Surrealist Joy

[arachnekallisti]

"...beautiful as the chance meeting on a dissecting table of a sewing machine and an umbrella..."
- Comte de Lautréamont

I've always had a bit of a thing for Surrealism. A few years ago, ignisophis and I ran a LARP set on the borders of Dream, which took place in paintings which preserved the dreamscapes of a powerful dream sorceror, and all the characters were named after surrealist artists. I've been reading up on the Surrealists again recently, after being bitten by the desire to write a proper myth-arc for Dark Heresy - but more on that in another post, I don't want to spoiler my players before they get to the surreal goodness.

1. A series of Magritte-inspired poems by Mark Young. Not always successful, but generally interesting.
2. The story of Gef the Talking Mongoose. A particularly bizarre bit of Forteana.
3. A psychological study appears to suggest that surreal experiences improve your pattern recognition capabilities. Clearly you should all play in more of my games.
4. The Codex Seraphinianus is a bizarre surrealist encyclopaedia of an unreal world, written in an invented language that may in fact be utterly meaningless. It's remarkably difficult to get hold of a copy, as the previous printings have been limited in scope and it's extremely rare and valuable. As the_whybird mentioned, it almost has the vibe of an Unknown Armies artifact designed to trap bibliomancers - books are generally valued for the information they contain, but this book is incredibly valuable precisely because it contains no information whatsoever.

"Surrealist beauty is convulsive. That is, you feel it, you don't see it - it exists as an excitation of the nerves. The experience of the beautiful is, like the experience of desire, an abandonment to vertigo, yet the beautiful does not exist as such. What do exist are images or objects that are enigmatic, marvelously erotic – or juxtapositions of objects, or people, or ideas, that arbitrarily extend our notion of the connections it is possible to make. In a way, the beautiful is put at the service of liberty."
- Angela Carter, The Alchemy of the Word

Comments

[markbanang.livejournal.com]

3. How right you are. *;')

[ignisophis.livejournal.com]

For anyone who's interested, our plot document for that LARP is available to read online as an rtf file downloadable from the White City website (http://www.flrp.anang.com/whitecity/larpsums07.html#260507). In addition to the NPC names, each encounter was named after a Magritte painting and we came up with our own written descriptions of surrealist paintings. It's one of the few White City LARPs i think could've worked equally well as a tabletop.

The running had an unexpectedly emotively powerful ending when flannelcat's PC, for whom we primarily wrote it (the powerful dream sorceror was his estranged mother), sacrificed his memories of his mother to an entity in one of the dreamscapes/paintings and ended up disavowing all association with her.

3. One does hope the study came up with a suitable double-blind mechanism to eliminate the possibility that one sample was simply better at pattern-recognition.

4. The Codex Seraphinianus is indeed brilliant, but i take issue with your assertion that it contains no information whatsoever. Perhaps no easily communicable information in one of the modes to which we are accustomed, but with the right analysis it still contains a wealth of information about the author's talents, methods, influences and thought processes; the images are sufficiently derivative of 'real'-world flora, fauna and the like that a certain amount could be reverse-intuited about our world by a hypothetical alien observer who came into possession of the codex; and furthermore, like any medium with no explicitly familiar pattern or message it provides a mirror in which the reader can gain information about their own thought processes.

That is a fantastic Carter quote!

[ignisophis.livejournal.com]

P.S. Re: 3. - I'm impressed that after only one session of your Dark Heresy game you've already got four hardened Inquisitorial Acolytes scared of butterflies ~grin~

[prochytes.livejournal.com]

As noted previously, the Codex is very similar to the works describing Tloen in Borges.