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TRANSLATOR'S NOTE:

A Lampiste is a man who makes lamps.

He is also in argot a scapegoat.

Note on art

Art is at present the only self-contained construction about which there is no more to be said, such is its richness, vitality, meaning and wisdom. To understand, to see. To describe a flower: relative poetry more or less artificial flower. To see.

Until we discover the intimate vibrations of the final cell of a mathematical god-brain and the explanation of the primary astronomies - its essence - we shall always find ourselves describing this impossibility with its logical elements of perpetual contradiction, a marshland of starts and of futile bell-ringing. Like toads squatting on cold lanterns, squashing the descriptive intelligence of the red belly. What people write on art is an educative work, and in this sense it has a right to exist. We want to give back to mankind the ability to understand that a unique fraternity comes into existence at the intense moment when beauty and life itself, brought into high tension on a wire, ascend towards a flash-point; the blue tremor liked to the ground by our magnetised gaze which covers the peak with snow. The miracle. I open my heart to creation.

There are many artists who are no longer looking for solutions in the object and in its relations with the outside world; they are cosmic or primary, decided, simple, wise and serious.

The diversity of today's artists is a compressed jet of water scattered at crystal liberty. And their efforts create new limpid organisms, in a world of purity, with the aid of transparencies and of the materiality of construction of a simple image which is in the process of formation. They are carrying on the tradition; the past and its evolution are pushing them slowly, like a snake, towards their inner, direct consequences, beyond both surfaces and reality.

Note on negro art

The new art is first and foremost concentration, the lines from the base to the apex of a pyramid forming a cross; through purity we have first deformed and them decomposed the object, we have approached its surface, we have penetrated it. We want a clarity that is direct. Art is grouped into camps, each with its special skills, within its own frontiers. The influences of a foreign nature which were mixed up in it are the rags of a Renaissance lining still sticking to the souls of our fellow men, for my brother's soul has sharp branches, black with autumn.

My other brother is naive and good, and laughs. He eats in Africa or along the South Sea Islands. He concentrates his vision on the head, carves it out of wood that is as hard as iron, patiently, without bothering about the conventional relationship between the head and the rest of the body. What he thinks is: man walks vertically, everything in nature is symmetrical. While working, new relationships organise themselves according to degree of necessity; this is how the expression of purity came into being.

From blackness, let us extract light. Simple, rich luminous naivety. Different materials, the scales of form. To construct in balanced hierarchy. EYE: button, open wide, round, and pointed, to penetrate my bones and my belief. Transform my country into a prayer of joy or anguish. Cotton wool eye, flow in my blood.

Art, in the infancy of time, was prayer. Wood and stone were truth. In man I see the moon, plants, blackness, metal, stars, fish. Let the cosmic elements glide symmetrically. Deform, boil. Hands are big and strong. Mouths contain the power of darkness, invisible substance, goodness, fear, wisdom, creation, fire.

No one has seen so clearly as I this dark grinding whiteness.

Note on art

H. Arp

Having finally succeeded in making parallel lines meet at infinity, and arrived at the sobriety of skilful superimpositions, he shook his art like a thousand-branches explosion whose richness of forms and allusions are marvellously grouped in one simple organic unity.

The summit sings what is being spoken in the depths.

Nature is organised in its totality, the rigging of the fabulous ship up to the focal point in the principles that regulate crystals and insects in hierarchies like trees.

Every natural thing keeps its clarity of organisation, hidden, pulled by relationships which are grouped together like the family of lunar lights, the hub of a wheel that might revolve ad infinitum, the sphere, it ties its liberty, its final, absolute existence, to innumerable and constructive laws.

My sister, root, flower, stone.

The organism is complete in the mute intelligence of a nervure and in its appearance.

Man is dirty, he kills animals, plants, his brothers, he quarrels, he's intelligent, talks too much, doesn't know how to express his thoughts.

But the artist is a creator: he knows how to work in a manner that becomes organic. He decides. He makes man better. Cultivates the garden of intentions. Commands.

The purity of a principle makes me happy. To see, beyond the horizontal which expands as it tranquillises the vegetable novelties of far-off countries, icy inflorescenes.

The vertical: thinking of infinity while feeding the depth of a moment of animality.

H. Art

Symmetry

flower of a midnight encounter

in which fever and bird become the tranquillity of a halo

and the hop-bine climbs

the flower becomes crystal or beetle magnet start

to want to live a simple life.

If we can live a miracle we have reached the level where your blood will be an order of archangels, the medicine of astronomy, reader, - belief stored up clearly in simple hearts, - wisdom, knowledge.

Guillaume Apollinaire

"le Poète assassiné"

"les Mamelles de Tiresias"

________________________________________________________________________

For this poet, life is a serious and revolving game of jokes, sadness, good-nature, naivety and modernism, turn and turn about. The finger bores into all sorts of flesh till it gets to the innermost part that shrieks and vibrates, where is becomes a flower, and laughs. The unforeseen is everywhere's explosive star, and speed harmonises with the tranquil, curious narrator, in a natural affirmation of constant novelty. This collision begets the burlesque. The past put in a reflecting mirror which is projected several centuries ahead. With the unerringness of a cowboy. With an elegant and grotesque turn. Impulsive, capricious, subtle. At the gallop above life, man is ridiculous.

While Second Lieutenant Apollinaire was in hospital with a serious head-wound, his book of stories, Le poete assassine appeared, and the Croniamantal poet in a frock coat, in a pink cradle, burst forth simultaneously in Munich and in various cellars frequented by princes.

The theatre. Since it still remains attached to a romantic imitation of life, to an illogical fiction, let us give it all the natural vigour that it had at the outset: whether it be entertainment or poetry.

The tortured little sensitivities of changeable psychologies, a declamatory theory, cannot reveal a truth that will for ever remain obscure, like all useless actions and their relative results.

At an evening organised by the review Sic on June 24th, Apollinaire's surrealist drama Les mamelles de Tiresias was performed. Let women have children - their duty and their purpose. It's reasonable and correct.

