The Surreal Life

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'I like to use the unexpected to jolt audiences into an awareness that their everyday lives don't necessarily make logical sense,' says D'Amour, an admirer of Breton whose latest play 'ends with people pulling flowers out of each other's eyes.'

But the real impact of surrealism on our culture is both broader and deeper. Eric Lorberer, editor of the surrealist-friendly literary review Rain Taxi, points out that 'it's been said that there's more surrealism in 15 minutes of MTV than in the last 20 years of the art world. We have absorbed so much surrealism, almost without realizing it, in our advertising and our media culture that it's hard to think outside of it.'

For Lorberer, we mostly experience surrealism in its descendant, postmodernism, a steady flow of incongruous, often disconnected images from many times and places. We flip from the History Channel to CNN to ads that Dal? might have created; the Internet takes us on an even wilder ride around the world and from psyche to psyche. Our daily lives are full of encounters with people from different cultures and other surprises of a thousand kinds. Although sophisticated artists can make postmodernism meaningful, for many of us it's a psychic overload from which we seek relief in everything from simplicity circles to suburban 'safety.' But we may tune out too much. 'The problem,' Lorberer says, 'is that we are likely to put blinders on and just sit in our cubicles, hiding from the marvelous in our lives.'

What if we went the other way and reclaimed our own experience in a surrealist spirit? If advertising and music videos have trained us to appreciate a surreal flow of discontinuities, then we ought to be able to enjoy them, creatively and intentionally, in our own lives: the Arabic we hear at the corner store, the anime comics in the bookstore rack, the bizarre profusion of the supermarket, mixed with our dreams and fantasies. A transition from being overwhelmed 'consumers of images' to empowered artists of the everyday could begin with a shift of attitude from postmodern prostration to surrealist elation.

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