Nirodbaran

Correspondence with Sri Aurobindo

Second Series

2. Art and Literature

Surrealist Poetry

I am a little disappointed. Every time there is any difficulty in expression, transition etc., etc., you escape always by using the word 'surrealist. What's this blooming surrealism now? At times I have to make a foolish face to people when I can't understand my own expressions.

Why foolish? Make a mystic face and say “It means too much for owls.” The difficulty  is that you all want exact intellectual meanings for these things. A meaning there is, but it can't always be fitted with a right and neat intellectual cap.... My “surrealist” is a joke but not a depreciatory one.

Surrealism is a new phrase invented only the other day and I am not really sure what it conveys. According to some it is a dream-poetry making¹ a deeper truth, a deeper reality than the surface reality. I don't know if this is the whole theory or only one side or phase of the practice. Baudelaire as a surrealist is a novel idea, nobody ever called him that before. Mallarmé, Verlaine, and others used to be classed as impressionist poets, sometimes as symbolists. But now the surrealists seem to claim descent from these poets.

People think I am just rioting in fancy and meaninglessness – with no real transitions from one part to another. Would you say I am expressing dreams from what we call the vital plane – dreams without link or reason?

This is the gibe of the orthodox school of critics or readers – certainly the surrealists would not agree with it – they would claim they have got at a deeper line of truth and meaning than the intellectual.

Transitions are not there of a mental logic. Not palpable on the surface but palpable to a deeper vision.

How do you say the vital dreams have no link or reason? They have their own coherence, only the physical mind cannot always get at the clue by following which the coherence would unroll itself. For that matter the sequences of physical existence are coherent to us only because we are accustomed to it and our reason has made up a meaning out of it. But subject it to the view of a different consciousness and it becomes an incoherent phantasmagoria. That is how the Mayavadins or Schopenhauer would speak of it, the former say deliberately that dream-sequences and life-sequences stand on the same footing, only they have another structure. Each is real and consequent to itself, though neither, they would say, is real or consequent in very truth.

17.01.1937

¹ Doubtful reading (Nirodbaran).

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