A Surrealist Mind

If imagination is more important than knowledge, rolling waves of time, sound and matter translate and rotate, swirl and tremble at the surface and on the horizon. At daybreak, when the dim sky barely shows its colors and spirits wait around a while longer before the rising sun, deep memories are passed on ethereally “How could one who has never felt the rain cherish waterlilies?” A surrealist mind asks. It has intentionally chosen imagination over reason, fearing that reason is self-stultifying.

Like an evolutionary makeshift of older stars and younger stellar activity, nebulae offer a landscape of timelines. As orbits align with orbits and spin with orbits, nudged by chance, spinning and rotating objects are global manifestations of outflowing particle chains transitioning and drifting, polarizing and circulating. They are the macroscopic appearance of spinning particles in gravitational fields. Gravity surfaces at boundaries, crystallizing and splitting forms and shapes, opening up geometrical degrees of freedom.

A surrealist mind departs from this shore to a space of time where revelations are made. Yet, it harbors doubts. If there is no place in the Universe where gravity does not exist, and if there is no consciousness without gravity, then consciousness may rise even out of the accretion disk of a black hole as it falls into singularity. The greater the force reality exerts, the more it hinders the mind’s ability to draw from the invisible which, in turn, ceases to yield anything of a conscious nature. 

If imagination is more important than knowledge, the mind should find inspiration in the knee and ankle of the energy spectrum of cosmic rays isotropized by magnetic waves. It should visualize massless gravitons propagating on the boundary of cone-shaped black holes, and electron-positron pairs interacting with rings of magnetic fields off their mouths. The Event Horizon Telescope has revealed twisted bundles of strong magnetic fields around the galaxy’s supermassive black hole, Sagittarius A*. Its mass is connected with the luminosity, mass, and velocity dispersion of the galactic stellar bulge. Most black holes are surrounded by a non-zero magnetic field, although we have not yet detected one as strong as a magnetar’s. When host galaxies collide, binary formations and triple dynamics can occur during the merging of their black holes.

If imagination is more important than knowledge, then layers upon layers of the mind’s and the Universe’s imaginary time rule over the real time. Intuitively, a surrealist mind senses that these layers collapse into one ultimately. As imagination bodies forth the forms of things unknown, it holds the hand Mirror of the mind and the Universe. Knowledge is the outward form of imagination when it translates to the real world. 

When gravity couples with spacetime, it becomes chiral. Chirality is the expression of free will, a choice between right-handedness and left-handedness in a Multiverse made of an infinity of opposite directions. Chirality nudges the ins and outs and evokes the breaking of the Mirror. Between negative and positive energies lies infinity. Between beneath and above, there’s a surface and its boundaries. Even time has left-handed and right-handed orientations. Chirality enables the directional flow of time, with chiral gravitational effect tilting in one direction. 

From dust lanes to dust rings,  clouds of spin-waves scatter left and right, making a 180-degree cut into the roundness of the Multiverse. The chirality of elementary particles extends into macroscopic manifestations,  as in the ciliary force. Chirality relates to topology when stars and planetary systems surface in clusters, hot stars spin and rotate in super-bubbles. While chiral plasma instability may be the origin of primordial magnetic fields, magnetic fields seem to have favored and amplified homochirality, a single image forming on the surface and, down the roads, the left-handedness of amino acids and proteins and the right-handedness of DNA, RNA and their building blocks.

The stellar mass and star formation rate are indicative of a galaxy’s metallicity. Low-metallicity systems with lighter elements such as hydrogen and helium dominated the landscape at early epochs of ionization. While the number of massive black holes may be reduced by up to a factor of ten at high metallicity compared to metal-poor, low-oxygen ancient systems, approximately one out of every thousand stars will still end their lives as evaporating black holes. This suggests that the Milky Way potentially contains hundreds of millions of black holes of which we are currently aware of only a few hundred of them. 

At any level of metal enrichment, minerals and elements are left to themselves or placed at the disposal of volitional bodies, as it is for seeds dispersed by the wind. While magnetite may be cause for an initial, albeit minor, bias toward one form of a chiral molecule, the Moon could provide evidence for deposits, such as iodine, a key mineral in the biological evolution of life, dispersed from nearby collisions of neutron stars caused by gravitational waves. 

The eclipse briefly reversed roles as the Sun became a crescent. Switching places, the Sun and the Moon turned the Universe upside down. “Imagination,” they said at once, “holds the key.” The Sun hovered over the Earth’s canopy, resting atop tree rings as if they were rescalable slides of nebulae. “ Elephants, too, are contagious,” it mumbled to itself, recalling a white elephant Charlemagne had around the time that it struck the Earth with a powerful storm. 

In the constellation of Cepheus lies the over 20 light-years long Elephant's Trunk Nebula. Edward Emerson Barnard commented about the dark markings on his photographs of the sky. “There seems to be no question,” he wrote, “that some of them are real objects which are either entirely devoid of light or so feebly luminous when seen against the Milky Way as to appear black.”

The roads of the Universe are lined with symbolic events, some otherworldly, others in real time, in sofar as a surrealist mind cannot tell them apart. Some believe that dreams allow time reversal like a bursting white hole turning the clock backward while others see them as prophecies. In any event, they provoke in one’s mind the collapse of spacetime and the riddance of scale. Once scale falls from the inner eye, physical and non-physical symmetries and synchronicities emerge along cross-dimensional lines, merging into a shapeless Universe.

A surrealist mind dreamt of an elephant on a basketball field, a giant bear snoozing on a rooftop, the Earth quaking, and tornadoes looming in the distance. In real time, elephants cross the Zambian River with their calves close by, a young bear strolls the neighborhood and a sculpture of a white elephant stands in a distant land off the coast. Dreams and reality are asymptotic symmetries. They move along with each other and may fuse randomly. Yet, they remain apart. Dreams follow the same paths as the waking mind. It is how the inner process of imagination works. A dream nonetheless is a shadow — an abstract line etched deep in the recesses of the mind until imagination frees the absurd and allows the dream to take on a physical form. 

John Herbert Matthews, The surrealist mind

Benjamin Peret, Paul Éluard, and Ela Kotkowska, 152 proverbs brought up to date. Chicago Review 50, no. 2/3/4 (2004): 173–84. http://www.jstor.org/stable/40785372.

The Saturday Evening Post, What Life Means to Einstein: An Interview by George Sylvester Viereck, Saturday Evening Post Society, Indianapolis, Indiana, 1929 October 26

William Shakespeare, A Midsummer Night's Dream

Rudolf Steiner, An outline to the Occult, 1922