It seems that people enjoyed themselves very much listening to what Apollinaire said so clearly in sets made out of scraps of newspapers and in masks which were supposed to represent fever cut out of the margin of a supreme, multicoloured star. Laughter is men's goodness.

Look for medicines and wisdom in songs, and let's start again.

Pierre Reverdy

"le Voleur de Talan"

________________________________________________________________________

An unexpected book, almost the novel of one's dreams. Since the Renaissance, the centre and principle of art has been anecdote: in other words, a story told to a rich man in order to awaken in him a "feeling"; 64% pity and the rest humility, etc., + forgetting of an inconvenient instant in which we made a splendid bargain. Half of all writers know that and take advantage of it; the other half are still trying to warm up the egg of anecdote to turn it into art, they are speculating on the short tradition of a few centuries. But they serve the same stomach, which they neither wanted nor foresaw.

The Renaissance was the infernal age of the cynic. For art it was a shambles, divided between anecdote and charm. Illusion became the goal, and man was trying to go one better than God. But the problems of an eventful life made him interesting and, unfortunately, productive.

We want to continue the tradition of Negro, Egyptian, Byzantine and Gothic art and destroy in ourselves the atavistic sensitivity bequeathed to us by the detestable era that followed the quattrocento.

Reverdy's novel is a poem. Its episodes are carefully muffled up in a substance with which we are unfamiliar. The collision of its elements is particularly brutal. But it is a difficult life that burns within the golden egg. Straight lines emerge from this flesh, penetrate us and link us to it. For Reverdy the action, transformed into a centipede, advances slowly inside the organism of the novel, and a hundred bees bring us little by little, by thousands of invisible stings, the consequences and the facts, and introduce them uniformly into our bloodstream.

Le Voleur de Talan is above all in a radiator of vibrations, and the images which are discharged in all directions (an almost electrical effect as they go past) unite around it; because of this, Reverdy's work is COSMIC. But this ambulant and ever-renewed halo leaves us with a cloudy impression and the bitter taste that man is the centre of it and that he can, in his little world, become a god-master.

What I call "cosmic" is an essential quality of a work of art. Because it implies order, which is the necessary condition of the life of every organism. Multiple, diverse and distant elements are, more or less intensely, concentrated in the work; the artist collects them, chooses them, arranges them, makes them into a construction or a composition. Order is the representation of a unity governed by those universal faculties, sobriety and the purity of precision.

There are two principles in the cosmic:

(1) To attach equal importance to each object, being, material, and organism in the universe.

(2) To stress man's importance, to group round him, in order to subordinate them to him, beings, objects, etc ...

The nucleus of the latter principle is a psychological method; the danger is the need to CORRECT men. They should be left to what they want to become - superior beings. The poet allows himself to be implicated at the whim of succession and impression. For the form principle, this need takes on a new form: to place men beside the other elements, just as they are, to make men BETTER.

To work together, anonymously, on the great cathedral of life we are preparing, to level man's instincts, for if we were to stress his personality too much, he would take on babylonian proportions of spite and cynicism.

Reverdy, in grouping breaths, and the relations of the elements, around man, creates near-material conditions which remain stagnant throughout the journeys of the various characters, and towards the end of the book, if we have been following with some care the steps covered, we almost suffocate in that atmosphere, knowing as we do the secrets of its composition. One of the great qualities of this book is that it moves us so strongly, given Reverdy's deliberate sobriety in the choice of the means that he uses; in this he is honest and serious. He comes close to the first principle in that he does not moralise, because he allows all the elements, except man, to appear simultaneously. To art for art's sake, Reverdy opposes art for life's sake. To which we oppose life for the sake of cosmic diversity, for totality, for the universal, and we want to see as innate in the latter the slow life which exists, and even sleeps, in what is usually called death. But theories and formulae are relative and elastic - in terms of the absolute, they would become narrow dogmas and fanaticism - and we don't want to go in for that.

Reverdy's novel must be read; its poetry is wise and clam, as if it were the evidence of a tranquillity that grows and increases in its own power. A cascade that seems to fall from on high, like a productive conflagration, a great tree with multiple and diverse fruits.

Pierre Albert-Birot

Trente et un poemes de poche

________________________________________________________________________

Irregular necklaces of houses, green fir trees. Each notion in its own box: an atmosphere in a box of matches and speed captured; insects, trams, crawling up towards a glass head. To say: futurism for young ladies, an explosion in a convent school and, squashed under soft pillows, new landscapes? But each little page should too loudly and implodes in its vase, each one contains a new idea, and we are astrally amazed at the rapid passage (a little too brutal, but perhaps necessary) of the images of intense and highly-coloured life.

Translator's note:: Pierre Albert-Birot's widow in helping with certain technical points of meaning has pointed out that this form of criticism is a critical synthesis, the point of which is to give an impression of the work without the critic intervening personally. The review is a form of digest in which the intelligent reader can discern the writer's opinion of the work in question.

Note on negro poetry

"I don't even want to know that there were men before me" (DESCARTES), but some simple, essential laws, the pathetic, secret fermentation of a solid earth.

To fix at the point where forces have accumulated, from which the expressed meaning springs, the invisible radiation of substance, the natural - though hidden and accurate - relationship, naively, without explanation.

To round off and arrange images into forms and constructions according to their weight, their colour, their matter, or organise values, material and durable densities on different spatial levels without subordinating anything to them. Classification of operas comiques sanctioned by the aesthetics of the props. (O, my drawer number ABSOLUTE>)

I can't bear going into a house where the balconies, the "embellishments", are carefully stuck on to the walls, And yet the sun and the stars continue to vibrate and hum freely in space, but I am loath to identify explanatory (and probably asphyxiating) hypotheses with the principles of life, activity and certainty.

The crocodile hatches future life, rain falls for vegetable silence, we are not creators by analogy. The beauty of the satellites - the lesson light - will content us, for we are only God for the country of our knowledge, within the laws in which we live our experience on this earth, on both sides of our equator, within our frontiers. A perfect example of the infinite that we can verify: the sphere.

