AUTOMATISM
Written by Andre'Breton
On 27 September 1933 (around eleven at night, as I was trying to fall asleep earlier than usual) , I once more recorded such a series of words, not provoked by anything conscious in me. Although spoken as if by an actor offstage, they were quite distinct and, to what is aptly called the interior ear, constituted a remarkably autonomous group. I have been forced at various times to turn my attention to these particular verbal formations which, in any given case, can appear very rich or very poor in sense but- at least by the suddenness of their passage and by the total, conspicuous lack of hesitation which reveals the manner in which they are brought to us-bring to mind such an exceptional certainty that one does not hesitate to examine them in greater depth. Plunged each day into the fog of received ideas, man is led to conceive of all things and to conceive of himself through a dizzy series of quickly hidden stumbling,of false steps rectified as best as possible.
The fundamental disequilibrium of modern civilized man vainly tries to absorb itself in the artificial concern with minor and transitory equilibriums. The odious crossing out of words increasingly afflicts the written page, crossing out life itself with a stroke of rust. All the "sonnets" that are still written, all this senile horror of spontaneity, all this rationalistic refinement, all the conceit of instructors, all this incapacity to love, conspire to convince us that it is impossible to flee the old house of correction. To correct, to correct one self, to polish, to smooth out, to find fault instead of drawing blindly from the subjective treasure only for the sake of throwing here and there on the sand a handful of emeralds and foaming algae-this is a command which, in art as elsewhere, slavish custom and poorly understood rigor have for centuries asked us to obey. But it is also a command, which has been infringed, historically, in exceptional and fundamental circumstances, Surrealism begins from that point.