A PERSONAL READING OF  BRETON 

Loyalty to systems equivalent to loyalty to beautiful entities is to be avoided as an error.

Systems have no part in beauty, and can remain only temporary utilitarian instrumentations insofar as they promote movement toward objects of desire.

Men’s “ideas” may be seduced into camps of opinion, and thus be violate by those who find such camps attractive.

Surrealism (as a system) may be equally assailed once its central “character” is allowed to exit the stage.

Surrealism is capable of becoming stagnant, frozen into placid dioramas of safe vignettes.

The word “surrealism” can be, has been, and shall be misappropriated by charlatans (“new managers”); and although it has not been moved (yet) into a position of “crimes against itself,” it may be judged as having done so by those who desire only to be “assigned” to duties and contracts constructed mainly to contain their desires safely.

Surrealism (this system of sprung desire) will (of course) be assailed most by those wishing to constrain their own frightful desires; by those constricted in pressures high enough to transform soft envy into diamond hard mistrust.

As long as man lies to himself and so refuses to liberate himself as an individual from capital corrosions and base trivia and from the merely gregarious – there shall be no sense to life: life will remain a utilitarian and non-sequential parade of duties and segregated urges enforced from above, and only put into action from below.

The key to liberty is always prepared to blossom. This key – while always freshly nurtured – will have to contain the seeds of what has gone before (failures, successes, and the barely attempted) if it is to have any useful strength.

But we cannot conceive of these new flowers of accomplished desire as having sprung merely from what we now gaze upon.

We shall shield ourselves against cults of personality by the realization that systems are tools, and by the knowledge that one should not become seduced by only one tool, as this manifests that inflexibility of thought and action that can lead only to all-too-easy tumbles into explanation.

One must remain loyal not to systems but to non-conformity, especially to the non-conformity we may foster within surrealism itself, since loyalty to surrealism as a system may lead to aesthetic mimicry of technique, and of such “effects” as may be purchased at no risk.

Though surrealism is a collective “covenant” (of a guarded mutability) only an informed individual resistance can liberate desire. And, far from the re-education camps hallucinated by our enemies, we call now for constant self-education.

Unanimity of any group not intended to contravene the greater assembly remains suspect; but we must be willing to grant our assent to even untested programs that we intuitively sense are dedicated to the creation of further and further freedoms for the individual man.

We must put an end to claims of omniscience (we must foster a scientific and poetic re-investigation of all phenomenon and ideas.) The entirety of human history must be re-opened to this poetic investigation, and must be de-mystified so as to defeat obscuring awe. At the same time, we must not reject educated respect, and any temporary alliance of minds and bodies formed by illuminated consent.

We realize charges of mysticism may be leveled, but we admit it is not healthy to allow men to cling to “human-centric” notions of omnipotent management, because this confession of a “lack of control” fosters a poetic distance, an evocative separation from the objects of our desire. A too-easy capture of all aspects of the re-made world strikes us as anti-poetic.

We may “allow” ourselves therefore to conceive (if only as a mythological exercise) that there may be invisible sources of universal power, if only to remove this world from the killing control of man, and to dissolve the “obvious” in the “possible.”

Dale Michael Houstman, 2001