Surrealpolitik: A Wave of Dreams

Sometimes such a visitor, influenced by fashion, would declare himself for Idealism but all I could see was yet another shame-faced realist, like so many well-meaning men these days, subsisting on a compromise between Kant and Comte. By abandoning the commonplace notion of reality for the concept of reality within they believe they have made a great leap forward -- but their idol, the Noumenon, has been exposed as a very mediocre piece of plaster...[T]here are other experiences that the mind can embrace which are equally fundamental such as chance, illusion, the fantastic, dreams. These different types of experience are brought together and reconciled in one genre, Surreality. (page 16-17)
Tags: [Surrealism, Truth & Real, Realism, Literary/Poetic, Dreams]

What will suddenly alert them to the abyss beside which they have set up camp, what opens their eyes to the field of comets they've been tilling unawares, is the unforeseen impact of surrealism on their lives. They'd thrown themselves into it as if it were the sea, and now, just like a treacherous sea, surrealism threatens to sweep them out to the open ocean where the sharks of madness cruise. (page 19)
Tags: [Surrealism]

Having weighed up its experience of the Real -- in which it indiscriminately mixes everything that exists -- the mind naturally juxtaposes what it knows of the Unreal. Only when the mind has gone beyond these two notions can it begin to envisage a wider experience, one where these other two experiences co-exist, and that is the Surreal.

Surreality, the state where these concepts are fused by the mind, is the shared horizon of religion, magic, poetry, dreaming, madness, intoxication and this fluttering honeysuckle, puny little life, that you believe capable of colonizing the heavens for us. (page 23-24)
Tags: [Surrealism]

Liberty begins where the Marvelous is born. (page 29)
Tags: [Surrealism]

Dreams, dreams, dreams, with each step the domain of dreams expands. Dreams, dreams, dreams, at last the blue sun of dreams forces the steel-eyed beasts back to their lairs. Dream, dreams, dreams on the lips of love, on the numbers of happiness, on the teardrops of carefulness, on the signals of hope, on building sites where a whole nation submits to pickaxes. Dreams, dreams, dreams, nothing but dreams where the wind wanders and barking dogs are out on the roads. (page 31)
Tags: [Surrealism, Dreams]

There is a surrealist light:...it is the beam of flashlights on the murdered and on love. (page 35)
Tags: [Surrealism, Crime/Noir]

Philippe Soupault for many years was recognised by his curly hair alone, he used to talk to chair upholsterers and laugh unnervingly near noon. (page 38)
Tags: [Surrealism]

We're working on a task that's enigmatic even for us, in front of a volume of Fantomas fixed to the wall by forks. Visitors, born in faraway climes or at our own door, are helping us design an extraordinary machine which is for killing what exists so that what does not exist may be complete. At 15, rue de Grenelle we've opened romantic lodgings for unclassifiable ideas and revolutions in progress. (page 41)
Tags: [Surrealism, Dreams]

It seems certain, my friends, that we're dropping our prey to chase after shadows again, that we plumb the depths of the abyss quite in vain. (page 42)
Tags: [Surrealism]

The only way to look at Man is as the victim of his mirrors. (page 43)
Tags: [Surrealism, Surrealism & Politics, Truth & Real, Terror, Simulacra/Illusion, Lead Quote Candidate, Literary/Poetic, Paranoia]