Surrealism and the Homeless
In my early morning meanderings through the neighborhood with Elmer, we had seen many sights related to the homeless that I believed in my lifelong study of American history had no parallel in American history. Some were bizarre; some defied explanation; some were farcical or comedic; many were mesmerizing; some poignant, several pathetic, one aggravating; some ended up as poems of collage; some piled up one after another in the course of 20 minutes and remained eternally unsorted.
Elmer and I had also encountered astonishing scenes of nature in the park: creeks, oak and conifer trees, blue herons, Canadian geese, multiple species of ducks, a turtle, otters, skunks, beavers, owls, hawks, a beaver lodge, a muskrat, nutrias, squirrels and coyotes. What also astonished me was knowing that if I had walked a through this park 30-35 years ago, as I had many times while living in the neighborhood, almost none of these sighting of wildlife would have occurred because the park’s riparian areas had yet to be restored to fuller ecology.
But now a bit of wildness ( a beaver lodge!) had returned to the city and I benefited every morning. It was perhaps the main reason I could endure living in Portland.
I often wondered if what I constructed after witnessing and juxtaposing these images and experiences constituted an act of surrealist thought, I mean pure unadulterated slices of the classical artistic movement known as surrealism that originated in France a century ago with Andre Breton as its champion and author of its manifesto.
Surrealism today is almost elusively associated with hallucinatory visual art (i.e. Salvador Dali) but its literature was almost as vital, although that’s largely forgotten today.
Before exploring this subject deeper in this essay, let me discourse a bit on surrealism to set up the ending.
The adjective “surreal” gets tossed around a lot in various American media circles by people who think they know what it means. They don’t.
Some recent examples:
A Fox News host shrieks it surreal that a former President was convicted of 34 counts of fraud by a jury of his peers. (Wrong.)
A college basketball player whose team has just won back-to-back NCAA Division 1 championships describes the moment as surreal. (Wrong.)
A contestant on a network talent show tells the judges it feels surreal being up on stage. (Wrong.)
A historian of the War in the Pacific during World War II writes how surreal it was for a Japanese artillery shell to blast a Marine completely through the trunk of a tree during an amphibious landing. (Wrong.)
A sports talk radio jock proclaims a the aftermath of a prize fight that devolved in bedlam surreal. (Wrong.)
I could could go on and on. Right now, surreal is the most overused and erroneously used word in the vernacular of American popular culture.
Surreal is not a synonym for bizarre or something that seemingly could not happen.
I have studied surrealism for decades, taught a surrealism-themed writing workshops to high school students, teachers and adults, and infrequently integrated its concepts into my books, most notably in Of Walking in Rain.
What then is surrealism? Its famous definition goes something like, “An umbrella and sewing machine meet on an operating room table.” In the manifesto, Breton wanted surrealism to bridge the antediluvian chasm between dreaming and waking life that might lead to a future resolution between those states of mind.
Surrealism as formal art occurs when utterly distinct words or images or sounds or experiences become juxtaposed by an artist, either at random or by design, and then the artist, or anyone for that matter, is free to construct a new reality or irreality based on the juxtaposition or collage of the presented items.
There is absolutely nothing linear or narrative in surrealism. How can there be if an artist cuts out images from a 1963 Playboy, a current issue of Guns and Ammo, a 1930s children’s illustrated life of Jesus Christ, and 1975’s The Joys of Jello cookbook, places them in a dryer for 30 seconds, pulls out the images one by one in the dark, perhaps coasting on magic mushrooms, and collages them into a piece of art while listening to a cassette of calliope music.
What I have just described above is an example of making visual art in a surrealist manner. Something similar can happen with writing.
William Burroughs and Gertrude Stein would scissor random words or lines from vastly different publications and then arrange the words or lines at random or with editorial intent to construct a piece of writing. Burroughs called these experiments in surrealism “Cut Ups” and I’d met with incredible success using this method in teaching creative writing for decades but several years had passed since I’d written (compiled and/or collaged) anything in the surrealist mode.
