550: Surrealism

I have appreciated elements of surrealism in fiction for a long time (Aimee Bender, Tom Robbins, Chuck Palahniuk, Haruki Murakami, and Ryu Murakami, to name a few), and while I enjoyed some of the poets I looked up, I have had a little difficulty getting into Michael Earl Craig’s Yes, Master. What I like about surrealism is the feeling I get from it; it manipulates my feelings, yet I can’t always explain very well how or why. I can try to describe my feelings after reading it, but cannot seem to tie them to anything in particular about the poem, much less find any decipherable meaning in the poems. It may sound corny, but I am sympathetic to the methods of surrealism, even if I don’t always agree with the reasoning behind it (well, sometimes that, too). I can be a bit of an anarchist, if that is not too anachronistic to say. I feel rebellious towards categories, genres, modes, rules, and expectations, sense and censoring, in the realm of literature. I feel that both literature and experience are too complicated to divide cleanly into discrete sections or order with too many rules, much like I don’t understand people who don’t like different foods touching each other or who have to eat all of one kind of food before moving on to the next. Give me food that is enhanced by the food around it, layer and sauce it up. Give me casserole. If it tastes good, I’m not much concerned about what’s in it or how it’s made. And the person who made it probably couldn’t duplicate it if they tried. And that’s okay.

Surrealism is so simple in its concept that I would suggest it must be actually very difficult to do well. Anyone can string together disparate images, stream-of-consciousness narratives, idiosyncrasies, or non-sequiturs, but not anyone can do this in a truly evocative way. Though, I have to admit, I’m still not sure how to read or judge surrealist verse. What should I be looking for? How do I discern mediocrity from genius? How much can a surrealist poem really be analyzed (at least where meaning is concerned)? What do we do with only the occasional surreal moment? Actually, I think the unexpectedly surreal pleases me the most. This is why I love Haruki Murakami. His novels, no matter how many surreal elements, phrases, characters, moments, are usually intensely grounded in the tangible and very real kind of world where you can’t go off on an adventure without having someone to take care of your cat or where you have to wash dishes and buy groceries, travel takes time and some days are really boring. Then the surreal bits kick in and you see the mundane world in a whole new light, oceans of possibilities, rivers of meaning flood your mind. It’s exhilarating and wonderful.

Neruda has been a favorite of mine for a few years now, but for some reason, I never thought of him as a Surrealist. After Dylan passed away, it was a while before I could read anything. Nothing made sense. Because Dylan and I had read Neruda together for a class the year before and had both enjoyed his work (and because Dylan, in fact, dabbled in surrealism, taking images from dreams and hallucinations, delighting in taking the reader on a mental trip through unexplored territory, where elephants dance on ceilings, where discussion of fall foliage leads to condemnation of the mindlessly wealthy), I finally decided to start with that. And somehow, the way Neruda talks about death, and love, and life, in its insanity, in its surrealism, made sense. The real had become surreal to me, and thus the surreal became real and resonated like nothing else could at the time. I think this has a lot to do with the fact that war marked many Surrealist poets and artists. With so much senseless bloodshed and violence, rules and order become meaningless and devoid of the necessary communicative or restorative powers. In the presence or aftermath of this kind of horror, I think that we need to believe in something beyond our puny, conscious, decision-making, destructive, killing selves; we need to believe that there is something yet that is beautiful and honest, even if we can’t control it or can’t fully comprehend it.

Getting back to Michael Earl Craig, I take back my initial hesitation. I enjoyed reading his work, even if it confounded me. I particularly liked “Notes on Robert Musil,” “We Picture the President,” “Axiom,” “Piece,” “I’ll Fight Depression for You,” and “Ways of Dealing.” And while I can point out lines that brought me up short or muse on feelings for a while, I can’t seem to describe or analyze these in any sensible way. And I think that’s the way it should be. Sometimes the quest for explicit meaning robs the joy of the journey. Surrealism is a trip I like to take sometimes, but I can’t give you directions.