Saturday, January 17, 2009
Surrealism ... Synchronicity
Andre Breton in his first Manifesto of Surrealism (1924) is surely talking about synchronicity. He says: "Everything is valid when it comes to obtaining the desired suddenness from certain associations."
Or maybe it's chaos theory, that seemingly random association that creates something of sense or something or of a sensory cohesiveness. Breton says: "If such and such a sentence of mine turns out to be somewhat disappointing, at least momentarily, I place my trust in the following sentence to redeem its sins: I carefully refrain from starting it over again or polishing it. The only thing that might prove fatal to me would be the slightest loss of impetus. Words, groups of words which follow one another, manifest among themselves the greatest solidarity."
No word is accidental. No word or group of words lacks value or is orphaned from some wider train of thought, some nonlinear, but nonetheless, meaningful order.
I wonder what effect Surrealism had on Jung, walking away from the footsteps of Freud, whose psychoanalytic theories launched Breton? How is Jung's collective unconscious - and the ability for each of us to tap into this mine - different from the collective word games of the Surrealists? I imagine inter-relationships among all of them. That's the play of synchronicity.
at 10:39 AM