Andre Breton Sutra

Beauty will be CONVULSIVE or will not be at all.

– Andre Breton

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I finished watching Bronowski’s The Ascent of Man this week, and boy howdy am I in love. I get it folks, I totally get it. I get why this series is considered to be one of the greatest, if not the greatest, science series ever. Dude.

I loved that he had some things to say about art along the way (he loved William Blake. How lovely!). One thing that caught my attention was a comment he made about 20th century art, and how it reflected what science — namely, physics and such — was showing us about the world. Science was looking past the surface and into the atom itself. It was a process of reductionism that painted a bigger picture than we had imagined. The painters of the era — cubists, for instance — show the same process. Cool thought. I’ve mangled it, by the way. Go watch the series. Bronowski says it with all the pretties intact.

And now the Gregory thoughts that tumbled out in the thought storm Bronowski caused:

Andre Breton is one of my passions. He’ll be a “Literary Influence” post sometime. Bronowski’s comments brought him to mind, in a very tangential way, because I got to thinking about how the scientific advances of the past few hundred years have shattered our preconceptions, and challenged almost every aspect of our view of the world, the universe and ourselves.

Geology and cosmology shattered our comfortable notions of a short period of time with vast stretches of time — remember that Sagan video I posted? Our sense of size and distance was also shattered. Even in the solar system we’re amazingly tiny, and this solar system is just a tiny, insignificant portion of the galaxy, which in turn is just one among gazillions. Science has made us feel very, very small.

It did more than that, though. Darwin and Wallace, by finding a mechanism for evolution, shattered Aristotle’s notion of fixed species. We were forced to confront life as being a thing of constant flux and change. Geology added to that, showing that even the mountains were momentary things. The very Earth under our feet, we learned, was moving around. That seems to be one of the central lessons in our explorations of the world and the universe — everything is motion, everything is change.

I can’t help but think of Breton, who seemed to recognize this instinctively. I love that quote because it shows his recognition that it is in the living, the convulsing, the conflict, the dance, that beauty is found. It is not a dead thing, not static, but alive and vibrant. And yes, that word, CONVULSIVE (he wrote it in caps, just like that, where it appeared at the end of Nadja). Beauty can hurt. Beauty can destroy. Beauty can be violence. But it’s like a phoenix, destroying to birth new beauty. Beauty is not a thing, but a process.

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