Month: August 2017

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The Great Game

It is not to belittle Surrealist activity — as it has unfolded from 1924 to the present day — to consider it as a game, in fact as The Great Game, whose prizes in the eyes of those who played and lived it, can be calculated in promises of freedom, love, revolution, and in anything else that intransigent desire can aspire to.

— Philippe Audouin

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A Surprisingly Simple Game of Chance

hibiscus signed

— photograph by Michelle Tennison

 

How to play The Question and Answer Game:*

 

A question is written down and the paper folded to conceal it. Another player writes an answer without reading the question. The paper is unfolded to reveal the results.

 

What is a dream?
          one note
         of
          Mozart

Question Dietmar Tauchner,  Answer Michelle Tennison (2017)

 

 

*(Also known as “Definitions”) as found in The Book of Surrealist Games, Shambala Redstone editions, Boston, 1993.

 

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“The surreal is but reality that has not been disconnected from its mystery.” — Rene Magritte

Version 5
Music Coming from the Missing Pages,  Michelle Tennison

 

What do I absorb from the sun and stars?
          My mother’s voice 

Question Mary Ellen Binkele,  Answer Michelle Tennison (2014)

 

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“Poetry should be made by all.” — Lautreamont

Many of the French surrealists of the early 20th Century were poets.

Maybe that’s why this game they invented (which is so easy to play) has a lot in common with exceptional poetry.  At times it hits home with an epiphanic jolt and even an aesthetic rush …  and it’s full of metaphors, which Aristotle considered the mark of genius.*

The fact that we’re playing a game and we laugh a lot more than we usually do with poetry is a just a nice bonus.

 

*The greatest thing by far,” said Aristotle in the Poetics (330 BC), “is to have a command of metaphor. This alone cannot be imparted by another; it is the mark of genius, for to make good metaphors implies an eye for resemblance.”

 

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“The ability to perceive or think differently is more important than the knowledge gained.” — David Bohm

Version 6

Dormez Vous,  Michelle Tennison*

 

 


what is your
still, small voice
saying?
          That which is overheard while in a coma

Question Sabine Miller,  Answer Michelle Tennison (2015)

 

*The bee must have spent the night on this cosmos flower. It awoke about a half hour after this photo was taken.