To round off and arrange images into forms and constructions according to their weight, their colour, their matter, or organise values, material and durable densities by personal decision and the unshakeable with the matter transformed, very close to the veins commensurate with the matter transformed, very close to the veins and rubbing itself against them while waiting for a present and definitive joy. An organism is created when its elements are ready for life. Poetry lives primarily for the functions of the dance, of religion, of music and of work.

Guillaume Apollinaire is dead

He fell like the feverish "rain" that he had so carefully composed for a Paris magazine. Will the trains, the dreadnoughts, the variety theatres and the factories raise the wind of mourning for the most enduring, the most alert, the most enthusiastic of French poets? The fog isn't enough, nor is the tumult and the shouting. His season should have been the joy of victory, of our victory, that of the new men working in essential darkness, shaping the essential Logos. He knew the mechanism of the stars, the exact proportion of turmoil and discretion.

His spirit was a gallop of clarity, and the hail of fresh words, the escort of their crystalline kernels, were the angels.

He'll meet Henri Rousseau.

Is Apollinaire dead?

R. Huelsenbeck: "Prières fantastiques"

Energy and speed propelled over the glacier, vertiginous currents leaping furiously through invisible obstacles, a stagnant effervescence expanding enormously above, descending into the mines, thrusting out on all sides, always struggling and calling on all objects, colours, feelings, races, factories, animals and different languages to help him - his companions, his witnesses. He casts his vision of paradise into hell, and vice versa; nothing is sacred, everything is of divine essence. In this suspense - gymnastics in the irregular movement of the pendulum (irony, deep voice, sacrilegious flower), which gradually slows down towards the end of the book, calm and serious, clear, a wise passion, the final prayer resounds.

The representation of noise sometimes really, objectively becomes noise, and the grotesque takes on the proportions of disconnected, chaotic phrases. The bourgeois spirit, which renders ideas usable and useful, tries to assign to poetry the invisible role of the principle engine of the universal machine: the practical soul. With its help they'll give Christ back to men: expressionism. In this way it is possible to organise and fabricate everything. Liberty, fraternity, equality, expressionism, are produced. Huelsenbeck is one of the rare people who, having shouted and protested, will remain inaccessible to the paths of the snivellers disguised as butterflies.

Note on poetry

The poet of the last station has given up vain weeping; lamentation slows down progress. The humidity of past ages. People who feed on tears are contented and obtuse, they thread their tears behind the necklaces of their souls so as to cheat the snakes. The poet can go in for Swedish gymnastics. But for abundance and explosion he knows how to kindle hope TODAY. Whether tranquil, ardent, furious, intimate, pathetic, slow or impetuous, his burning desire is for enthusiasm, that fecund form of intensity.

To know how to recognise and pick up the sign of the power we are awaiting, which are everywhere; in the fundamental language of cryptograms, engraved on crystals, on shells, on rails, in clouds, or in glass; inside snow, or light, or coal; on the hand, in the beams grouped round the magnetic poles, on wings.

Persistence quickens joy and shoots it like an arrow up to the celestial domes, to distil the quintessence from the waves of phlegmatic nourishment, creating new life. Flowing in all colours and bleeding amongst the leaves of all the trees. Vigour and thirst, emotion faced with a form that can neither be seen nor explained - that is poetry.

Let's now look for analogies in the various forms in which art is materialised; each must have its own liberty and its own frontiers. There are the equivalents in art, each branch of the start develops independently, expands, and absorbs the world of its choice. But the parallelism that records the march of a new life will brand the era, without any theory.

To give each element its identity, its autonomy, the necessary condition for the creation of new constellations, since each has its own place in the group. The drive of the Word: upright, an image, a unique event, passionate, of dense colour, of intensity, in communion with life.

Art is a series of perpetual differences. For there is no measurable distance between "how are you?", the level on which people make their world grow, and human actions when seen from this angle of underwater purity. The strength to transmute this succession of ever-changing notions into the instant - that is the work of art. An Everlasting Sphere, a shape begotten by necessity, without a begetter.

The mind is alive with a new range of possibilities: to centralise them, to collect them under a lense that is neither material nor delimited - what is popularly called: the soul. The ways of expressing them, of transmuting them: the means. Bright as a flash of gold - the increasing beating of expanding wings.

Without pretensions to a romantic absolute, I present a few mundane negations.

A poem is no longer a formal act: subject, rhythm, rhyme, sonority. When projected on to everyday life, these can become means, who use is neither regulated nor recorded, to which I attach the same with as I do to the crocodile, to burning metals, or to grass. Eye, water, equilibrium, sun, kilometre, and everything that I can imagine as belonging together and which represents a potential human asset, is sensitivity. The elements love to be closely associated, truly hugging each other, like the cerebral hemispheres and the cabins of transatlantic liners.

Rhythm is the gait of the intonations we hear, but there is a rhythm that we neither see nor hear: the radius of an internal grouping that leads towards a constellation of order. Up to now, rhythm has been the beating of a dried-up heart, a little tinkle in putrid, padded wood. I don't want to put fences round what people call principles, when what is at stake is freedom. But the poet will have to be demanding towards his own work in order to discover its real necessity: order, essential and pure, will flower from this asceticism - (Goodness without a sentimental echo, its material side).

To be demanding and cruel, pure and honest towards the work one is preparing and which on will be situating amongst men, new organisms, creations that live in the very bones of light and in the imaginative forms that action will take - (REALITY).

The rest, called literature, is a dossier of human imbecility for the guidance of future professors.

The poem pushes up or hollows out the crater, remains silent, kills or shouts in an accelerating crescendo of speed. It will no longer depend on its visual image, on sense perception or on intelligence, but on its impact, or capability of transmuting the trances of emotions.

Comparison is a literary means which no longer satisfies us. There are different ways of formulating an image or of integrating it, but the elements will be taken from different and remote spheres.

Logic no longer guides us, and though it is convenient to have dealings with, it has become impotent, a deceptive glimmer, sowing henceforth a light that has failed forever. Other creative powers, flamboyant, indefinable and gigantic, are shouting their liberty on the mountains of crystal and of prayer.

