For an Ecology of the Marvelous
North American Surrealist Movement statement

“Every time I think about us women, I think about the trees, the subversive trees laden in blood but not bleeding the rebellious trees encrusted but not cracking.”

—Jayne Cortez

“Unless rooted in poetry the experience of ‘outside’ from within—even the deepest ‘deep ecology’ barely scratches the surface.”

—Franklin Rosemont

As Ecologists of the Marvelous, surrealists move beyond conventional environmental concerns for the “conservation” and “endangerment” of a natural world which is viewed as external to us, and instead head toward a relationship of Passional Attraction and erotic engagement with a natural world of which we are fully a part. In embracing the Marvelous, we seek nothing less than the expansion of wilderness everywhere in the face of the rapaciousness of oil-industries, timber-industries and a techno-industrial civilization with its charade of reformist attempts at recuperation.

In our quest to live more poetic lives, we discard the miserabilist straitjacket of anthropomorphism. In doing so, we become increasingly aware of ourselves as free-spirited beings that are active participants in an ecology of wonders rather than seeing ourselves as superior beings divinely ordained to be at the center of the universe by some all-powerful God of Yore or by the newer gods of Media and Advertizing or Science and Technology.

We are the barbarians at the gates, the storm on the horizon, and the boulder on the tracks. With a fervent desire in our hearts to re-enchant the world, we embrace both the feral voices of the animate and the profound silence of the inanimate while always knowing that the seeming stability of both can be shattered on a moment’s notice in the anarchic upheaval of an earthquake.

We want the earth to quake! We want the dams of exploitation and alienation to break! We welcome the flood of marvelous freedom amidst the debris of destruction! We want lives beyond measure! We imagine a world without rulers or ruled!

We are the ungovernable grass of resistance and transformation that always grows up wildly from within the cracked pavement of reality!

Ron Sakolsky, Penelope Rosemont, Beth Garon, Paul Garon, Gale Ahrens, Tamara Smith

North American Surrealist Movement, September 2018