In searching and seeking out the hidden fears within our minds eye, the unconscious desires of our dark fantasies, the screams of the madness inside us all, drawing these out into the realm of awarness, making those ethereal concepts become real, then casting off the accepted reality of the mundane, we find our true purpose, and realize the message peculiar to each of us. The unique message without which we are mere chattel in this existence, each of us unconscious and alone surviving merely in a singular dimension. Only by becoming cognizant and developing the acumen of existence, can we actualize the unique perspective and perceive the subtle disparity between the internal self and the contrived reality of one’s own current existence.
The key then is to be different from what is perceived as normal. That seems easy but it’s really a rather subtle concept. Last year I said, “Embrace weirdness, normal is boring”. I’m reaching to understand why I believe that. I extended the simple concept, an unthinking utterance on my part, to a sort of mantra for myself; and then I found that this concept is much like the idea of surrealism if one allows weirdness, in my instance, to be equivalent to the unconscious self.
I wish I had come up with this for last years theme. It still is possible to relate this to the theme for 2006 since fear and hope relate to unconscious desires. The concept of surrealism was born in the 1930’s which seems related to the font and style of the artwork on the current bman mailings, this being reminiscent of the socialist movement which occured about the same time.



Excerpt from Nadja, 1928 :

"Who am I? If this once I were to rely on a proverb, then perhaps everything would amount to knowing whom I 'haunt.' I must admit that this last word is misleading, tending to establish between certain beings and myself relations that are stranger, more inescapable, more disturbing than I intended. Such a word means much more than it says, makes me, still alive, play a ghostly part, evidently referring to what I must have ceased to be in order to be who I am. Hardly distorted in this sense, the word suggests t hat what I regard as the objective, more or less de liberate manifestations of my existence are merely the premises, within the limits of this existence, of an activity whose true extent is quite unknown to me. My image of the "ghost," including everything conventional about its appearance as well as its blind submission to certain contingencies of time and place, is particularly significant for me as the finite representation of a torment that may be eternal. Perhaps my life is nothing but an image of this kind; perhaps I am doomed to retrace my steps under the illusion that I am exploring, doomed to try and learn what I should simply recognize learning a mere fraction of what I have forgotten. This sense of myself seems inadequate only insofar as it presupposes myself, arbitrarily preferring a completed image of my mind which need not be reconciled with time, and insofar as it implies-within this same time-an idea of irreparable loss, of punishment, of a fall whose lack of moral basis is, as I see it, indisputable. What matters is that the particular aptitudes my day-to-day life gradually reveals should not distract me from my search for a general aptitude which would be peculiar to me and which is not innate. Over and above the various prejudices I acknowledge, the affinities I feel, the attractions I succumb to, the events which occur to me and to me alone-over and above a sum of movements I am conscious of making, of emotions I alone experience-I strive, in relation to other men, to discover the nature, if not the necessity, of my difference from them. Is it not precisely to the degree I become conscious of this difference that I shall recognize what I alone have been put on this earth to do, what unique message I alone may bear, so that I alone can answer for its fate?"

Andre Breton, 1928


"The idea of surrealism tends quite simply towards the total recuperation of our psychic strength by a means that is none other than the vertiginous descent into ourselves, the systematic illumination of hidden places and the progressive darkening of other places, the perpetual promenade in the midst of forbidden zones."
-- Andre Breton, 1930