Surrealist automatism.
I came across the phrase in a blog I read. Yes, blogs still exist in the age of TikTok.
Anyway, the phrase means a method of making art by dragging
a pencil, paintbrush, or other means of marking across a chosen canvas as the
conscious and objective mind is set aside to allow the subconscious to render
whatever it will. Andre Masson was a surrealist who pioneered the method in the
1920s, and you can find his sketches hanging in the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
Hilma af Klint was also such an artist, but it’s said that she claimed her art
came from a more spiritual connection than just the subconscious, something
more akin to “automatic writing.”
When I learned about the process, I thought it might be just
the ticket for my overstressed and anxious brain. So, I tried it out. The
results are what you see above.
What astonished me was how difficult it was for me to do. I just
could not relax enough to keep an even flow. Several times, my mind stopped the
process. “What meeting do I have next Thursday?” “Did I break next week’s
classes into fifteen-minute blocks yet?” “I need to review everything on the to-do
list thus far for the new draft.” “Is that a new notification?” “Oh God, what’s
the breaking news?” And my favorite: “Am I doing this right?”
In a process where the creative subconscious is meant to
freely flow, I wasn’t sure if I was “doing it right.”
Everywhere I turned there were walls. I suppose it isn’t
surprising as my whiney response to most requests these days is “You know how
much shit I have to do?” or my wife’s favorite, “Sigh. I’m a busy man.” Here we
are in the primaveral phase of the year…but my mind feels frozen in a
never-ending doom loop of “What’s the next problem I have to solve?”
It should therefore come as no surprise that I’ve written
nothing in the past year. Nada. Zip. Squat. I mean, sure, I’ve written emails
and endless comments on student work, but really *written*? Nothing. Nothing new
creatively either fictional or nonfictional. Part of what stops me cold
mid-process is the internal editor/publishing department asking, “It doesn’t matter
a bit if you like this. Is there a market for it?” The other, far more significant
factor in the scheme of the process, is that nothing is coming out of the
spigot. Not even brown water.
That might be what scares me most.