Liberty, liberty: not being a vegetarian, I'm not give any recipes.

Obscurity must be creative if it is so pure a white light that it blinds our fellow-men. Where their light stops, our starts. Their light is for us, in the fog, the microscopic and infinitely compact dance of the elements of darkness in imprecise fermentation. Is not matter in its pure state dense and unerring?

Under the back of felled trees, I seek the image of thing to come, of vigour, and in underground tunnels the obscurity of iron and coal may already be heavy with life.

Pierre Reverdy

"les Ardoises du toit"

"les Jockeys camouflés"

We know to what extent psychological art anaesthetises any movement - even if it is sometimes a literary movement - and the balance that le Voleur de Talan established in favour of the cosmic spirit. Les ardoises du Toit marks another state of equilibrium, a sensitivity specialising in soft, warm atmospheres, through elegance, the unexpected ending, first-rate and appreciable qualities, but it is definitely with Les jockey camoufles that Reverdy achieves the maximum personal state of freedom: suddenly stopping and re-winding the movement starting from the other end, piling image upon image, dissipating the patchy fog, working on the reader's underwater matter, shocks of varying strength, dimension, level and price, poetry is certainly not a neurasthenic serum. Reverdy inclines more and more closely towards precise, free and cosmic CERTAINTY.

There are no laws, w can do whatever we like

let us use all means, every element calls to us,

post coitum exact flower of the sun.

Francis Picabia

"l'Athlète des pompes funèbres"

"Rateliers platoniques"

When it wants to destroy, the creative blood attains geyser-force, and collective, non-zoological vitality is heralded, inscribed in shorthand on the piano of anti-artistic isthmuses. In painting, Picabia has destroyed "beauty" and built his work with the left-overs: cardboard, money, the bird of the eternal mechanism, brain in an intimate relationship with the qualities of machines. Functions. Not merely the fabrication or expression of time, but the natural simplicity of an immediate notation with personal means. Whence the purity of his works. Romanticism is the descriptive exasperation of the gutter, of the plant, of the motor car, or a tender way of looking; disgust with observed systems leads Picabia on to the clear realities of machines; the rest is tranquillity, - immediate externalisation is the least effort or a naivety of means.

A stone expresses itself by the form and sometimes the luminosity of its facts, the vibration of the air passed through. I hate nature. Picabia doesn't like professionalism. His poems has not ending, his prose works never start. He writes without working, presents his personality, and doesn't control his feelings. Probes into the flesh of organisms. neither word-stability nor music predominates, and I glide over his phrases towards a subterranean harmony. Picabia throws light on the rotation of realities and of mystery and reduces importances or pretensions to the relative equality of cosmic formation; he kills hysterical declamation and pathos on the little paths that we still find everywhere.

Francis Picabia

"Pensées sans langage"

The philosophical myriapoda have broken some wooden or metal legs, and even some wings, between the stations Truth-Reality. There was always something that could not be grasped: LIFE.

To try to replace life by a private pleasure is an adventure that is sometimes amusing. (The remorseless adventures that insinuate themselves into art by its means, in order to destroy it slowly, revive the embers in the kernel, mutual interests, insinuations and obstacles system DADA movement.)

But to make a joke into something eternal and then starve it to death is ridiculous, it's the naive hello of the onanist, salvation army music, a motley pretension, a branch of the bourgeoisie flirting with art.

Anaemia isn't propagated on the continent, but you know about strength, microbes, flowers, alcohol, blood, invention which diffuse their rain - aimlessly - or break like echoes on the solid, morning rock.

I'm thinking about the same need to impress - teach me how to say things seriously without soudning false - and it's always everyone else who is right.

The need to try to find explanations for what has no other reason than that it has quite simple been done, with no argument, with the minimum of criterion or criticism, is like self-kleptomania: like permanently sticking your own objects in different pockets. We also usually manage to build up a collection of some sort of moral speciality, to make it easy to pass judgement. Men are poor because they steal from themselves. It isn't a question of the difficulty of understanding modern life, but they steal elements of their own personalities.

PICABIA. His words fertilise metal. Whether meteor or wheel, urubu or hemstitched hurricane, he lets his feelings sleep in a garage. I place a hoot-owl in a hexagon, sing in hexameters, wear down and use up angles, howl "down with", and abuse. Geometry is dry, and old. I've seen a line leap in a different way. A line that has leapt kills theories; all we have to do then is look for adventure in the life of lines. A personal work, a work that shuns the absolute. And lives. Escapes. Full of silent sap. The mechanism of the aorta makes more noise than a life, its cog-wheels are on fire, awakening: typography of one's primary feelings, too simple to be deciphered so soon by the captains of science. My dear Picabia: "To live" without pretension, to dance on iron spikes, telegraphically, or to keep quiet on the equinoctial line, to know that at every instant - perpetua mobilia - it is today.

"Charm" and "pretty" apply to a moonlit night, to feelings, to paintings that sing and to songs that see, stick to traditions, insinuate themselves amongst the conventional and amongst painters.

Cubist and futurist painters, who ought to be allowing free vibration to their joy at having liberated appearances from a cumbersome and futile exterior, are becoming scientific and academic. Theoretical propagation of carrion, blood pump. There are words which are also legions of honour. Hunting down the vulgar words that ensure the happiness of humanity, and the prestidigitatic prestige of prodigious predilections for the pleasure of the people who pay. Item: respect for bread and butter.

Ideas poison painting; if the poison bears the sonorous name of a big philological pot-belly, art becomes contagion and, if people rejoice at this intestinal musicality, the mixture becomes a danger for clean and sober men. It is only negative action that is necessary. Picabia has reduce painting to a simple structure; everyone will find therein the lines of his own life,

which go with time by railway and by wireless telephony

if he knows how to look without wondering why a cup is like a feeling.

