#03 Making a Surreality Together - Through Creative Writing and Reading

Last week's show was all about finding your unique creative purpose. But did the original Surrealists have a creative purpose, and what can that tell us about inspiration and creativity?

Another deeply weird and philosophical exploration, followed by 3 rounds of Exquisite Corpse.

Keep those words coming! - Please submit words at annatizard.com/play. You never know when they'll crop up in a Brainstoryum, to inspire a new story idea.

SHOW TRANSCRIPTION (does not include Exquisite Corpse game play at the end):

I admit, I’ve been playing around with my husband’s keyboard which is straight out of the 1980s. It even has helicopter sounds on it. But I wouldn’t take it that far, no-no.

I’ll begin with a quotation from Andre Breton’s first surrealist manifesto: “I believe in the future resolution of these two states, seemingly so contradictory, of dream and reality, in a kind of absolute reality, a surreality, so to speak.” I love this. It seems to just sum up the surrealists’ creative purpose really neatly and succinctly. He goes on to say, “That is the quest I am about, certain not to find it, but too heedless of death not to weigh a little the joys of its possession.” (p39).
 
I’m a bit unsure about that last bit. It does seem a bit odd to bring death into it. I mean, art isn’t generally that dangerous… in my experience anyway! But maybe he’s saying he wants to make-believe he’s achieved this, in spite of the really low chances of actually doing so. It reminds me a bit of those positive thinking exercises you hear about nowadays, where you have to behave like you’ve already achieved the thing you’re going after, and so you’re acting on faith alone to make it happen.

But the main part he said does sound like the big surrealist statement, of what they were trying to do: “The future resolution of these two states… of dream and reality… a surreality.” D’you know, I’m reading my notes on my laptop screen, and Word has just underlined “surreality” because apparently it’s not in the dictionary? Technology itself is rejecting this word! The concept of bringing dream and reality together has been snubbed by the dictionary – it’s unacceptable as a word.

Well… the dictionary has many words and in a little while we’re about to cause mayhem, I guess, by putting together some words that really don’t fit, in a game of Exquisite Corpse. So go on and arrest me, why don’t you…?

But in the meantime, what was Andre Breton really talking about? The “resolution” of these two states…. Dream is a mental state, a matter of things happening in your mind only. And then reality… is reality, isn’t it?
You do get neuroscientists who say that reality is, or may be, a hallucination. I can see why they might think that, up to a point. Perception is all we really have, if you think about it. What’s out there in the world has to be fed through our senses, and then interpreted by our brains, and there are lots of examples of visual illusions which demonstrate how our pattern-seeking brains, our order-loving neurons just love to see images that aren’t really there.

There was a recent article in The New Statesman, an interview with Anil Seth, a British neuroscientist who believes that “reality is the hallucination we can all agree on.” And yes, I do have a difficulty wrapping my head around this theory. But I tried to give it a chance, and I was reading the article, and apparently during the interview, they were looking for a sandwich. I wondered why that detail struck me in particular, when I was meant to be contemplating, ruminating on this difficult theory. But then it hit me - why would he bother looking for a sandwich, if he really believed that nothing’s real? Maybe I’m being a little bit simplistic about it, but still, if hunger is an illusion, like the body… It’s like, follow through with your theory, why don’t you? This is not a theory to think about before you cross the road, is it? If that bus hits you, it’ll hurt all the same. If pain, or cracking your head open, is an illusion, it’s a pretty realistic one and when the ambulance arrives, I’m going want to see some paramedics in the back, not a bunch of philosophers, thank you very much!

But as with a lot of things, I suppose we can find elements of truth in something we might not think is absolutely true: pieces of a bigger picture. We know from experience – of times when we’re feeling really low or stressed, and times when we’re feeling on top of the world that our perception, our positive or negative mindset, can really flavour reality for us, and affect the way we behave. How we react in a disaster, for example, might even affect whether we actually survive it.

