Surrealism

I used to enjoy some crazy paintings circulated in chain mails. I once read about Salvador Dali. He is one of the famous surrealists of 20th century. If we go deep into our thoughts, at one point we would find that dream and reality merge together. This is the point, which is captured in surrealistic painting, literature or music.That is my understanding, though.

Surrealist movements originated in Europe (France) after the end of first world war, in 1930s. The beginning of surrealism is interesting, because the era of psychoanalysis had come to a peak in that period (Sigmund Freud died in 1939, if I am right). Both surrealists and psychoanalysts observed the dreams, but from different angles. The interest of surrealists was in representing dreams with its whole mystery, while psychoanalysts considered that dreams-not-interpreted were just like unopened letters. The former was like religion and the latter was like science!

However, the surrealistic ideas raise one fundamental question: what is the guarantee that what we are living now is reality and not just a dream?! Until you wake up, you never know that you are dreaming. Even in Zen, we can find similar concepts like surrealism.

The surrealistic pictures reminded a beautiful poem written by Kavikko Abdul Rahman on a famous painting of Salvador Dali, "Persistence of memory". I read it in a Tamil magazine, Junior Vikatan (~1988). I will try to translate and post it in some other occasion. I have heard that Kalki used to sleep in Thanjavoor temple and he created several scenes in Ponniyin Selvan based on his dreams. Could it be surrealism?!