Open letter to Jacques Rivière

People these days no longer write with their race, but with their blood (what a platitude!) What, for the other sort of literature, was a characteristic, is today temperament. It more or less amounts to the same thing if we write a poem in Siamese or if we dance on a locomotive. It's only natural that the elderly don't notice that a new type of man is being created here, there and everywhere. With some insignificant variations in race the intensity is, I believe, the same everywhere, and if there is a common characteristic to be found in people who are creating today's literature, it will be that of anti-psychology.

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

If one writes, it isn't a refuge: from every "point of view". I am not a professional writer and I have no literary ambitions. I should have become a successful adventurer, making subtle gestures, if I had had the physical force and nervous stamina to achieve this one exploit: not to be bore. One writes, too, because there aren't enough new men, out of habit, one publishes to try to find men, and to have an occupation (this in itself is very stupid.) There could be a solution: to resign oneself; quite simply: to do nothing. But you need enormous energy. And one has an almost hygienic need of complications.

Art and hunting

Man-hunting has its roots and sources in one's topographical map in the discount bank; this goes without saying for that soft and subtle hallucination: man. This is normal and quite good, and quite foolish in the repetition that always attaches new importance to its latest apparition. But the results of man-hunting that are sold on the Stock Exchange need to be exhibited. With éclat and in a frame. It is here that a thick beard starts growing round the clear idea that I have, it hasn't yet had forty years of existence and of honest toil. I hate madness and its platonic form which is poetry and the absurd. "I hate" no longer has the unpleasant flavour that it used to have; it now means that I am smoking a cigarette.

Men are impenetrable; people who believe that men can interpenetrate each other like two hands crossed over a stomach, are wrong, are lying, and are getting a bad bargain. Values are as elastic as Lassalle's iron law of wages. Conflicts no longer exist because we are in summer's pocket. Bad speculation on the Institute, which used to express an insult, has brought us to see things on the same level: Place Vendome, which couldn't contain pejorative mustard, is only a purely verbal statement.

Our ideas are clear and have no need of expression; the sport that consists of discharging, parallel with ideas, breaths which run and which discuss, is known to our best dialecticians. It is these breaths that try to dominate and to be in the right. But even the most beautiful women in France have only succeeded in showing themselves off at the Casino de Paris. Language is pretty threadbare, and yet is alone fills the lives of most men. All they know is the stories life has been able to tell them. Cracking jokes and the little pejorative air are for them the savour of language, the salt of life. Dada brutally intervened in this little cerebral domestic scene. But the most important inventions of the century have gone unnoticed: the tooth brush, God, aluminium. Therefore, Madam, mind you understand that a really dada product is something other than a brilliant label.

Dada has abolished nuances. Nuances don't exist in words, but in the brains of a few atrophied people where the cells are too congested. Simple notions which serve deaf-mutes as signs are entirely sufficient to express the four or five mysteries we have discovered.

Active influences are felt in politics, in commerce, in language. The whole world and everything in it has slid a bit to the left with us. Dada has stuck a nozzle into the hot bread. Little by little, big by big, it destroys. And we shall also see certain liberties that we take every day with feelings, and with social and moral life, becoming common practice. Already liberties are no longer being considered as crimes, but as itches.

Dada proverb

Paul Éluard wants to achieve a concentration of words, crystallised as if for the people, but whose meaning remains null and void.

For example, the definition: "A proverb is a proverb", or: "A very proverby proverb." The dada proverb is the result of a multi-faceted sonority which comes out of all mouths with the force of inertia and with conviction of tone, but which alights with the tranquillity of time on wine. The motivating force behind the popular proverb is observation and experience, that of the dadaist proverb is a spontaneous concentration which penetrates in the guise of the former and may achieve the same degree and result: the little collective madness of a sonorous pleasure.

The bankruptcy of humour: reply to a questionnaire

I think we should invent new words to express better what we would like to mean by humour. I tried to introduce a meaningless word: "Dada."

Spontaneity closes the circuit of problems and the world which everyone creates in himself, purifies the work of art and generates the intimate communion of the soul with things. It is the great principle of subjectivism, the noble force of reality, the knowledge of the individual, that will characterise future art. The difference between Latin art (active simplicity) and German art, the result of heavy, systematic research until there is no longer any distinction between labour and creative spark, is defined by spontaneity. The work has wings, it takes its place amongst the elements of existence.

Isn't it enough to say: Rimbaud + Lautreamont + Jarry: the surety and most complex expression of French art? I don't think anyone will ever mange to put the most cosmic-diverse writers into pigeon-holes. Their richness, which belongs to the great apparitions and events of nature, their cosmic diversity, their supreme power of expressing the inexplicable simultaneously, without previous logical discussion, by severe and intuitive necessity, place them above all classification and formulae.

I don't believe in influences, I sometimes think (at around 6 o'clock in the evening) of a spirit common to the period, but I declare myself an enemy of explanatory criticism and of objectivity. (Where is the fine, definitive and perfect system that we have been promised for the last 3,333 years, and the happiness of onanists? Philosophical discussions don't amuse me, for I am a partisan of the wireless.) I don't believe, either, in the mechanical elements of art, which are neither the regulation of the beautiful, nor its control, nor its consequence; but which we would be more likely to find at the peak of the intersection of two parallel lines, or in a submarine formation of stars and transchromatic aeroplanes. In the blood of stone, perhaps, in the obscurity of cellular metals and of cryptograms, and in the surge of images under the back of trees.

I have seen "the deflatable man"

at the olympia

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IN the dead-tired courtyard, two men are sleeping - patches of difficult hours on the clock-face of human literatures. A cart, planks, furniture smelling of young wood and resin. Why are we sitting in the stalls watching him descend from sleep into death? We always leave by the stage door. Death is the colour of lead, his moustaches droop like the wings of worldly birds. His arms hang loosely. his chest is heavy. His leg muscles are like jelly. Everything is inflated with condemned breath. And that mass of accustomed material and flesh screws itself into a spiral in the centre of gravity that attracts it. His comrade is strong. He doesn't understand. He tries to sit him down on a chair. So as not to be next to a corpse any longer. He doesn't understand a thing. The other is still subsiding. He persists. Gets furious. Can't see anything but the tranquillity of balance. This lasts as long as the normal course of an illness. They are sitting side by side on chairs, and sleeping. The sun. They wake up. The deflatable man first. And scratches his head, which is seething with animal irritants.

note on the comte de lautreamont, or the cry

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We know now that Lautreamont will be the Rimbaud of the poetry of today. "The Dictatorship of the Mind", presented without bothering about improvements or circumspection, is an affirmation of intensity, and steers every thought towards that noble, precise, sumptuous force, the only one worthy of interest - destruction.