Was there anything surreal about the homeless crisis that I had observed in recent years? The question had frequently crossed my mind. I’d chronicled many episodes of my encounters with homeless people’s behavior and often evaluated them for qualities of surrealism. For example, and these are all pre Elmer:
Was the image of someone naked, zonked on fentanyl and screaming at a light pole in a progressive city like Portland and no one does anything about it surreal. No. That’s addiction and neglect.
Was the image of two men playing foosball in a homeless encampment that flew American flags atop dilapidated RVs surreal? No. They found the foosball table on a sidewalk, carried it to the encampment, and returned to a favorite pastime from their glory teenage years in the 70s. I would have done the same if I’d found a foosball table. The two men were merely having fun by using a discarded toy precisely the way it was intended.
Was the image of a stripper pole installed in a two-store plywood and pallet shanty surreal? No. To quote Marvin Gaye, “Let’s Get It On.”
Was the image of a man living in a homeless encampment using a portable blow torch to barbecue a crawdad surreal? Okay, that edged closer, but still, not there yet. He was hungry. He owned a blowtorch. He knew how to use it. He saw a crawdad in the creek behind the encampment. He cooked it up for supper. That made perfect sense, as did the paprika he used to season the crawdad.
And what about the image of two young girls dressed in grimy hoodies, oversized holey jeans and mismatched sneakers? One pulled a red wagon full of cans and bottles; the other walked beside her friend, grunting and gesticulating. They both laughed in staccato bursts and generally acted weird. Initially, I had no idea what the hell was going on. I watched them as they passed me as I stood near a homeless man sauced on malt liquor while I was then writing a book about the homeless in my neighborhood.
I didn’t get it until…
…I…
…did…
The girls were playing at being homeless. There was no other possible explanation.
Was that surreal? No. They were simply modeling behavior they’d habitually observed and were having a blast doing so. Hey, adults still dress up as hobos and bindle stiffs for Halloween and carry jugs of Carlo Rossi rotgut wine as part of the costume. That’s not surreal.
One day, after seeing a man sitting on a camp stool wearing a box over his head while smoking fentanyl at 5:45 in the morning, I was staggered by the sight and decided then and there to immerse myself in a surrealism writing workshop later that day.
The goal was to distill what I was seeing in the park with Elmer and perhaps make sense of everything. That I was trying to discover meaning through an exercise in surrealism automatically ruled out any possible outcome of surrealism…
…but…
…after writing almost a half million words about the homeless crisis in every conceivable literary genre, except surrealism, why not give it a try? There was nothing to lose and everything to gain if the exercise produced even a sliver of understanding.
All these years and words and I was no closer to discovering what was really happening in Oregon in connection to homelessness, let alone how to solve the greatest domestic humanitarian crisis of my adult lifetime. It was a crisis that I saw and/or interacted with every day, sometimes two or three times a day, no matter where I traveled in Oregon, a crisis that I had tried to alleviate by assisting homeless people in my midst and writing and publishing a book on the subject.
But something had shifted. Since adopting Elmer and walking with him every morning, I had witnessed scenes of homelessness blocks from my home so novel and devastating to me that I feared a decline in my spiritual and mental health.
Therapy? No!
“Pluck they own heart string” as Emerson advised? Yes!
So I devised a surrealism-themed writing workshop. Feel free to take it yourself. It doesn’t take very long.
What follows are declarative sentences I wrote about the occurrences that transpired on a dozen of our walks through the park between 5:30 and 6:00 in the morning in the months of April-June 2024. I could have written hundreds of more sentences from previous winter walks, but I didn’t want the exercise to become too unwieldy or time consuming. These incidents are not in chronological order.
An abandoned notebook has two words written it: Royal Flesh.
A softball field waits for players.
Ducks swim in a fly fishing casting pond built by the CCC during the Depression.
Two skunks sniff around the entrance to the Presbyterian church.
Mt. Hood looks orange, red, purple and blue in the eastern sky.
A writer walks his husky at 5:30 in the morning.
