THE EXTERIOR IS POPULAR

There is an important class of poetry available in the sensory-mental abandonment-presence in the physical environment that is extending beyond that which is structured for commercial or other disciplinatory purposes. There is an important type of vigilance that will establish communication over the elusive membranes of conscious and unconscious, inside and outside. The exterior is a relative concept. It does not start somewhere. It does not require any leap. The inner or outer void reverbates at the strange friction and the strange lack of friction. Nevertheless, if possibly privileged for being poetic, this is not unusual or reserved for a minority of connoisseurs. Instead, it is probably one of the (several) truly popular manifestations of poetic sense. And anyone who hunts for exteriority kicks can easily make a few efforts to widen its apertures, to make it a field of systematic poetic enquiry (and therefore of poetic living) more than just an occasional source of kicks. These are some advice:

1. Rediscover poetry. Poetry is a set of phenomena responding to vigilance, seriousness, clarity, playfulness, discipline, methodic disorder, etc; Poetry may require an effort, poetry will benefit from preparations, method and evaluation. Poetry is not a rest category for musings which don't obviously fall under another category, it is not a passively received grace, it is not an excuse for personal lack of method, or laziness.


2. Acquire some analytical tools for describing the physical environment and the longterm historical processes shaping it. This is easy. Just go to your library or university bookshop and pick up a copy of a standard textbook of physical geography (sometimes called "earth science" or "natural geography"), and read it. You will find explanations, and models for finding explanations, for a large amount of your discoveries, and tips about loads of other exciting stuff to go look for. If you have rediscovered poetry, you will know that explaining is not necessarily in conflict with experiencing, that background information and clarity might spur rather than suffocate poetry.



3. Acquire some analytical tools for understanding shortterm historical processes and social interactions shaping the physical environment. This is a bit more difficult. Try to grasp the historical-materialist method of Marx, look out for what is going on in cultural geography, urban sociology, economic history, human ecology, and city planning. This field is indeed hard to survey, but much of it is bullshit anyway, and so you only need to pick up some basic models and concepts. You will find explanations, and models for finding explanations, for a large amount of your discoveries. If you have rediscovered poetry, you will know that explaining is not necessarily in conflict with experiencing, that background information and clarity might spur rather than suffocate poetry.



4. Acquire some basic skills in floristics and faunistics. Pick up a flower book, an insect book, download some bird songs from the Internet, or pick up basics from some old friends who were educated according to some now obsolete standards or grew up in the countryside. Several large cities have guidebooks for the local species assemblies and hotspots (corresponding to Lindberg's "Stockholmsfloran", Staav's "Stadens fåglar" and Sjöberg's "Naturens nollåttor" about Stockholm). Combined with some concepts learned from ecology and from physical geography, this will allow you to enhance your senses, discover and describe daily global- and local-scale high 
drama, daily encounters with unusual beings, cross-specific communication, daily hidden aspects of environments that seemed all-too-well-known or minutely-controlled.



5. Look around yourself and realise that "the marvellous is popular" (as Péret said), that some large parts of the population are busy with rediscovering the physical environment too. If we disconsider the distinctly bad company connected with its commercialisation in the experience industry (adventure tourism etc, which still provides many 
opportunities for certain exteriority experiences, which may for the individual transgress their qualities of commodities) or its conservative ideologisation in the movements of regional romanticism with its focus on old agricultural methods and local environmental sightseeing; there is still a vast field of outdoors/ naturalist amateurs and hobby enthusiasts organising excursions and popular education making possible and deepening a largely conventional but nevertheless rich class of exteriority experiences. If you are an antisocial person or just despise 
conventional exchange with other people, you could join the Cloud appreciation society via Internet, and you could go to a library and take a look at traditional poetry as well as popular essayism - much of it is about this experience of exteriority. I'm not saying that a lot of this is objectively allied with surrealism nor necessarily interesting, only that the discovery of exteriority isn't very exclusive or very new and there is no need of inventing a new vocabulary for it, 
nor for circling around it in only vague and tentative terms.



/The Pilgrim Surrealist