Mal d'or or gold of dolour

Mal d'or or gold has destroyed the door of death.

His madness was not sublime - which is why it still lives on. Who dares to combat a reality because it is served up as a form of reproach?

TO SEE : necessity of a cerebral trigger.

Those people who uncertainties show themselves in pretension and whose pride rises in the form of cerebral saliva, those people for whom swamps and excrement have determined the rules of philosophical pity, will see, one of these days, this immeasurable malediction destroy their filthy, feeble muscles. The Comte de Lautreamont has gone beyond the tangential point which separates creation and madness. For him, creation is already mediocrity. On the other hand it is unpronounceable solemnity. The frontiers of wisdom are unexplored. Ecstasy devours them with entire hierarchy nor cruelty.

The dolour that freezes the brains, pulverises the crystal of its blood, and leads the chaos of the sheathing of the hulls of old boats, of the lining of old coats, down a strange channel of pathetic regrets. Whether imaginary or exaggerated, dolour drinks silence, and accompanies the high-pitched force that is constantly trying to dissolve itself in the magic, universal delirium tremens.

The liberty of his faculties, which are bound by nothing, which he turns in all directions and especially towards himself, the strength sincerity far too intimate to interest us, are the highest human attitude because, transformed, as actions, they ought to culminate in the annihilation of that strange mixture of bones, flour and vegetation: humanity. The mind of the negative man, who was ever ready to be killed by the merry-go-round of the wind and to be trampled on by a hail of meteors, goes beyond the sickly hysteria of Jesus and other tireless windmills installed in the sumptuous apartments of history.

Don't love if you want to die in peace.

Mal d'or or gold of dolour

Mal d'or or gold has destroyed the door of death

by this brilliance and the music of the zephyr's frogs.

Inside-out photography: Man Ray

It is no longer the object which, with the trajectories from its extreme points intersecting in the iris, projects a badly reversed image on the surface. The photographer has invented a new method; he presents to space an image that goes beyond it; and the air, with its clenched hands, and its head advantages, captures it and keeps it in its breast.

An eclipse revolves round a partridge: is it a cigarette case? The photographer makes the spit of thoughts revolve to the creaking of a badly-greased moon.

The light varies according to the giddiness of the pupil on the cold paper according to its weight and to the shock it produces. A wisp of a delicate tree enables us to anticipate metalliferous strata, mighty chandeliers. It illuminates the vestibule of the heart with a torch of snowflakes. And what interests us has neither reason nor cause, like a cloud that spits out its abundant voice.

But let us talk art. Yes, art. I know a man who does excellent portraits. The man is a camera. But, you say, the colour and the quivering of the brush are missing. That vague shiver that was first a weakness and later, in order to justify itself, called itself sensitivity. Human imperfection, it would appear, possesses more serious virtues than the exactitude of machines. And what about still lifes? We'd be glad to know whether hors-d'oeuvres, desserts and game hampers don't excite our appetite more. I listen to the humming of a tube in an oil field, a torpedo twists its mouth, the crockery breaks with the sound of domestic quarrels. Why not make the portrait of all that? Because this applies to a particular disturbance through a channel that leads to those sorts of emotion but which consumes neither eyes nor colours.

Painters have seen this, they've got together, talked for a long time, and discovered the laws of decomposition. And the laws of construction. And of circumvolution. And the laws of intelligence and of comprehension, of sales, of reproductions, of dignity and of museum-keeping. Other people arrived later with enlightened cries to say that what the first ones had produced was nothing but bird-droppings. They offered their merchandise instead, an impressionist blueprint reduced to a vulgar but attractive symbol. For a moment I believed in their idiots' cries, washed by the melting snow, but I soon discovered that it was only sterile jealousy that was tormenting them. They all ended up producing English postcards. After having known Nietzsche and sworn by their mistresses, after having pulled all the enamel paint off the corpses of their friends, they declared that beautiful children were just as admirable as good oil painting, and that the painting that sold for the most money was the best. Noble painting, with curly hair, in gilt frames. That's their marble; that's our piss.

When everything that people call art had got the rheumatics all over, the photographer lit the thousands of candles in his lamp, and the sensitive paper gradually absorbed the darkness between the shapes of certain everyday objects. He had invented the force of a fresh and tender flash of lightning which was more important than all the constellations destined for our visual pleasures. Precise, unique and correct mechanical deformation if fixed, smooth and filtered like a head of hair through a comb of light.

Is it a spiral of water, or the tragic gleam of a revolver, an egg, a glittering arc or a sluice gate of reason, a subtle ear with a mineral whistle or a turbine of algebraical formulae? As the mirror effortlessly throws back the image, and the echo the voice, without asking us why, the beauty of matter belongs to no one, for henceforth it is a physico-chemical product.

After the great inventions and storms, all the little swindles of the sensibility, of knowledge, and of the intelligence have been swept up into the pockets of the magical wind. The negotiator of luminous values takes up the bet laid by the stable-boys. The ration of oats they give morning and evening to the horses of modern art won't be able to disturb the passionate progress of his chess and sun game.

Reply to a questionnaire

I got your letter at Hohenscwangau, the well-know site of the grotesque and shapeless memories of a mad king and another Wagner, where every step I take makes me realise the extent to which these false world-wide reputations still have a pernicious influence in France. From symbolism to instrumentalism, from orphism to paroxysm, from futurism to all the etceterisms that mix music and poetry, the singularly primitive idea of a "universal art" has tormented our writers' minds, and left traces of Wagnerian bouillabaisse, that mysterious but undiscoverable sensitivity of which M. Maurice Barres in Ennemi de Lois.

