toast. And we wonder: What can any of this mean? We aren't certain. Life and dreams and fantasies and conditioning and the "real world" and the "mad land" of illogic and insanity--our modern hypnotism. NONE of these doors dare be unlocked. Here there be MONSTERS.

Surrealism has been defined as "the juxtaposition of incongruent images." We might argue that to decode the textual tactile world, it is necessary to "cut up" (as Wiliam S. Burroughs did) the exterior reality and rearrange the flow and pattern of events into a new pattern, one that might result in the hidden key to unlock the doorway that will lead to an even deeper communication than that which is buried as subtext or coded language beneath the thick and heavy layers of conscious conditioning. A "derangement of the senses" might very well, as Rimbaud suggested, be the key to the "former feasts". But it might also simply bring "the empty laughter of imbeciles."

But, as Andre Breton exclaimed, "Only the marvelous is beautiful." Only the fantastic can have meaning for a life in which everything if properly contexted, will be blown into a new and startling form or shape--that context being: NO CONTEXT. Because it is marvelous that it exists at all when nothing properly should.

We should be floating in the Void, unawares; but the Universe created God.

And we live on the inside of the Cosmic Egg.

And then back into darkness, we return

Return?

"...to blood, and to piss, and to shit we return, to the grave we belong, just more food for the worm. Lines spelled out in ash, just a cyanide treat, with an angel to torment and a child to beat. And this is the Universe, long may it rot, in eternal putrescence, as death is our lot. And Time is the enemy, decay is the Way; and bones, all that rattle, at the end of the day."