tooknap press

[No date]

I stopped paying attention to things in themselves and became interested only in the words that designated them.  Each syllable seemed to me to be a kind of oracle that, on the one hand, revealed that things possessed properties that I had previously ignored and, on the other hand, through formal relations with other syllables, disclosed to me relations I had never before imagined between things that I had previously thought shared no connection.  In this way, the universe, which had formerly seemed to be chaos, fell into place and gathered itself together in sorts of chains of objects (chains born from chains of words that I myself had created), extended series which, at multiple points, intersected and cut across one another again and again, just as they could also be added to each other end to end, grafted one on top of another, and once again locked away.  And so, each word became no longer an inanimate and separate sign, but a kind of individual, capable of crystallizing the whole universe around itself -- just as, through perception, an individual effectively creates his own universe around himself, and is able to conceive of the the so-called real world only as a collection of all these particular universes, whose abstract schema results from their juxtaposition.  

  

          {august, 1927}

 

{while Leiris undoubtedly made use of it,

this passage could not be located

 in his published work.}