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What if you slept? And what if, in you sleep, you dreamed? And what if, in your dream, you went to Heaven and there plucked a rare and beautiful flower? And what if, when you awoke, you had the flower in your hand? Ah, what then? Samuel Taylor Coleridge [1772-1834]
The automatic writing was raised by the surrealist movement in the early twentieth century. It is a “Psychic automatism in its pure state, by which one proposes to express -- verbally, by means of the written word, or in any other manner -- the actual functioning of thought. Dictated by the thought, in the absence of any control exercised by reason, exempt from any aesthetic or moral concern.” [1] This method allowed access to an uninterrupted flow of words that appear to come from the unconscious. But, how the unconscious can be constituted as language and speak properly? There would be an unconscious thought, activating a kind of theater in the brain, independent of the subject control? And how can I attribute to me this unconscious thought, if I cannot control it?[1] BRETON, Andre. Surrealist Manifesto
In the evening, just before entering the dream, I begin to observe a series of stories in my mind: some children who run, a conversation in a country house, a drizzle in a distant landscape. Just at the time that I am aware of it, disappears. It does not belong to me, I can not think, I can barely remember. According Borges, the lyrical poem Kubla Khan was dreamt by Coleridge in the eighteenth century, after reading a text on building a palace, dreamed by the mogol emperor Kublai Khan in the thirteenth century. "Perhaps an archetype not revealed still to men, an eternal object, is gradually entering into the world; its first manifestation was the palace, second, the poem." [1] Poem and palace were given to different persons at different times through the dream. As if that strange object wanted to exist and revealed itself in dreams. This eternal object, these series of stories in my mind just before entering the dream: where they come from? Who creates them?
In a meeting of the surrealist movement, Tristan Tzara proposed to create a poem removing words of a hat. As a result, he was expelled from the movement. The idea went against the automatic writing because the flow of words came not from a psychic automatism, but from an arbitrary strange instance, a purely artificial production, precisely the way of Brion Gysin using words as images to compose a collage of text. William Burroughs, Gyson's friend, rigorously applied these ideas to writing methods such as cut up, fold in or splice in. The exciting thing about these random and even chaotic methods is its potential for becoming. With the possibility to produce everything, achieve a sort of machinic power that will always create dissimilar results, an efficiency that will never remain silent, a conscience that will always have something to say.
I am always perplexed when I open a Beckett’s book. Phrases grammatically incorrect but full of sonority, alterations of syntax to introduce literary unthinkable spaces, unconnected ideas, whole stories without punctuation, loaded with beautiful repetitions of words and thoughts. Beckett's world addresses the domination that language has on the thinking and creativity of man, destroying the established codes and introducing new orders. The rupture and reprogramming of language that his work implies, does not prevent him from making literature, tell histories, evoke psychological states. The new processes allow contact with new spaces, which conventional grammar cannot achieve. This questioning of language operates to formal level but also mental. Their characters have lost the contact with reality because language is no longer linking the inside-outside, designating things and creating them. A signifier-signified rupture prevents Molloy the contact with world: “The words I heard were heard for the first time, as pure sounds, free of any meaning… The words I spoke seemed to me like a buzz insect" [1] Indeed, if the words disappear, things continue to exist for us? And if they continue to exist, would mean something?[1] BECKETT, Samuel. Molloy
The artificial production methods can create meaningful texts without knowledge or talent. Writing available to everyone. The language itself seems to have implied some secret possibilities obscured by traditional methods. When the flow of words comes from the person’s thought -consciously or unconsciously-, the result is submitted to the closed universe of self -my pictures, memories-, all the poverty of an inner world of which I can not escape. How to accede to a space in which writing itself would reveal it flows? What machinery use to attain an exterior flow, outside the closed universe of self?