This essay is a deviation from the norm for me, as it contains some personal musing which is absent in my other essays which tend to be impersonal and focused on rationalism. Doing so will at least reinforce the point that subjective feelings as in arts do not contradict rationality. Surrealism (A term coined by Apollinaire in 1917), was launched as a movement in arts by Andre Beton between WWI-WWII It evolved as an offshoot of earlier Dadaism, which was a rebellion against conventions, norms and traditional rationality in arts. The rebellion was in part triggered by the mechanizations and the destructions of war in the early twentieth century. But surrealism although rooted in dadaism, was an affirmative movement, not a negation or anarchism that Dadaism was. For me personally, surrealism has been the guiding inspiration for my thoughts and interests. Breton in 1924 published his first Manifeste du surr�alisme defining surrealism as the pure psychic automatism by which it is intended to express either verbally or in writing, the true function of thought, thought which is dictated in the absence of all control exerted by reason, and outside all aesthetic or other preoccupations. Surrealism is based on the belief in the superior reality of certain forms of associations heretofore ignored, in the power of dreams and in the disinterested (i.e uninfluenced by external conscious social factors) workings of thought. Surrealism in painting and literature came about much the same way as jazz came about in western musical art form, a rebellion against rigid rules and constraint imposed reason and rationality on human mind and spirit. The notion of automatism in surrealistic painting is similar to the notion of improvisation in jazz. Both strive to explore and liberate the creative powers of subconscious mind (For example the Joe Harriott Quintet's early 60's album "Abstract", or SunRa's 60's albums such as Atlantis, Magic City etc). Breton was inspired by the Freudian notion of the power of the subconscious mind. But whereas Freudian motivation for exploring the subconscious was to help the mind make the transition to normalcy from an abnormal state, Bret's fascination with the subconscious was for going into the other direction, to liberate the anarchic energy of the subconscious mind to rebel against the "normal" bourgeois life.

To me surrealism represents a certain feeling/perception which is mostly ineffable, very similar to mystical feeling. That surrealist feeling can be in certain aural, visual (still or moving) or verbal expressions of an art form like dance, painting, music, movie, poetry, story, or certain sights, sounds and imageries experienced in reality or in dreams, where absurd/irrational images are obtained from the recollection of a dream or hallucinated experience, (e.g the metaphysical paintings of Giorgio de Chirico). Or it can be in certain abstract ideas and symbologies of Physics or Mathematics like m-branes (hyperspace), Global Hyperbolicity of Spacetime etc. In the early 1920s, Breton tried to explore the surrealistic experience of the first type in the form of experiments with the possibilities of hypnotism, drugs and other forms of altered consciousness but ultimately rejected such artificial aids. I believe the true surrealistic feeling or experience (or the yearning for it) comes naturally to some and such artificial stimulus is unnecessary for them. Similarly some mathematicians have also explored artificial stimuli (specially in the 70's) to heighten their mathematical insights of abstract mathematical shapes and forms.

Although the original surrealistic movement in arts by Breton was mainly inspired by the anarchist movement and later became related to political ideas, all of which were rooted in Breton's admiration of Freudian theories of the subconscious and to Marxist idea of revolution (He published two surrealist Manifestos reflecting these two inspirations), to me surrealism is purely a matter of inner self, independent of and irrelevant to any putative political and ideological import, much as the metaphysical paintings of Chirico do not contain any political implications.

Surrealism has been the primary factor in shaping my interest in all the art forms and intellectual pursuits. Surrealism to me represents that part of our subliminal self which yearns for certain imageries, sights, sounds and fantasies, symbolizing a platonic reality beyond our phenomenal world. Surrealism as an art form acts as a vehicle/medium to express that ineffable yearning. It also represents an inherent urge to transcend the known, observed and experiential world of phenomenon and enter into the unknown, unexperienced realm. This is the urge that I believe has inspired the mystical yearnings of Sufis (Like the Wailing Dervishes) ,the Gnostics and the Kabbalas, the abstract paintings of the late 19th century symbolists like the Nabis (Prophets,a group of French abstract painters), although those mystics and earlier painters may not have been consciously aware of surrealism as a separate genre. There is some common aspects between the subjective notions of surrealism and mysticism. For example the underlying basis of what Breton called automatism was the surrealist notion of 'objective chance'. He believed that the existence of coincidences or events for which there were no rational explanations was evidence of a higher reality and that true reality was not ordered or logical and that access to reality could only be gained through the unconscious mind, which is also the main theme of mystical experience. In essence what it claims is that "true reality" is irrational (I wish to parenthetically add that irrational here truly means arational, i.e BEYOND rationality, not AGAINST rationality) and can only be experienced by unconscious mind and phenomena (i.e projection of "true" reality that we experience with our senses) is rational and thus can be experienced with the rational conscious mind. This notion of phenomena as a projection of a true higher reality will be appreciated by those conversant with the notion of projection space (or submanifold) in mathematical physics. Another parallel between the surrealism and physics lies in the surrealistic techniques like automatism in painting where random unconscious movements by hand is supposed to result in a very meaningful and highly suggestive imagery, much like the random emergent effects result in highly complex and beautiful patterns in a chaotic system. Of course I should remind that one must not take this analogy too literally as the notion of a "true" reality of which this phenomenal world is a projection (shadow) is purely a metaphysical specualtion, not a scientific one.

