“The Magnetic Fields (fragment)” (1920)
The corridors of the big hotels are empty and the cigar smoke is hiding. A man comes
down the stairway and notices that it's raining; the windows are white. We sense the presence of
a dog lying near him. All possible obstacles are present. There is a pink cup; an order is given
and without haste the servants respond. The great curtains of the sky draw open. A buzzing
protests this hasty departure. Who can run so softly? The names lose their faces. The street
becomes a deserted track.
About four o'clock that same day a very tall man was crossing the bridge that joins the
separate islands. The bells, or perhaps it was the trees, struck the hour. He thought he heard the
voices of his friends speaking: “The office of lazy trips is to the right,” they called to him, “and
on Saturday the painter will write to you. ” The neighbors of solitude leaned forward and through
the night was heard the whistling of streetlamps. The capricious house loses blood. Everybody
loves a fire; when the color of the sky changes it's somebody dying. What can we hope for that
would be better? Another man standing in front of a perfume shop was listening to the rolling of
a distant drum. The night that was gliding over his head came to rest on his shoulders. Ordinary
fans were for sale; they bore no more fruit. People were running without knowing why in the
direction of the estuaries of the sea. Clocks, in despair, were fingering their rosaries. The cliques
of the virtuous were being formed. No one went near the great avenues that are the strength of
the city. A single storm was enough. From a distance or close at hand, the damp beauty of
prisons was not recognized. The best refuges are stations because the travelers never know which
way to go. You could read in the lines of the palm that the most fragrant vows of fidelity have no
future. What can we do with muscle-bound children? The warm blood of bees is preserved in
bottles of mineral water. We have never seen sincerities exposed. Famous men lose their lives in
the carelessness of those beautiful houses that make the heart flutter. How small they seem, these
rescued tides! Earthly happinesses run in floods. Each object is Paradise.
A great bronze boulevard is the shortest road. Magical squares do not make good
stopping places. Walk slowly and carefully; after a few hours you can see the pretty nose-bleed
bush. The panorama of consumptives lights up. You can hear every footfall of the underground
travelers. And yet the most ordinary silence reigns in these narrow places. A traveler stops,
changing expression. Wondering, he approaches the colored bush. Without doubt he wants to
pick it but all he can do is shake hands with another traveler who is covered with stolen jewels.
Their eyes exchange sulphurous sounds like the murmuring of a dry moon, but a glance disperses
the most wonderful meetings. No one could recognize the pale-faced travelers.
(sentences or parts of sentences completed by other; notice transformation from seeming nonsense to narrative, experience of reading is experience told in story, painting, etc)
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"...the flashes of wit and other niceties vie in concealing from us the true thought in search of itself."
"Our brains are dulled by the incurable mania of wanting to make the unknown known, classifiable…"
"If man’s awaking is harder, if it breaks the spell too abruptly, it is because he has been led to make for himself too impoverished a notion of atonement."
"It requires a great deal of fortitude to try to set up one’s abode in these distant regions where everything seems at first to be so awkward and difficult, all the more so if one wants to try to take someone there. Besides, one is never sure of really being there."
from André Breton, First Manifesto of Surrealism, 1924
'Surrealism as a solution to the problem of despair or “miserableness,” using, as his translator Mary Ann Caws (1990) puts it, “the enabling ‘capillary tissue’ between the exterior world of facts and the interior world of emotions, between reality . . . and the imagination”' http://apa.sagepub.com/content/59/1/173.full.pdf+html?ijkey=691c49132c28a33d463f1889c2dbbd581af401e1&keytype2=tf_ipsecsha
Breton's early experience included training/experience with medicine and psychiatry, where he was impressed with the poetry of 'madmen' and the development of thought through dreams, free association.
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