1. Who is M. Thiers? Is he the author of the Fetes Galantes? In that case here's no doubt about it: he's the worst writer in the French language. With a bit of subtlety on the part of the reader, we can substitute any other name for that of M. Thiers, even that of M. France. With the aid of progress, of perfected perfidy, of logic and of Wilde-like repartee, anyone can be right about anything. So far as I am concerned, the worst writer I had to read at school was M. France. He knows how to cheat his readers by well-worn seductive methods, and how to make his ambition pass for humanitarian good nature.

2. In won't talk about Massenet, that victorhugo of verlainian poetry. Nor of the Dumas-fils toothpaste, the false crocodile Rolinat, nor of the Sully vase and the broken Prudhomme, the boring Emile Augier ... I ought to quote all M. Doumic's history (I apologise for talking about the latter, because I believe he's still alive). Mallarme has achieved a false reputation since the commercial zeal of the N.R.F. has acquainted us with those miserable Vers de circonstance, which reveal nothing but the rapidity and narrowness of mind of their author. I consider myself robbed by Mallarme, because when re-reading his poems that I used to like, all I can see in them is mechanical procedure of purely exterior syntax whose relative beauty lies in their workmanship. This is why they sympathy certain "constructivist" cubists feel towards him doesn't surprise me.

3. A writer whose reputation has been systematically usurped by the sweet, latent irony of a few snobs, is A. Dumas pere. Yet his novels are extremely amusing, unique in the genre of direct literature, and more likeable since we have been sure that someone else wrote them.

I suggest that lovers of French poetry should count the numbers of copies sold of all the existing editions of Rimbaud. They will certainly be amazed.

The work of the Comte de Lautreamont, which I don't want to popularise here, had to suffer the malicious praise of Remy de Fourmont and Leon Bloy who, with the superior airs, classified it as a literary curiousity and declared that is author was mad. Those who know Les Chants de Maldoror, however, are aware that nothing counts in comparison with that marvellous anti-human epic. In every register, that of the illuminated assassin, of the irritating petit bourgeois, of the prophet conscious of his ridiculous position, with the grandeur that accepts and uses both the good and the bad, Lautreamont has formulated the greatest accusation against the human species. You know very well that this species is only distinguished from the others by its mania for writing and reading books.

In talking to you of these three writers who reputations have been usurped, I can't help adding that I prefer the worst writers to the best, and false reputations to real ones.

Lecture on dada

You already know that for the general public, and for you society people, a dadaist is the equivalent of a leper. But that's only a manner of speaking. When people talk to us at close quarters, they still treat us with the remains of elegance that they owe to their habit of believe in progress. But from ten metres away, their hate starts up again. That's dada. If you ask me why, I wouldn't be able to answer you.

Another characteristic of Dada is that we are always parting from our friends. We part, and we resign. The first person to resign from the Dada Movement was I. Everyone knows that Dada is nothing. I parted from Dada and from myself the moment I realised the true implication of nothing.

If I continue to do something, it's because it amuses me. or rather because I have a need for activity which I exert in all directions. In actual fact, the real dadas were always apart from Dada. Those people to whom dada was still important enough for them to part from it with éclat, were only acting with a view to their own personal advertisement, and proved that counterfeiters have always insinuated themselves with filthy worms amongst the purest and most lucid adventures of the spirit.

I know you're expecting some explanations about Dada. I'm not going to give you any. Explain to me why you exist. You've no idea. You'll say: I exist to make my children happy. But you know it's not really true. You'll say: I exist to protect my country from barbaric invasions. That's not enough. You'll say: I exist because God wants me to . That's a tale to tell the children. You'll never know why you exist, but you'll always allow yourselves to be easily persuaded to take life seriously. You'll never understand that life is a ply on words, because you'll never be alone enough to refuse hate, judgements, and everything that needs a great effort, in favour of an even, calm state of mind in which everything is equal and unimportant.

Dada isn't at all modern, it's rather a return to a quasi-buddhist religion of indifference. Dada places an artificial sweetness on things, a snow of butterflies which have come out of a conjuror's head. Dada is immobility and doesn't understand the passions. You'll say that this is a paradox because Dada manifests itself by violent actions. Yes, the reactions of individuals contaminated by destruction are fairly violent, but once these reactions have been exhausted and annihilated by the continuous and progressive satanic insistence of a "what's the use?", what remains and predominates is indifference. I could, what's more, with the same air of conviction, maintain the contrary.

I admit that my friends don't approve of this point of view. But this Nothing can only be expressed as a reflection of an individuality. That is why it will be useful to everybody, as no one accords any importance to anything but himself. I'm speaking of myself. That's already too much. How could I dare to speak of everyone at the same time and please everybody?

Nothing is more pleasant than to baffle people. The people one doesn't like. What's the use of explaining to them things that can only interest their curiosity? For people only like their own person, their income and their dog. This state of affairs derives from a false conception of property. If one is poor in spirit one possesses a sure and unshakeable intelligence, a ferocious logic and an immutable point of view. Try to become empty and to fill you brain cells haphazard. Go on destroying what you have in you. Indiscriminately. You could understand a lot of things, then. You aren't any more intelligent than we are, and we aren't any more intelligent than you.

Intelligence is an organisation like any other, social organisation, the organisation of a bank, or the organisation of a gossip-session. A society tea-party. Its purpose is to create order and introduce clarity where there is none. Its purpose is to create a hierarchy within a state. To make classifications for a rational piece of work. To separate questions of a material order from those of a moral order, but to take the former extremely seriously. Intelligence is the triumph of good breeding and pragmatism. Life, fortunately, is something different, and its pleasures are numberless. Their price cannot be evaluated in the currency of liquid intelligence.

