THE DIONYSUS MANIFESTO:

 Lancaster Surrealist Founding Statement written by Joe Simpkins

Since the founding of Lancaster Surrealism there has been a sense of confusion created on two fronts. Firstly, from those within Lancaster, unaware of Surrealism as a movement, who are unsure what exactly the Lancaster Surrealist Group is. The second front is from the wider British Surrealist Movement, who, as far as I have gathered, were surprised by our appearance and our mysterious connections to an unknown movement called ‘Peeny Greeny’. This is my attempt to dispel such confusions, but I fear that I will only add more, as I am not used to speaking clearly. In fact, I despise speaking clearly, because there is nothing much clear about human thought.

We have been led to believe that the ultimate conclusion to Peeny Greeny (a non-religious resurgence of worship for the Greek God Dionysus) as a tendency is a complete and violent antagonism toward rationalism, wherever it exists. To do this we must strive for a point where dream and reality, fantasy and action, Peeny Greeny and Pinot Grigio, cease to be perceived as contradictions. This point can only be strived for through Surrealism as we understand it:

“I CONSIDER THAT FOR US SURREALISM IS LIFE…[IT IS] A REINSTALLATION OF LIFE FROM THE SURREALIST PERSPECTIVE.”^[1]

As Surrealists we are dedicated to the complete exploration of our exterior and interior worlds, unshackled from a hierarchy of realities that places the Rationalist waking life experience at its peak. Afterall, dreams, to give one example, are often neglected by modern society, cast aside with the opening of the eyelids. However, we believe dreams are just as important as waking life and do not go away with the opening of the eyelids. Dreams are always in the back of our head, they are our feelings, our emotions and they direct our thoughts and actions whilst awake. Dreams do not end, we simply stop watching them.

Psychology has a nasty tendency of rationalising and ‘ironing out’ the unconscious mind, a method we believe has been used throughout history to oppress our inner desires and inner workings, instead of fostering them. All of this is a bourgeois attempt to make us “well behaved” citizens and traps us in the miserablist world of Law and Order. We aim to flatten this hierarchy of realities so that life and all of its experiences can be viewed as one big hallucination. Afterall, that is all it will appear to be as we lay on our deathbeds.

“PSYCHIC AUTOMATISM IN ITS PURE STATE, BY WHICH IT IS PROPOSED TO EXPRESS – VERBALLY, IN WRITING OR BY ANY OTHER MEANS – THE ACTUAL FUNCTIONING OF THOUGHT.”^[2]

As Surrealists we believe in automatism and the dream as the core expressions of Surrealism. We do not believe that these are the only Surrealist techniques available, or that they should escape being later edited or critiqued using more controlled means of expression. We merely believe that automatism and the study of dreams must be regularly practised to reveal the true functioning of thought. These experiments may not even be published, but to achieve a state of Surreality within oneself, these are the most open windows of which to begin exploring other Surrealist techniques. And that only from this foundation, the willingness to relinquish control to your unconscious and its exploration, can other equally automatic or more lucid means of liberation be attempted.

“SURREALISM IS THE COLLECTIVE EXPERIENCE OF INDIVIDUALISM”^[3]

As Surrealists we believe in the collective. The collective can protect each other. The collective can explore each other. The collective can organise, the collective can be democratic, the collective can represent a collective unconscious and therefore explore the exterior world, precisely as it merges with the interior world. In this way a Surrealist Group is merely a sample group, aiming to represent the wider collective unconscious that inhabits and directs the world around them.

“POETRY IS MADE IN THE WOODS”^[4]

Our first slogan was “Make Art, Do Crime, Act Insane”, a statement we believe demonstrates our political aims. We believe Activism can be a Surrealist act in of itself as it turns the internalised political of our unconscious into praxis, just the same as Surrealists convert the internal into the external through art. Words such as “Eco Grief” and “Ecoanxiety” are coming into popular discourse amongst the young, as well as other more broad concepts like “microaggressions”. We believe that these concepts prove that the mind is not separate from the world, whether we wish it to or not, when the forests fall our mind’s natural reaction is to grieve.

The unconscious serves the planet, and therefore in our freeing of the unconscious, we must also free the praxis to act on our political grief, our political anxiety and our political microaggressions.

With widespread awareness of mental health, the omnipotence of the unconscious mind has never been stronger amongst the people of today. The Mental Health Crisis, a political choice from our ruling class, will be their greatest undoing. The victims of the Mental Health Crisis, of which there are many, have been deeply and intimately acquainted with their own irrationality at the point where it disrupts life. Surrealism can be the voice of us victims, it can be both the weapon against the ruling class who did this and also the voice of which we can express the irrational that plagues us. How else can we express our own irrationality except irrationally?

And furthermore, they marginalise our irrationality because it does not serve their profiteering system. But tell us, are our mental ails really more irrational than a system that supports so much suffering? For us, the system is mentally ill.

“SURREALISM IS REVOLUTIONARY BECAUSE IT IS A RETURN TO THE BEGINNING OF ALL BEGINNINGS.”^[5]

In the absence of God and the absence of myth, the magic imagination, so natural to humanity, has been destroyed. The world, its objects and things have a profound impact on our psychology. Each experience to its own has a deeper meaning, a poetic meaning if you will, that performs a magical transformation on our psychology. Behind every action, every entity and every thing hides its psychological ramifications on the mind that can only be expressed poetically and magically.

Morecambe Bay, where Lancaster sits, was the last bastion of the Celts in England, and now, we hope to reinvigorate it as a new bastion of the Celtic imagination. The Imagination will reclaim its right over the people, the poetic and magical shall exist once more, not in belief of superstition, but in the belief of the mind.

We invoke our old master, who we only scratched the surface of under ‘Peeny Greeny’. With Surrealism, we shall turn the streets of Lancaster into the streets of Dionysus for they will be filled with wine, pleasure, madness, ritual, and ecstasy.

The Dionysus tendency, the tendency to resist the so-called Realist and Rationalist perspectives of life, is ancient and has had many names, in many traditions, against many foes and been in the service of many collectives. It has never stopped striving to free humanity, liberate their desires and minds.

Surrealism is merely the post enlightenment incarnation of this old tendency, always opposing the rational and the miserable. It is time we unified this dialectic, reaching its point of conclusion where the body and mind, the rational and irrational, the useful and useless, dream and reality can all cease to be perceived as contradictions.

We have once more been revolted into revolt, the mind and the world must be reunited, through myth and rebellion.

The air seems denser here

          while the ears sprout blood

I fear no God and no Master, only myself

                                                   I fear only my own possibility

It is time hysterics were saints

                                                   And the well behaved sinners.

The concrete is not concrete anymore:

the road can be lifted like a blanket

the wall pushed over like a domino

and the cell is as imposing as a hat upon one’s head.

My hand becomes a fist

                                         the fist I dream of often,

                                         and when I acknowledge it

                                         contemplate it without prejudice

                                         it opens up

                                         to reveal,

                                         the entirety of what moves this world.

                                         Moves the bombs across our cheeks

And moves our tears

across the sky

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^[1] Antonin Artaud

^[2] Andre Breton

^[3] Andre Masson

^[4] Andre Breton

^[5] Octavio Paz