Slicing Open the Eyeball: Rick Poynor on Surrealism and the Visual Unconscious

MD: Your dream of discovering the mind-stretchingly alien, uncanny, or dreamlike alternate realities latent in the everyday reminds me of Walter Benjamin’s concept of “profane illumination,” his term in his 1929 essay “Surrealism: The Last Snapshot of the European Intelligentsia” for Surrealism’s ability to make us see the world around us in radically dislocating ways, transforming the heimlich into the unheimlich without warning.

What I’m curious to know is: what specific, concrete instances can you cite, either in your writings or undocumented personal experience, of first-person encounters with a surreality? Can you talk about moments in your mental life when the ontological ground has suddenly dropped away and you’ve found yourself peering into the vertiginous abyss of “the fantastic, the unaccountable…in ordinary experience and everyday life, the moments when something unexpected but deeply thrilling is suddenly manifest”?

RP: Here’s something that happened two days ago. (I don’t know how “vertiginous” it will sound.) I was visiting my elderly mother for lunch and we were looking through old family photographs, a perfectly pleasant and ordinary way to pass the time. My mother would be the first to admit that she is not the greatest photographer and several pictures had peculiar blurs in the corner: her finger obscuring the lens. Most of the photos in this particular album were entirely unexceptional snapshot views. Then we came to a picture, once again with the telltale blur, that showed a road stretching into the distance with carpets of deep snow coming down on either side to the asphalt, except where areas of rocky ground, forming three curious irregular shapes, emerged from the whiteness. The road itself was entirely without snow. A white-haired man unknown to my mother was walking down the road with his back to her. There were other walkers at intervals in the distance, but no vehicles. Two clouds hung in the sky very low over the land. On the back of the photo, my mother had written “View from Highest Point.”

Now it’s safe to say that she had taken no trouble over this picture. She hadn’t composed it with any deliberation, it didn’t show anything she wanted to remember years later, and it was spoilt by an unsightly blur. Yet inside this failed image, with only minimal adjustments required, I could immediately discern a wonderfully enigmatic tableau, a place both familiar and strange that I yearned to inhabit myself, a scene I might even call surreal, if I were ever to use this drained and lifeless qualifier. I took the picture home, scanned it, cropped the bottom third to eliminate the finger blur and a distracting section of road, and the top to remove some unnecessary sky. This gave greater presence within the image to the clouds, which had the exaggerated white cloud-essence of a painting by Magritte. Enlarging the picture a little, I printed it out. Now the unknown man, standing dead center and casting a thin shadow at an angle to the rocks, was unambiguously the protagonist, contemplating the scene before him like one of Caspar David Friedrich’s romantic adventurers in the wilderness, except that he wasn’t alone.

Since chancing upon this image-within-an-image two days ago, I keep going back to it. The Surrealists used the term hasard objectif (objective chance) to describe the process by which the force of our unconscious desire seems to attract the object of its fulfillment. The revelatory operations of the chance encounter lie at the heart of le merveilleux (“the marvelous”)—the Surrealist conception of beauty. You find something marvelous in the world (an object, an image, a person, a place) that corresponds, like a piece clicking into a puzzle, to a deep inner need.

MD: Of course, most of us rely more on Google, these days, than on objective chance to summon up the obscure objects of our desire. To go meta for a moment, I’m wondering if you think the mind-splintering impact of serendipitous discoveries such as your adolescent encounter with Surrealism: Permanent Revelation was a product, in retrospect, of the difficulty of sleuthing out such cultural wormholes into alternate universes? To what degree was their affect on you bound up in your giddy sense of being a member of a secret society, perhaps the only person in your social world who’d stumbled on this concealed trapdoor into the cultural unconscious?

