Thursday, August 28, 2008

Manifesto!

If you hadn’t noticed my thoughts and view points are a bit on the
surrealist side.  Ok more than a bit. Call me a dreamer…no ,
really go ahead. it’s obvious. Anyway, I was looking up UFO
sightings because yes,I’m morbidelly fascinated with the thought
of space and space travel and life outside of what we know. Through
research, one topic led to another until I came across a poem by
Andre Breton.  I was instantly captivated by his ability to take a
thought, some of my own actually, and dissect them further
than I could imagine them to be.  Anyway this is an excerpt
from his Manifesto of Surrealism and following
is a poem I wrote in response……

Manifesto of Surrealism
by
André Breton

1924

[It is interesting to note the similarities this work shares
with The Art of Noise, a manifesto proposing an
entirely new approach to music. --LMC
]

So strong is the belief in life, in what is most fragile in
life–real life, I mean–that in the end this belief is lost.
Man, that inveterate dreamer, daily more discontent with
his destiny, has trouble assessing the objects he has been
led to use, objects that his nonchalance has brought his
way, or that he has earned through his own efforts, almost
always through his own efforts, for he has agreed to work,
at least he has not refused to try his luck (or what he calls
his luck!). At this point he feels extremely modest: he
knows what women he has had, what silly affairs he has been
involved in; he is unimpressed by his wealth or his poverty,
in this respect he is still a newborn babe and, as for the approval
of his conscience, I confess that he does very nicely without it.
If he still retains a certain lucidity, all he can do is turn back
toward his childhood which, however his guides and mentors
may have botched it, still strikes him as somehow charming.
There, the absence of any known restrictions allows him
the perspective of several lives lived at once; this illusion
becomes firmly rooted within him; now he is only interested
in the fleeting, the extreme facility of everything.
Children
set off each day without a worry in the world. Everything is
near at hand, the worst material conditions are fine. The
woods are white or black, one will never sleep.

~in response….

A Surrealist Thought


If we bring to light
this child like yearning…
what deeper enlightenment,
what shuddered thought have we forfeited?
Imagination and fairytales,
nurtured by them
weened from them
until “reality” takes precedence!!

what then?
these thoughts of love,this
craving for the sunlight
for this dreaming…
are only things of the past?
“at some point you have to let it go…”
let yourself drown in the ocean of compliance
but my imagination rebels against this sentiment
 
if we bring to light this adolescent needing
if we forget the limitations
push past the ordinary and reclaim this innocence
what really have we lost?

don’t we need this?
more acutely than any physical addiction?
desperately? like a dying thirst!
and like the promise of the shapen waters
endless in possibility…
we need this
 
if we bring this to light
if we together grasp
give willingly
take it back to the begining
take it back to the start of this journey
take it all the way back
couldn’t  we float
just a little further down this river
of thought?

Posted by Shira at 05:01:59 | Permalink | Comments (1) »