Mind Storms
 

Surrealism began in the early 1920's as a literary movement that sought to experiment with automatic writing and the unexpected expressions born out of the unconscious mind.  Officially consecrated as a political and philosophical movement in 1924 with Andre Breton's Manifesto of Surrealism, Surrealism was not merely an aesthetic movement, but one that endeavored to shake the middle-class and allow a space for a new way of viewing the world.  Unlike the earlier Dada movement, a primarily anti-war movement that protested cultural values and focused on anti-art in an attempt to destroy bourgeois culture, Surrealists aimed instead to seek out the imaginative response of the unconscious and break away from what they considered to be a false rationality.  Breton, a trained psychiatrist, found the dream-theories of Sigmund Freud to be paramount in the philosophy of the movement, particularly those theories pertaining to free-association and the language of unconscious dreams.  Andre Breton defined Surrealism in his Manifesto of Surrealism as

Dictionary: Surrealism, n. Pure psychic automatism, by which one proposes to express, either verbally, in writing, or by any other manner, the real functioning of thought.  Dictation of thought in the absence of all control exercised by reason, outside of all aesthetic and moral preoccupation.

Encyclopedia: Surrealism. Philosophy. Surrealism is based on the belief in the superior reality of certain forms of previously neglected associations, in the omnipotence of dream, in the disinterested play of thought.  It tends to ruin once and for all other psychic mechanisms and to substitute itself for them in solving all the principal problems of life.

Throughout Early Occult Memory Systems of the Lower Midwest, B.H. Fairchild references a number of Surrealist writers and artists, including Marc Chagall, Guillaume Apollinaire, and Andre Breton.  From 'Part Three' on, Fairchild's poetry moves dramatically from the themes of his childhood—working class values, the melancholy of economic distress, and the way of life in small-town 1950's America—to the evolution of himself as an artist, a progress in which Surrealism plays a significant role.  The three poems he attributes to Roy Eldridge Garcia and "At the Cafe' de Flore" are particularly influenced by Surrealism, utilizing the unexpected connections of phrases and an unconscious, dream-like quality of language, eschewing logical reason.  As in "The Levitations," these poems read like dream-sequences:

Even from such a distance, positioned above one of the raging gargoyles, Maria was able to reassure him, It's only a kind of mind storm, the clouds of Ulro, the bad weather of the turning soul, and you need not to pray but to wake up.  Wake up, she whispered, wake up.

The waking up that the speaker claims 'he' needs to experience is not the literal waking up of a sleeper into wakefulness, but the awakening of the mind fettered by banality and false rationality into the liberated state of the dream.  This type of foray into Surrealist aesthetics is also found in "The Memory Palace," and throughout a number of the later poems that turn away from a world of plain logical reasoning to one steeped in the organic, impromptu language of unconscious thought processes and dreams.

--Sasha Irby