Yesterday, I was out walking in a forest near my work place, and I had this weird feeling of unreality. I saw a bee on a yellow flower and it seemed almost otherworldly to me. I realise that I’ve got the residue of lockdown in my head, having come out of it not that long ago, and this is probably affecting me – but there’s also everything else, the horrors on the news, and it makes me think how easy it is nowadays, that the real may come to seem unreal, and with all the opinions and false pieces of information floating around the internet – the unreal may seem real. And sometimes, genuinely, we might not be able to tell the difference between the real and unreal, no matter how hard we try, depending on what facts are available to us.

Have we reached surreality? Have we arrived at what Andre Breton was looking for, but not necessarily in a good way?

There are more positive ways, as well, in which, yes, to some extent, I think you could say, surreality has arrived. People talk about creating their own truth; and those positive thinking techniques I was talking about, they’re really well known now, they’re part of our culture, where we talk quite seriously about the way our mental attitude directly affects our experience of reality. This is no longer something said just by psychologists and psychiatrists in exclusive academic spaces or in a counsellor’s office. These aspects of psychology are common knowledge now, and we’re unlikely to go through life not being aware of them and not thinking about them.

With the internet being everywhere now, and more of our experiences actually happening through the internet – like communicating with others online, creating an identity online, which we all do – maybe this has contributed to this surreality. If we live to some extent in our heads via technology, how different is that from a dream? Have we created a resolution between dream and reality?

I’m starting to wonder why Andre Breton wanted that. It’s certainly not utopia. What did he think would happen if we did this? If we, I don’t know, smoothed the path between what we really want deep down and what happens in the external reality. Because I think with the first world war at the time, there was this idea that a lot of conflict happened because of the denial of what’s in the unconscious mind. Well, consciously and unconsciously people don’t always want good things, or the right things, so maybe he was deluded if he thought life might be better, I don’t know… I definitely don’t agree with everything the surrealists said or did, but there are still these nuggets of truth that I’m trying to tease out, because they were on to something.

So let’s bring ourselves back to inspiration and creativity. What can we get out of all this weird conjecture that is positive and forward-thinking? Writing stories are the ultimate fun ways in which to create our own surreality. I mean, think about it: We’re creating these new experiences, new places and characters that wouldn’t otherwise exist, so they may live a dreamlike life in the minds of other people. But there’s another side to this: when we read, we’re not just receiving the images fully made: our minds generate images using the prompts of the writer. Readers and writers actually work together on creating these worlds and situations, it’s like a collaboration to create stuff in our own dream world. I mean, that’s magic, isn’t it? We’re experiencing things that don’t exist in external reality. We’re creating a surreality – but a good one!

Einstein himself said imagination is more important than knowledge. Einstein said that! Just think about that for a second! (No wonder he had crazy hair – good for him.)

Fiction straddles that place between dream and reality, because of this collaborative effort between reader and author. And if you still don’t believe me, after this weird maze of thought that I’ve taken you through – none of this really exists by the way, it’s all just been created in your head, prompted by words that I’ve said – well, get this. Scarlett Thomas (who is amazing, by the way), once said, “One of the paradoxes of writing is that when you write non-fiction everyone tries to prove that it’s wrong, and when you publish fiction everyone tries to see the truth in it.” Now, instead of just saying this herself, she got a character in one of her novels to say this, in “Our Tragic Universe.”

So here we are. She’s done it, she’s made it happen. We’re talking about something a fictitious character said, and reflecting on how real it is.

And on that note, I think we can safely say, we’ve reached the centre of this maze, this very wiggly maze. Thank you for following me along this strange path.

And now it is time to ask ourselves, what kind of surreality do we want to create today?

I think it’s time to play Exquisite Corpse. Bring on the Socks of Destiny!

Exquisite Corpse game play is not transposable... Please listen the last section of the show to enter a realm of deep silliness and inspiration!