Surrealism and the Visual

...I consider verbal inspirations infinitely richer in visual meaning, infinitely more resistant to the eye, than visual images properly speaking. Whence my constant protest against the poet's so-called "visionary" power. No, Lautréamont and Rimbaud did not see, did not experience a priori what they described; which is tantamount to saying that they didn't describe it at all, but rather that they limited themselves in the dark corridors of their being to listening--indistinctly and, while they wrote, without understanding them any more than we do when we first read them--to certain accomplished and accomplishable works. "Illumination" comes afterward.

-Breton, "The Automatic Message" (trans. Polizzotti)

This passage comes toward the end of "The Automatic Message," a long essay in which Breton, in 1933, assesses the relative failures of automatic writing and yet continues to advocate for its potential usefulness in achieving aspects of the surrealist agenda.

Breton's point flies against the grain of so many assumptions about writing, assumptions which rest upon a representational model of art. Think of imagism. Think of some aspects of objectivist writing. Think of your first creative writing class. Think of something as recent as Donald Revell's "Art of Attention: The Poet's Eye" or Stephen Burt's "New Thing." These aesthetics tend to adhere to a model in which language conveys an objective sight and in which the task of poetry is to re-present some imaginary or real "visual" picture.

Breton insists rather that a poet listen, not look; that she be attuned to the ebb and flow of language. It is only in obediently following the rhythm of language's haphazard currents, streams, rivulets, etc, that "illumination" occurs.

Breton's notion closely aligns, for me at least, with Spicer's Martians. Writing poetry isn't about reproducing some aspect of visual perception. Fuck perception. The poet is tapping into signals, waves, rhythms, some of which come "from out there," others of which originate in the shadowy confines of the interior, a space many of us postmetaphysicals are frankly terrified to venture into.

Let's get out of this representational mess--let's drop the tired visual metaphors. It's true, we're an inveterate visual culture. We move with our eyes, we think with our eyes, we read with our eyes, we entertain ourselves with our eyes, we awaken with our eyes, we sleep with our eyes, we drink with our eyes, we poop with our eyes. The eye is wonderful; it's a lovely little orb full of aqueous humor and tiny blood vessels; it's got a cornea; it's got a crystalline lens; it sits in a socket padded with fatty tissue. And thanks to all this, I'm treated to wonderful sensations. Pretty awesome.

I'm not disparaging the sense of sight or the eyeball itself. But in the realm of poetics I'm sick of it. And let me be clear: this isn't about imagery per se. I love that trick as much as anyone. It's about the orientation of the creative paradigm. Illumination comes afterward.