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number, conjurer of wounds, crowds and cursed adventures, we
find everywhere. We see it in filigree, in the hollow of a navel,
in the interior of an empty fruit or on the round plateau of the
scales which estimate the weights of light.
For our earthly spirit is lighted only by the lowest of win
dows too few to conjure the sorceries and we all rot in a cave like
the drowned, pierced with a million pricks of the needle, little
partial revelations, powerless to satisfy us and capable only of
creating in us the immense desire to annihilate the world called
“real” or to flee forever its lying stars cloistering us in a world
of crystal, like that of Masson—crystal of tears or petrified
charms, cut with sparkling facets, to blind the sky, with the
splendor of transparent armour, which in this region where all
is light, holds the place of haircloth upon our separate bodies
whose looks will remain eternally parallel.
MICHEL LEIRIS
A LETTER TO MY FRIENDS
S UPER-REALISTS. Chameleons, rather! Even as one
begins to scold you the colors change and a new “move
ment” is under way.
As we billet this new artistic organism in the Little
Review (unalphabetized cyclopedia of the twentieth cen
tury) word comes that it is no longer among the living. I insist,
however, upon a moment’s time to record my protest against
your somnambulistic literature.
It was with much sinking of the heart that I watched my
friends. . . . After the exquisite uproar of Dada, which was
incontestably a miraculous sideshow for the world, this Super
realism is the faint, ugly whine of a decrepit engine. In the
winter of 1921-1922 when I met Aragon and Tzara and the
others, I asked them anxiously how they had received Freud and
Psychoanalysis. In their superior Parisian manner they replied
that it was an old thing with them. And beside, the French had
never been very repressed. But something told me that they
had not really sweated and suffered through psychoanalysis
—not as I who at the age of sixteen interpreted the dreams
of my little girl friends and pleaded with them to cast off their
inhibitions. And so a year later I heard of special pilgrimages
to Vienna. When I returned to Paris I burst upon a whole mob
in Paul Eluard’s house engaged in grandiloquent revelations of
their unconscious love or hatred for each other. Then Spiritism