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under the banner of d.a.d.a. that is to say, domine anno domine anno, the cy 
press is not a dancer’s calf in the ecclesiastical ballet. 
while the ferocious lion scents a succulent pair of newly-weds the lime- 
tree grows tractably on the boarded plains, when a traveler and a mountain 
meet in the sky they become confounded with one another, the mountain takes 
itself for the traveler and the traveler takes himself for the mountain, these 
encounters always end in a bloody brawl in which the traveler and the moun 
tain tear out each other’s trees, the chestnut and the oak start out under the 
sign of the vegetable banner, the cypress is a dancer’s calf in an ecclesiastical 
ballet. 
the idol dreams in the sea and the rain, harnessed in fours ahead of the four 
preceding like ventriloquists’ cemeteries or fields of honor the insects emerge. 
and now only eve remains to us. she is the white accomplice of newspaper 
filchers. here is the cuckoo the origin of the clock, the sound of his jaws is like 
the sound of a violent fall of hair, and so we count among the insects vacci 
nated bread the chorus of cells lightning flashes under fourteen years of age 
and your humble servant. 
the marine sky has been decorated by expressionist paperhangers who have 
hung a shawl with frost-flowers on the zenith, in the season of the harvest of 
conjugal diamonds huge cupboards with mirrors are found floating on their 
back in the oceans, the mirrors of these cupboards are replaced by waxed 
floors and the cupboard itself by a castle in Spain, these mirrored cupboards 
are rented as rings to midwives and storks to make their innumerable rounds 
in and as tabourets to two gigantic rusty feet which rest upon them and some 
times tap a few steps pam pam. that is why the seas are called pampas because 
pam means pas (step) and two pas make pam pam. 
and so you see that one’s honorable father can be consumed only slice by 
slice, impossible to finish him in a single luncheon on the grass and even the 
lemon falls on its knees before the beauty of nature, [illustration 1] 
Dadaland 
In Zurich in 1915, losing interest in the slaughterhouses of the world war, 
we turned to the Fine Arts. While the thunder of the batteries rumbled in the 
distance, we pasted, we recited, we versified, we sang with all our soul. We 
searched for an elementary art that would, we thought, save mankind from 
the furious folly of these times. We aspired to a new order that might restore 
the balance between heaven and hell. This art gradually became an object of 
general reprobation. Is it surprising that the “bandits” could not understand