So surrealism is the world that we experience (sometimes) in dreams or hallucinations. It symbolizes the world where the subconscious is given free rein to revise the definition of reality. It is not a rational world. This world is characterized by absurd and bizarre objects and scenes, or by various absurd and bizarre juxtapositions between objects and scenes of the phenomenal world. This was also the basis of the "surrelaist image" referred to in Breton's first Manifesto of Surrelaism. Surrealistic feelings can be evoked by specific sights, sounds or certain places. This may have been true for surrealist Max Ernst for whom surrealistic inspirations (like the fantasy creature Loplop) might have been derived from the enchantment and terror he experienced in the German forests. Is it a coincidence that the avant guards of surrealistic movement were mostly French and from Paris? Paris is probably the city that evokes surrealistic feeling the most, with its catacombs, lanes, gothic buildings with gargoyles. No wonder the surrealistic novel "Paris Peasant" by Louis Aragon is based on a dreamlike scenes of Aragon's meandering through Paris along it;s arcades and passages. And of course not to mention the legend of the phantoms of Paris as made famous through the stories of Apollinaire. Paris was the virtual capital of surrealism between the two world wars.

Unlike all other emotions and feelings, yearning for surrealist experience is not explainable by any adaptive value of evolutionary origin. In terms of the new ideas of evolutionary psychology, surrealism is an aspect of art that cannot be (vestigially) traced to an adaptive aspect of human evolution,it is a purely non-adaptive by product (the so-called spandrels of evolution) of the emergence of human consciousness through evolution and manifested in artistic expression. (For a nice discussion of the evolutionary basis of artistic appreciation of human mind please refer to chapters 23 and 25 of Between inner Space and Outer Space by John Barrow.

The platonic reality as referred to above is reminiscent of Plato's vision of a noumenal world that exists independent of and external to our mundane world of phenomena. Oxford Mathematician and Cosmologist Roger Penrose also believes in the platonic reality to which human intellect in its most sublime state occasionally gets a priviledged access through epiphanic flash of insights. The existence of a platonic world seems to be just a result of pure faith or belief. But the very existence of natural laws and their discovery point to its existence since the natural laws themselves remain unexplainable in terms of things that are mundane or understood. Surrealism includes anything that is evocative of a platonic, transcenedent reality. The visual/aural imageries that evoke surrealistic feelings can belong to two categories. In the first category the objects/scenes are part of mundane reality (i.e phenomena) but the mundane elements act together to evoke or suggest a feeling of a surrealistic (i.e extra-mundane, noumenal) world in one's mind's eye. In the second category, the objects/scenes themselves can be abstract and bizarre and non-existent in the phenomenal world, thus suggestive of a transcendental realm, created only in imaginative minds, either consciously or subconsciously (as in dreams). The latter category reflects an yearning of imaginative minds to experience or fantasize sights, sounds or objects that contradict reality and mundane experience. In either case the end effect is an evocation of mental images that cross the boundaries of the mundane world of reality, inspiring a feeling of having experienced, however fleetingly, an abstract platonic world. Similar inspired feeling is possibly experienced by mathematicians visualizing an abstract geometric shape in an epiphanic flash of ideas.

