My mother called me a few months ago and asked me to pray. She had just had a vision, or a dream – I cannot remember which, but she said that there was a gate. A black metal gate bound shut by a huge padlock. Even over a Whatsapp call, I could hear the strain in her voice, familiar and urgent. Somehow, my mother insists, by an unexplainable impulse that this gate refers to me and my sister. You must pray more, she says to me often, the devil is working. The gate of this latest vision, my mother explains, signals missed opportunities; her rhetoric sounds almost logical, gates as portals, entry and exit ways—a closed gate connotes a kind of shutting out, a bad omen.
Over the years, I have taken on the task of praying opposite of my mother’s instructions. In this case, I close my eyes in willful meditation and return to the gates of her visions, and then pry them open. I, myself, a spiritual person, given to practiced imagination, I speak over myself as if the foundations of my life were an ear, as if it hears. There are days I wake up and look in the mirror, and wonder at which point I acquired my mother’s skin, how did we become so alike, when did the sound of her laughter trade itself for mine? This is to say, I carry my mother’s face, and her love for prayer, and her heart for family—but her fears and obsessions were a burden I learned to drop a long time ago.
I recently did some unrelated research has led me to think about the origins of the surrealist movement. The story begins after the first world war. A group of poets and artists had come together, frustrated by the outcome of the war, and by the fact that a kind of bourgeois, privileged thinking contributed to the conflicts of the time. Essentially, they seemed to say that if our analysis and articulation of crisis only results in more questions, then what good is our work? What hope does our art and activism and politics offer, except to state the obvious, that we are broken—that we have language and intellect and yet remain hopeless. Flowing out of this disenchantment, the founder of the movement, working with other artists began to experiment with a kind of freeform creativity. Think of it as works produced from a stream of consciousness, an artistic process that delves into the quietest chambers of the mind and captures ideas from subconscious realms such as dreams and imagination. The idea is to return to your uncensored self and capture or evoke what the mind does not consciously know.
Surrealism has evolved over time, in art and language, and as metaphor for other things, but I really like this origin story. I could tell you that I have written all of this to defend the attention that I tend to pay to my dreams, all the painful productions of salvation that I invest to extract myself from my mother’s dreams or my father’s words. I could also tell you that there is a world of difference between the spiritual and the surreal. But what I want to say, instead, is this: the human mind, too, is both its own prison and its own liberation.
The surrealists believe in the language of metaphor, or as Suzanne Cesaire writes, ‘domain of the marvelous.’ Their confidence is espoused in the fact that our world can be a place where surrealism, is the final register of artistic liberty—their productions of poetry and visual art, were often a response or confrontation with those unbridled territories. Yet, as I think about it, I often wonder: why? What is the point of extracting our uncensored thoughts? Do we really need to go into silent chambers to understand that the material world is unhinged and unbowed? Here's another thing, closed doors were a central part of my young adult years. I know what a padlock looks like, not just because my mother’s dreams lend such vision to my imagination, and not because I spent my preteen years securing my belongings in boarding school, but also because I often stared down a locked gate when I was a few moments late on an unspoken curfew. I know for a fact, that there are terrors tethered to the quiet of an ordinary day and I do not need visions of gates to remind me of all that is strange and terrible in this world.
I am intrigued by the open ended appeal that Paul makes in one of his letters to the Roman church. “Do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind.” I have taken it outside it’s broader context to fit into the direction of this letter. Still, I like that his words calls for a kind of willful encounter with the mind, a kind of open and questioning confrontation with thoughts and dreams and the subconscious—so that beyond the affects of the unspoken which the surrealists offer us, we can, likewise, in addition ask: where does this come from?
At least, this is what I say to my mother when she tells me about the closed gates, and it is what I say to myself when hours after the chat, her voice begins to creep into my thoughts: Where does this come from? And more recently, how can I refuse it?
Whether in therapy, counseling, prayer, or through the production of art, the work of making the mind new is daunting, yet also necessary. Like the surrealists, I’m aligned with a posture that extracts the ideas that exist in these liminal spaces of known and imagined worlds. But unlike the surrealists, I insist on productive encounter with what the mind holds, and where necessary, a replaced. It is, to me, exactly as Paul writes, “whatsoever things are true, whatsoever things are honest, whatsoever things are just, whatsoever things are pure, whatsoever things are lovely, whatsoever things are of good report; if there be any virtue, and if there be any praise, think on these things.”
Your writing is *chef's kiss.*