17 
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