Examples of first category are the fog horn of a ship, the sound and horn of a steam locomotive, the beaconing light of a lighthouse or the searchlight of a ship, the unison calls of frogs or crickets in a swamp in the dark, the hooting of an owl, the haunting wails of leaves blown by the winds on a gusty night (As in Disney's animated adaption of The Legend of Sleepy hollow), colorful cloud formations etc. Examples of second class are :

• Painting: the Work of Dali, Magritte,Bosch, Escher,
• Movie:
  1. Cartoons like Disney's Silly Symphonies, Porky in Wackyland, early Betty Boop cartoons (Vol-3 of Betty Boop Definitive Collections is rich in surrealist episodes, like Crazy Town, Betty in Blunderland etc )
  2. Bunuel's "Un Chien andalou" (In 1928 with Dali),
  3. Argentinian Composer Maurice Kagel's Antithese(1965) showing clear dadaist influence.
  4. Match: A Surreal film, where two cellists are pitted against each other in front of an umpire who plays percussion in a bizarre musical contest.
  5. The dance sequence from the musical "An American in Paris".
  6. This is my favourite. The classical concert of prisoners of the dungeon using improvised instruments in a scene from "5000 Fingers of Dr. T",
  7. Italian Renaissance painter Giovanni Piranesi's Carceri d'Invenzione (Imaginary Prisons), in which he transformed Roman ruins into fantastic, immeasurable dungeons dominated by immense, gloomy arcades, staircases rising to incredible heights, and bizarre galleries leading nowhere.

     Swiss painter Fuseli's imaginative fantasy painting "The Nightmare" picturing a young woman draped erotically on her bed in the throes of a nightmare, attended by horrific apparitions of a gnome/devil and a horse's head with glowing eyes

  8. Many of the scenes from the sets of Hollywood Musicals, like Busby Berkely's Broadway reviews, Ziegfield Follies, Dance sequences from "Singing in the Rain" etc.

• Music: Argentinian Composer Maurice Kagel's reissue of "Un Chien Andalou". Other examples are: Passages of a musical instrument or instruments in unison in a jazz/classical piece (e.g in "The City of Glass"- By "Bob Graettinger",specially the movements "Structures" and "Reflections", "Mirage" By Pete Rugolo,"Medicine for a Nightmare" By SunRa, "Eclipse" and "Weird Nightmare" By Charles Mingus, "Abstract" by Joe Harriott Quintet etc).

• Literary Form(Poetry/Novels): Breton called surrealism in written text form automatism or automatic text. Besides Breton, this form is represented in the works of Paul Eluard, Louis Aragon, Antonin Artaud et al. Notable ones are Breton's "Nadja", Aragon's "Paris Peasant".

In all of the above we see essentially the same surrealist motif. It is the motive force that helps us make the journey into our subconscious and discover or to experience, in the most intense way, the existence of a platonic world. A journey that evokes the most sublime aspect on our most quintessential feelings of beauty, virility, pathos, fear, mystery/occult/unknown etc. In my quest for an artistic satisfaction, surrealism has been of foremost consideration and as a consequence, my favourite movies, music, literature, paintings etc are heavily "biased" by this motif. And for this reason some of my favourite works are from juvenile literature, because they contain that surrealistic imagery, like the Bangla ghost story "Bhoot Potrir Deshey" (In the land of ghosts and apparitions) written by Abanindranath Tagore, where in one scene a boy witnesses the full moon falling from the sky and landing and ricochetting on the meadow on a silent night in a sleepy hamlet. Or a Bangla child's fiction I read in my childhood possibly by Bonoful where a boy sees a giant lotus flower rising out of the surface of a lake and heading towards the sky and slowly morphing into a demon and staring threateningly at him. Of course the cartoons I listed above also typify the juvenile literature in this genre. To mention another example, I liked an episode of the 70's TV serial "McMillan and Wife" containing a "Waltz of the Prophets", possibly in the episode "The Devil, You Say"

In some cases only a segment of an artwork contains surrealism. It is quite possible that some artists/performers can unwittingly become a conduit between the surrealistic world and the mundane world in a cameo moment reflected in certain segments of their artwork, evoking that distinct surrealistic feeling. In conclusion I must emphasize that despite my attempt to describe surrelism as best as I could with examples and languages, surrealism is primarily a subjective feeling, very much like mysticism. The "ism" should neither be mistaken as a doctrine nor a statement of truth. Truth requires objectivity and falsifiability, which neither surrelism not mysticism contains. Like the early surrealists, I too view surrealism as more than just an artistic or literary movement. As their writings made it clear, it was to be conceived of as a way of life or state of mind as much at work in everyday existence as in the work of art. Surrealist feeling and thoughts are always present in my conscious mind as well. And it does not anyway conflict with my sense of rationality and certainly rationalism, which I also strongly espouse does not in any way contradicts surrealism, but complements it. The very motivation to share this personal musing was to drive this point about the compatibility between the surrealism, which is a-rational and rationalism.