These observations about everyday conditions have led us to a knowledge that constitutes our minimum of understanding, apart from the sympathy that links us, which is mysterious. We couldn't base it on principles. For everything is relative. What are Beauty, Truth, Art, Good, Liberty? Words which have a different meaning for every individual. Words which claim to make everybody agree, which is why they're usually written with capital letters. Words which do not have the moral value and the objective force that people are used to giving them. Their meaning changes from one individual to another, from one country to another. Men are different, it's their diversity that gives them their interest. There is no common basis in humanity's brains. The unconscious is inexhaustible and uncontrollable. Its strength is beyond us. It is as mysterious as the last particle of the brain cell. Even if we are familiar with it, who would dare state that we could reconstruct it as a viable generator of thoughts?

What use have philosophical theories been to us? Have they helped us to take a single step forward to backward? Where is "forward", where is "backward"? Have they transformed our forms of contentment? We are. We quarrel, we fuss, we struggle. The intervals are sometimes pleasant, often mixed with a boundless tedium, a swamp adorned with the beards of moribund shrubs. We have had enough of the considered actions that have swollen beyond measure our credulity in the blessings of science. What we want now is spontaneity. Not because it is more beautiful or better than anything else. But because everything that comes from us freely without any intervention from speculative ideas, represents us. We must accelerate this quantity of life that spends itself so readily here, there and everywhere. Art is not the most precious manifestation of life. Art does not have the celestial, general value that people are pleased to accord it. Life is far more interesting. Dada boasts of knowing the exact proportion that is to be given to art; it introduces it with subtle, perfidious means into the acts of everyday fantasy. And vice versa. In art, Dada brings everything back to the initial, but relative, simplicity. It mingles its caprices with the chaotic wind o creation and with the barbaric dances of savage tribes. It wants logic to be reduced to a personal minimum and literature to be primarily intended for the person who creates it. Words have a weight, too, and are used for an abstract construction. The absurd doesn't frighten me because, from a more elevated point of view, I consider everything in life to be absurd. It is only the elasticity of our conventions that makes a link between disparate acts. Beauty and Truth in art don't exist; what interest me is the intensity of a personality, transposed directly and clearly into its work, man and his vitality, the angle under which he looks at the elements and the way he is able to pick these ornamental words, feelings and emotions, out of the basket of death.

Dada tries to find out what words mean before using them, not from the point of view of grammar, but from that of representation. Objects and colours also pass through the same filter. It isn't a new technique that interests us, but the spirit. Why do you think we should bother about a pictorial, moral, poetic, social or poetic renovation? we all know that these stylistic renovations are only the successive uniforms of different historical eras, uninteresting questions and fashions and facades. We know very well that the people in Renaissance clothes are more or less the same as the people of today, and that Dchouang-Dsi was a dada as we are. You are making a mistake if you take Dada for a modern school, or even for a reaction against present-day schools. Several of my assertions have seemed to you to be old-fashioned and natural; this is the best proof that you were dadaists without knowing it, and perhaps even before the birth of dada.

You will often hear it sad: Dada is a state of mind. You can be gay, sad, distressed, joyful, melancholy or dada. Without being literary, you can be romantics, you can be dreamers, weary, whimsical, shopkeepers, thin, convicts, conceited, pleasant or dada. Later, in the course of history, when Dada has become a precise, everyday word, and when its popular repetition has given it the meaning of an organic word with its necessary content, people will be dada with neither shame nor prejoration, for who today still thinks of literature in terms of calling a lake, a landscape, or a character, romantic? Slowly but surely a dada character is being formed.

Dada is more or less everywhere, just as it is; with its defects, with the differences between people which it accepts and regards with indifference.

We are very often told that we are incoherent, but people intend this word to convey an insult which I find rather hard to grasp. Everything is incoherent. The man who decides to have a bath but who goes to the cinema. The other man who wants to keep quiet but who says things that don't even come into his head. Another one who has an exact idea about something but who only manages to express the opposite in words which for him are a bad translation. No logic. Relative necessities discovered a posteriori, valid not from the point of view of their exactitude, but as explanations.

The acts of life have neither beginning nor end. Everything happens in a very idiotic fashion. That's why everything is the same. Simplicity is called dada.

To try to reconcile an inexplicable and momentary state with logic seems to me an amusing game. The convention of spoken language is amply sufficient, but for ourselves alone, for our inner games and our literature we don't need it any more.

In painting, things happen in the same way. Painters, technicians who do very well what a camera records much better, will carry on with the game. We'll play ours. We don't know why, nor how. With everything that comes to hand. It will be badly done, but we don't care.

The beginnings of Dada were not the beginnings of an art, but those of a disgust. Disgust with the magnificence of philosophers who for 3000 years have been explaining everything to us (what was the use?), disgust with the pretensions of those artists who were god's representatives on earth, disgust with passion, with real, morbid malice applied in cases where it isn't worth while, disgust with a new form of tyranny and restriction, which only accentuates men's instinct for domination instead of allaying it, disgust with all the catalogued categories, with the false prophets behind whom financial interests must be sought, with pride or with illness, disgust with people who separate good from evil, beauty from ugliness (for why is it more estimable to be red rather than green, left or right, tall or short?), disgust, finally, with the jesuitical dialectic that can explain everything and insert into people's poor brains oblique and obtuse ideas with neither roots nor base, all this by means of blinding artifices and the insinuating promises of charlatans.

Dada, after having again attracted the attention of the whole word to death, to its constant presence amongst us, works by destroying more and more, not in extent but in itself. Moreover it takes no pride in these disgusts, they bring it neither advantage nor profit. It doesn't even fight anymore because it knows that there is no point in doing so, that none of this is of any importance. What interests a dadaist is his own way of living. But here we are reaching the places reserved for the great secret.

Dada is a state of mind. That is why it is transformed according to races and events. Dada is applicable to everything, and yet it is nothing, it is the point where yes and no meet, not solemnly in the castles of human philosophies, but quite simple on street corners like dogs and grasshoppers.

Dada is as useless as everything else in life.

Dada has no pretensions, which is how life ought to be.

Perhaps you'll understand me better if I tell you that dada is a virgin microbe that insinuates itself with the insistence of air into all the spaces that reason hasn't been able to fill with words or conventions.

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