38 
introduction to max ernst’s natural history 
this introduction contains the pseudo-introduction the original the vari 
ants of the original the pseudo-original as well as the variants of the pseudo 
original the apocrypha and the incorporation of all these texts in an original 
arpocryphum with apocopated whiskers as well as fifty calcinated medals and 
fifty suns of fifty years because the medal rises. — the medal of light rises. — 
fifty suns and fifty medals rise. — the wheels turn. — the wheels turn. — fifty 
suns and fifty medals rise while the pseudo-sun after fifty years of service re 
tires into the calcinated wheels of light. — the wheels turn no more. — the 
wheels turn no more. 
it is man who has replaced alarm-clocks by earthquakes showers of jordan 
almonds by showers of hail, the shadow of man encountering the shadow of a 
fly causes a flood, thus it is man who has taught horses to embrace one another 
like presidents kings or emperors sucking each other’s beards licking each 
other’s snouts plunging their tongues into patriotic profundities, the passerby 
who sees these equine kisses thinks that peace has been established on earth 
forever. 
with his eleven and a half tails of cotton his eight legs of bread his hundred 
eyes of air his four hearts of stone he goes a-hunting the flying cyclopean 
moustache without any limbs, but as this moustache is actually intelligible 
the hunter always comes home baffled, with the help of his eleven and a half 
tails man counts ten and a half objects in the furnished room of the universe: 
scarecrows with volcanoes and geysers in their buttonhole show cases of erup 
tions displays of lava string systems of solar currency labeled abdomens walls 
razed by poets the palettes of the caesars thoroughly still (and dead) lives the 
stables of the sphynxes the eyes of the man turned to stone while squinting at 
sodom the scars of . . . 
enter the continents without knocking but with a muzzle of filigree 
leaves never grow on the trees, like a mountain in bird’s-eye view they have 
no perspective no soap no hybrid plastron no scotch cheeks no crypt, the spec 
tator always finds himself in a false position before a leaf, he has the impression 
of carrying his head in his umbilicus his feet in his mouth his unwashed eyes 
in his hands, as for the branches trunks and roots I declare them to be fan- 
tasmagorias bald men’s lies, branches trunks and roots do not exist. 
like a lion who scents a succulent pair of newly-weds the seismic plant de 
sires to make a meal of the dead man. in his millennial den made up as a foetus 
it whirls with lust like the white juice of the end with the black juice of the 
start and the ferocity of its gaze chases the navels around the earth, the lime- 
tree grows tractably on boarded plains, the chestnut and the oak start out