The Cult of Tara

WORSHIP
"Reality, then," says Breton's biographer Anna Balakian, "in its
dynamic sense proceeding from an interior state, nurtured by what
•we call imagination, and brought to an exterior existence, ... is
what Breton calls the ' surreal,' in a sense that it. has no connection
with the unreal." 12
* And thus, too, the image is no private illusion,
but rather may be "real-ized" in the artistic object: "the imaginary,"
in Breton's definition, "is what tends to become real." 125
And Paul
Eluard says: 123
"Images are, images live, and everything becomes
image. They were long mistaken for illusions because they were
restricted, were made to undergo the test of reality, an insensitive
and dead reality."
Thus to Breton, expanding upon Freud and Bergson, the imagination
is an omnipotent power that, dwelling within the mental
depths, must be brought to the surface through the dream, through
free association, through automatic writing, and through madness
itself; and the image, once surfaced, is thrust into the reality with
all the shock and clash of a dream revelation. Reality to the surrealist
becomes, in Eluard's words, "alive, and perpetually moving";
it becomes "nonempirical." Eluard wrote in The Surrealist Revolution:
"The dream alone entrusts to man all his rights to freedom.
Thanks to the dream, the meaning of death is no longer mysterious,
and the meaning of life becomes unimportant." 127
Breton's friend
Robert Desnos could fall into a state of dreaming at the slightest
provocation and produce a rich flowof verbal images for his admiring
colleagues. Salvador Dali intentionally cultivated his sense of paranoia,
crystallizing "the unbridled force of his mind to contract an
infinite number of free associations between objects, and through
the representation of these he was to suggest a totally fluid universe
shaped according to the artist's private speculations." 128
It throws a sharp metaphorical light upon the world of the Tibetan
yogin to say that he lives in this totally fluid surrealist universe, that
his visualization creates a surrealist imaginary landscape projected
upon the very fabric of reality; his private realm of freedom and
power is indeed an echo of Breton's rhetorical question, "What if
everything in the Beyond is actually here, now, in the present,
with us?" 12
» Ferdinand Alquie might well be describing the Tibetans:
"They admit, then, more or less explicitly, the postulates of
this conception: identity of sensation and image, proper existence
°f images, power of actualization inherent in the image." 130
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