9 
Formerly, the anxious tribes of men would bury their nail- 
peelings and their fallen hairs in fear of sorcery; for they 
believed that these particles of themselves contained their whole 
vital spirit. Later, geologists succeeded in reconstructing the 
enormous skeletons of extinct animals from a piece of bone, 
buried perhaps for several milennia. Today, there is a new race 
of men who, from the double world of flesh and spirit, retain 
only the traces, vestiges of structures which a valueless intelli 
gence can never render firm. The slightest notations which they 
make are a sufficient witness to their love. Their brains may be 
exactly compared to those pictures which the poor adore, pic 
tures made with locks of hair snipped from a whole family of 
brides, or fragments of the martyred bones of saints, buried 
under ruined cloisters. There is no question of proving, con 
structing. The state of mind is a new fetichism, which demands 
nothing but the perfect adhesion of the heart to any sort of 
object, free of symbol, but reflecting like the tiniest cell the 
infinite harmony of all the universe. 
A man like Miro belongs to that sorcerer race whose feats 
seem often ridiculous because of their bizarre tone and their air 
of coming from somewhere else. A cauliflower or perhaps the 
rising sun. His lines are only indications, not a diagram, but 
rather the marks by which phenomena can be recognized. In 
his canvases, built like the delicate and lacy architecture of cer 
tain insects, Nellie was a lady, will-o’-the-wisp, a woman’s hair, 
the windows open on a night peopled with miracles, while 
reason is still untangling its threads, in spirals more tenuous than 
the smoke of a devotional candle, burned and snuffed out before 
a pyramid. 
(Translated by Malcolm Cowley) 
MIOHEL LEIRI8