Do not be cross with poetry

[Leanne]

I'll see what billy can do to make it wunderbar.  During the meanwhilst:

Surrealism

Surrealism is an artistic and literary movement that explores the imagination as it is revealed in dreams.  It was a reaction against what the artists saw as destruction caused by the “rationalism” of the dominant European culture that had resulted in the horrors of World War I.  

Surrealism was heavily influenced by the work of Sigmund Freud and sought to “reunite” the worlds of fantasy and reality.  Surrealists consider the unconscious as the base of the imagination that is normally untapped.  


Absurdism

Absurdism is a philosophical idea that the desperate search for humanity to find any meaning in existence is ultimately doomed to fail, because of the sheer volume of information and the idea that the more you know, the more you know that you don’t know.  However, absurdism works on the idea that even though you know it’s absurd to search for meaning, you will anyway – because accepting that there are no ultimate answers means that you’re free to accept limitless possibilities.  

Both absurdism and surrealism rely on the suspension of disbelief, which means that to understand it you need to be prepared to let go of rational (logical) thought and accept that what you think you already know doesn’t actually matter all that much.  We already do this to a certain extent; for example, you know that a magician isn’t really sawing a woman in half, but that doesn’t mean you can’t enjoy the show.  You know that Jack and Rose weren’t real people, but you still cry when the Titanic sinks on the screen.  You know that there’s no such thing as two-dimensional yellow people with four fingers on each hand, but you still watch The Simpsons.  

Sometimes, you just need to take it a little bit further and accept what’s given to you as an invitation to think differently.  When breaking down a surrealist/ absurdist text, try to briefly describe the elements (objects, colours, phrases etc) and then let them sink in; forget about trying to decipher them according to what you already know, and let them suggest ideas to you, no matter how strange they seem.