File spoon-archives/surrealist.archive/surrealist_1997/97-01-28.224, message 109


From: Stuart Inman <S.Inman-AT-greenwich.ac.uk>
Date:          Mon, 9 Dec 1996 18:53:39 GMT
Subject:       Re: what is surreality?


Dear Davey

As you have bothered to ask I shall try to reply, and start by saying 
that you have got it all back to font and upside down!

Firstly it isn't metaphysical (or at least I'd need to know what YOU 
mean by metaphysical).
Secondly it isn't a twilight zone.
Thirdly it isn't semi-real or quasi-real.

You can certainly say that it is where imagination and outside 
reality overlap, but without imagination there is no outside reality, 
or rather there is no experience of it.

Surrealism is the experience of the greatest degree of reality. 
Imagination made real, the imaginary nature of reality realised.

Each aspect alone is unreal, incomplete. Together, they comprise of 
great reality, an open totality of what is and its possible meanings.

This can neither abandon the social nor the imaginary aspects, the 
subjective and objective poles of our experience. The collision that 
obliterates their apparent dichotomy is a zone of lightning, not of 
twilight. Everything else is twilight, the sad days we sped trying to 
piece together enough reality to get by, compromise on our desires 
until they are lukewarm cardboard rather than fire.

Stuart


   

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