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tags:surrealismwriting
Breton in Soluble Fish demonstrating Automatic Writing - Automatism - Surrealistic Techniques:
The ground beneath my feet is nothing but an enormous unfolded newspaper. Sometimes a photograph comes by; it is a nondescript curiosity, and from the flowers there uniformly rises the smell, the good smell, of printer’s ink. I heard it said in my youth that the smell of hot bread is intolerable to sick people, but I repeat that the flowers smell of printer’s ink.
You wonder the extent the individual is truly automatic in these constructions. Like the extent that taste or desire can influence what is given to the public as automatic.
Say I am constructing a surrealist sentence automatically. I will do this now:
hunt for the work that sm-
it is at that point, as a novice non-surrealist, where I stopped that flow and considered. What if I completed that sm- with something else?
regex like, sm*
It seems surrealism in this practice is only forward. There is no retrace, for the retrace is conscious. The is no edit.
That is my point here. How can you find the retrace? How can you find the edit, when given only the resultant text?
Can you find a way to call out Breton and say that you, sir used judgement here. This stream of consciousness is too neat, and too clever to be just automatic.
And when we construct these automatic texts, how do you resist that urge?