An elderly man and woman live in a van and share a wheelchair.
Someone left behind a plastic jar of Cheetos in a grocery cart.
A woman rides a bicycle towing a baby carrier full of cans and bottles.
An old man cuts rhododendron flowers with a Bowie knife.
Songbirds sing.
A man walking though the park carrying all his possessions listens to Tom Petty’s “Runnin’ Down a Dream” on his phone. He sings along to it.
A man in the park draws a picture of a penis and scrotum in bark chips.
A blue heron hunts in the creek.
A man on meth shoots hoops alone.
Rain falls.
A man sitting on a stool wears a box over his head and smokes fentanyl.
A creek flows down a watershed.
A man living in an Acura takes his black puppy for a walk in the park.
A beaver glides in the creek.
Canadian geese honk overhead.
A writer composes a haiku in his head.
A 1990s Oldsmobile SUV parked at the park hasn’t moved in six months.
Freight trains squeak as they couple and uncouple.
No one has returned in three months to a tent pitched in the blackberries.
The husky takes a dump.
A coyote appears, disappears, reappears.
I printed the sentences and cut them out individually. I put all the sentences in an envelope, shook it up, then dumped them onto a piece of yellow construction paper. I began arranging the sentences with conscious intent on a table in my back yard to the sonic accompaniment of classical music (later identified as a fugue) and Elmer’s gnawing on a bone. I attempted to construct a new reality, possibly a surrealist one, from whatever emerged from my construction.
Five minutes later I had composed this:
A man walking though the park carrying all his possessions listens to Tom Petty’s “Runnin’ Down a Dream” on his phone. He sings along to it.
A beaver glides in the creek.
A man sitting on a stool wears a box over his head and smokes fentanyl.
A blue heron hunts in the creek.
A man living in an Acura takes his black puppy for a walk in the park.
Canadian geese honk overhead.
A 1990s Oldsmobile SUV parked at the park hasn’t moved in six months.
A creek flows down a watershed.
A woman rides a bicycle towing a baby carrier full of cans and bottles.
Songbirds sing.
A man in the park draws a picture of a penis and scrotum in bark chips.
Ducks swim in a fly fishing casting pond built by the CCC during the Depression.
An abandoned notebook has two words written it: Royal Flesh.
Mt. Hood looks orange, red, purple and blue in the eastern sky.
An elderly man and woman live in a van and share a wheelchair.
Rain falls.
A man on meth shoots hoops alone.
A coyote appears, disappears, reappears.
I read it aloud twice and in doing so gradually recognized the reason for my particular arrangement. I wasn’t conscious of my choices when I was moving the sentences around or discarding some altogether. They fell into order as if by mental legerdemain.
The exercise produced a poem, if you want to call it that, of one image of homelessness followed by an image of nature. This type of stark contrast occurs almost every morning on my walks with Elmer. Just this morning, I saw a fine telescope in a encampment consisting of a tiny 60-year-old trailer and three tarped tents not long after I observed a mother and father goose herd their new chicks down a grassy slope.
My poem did not meet the standard for surrealism. I wasn’t disappointed. I seek understanding writing about the homeless and this exercise provided one on a strictly personal level. I don’t hold it out as a truism for anyone else.
What I observe in the mornings unfolds all the time in Oregon, and elsewhere in the United States. If something happens all the time it cannot be described as surreal. Surrealism isn’t commonplace or ongoing. What I see every morning with homelessness and nature in my neighborhood has become commonplace to me and obviously ongoing. Indeed, the former seems to worsen; the latter seems very much to prosper. My local watershed began recovering two decades ago after a century of ignorance and abuse.
After two decades of uniquely American abuse too varied and complex to delineate here, many people are homeless, many addled and insane and pulverized with no hope of reclamation or restoration.
Will I walk through the juxtaposition of early morning marvels of nature and the misery of homelessness for the foreseeable Oregon future, perhaps the rest of my life?
I think so. It’s the most dispiriting sensation I’ve ever felt as an Oregonian.
At least Elmer will be with me.