In the book of Zhuangzi there is a passage where Yan Hui declares to Confucius (in Watson's translation):
I smash up my limbs and body, drive out perception and intellect, cast off form, do away with understanding, and make myself identical with the Great Thoroughfare. This is what I mean by sitting down and forgetting everything.
This passage on 坐忘 (sitting-forgetting) provided a template for subsequent meditational practices in Daoism.
The surrealist practice of automatic writing begins with sitting and forgetting. I quote from two important guides to the practice:
Having settled down in some spot most conducive to the mind's concentration upon itself, order writing material to be brought to you. Let your state of mind be as passive and receptive as possible. Forget your genius, talents, as well as the genius and talents of others.
- André Breton, First Manifesto of Surrealism
Take a hand, paper, ink, and a pen with a new nib, and settle yourself comfortably at your table. Now forget all your worries, forget that you are married, that your child has whooping-cough, that you are Catholic, that you are a senator, that you are a disciple of Auguste Comte or of Schopenhauer, forget antiquity, the literature of all countries at all times. You no longer want to know what is logical and what is not, you no longer want to know anything except what you are going to be told.
- Benjamin Péret, in a guide to automatic writing collected in A Menagerie in Revolt.
The casual way in which Breton and Péret express this forgetfulness suggests it is an attitude that can be entered in a moment. But this forgetfulness is also a fundamental current running through all surrealist practices, manifesting in surrealists' love for objective chance, collective play, and all methods that work to dissolve, transmute, or annihilate concepts of self, aesthetics, morality, etc. that hamper revelation. So this forgetfulness is also a long-term cultivation.
In his later work on automatic writing, "The Automatic Message," Breton notes how some automatic texts were compromised by the writers' attachment to their conception of their own talents and aesthetic sensibilities:
This viewpoint of artistic talent, with the incredible vanity that is attached to it, is naturally not foreign to the internal and external causes of mistrust which, in surrealism, have prevented automatic writing from fulfilling all its promises. Originally the aim was simply to grasp involuntary verbal representation and fix it on the page without imposing on it any kind of qualitative judgment. However, critical comparisons have not failed to raise questions regarding the degree of richness or elegance, in this or that person, of the interior language. In this game an execrable poetic rivalry soon demanded its due.
On the other hand an inevitable delectation (after the fact) in the very terms of the texts obtained, and particularly in the images and symbolic figurations abounding in them, has had a secondary effect of diverting most of their authors from the inattention and indifference which, at least during the production of such texts, must be maintained. This attitude, instinctive in those who are used to appreciating poetic value, has had the vexing consequence of giving the participant an immediate awareness of each part of the message received.
In the same work Breton also rejects an automatism that affects an external inspiration:
contrary to what spiritualism proposes — that is, the dissociation of the subject’s psychological personality - surrealism proposes nothing less than the unification of that personality. For us, obviously, the question of the externality of the ‘voice’ (to repeat for the sake of simplification) could not even be raised.
The dissolution of self-identity is not in favor of an Other, but integration of those aspects of the personality ignored, despised, obscured, or deemed foreign, which opens an ever more expanding and ambiguous apprehension of the contours and limits of this personality.
All of this is to say that, for the explorer in automatism, forgetfulness is an ongoing practice, as well as a step in the process of automatic writing. For my part I intend to pay more attention to this forgetfulness, give it more time and breathing space, when I sit down to write.
No comments:
Post a Comment