How to Escape your own Skin

Traveling. Getting Lost. An old habit of mine, a vice. Nothing quite like the exquisite joy one can find in disorientation, in a swift and relentless dance through layer after layer of unknown and unmapped alien atmospheres. To lose ourselves, in order that we might find a thousand strange new selves. A thousand strange new realities. They are waiting for us, these untouched maybe-selves, these unthought realities…Over there, see ‘em? Behind that sticky pink membrane of the Outside-Other? Yeah, that’s where those little critters live. Kinda weird, eh? Listen, if you put your ear to that barrier, you might even be able hear them. Crawling ‘round and licking. Sensed, but unseen. Until we voyage out, that is, until we commit to travel. At its heart, isn’t all surrealist activity exactly this? Our laughing automatic muse takes the wheel, and off we fly, bound for whoknowswhere. A map? No, sorry, maps don’t exist in this place. The roads here are ever changing, metamorphosis, the only constant. The traveler and the destination? To us, both are equally unimportant. No, it’s the process which matters to us, it’s the trip. We stand before that obsidian eye of an infinite world, all open-closed, all blinking-unblinking, and we surrender to the experience of pure ontological openness. We cut off our arms, dive deep into river. And we float, and we wash up in peculiar new lands. In lands peopled by some very strange people. Remember that old dream of your youth? Of hitting the road with absolutely no destination in mind, and just driving?

Step 1: First, one must expand the above mentioned dreamwish over one’s entire life, over one’s every action, every thought. One must pluck out the traitorous lips eyes ears of this somnambule ragdoll, and plug them up with said wish. And Smile.

Step 2: Next, one must stumble around blindly, becoming an epileptic, space age Zatoichi. Transgressing every border, crossing every arbitrary line. One should continue parading until one stubs one’s toe on some skittering ganglia of the Marvelous, evaporates, and becomes sudden alchemical gold. In other words, it’s Pure Psychic Automatism baby! It’s a big yee-haw!

So, what does Surrealism actually want of us?
I mean, really?
Just this, friend: Surrealism wishes for you to Escape Your Own Skin.

So don’t get lazy, friend. Don’t stay at home, don’t check out, don’t flip on that oh-so-familiar-oh-so-comforting television show. One can “stay at home” anywhere, of course, even in the Grand Outside. Because there is an inner “stay at home” too, a kind of “stay at home” state of mind. And Lady Dérive, she will never reward the lifeless. She will never embrace a deserter. And yes, naturally, one can sometimes “hit the road” from one’s couch, too, I won’t deny it. Because there’s a “hit the road” state of mind, as well.

So? So let’s leave all those workadays those unchangeables behind us, dear friend, let’s cast away let’s set sail. Let’s molt into Pirate, let’s become the lunar lunatic voyager, let’s reach without sight without hands without skin towards that mythic lost city of Elsewhere. Let’s transform into exactly 7 supermassive serpentine comets, with tails ejaculating thick wanderlust seed into every dark and devilish space between those lumbering ancient galaxies. And then— finally finally!—let’s give a real bigboy yell yes let’s do a wild-n-crazy berserker charge into deepest oldest of all black holes: SAD MR. NOTHING. We shall spit upon his pompous crest then, O yes we will, and we will tear him limb from limb. And then, O comrades (just as a treat, as a little nice treat)—we shall rewrite the atom all together, you and I, O yes, and we’ll storm heaven with nothing but a matchstick and an ironing board too, to be seen and reported later as having wisely installed a common household mousetrap on the unmentionable one’s plastic yellow throne, before of course burning it all to ash all to cinders yes of course. Truly, with a three inch alpaca and a five foot flatworm by your side, you can really do no wrong. I do believe I may have said this once or twice before in your enjoyable presence, good sir, but still, it bears repeating…

Lastly, BEWARE. Five thousand three hundred and seventy two miserabilist sand traps have been set by that willy and wicked Pa Capitalism. These sand traps are his senile siren-songs for us, his IKEA-made self-assembly prisons. Trashy decoys, selling us a fool’s gold of false comforts, preaching warping us the pleasures of unchanging domestic sameness, respectability, predictability, and all other such tomfooleries. Many potential path-shirkers have been caught and brought back from Breach by just such pathetic enticements. So BE VIGILANT. Avoid the bait, burn the script, rewire and take flight. Everything— the insides, outsides, and inbetweens—must be eternally reinvented. Begin again, traveler, in a Revolution Endless.