A Surreal Experience

In Paris just after the Great War, two young men came to blows outside a theater on the Champs-Elysees. They were fighting over the ownership of an idea.

The winner of the fight had trained in medicine and psychiatry, and had used Sigmund Freud's psychoanalytic ideas to help treat the victims of shell-shock among the returning soldiers. His name was Andre Breton.

He won the fight and, by that means, his claim to be the sole founder of Surrealism, an extraordinary artistic movement of writers, artists, musicians, and philosophers. Although factional at its theoretical core--put simplistically, it gives primacy to the irrational over reason-- Surrealism, for all its conflicts and off-shoots, is now generally considered the brainchild of Monsieur Breton, fisticuffs notwithstanding.

In June of 1950, riding in a car with a friend along the Cele River, Breton came upon the village of Saint Cirq Lapopie. He wrote, "[It] was blazing with Bengal Fire, like an impossible rose in the night. It was love at first sight and the next morning, I returned to the temptation, to the heart of this flower - it had ceased to flame, but remained intact."

Breton went on to write that "above any other place in the world, in America or Europe, Saint Cirq Lapopie is my one place of enchantment: the one fixed forever. I stopped wanting to be elsewhere."

In the arts, Surrealism attracted and spawned artists as great and diverse as Miro,

Klee, Giacometti, Ernst, Man Ray, Magritte, and Dali. Surrealism also claims many writers, musicians, playwrights, and film makers among its adherents. And its political effect has been vast, from the French student revolts in 1968 (whose slogan, drawn from Surrealist philosophy, was "All power to the imagination") to post-modern crtiques of contemporary society.

It is a great story, but not this one. In the early 1950s, Andre Breton bought a house in Saint Cirq Lapopie (see photo) and spent every summer there until his death in 1966. About the village, he wrote "I think the secret of its poetry resembles that of some of Rimbaud's illuminations....Each day on awakening, it seems to me that I open the window onto the richest of hours, not only of art but of nature and life."

Breton's house is just behind our own. We had no idea of this when we bought ours. We are now, at the very least, spiritual neighbors. Surreal.

By Rimbaud (translated by John Ashbery):

I am the saint, at prayer on the terrace . . .

I am the learned scholar in the dark armchair . . .

I am the walker on the great highway . . .

I gaze for a long time at the melancholy gold laundry of the setting sun.