Why was the search for origins so important to the Surrealists? What did they hope to gain by finding a “lost innocence”?

They sought direct apprehension of a world that has been obscured by layers of culture. This is the point of Zen and surrealism — a direct apprehension of the world, in all its mystery and grotesque beauty. They abandoned a stale culture of conventional thinking, for a more vivid one, responsive to sheer wonder. They had to bracket the coded experience of the world to allow for a new sense of play and enchantment. And their irreverence is great.

Could you explain why Rosenkreutzism and the notion of the alchemical were so important to surrealism?

Transformation — of matter into meaning, lead into gold — drives both the alchemist and the artist to work with matter, to distill it to its essence. In medieval Europe, the alchemist, apothecary, and artist were under the same guild, sign of the mortar and pestle, because they extracted from matter the elixir, color, or vital energy.

Surrealism’s involvement with alchemy arises from Breton’s call for “the profound occultation of surrealism” (Second Manifesto of Surrealism, 1930). He signaled the Surrealists’ dissatisfaction with leftist politics; instead, they sought a new myth for the modern world.

For the Surrealists, occultism and alchemy made visible how artists transform matter into metaphor. The esoteric traditions of alchemy and Rosicrucianism demonstrated matter’s potency. The Surrealists pursued the principle of alchemical transformation in how they handled matter. They cast alchemical ideas into new forms that transcended the dichotomy of the spiritual and physical through their use of matter. Processes of alchemical transformation were allied to their exploration of magic in fetishism (ethnography), Rosicrucianism (The Chemical Wedding) and the occult sciences (tarot). Max Ernst, Andre Masson, Meret Oppenheim, Yves Tanguy, Rene Magritte, and Salvador Dalí created forms that recalled the alchemical prima materia and the philosopher’s stone.

It seems ironic that Modernists such as the Surrealists were “obsessed” with primitivism and the pursuit of origins. There seems to be something more primitive about modernity than pre-modernity?

Modernism attempted to go back to origins — Freud’s article, “The Antithetical Sense of Primal Words”, shows how a word — in archaic or primal language — can mean its opposite, such as high-deep, father-son, mother-daughter, familiar-strange. Now if you think of these words and an archaic art that show one thing as part of another — look at archaic Chinese bronzes, for example — you have a “both-and” phenomena. The work can be both this figure and that form. Modern artists and poets were fascinated by this aspect of archaic or “primitive” art and borrowed that principle of opposition from it.

We might say that modernism has no fixed frame of reference, no vanishing point, and no horizon line. It attempts to make visible both this image and that image simultaneously, to give us a different, fluctuating perspective that approximates experiential sensations rather than the objective dimension of human perception.

During the Renaissance, a seamless interpretation of vision resulted in the development of perspective, with its fixed frame of reference. This created a single vanishing point, and horizon line, to create a static window on the world. We might say that modernism has no fixed frame of reference, no vanishing point, and no horizon line. It attempts to make visible both this and that image simultaneously, giving us a different, fluctuating perspective that approximates experiential sensations rather than the objective dimension of human perception.

In poetry, Modernism usually rejects the seamless narrative by forcing the reader to think in image juxtapositions, and by expanding or contracting time, often with an expansive moment or epiphany that opens up all the nuances of experience for the reader.