" Any serious exploration of occult, surrealistic, phantasmagoric gifts and phenomena presupposes a dialectical intertwinement to which a romantic turn of mind is impervious. For histrionic or fanatical stress on the mysterious side of the mysterious takes us no further; we penetrate the mysterious only to the the degree that we recognize it in the everyday world, by virtue of a dialectical optic that perceives the everyday as impenetrable, the impenetrable as everyday. The most passionate investigation of telepathic phenomena, for example, will not teach us half as much about reading (which is an eminently telepathic process), as the profane illumination of reading about the telepathic phenomena. And the most passionate investigation of the hashish trance will not teach us half as much about thinking (which is entirely narcotic), as the profane illumination of thinking about the hashish trance. The reader, the thinker, the loiterer, the
flâneur, are types of illuminati just as much as the opium eater, the dreamer, the ecstatic. And more profane. Not to mention that most terrible drug - ourselves - which we take in solitude. "
Walter Benjamin One Way Street - Surrealism (Verso) [1929] (1997) p.237