If this sounds like a thinly disguised apologia for hipsterism, I’m not the first to have had this thought: in the comment thread to a Steven Johnson post about the Web as “the greatest serendipity engine in the history of culture,” a skeptical reader named Alan Jacobs compares the experience of stumbling on the obscure (and obscurely charming) word “solleret” while combing through the OED in search of another word—a direct result of the information architecture of all dictionaries—to the experience of chancing on something rich and strange on the Web:

My “solleret” discovery was unique to me: other people know the word, of course, but very, very few discovered it the way I did. But when I come across something random on the net—for example, a blogger I read to learn more about the Mac happens to link to a YouTube video of a phenomenal ukulele player—thousands upon thousands of people make that discovery nearly simultaneously with me. There is a unique pleasure in discovering something all by yourself.

Johnson makes the utilitarian case that the Web has, in a sense, automated the phenomenon of objective chance, mainstreaming discoveries like yours of Permanent Revelation. Search engines and bloggers who curate collections of links make effortlessly available to the mass of Websurfers an experience that, back in the day, was the hard-won fruit of a gnawing curiosity and a willingness to root around in the unfrequented corners of the culture, and thus was limited to an intrepid minority.

Yet he doesn’t consider the possibility that while the million now have instant access to the subcultural fringe, not to mention a magic cabinet of curiosities stuffed to infinity with ideas and images from other times and other cultures, the ease of that access may—may, I’m at pains to emphasize—be draining such encounters of their profundity. How marvelous can the marvelous be when we encounter it daily, with no more effort than scrolling down the front page of Boing Boing?

In a recent interview, the fashion designer Anna Sui told me, “I think that because of the immediacy of the Internet, and the availability, images aren’t as precious.” Growing up in the ‘70s, she said, she “couldn’t wait” for the latest issue of Life magazine: “I was hoping that they would write about London. Finding a rock magazine that would have a small picture of somebody on Portobello road—those kinds of things, they meant so much. Now you can spend 20 minutes and find 100 pictures, [but] it doesn’t burn into your brain the way it did before.”

What do you think? Is the currency of wonder deflating, in the age of instant access for everyone?

RP: This is an issue that weighs on my mind, for the reasons you give. Anyone who made formative discoveries before the Internet, far from the beaten path of ordinary social concerns, is acutely aware of moments of mind-altering private revelation that might never have happened, or might not have happened with the same life-perturbing intensity, after the Internet. People whose mental world was shaped later, taking digital super-abundance for granted, will find this hard to grasp without an effort of empathy and imagination. While digital optimists might have expected the vertiginous cascade of free-flowing information, unprecedented in history, to provoke a mass sense of wonder, has that actually happened? The crushing banality of the top Google search stats suggests otherwise.

Value comes from difficulty and scarcity. What can be gained too easily, with no personal effort, will be valued less. Mass experiences available to everyone at the same button click are fine, but that’s not what we are talking about with the Surrealist idea of chance encounter. The cultivation of a sensibility is an act of self-conscious individualism (there are reasons why this may be waning, but that’s another discussion). A refined sense of wonder requires us to venture out on a private trajectory—no, that’s too purposive—a drift through the world. This will be our path. The meanings we find on the path will be our meanings. Of course, this is the mission of the Baudelairean flâneur, the Surrealist wanderer in Paris in the 1920s, the Situationist on a dérive in the 1950s, all responding with poetically sharpened senses to the city’s matrix of atmospheric signals and cues. To discover things for yourself is to exercise and develop your will, to choose what you will become. The Internet is useful here (for me too) to the extent that it propels us out of the door. But it’s a mistake to depend on it for everything.

I chose the photograph as an example because there is only one copy of that picture, it was selected by me and is meaningful to me for reasons that might not register for anyone else, and I like it that way. (I wondered whether we should show it here. I have my answer now.)

These experiences are still available to us whenever we choose to seek them. If images are losing their meaning and we care about the loss, then take steps to recapture their meaning. Why do we feel we have to expose ourselves to so many unchosen influences that only deplete and demoralize us? Turn away, look elsewhere, fix on something of genuine private significance instead. The re-enchantment of the ordinary and obsolete has always been a vital project of Surrealism. The movement’s abiding concerns are those of anyone with senses peeled open to the non-market-defined possibilities of living.