Sri Aurobindo

Letters of Sri Aurobindo

CWSA 27

Fragment ID: 7043

Surrealism [4]

Now I find that in spite of your long letters, I haven’t yet grasped what this blessed surrealism is.

I wrote very clearly in my letter to Dilip [published on pages 424 – 26] that I did not know myself what Surrealism is since I have not studied either surrealistic theory or surrealistic literature. I gathered from what I have read – reviews, citations – that it was dream-consciousness of a lower type (therefore incoherent and often ugly). I also explained at great length in another letter that there was a Dream Consciousness of a higher type. Are these distinctions really so difficult to understand?

19 February 1937