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Surrealism and the Sacred by Celia Rabinovitch,

Across the spectrum of religious experiences—from the archaic and chthonic experience of sacred power to organized religion—surrealism arises in that elusive threshold between the sacred and the profane, between the illuminations and of everyday life and the more formal expressions of the sacred. The mysterious, contradictory nature of this liminal zone is embodied in surrealist literature and art: matter becomes metaphor; the ordinary object becomes extraordinary; and images evoke emotional disturbance and ambiguity rather than specific ideas. The ambivalent force of the surreal resists conventional rational categories of intellectual discourse. Behind its elusive potency of mood and charged associations lie the fundamental ambivalence and non rational power of the sacred.

Comments

is this not the case?

The cthonic, primal power is the soiurce of poetry, not irony.

JTA

Yes; but I wouldn't bind irony

author comment

I wouldn't bind anything, thats what freedom and creativity feed on

We don't have to be any kind of ist
Isms frame context for comprehension

In 1917 an intellectual motive had to be assigned to abstraction because people didn't know what they where looking at Today abstraction makes perfect sense

I don't think your a great writer because your a surrealist I think you are great and surrealism is your vehicle and if you disposed of it you'd still be great

author comment

you!

JTA

Delighted by your rambling My contribution is simply this I have had experiences that are certainly inexplicable by science by not out side of endless theoretical conjecture I think if we define truth as eternal because if it is the least bit ephemeral or transitory it can not be ultimately true Truth does not come and go and it can not end if it is true Everything else ultimately is transitory like the weather

Ie The concreate reality we look to for objectification is just another delusion / illusion We only have to look to our own mortality to confirm that. Strangely what is truth must be transcendental beyond form and self effulgent
Enter surrealism and dada as fragments of another dimension, the treasure trove of images mistakenly pawned off by literalists as nonsense because it is to difficult to penetrate beyond their own limitations of physical substance If we look to the quantum world we get a taste of subtlety that we find unintelligible in the realm of the senses

author comment

We habitate in a dense realm with all the underpinnings to persuade us we live in an irreducible concrete reality yet when creatures flicker out of perceivable existence, as we do, what is that telling you? Is it telling you that all we think believe feel and perceive is transitory? If there is an underling ineffable self effulgent reality that is permanent and a source of this one; what does that tell you about how you see things? It tells me what we see hear feel taste and touch is limited to our finite perception ie we are getting very limited information How do you perceive a multi dimensional universe in an infinite sea of multi-universes with finite comprehension?
Metaphorically speaking how does an ant understand its own existence?

author comment
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