1924

Saturday 23 August

Dream: I was walking in a forest with my friend. At a curve in the road, a comet passed us, so slowly and so low that I feared its tail would ignite the tops of the trees.  Once the meteor had disappeared, a tender and animated voice crept in between the branches and struck my heart as if with an axe.  Nacreous breaking of waves on the nocturnal beaches of silence, the voice gradually filled the wood with its tides.  "The birds are dying," my friend said.  At that moment, the voice ceased, and I knew that the last bird had died.  We had come to the edge of a pond where the nixies slept in their secret nests in the depths of the waters.  The comet suddenly reappeared and swayed above our heads, then fell behind the horizon with a loud cry.  The lake seemed clearer and more transparent; I saw that it contained towers and palaces, steps from which a crowd of men and animals descended, not living, but rather phantoms of entities -- and I quickly recognized among them Bear Skin, Donkey Skin and Puss-in-Boots who, as soon as they were out of the water, began to dance and dragged me into a round into which I never, never should have gone.  
 

                                               {Journal}          

     In the word, "alcool", the two o's that evoke the bluish flame and the odor of burning alcohol.  The final l expresses the trembling of the flame.  

from "Notes on the Sacred in Everyday Life"               

Classification of numbers and letters (1925)

     Numbers    even  -----> vegetable
                        odd   -----> mineral
     Vowels           -----> substance
     Consonants   -----> forms (edges and curves)

Vowels 
      A ------->              mineral
      E, I, O ------>       vegetable
      U ------->              mineral
      [Y (artificial vowel) :   human, via the hybrid of vegetable I and mineral U]

      Nasals and dipthongs : raw, amorphous matter.  Chaos.  

Straight consonants:                 B
                                                  hard C (brittle)
                                                  D
                                                  hard G
                                                  K (brittle)
                                                  P
                                                  Q (brittle)
                                                  R (implies the idea of slope)
                                                  T

 Curved consonants:                 F (cutting)
                                                  soft J and G
                                                  L
                                                  M
                                                  N
                                                  S  (throwing)
                                                  V (cutting by its sound and by its form) 

                spiral:                        X (throwing)
                straight, broken:        Z  (throwing)

                                [similar expressions of movement in Z and X, but the straight Z signifiies this 
                                            movement by its form, while the curved X signifies by its sound)

More or less anonymous, generally anodyne caresses are the ones I recall with the most emotion. 

from "Notes on the Sacred in Everyday Life"             

[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.}

1909

Because Marguerite Roussel, mother of Raymond Roussel 
and widow of Eugene Roussel, often lends him the use of her box
at the Opera, Michel frequents the Palais Garnier in 1909-1910.

There he acquires a passion for musical drama that will remain with him 
for his entire life, and becomes familiar with classical repertory 
(such as Ambrose Thomas' Hamlet, but also with more recent works 

such as Richard Strauss' Salomé)
which gives him his first impression 
of modernity 

1916.

At 15, Michel adopts the habit of powdering his face, 
a habit which he will keep for close to ten years. 
To combat his shyness, he begins to drink 
and takes up various eccentricities.  

He becomes interested in occultism and alchemy.  
His brothers are drafted, and so Michel is less looked after 
than ever by parents who are too worried about their sons in the army 
to see that no danger threaten the one that is closest to them. 

        Psychological color of my sacred.  I place the accent on the forbidden, the taboo, the reserved.  Attitude of refusal, of folding in on the self.  I need a sacred, but -- for lack of virility -- I make of it a circumscribed, separate domain, impossible to penetrate.  Negative idea of purity.  Always nostalgia -- constructed in the object of desire, or of regret -- never passion, which tends to seize, leading to the destruction of the desiring subject or desired object.  Position of witness: he who places himself -- fearfully or respectfully -- at the edge, but on the outside of, the sacred.  

  From "Notes on the Sacred in Everyday Life"             

        Never satisfied, read the gilded title (or black on a gilt cover) of one of my children's books whose theme was the following: naiveté of a young boy and his sister who believed that ancient times were better than our current age, but who met only with disappointment because, in their dreams, their experience of these eras proved to be without fault or flaw.  Never satisfied -- couldn't I be accused of the same, accused of an even more serious lack of wisdom than these two children, whose mistake was to underestimate what they shared and to attribute marvelous colors to what they lacked, but who were at least led by their successive deceptions to finally appreciate what the present had to offer them?  Prickly if someone does me the service of sympathizing with me when I whine about my bad luck, equally thorny if someone sings my praises, sensitive about judgements I brought on myself of which I will then admit to only a small number, disgusted by a collection of press clippings about myself that I have to read but sorry when they run dry, depressed almost immediately when I discover I am to be given a prize for my literary work (the same prize that I had been vexed about not getting from the moment I knew I was in the running for it) ... I behave like a sullen child and as if, despite my desire to go beyond it, I intend to be the living illustration of never satisfied.  

[Fibrilles, 603-604]

     Necessity of "formalism" or "formulation" : I only feel transported outside of my limits, in communion with the universe (that is to say, complete) when things or my thoughts take a certain form.  

From "Notes on the Sacred in Everyday Life"                

        History of "my" sacred, recounted in chapters which could include: real life (waking state, dream, and half-sleep), language, art (religious pomp, performances -- bullfighting -- music, painting, and poetry). 
        Or rather, a rosary of dichotomies: 
                                                                  dream and waking
                                                                        art and life
                                                   "crucial" experiences and everyday life
                                              mythical language and common language, etc...
        For each of these pairs, it would be a matter of  showing how the second, profane term distinguishes itself from the first, sacred term.  

        Impression of the absolute given by certain words, which seem to have no alternatives.  For example, "voracious," which evokes the idea of a famished being, tortured by the desire to devour.  These types of words make it easy to believe that an actual Kabbalah exists, a preestablished harmony between ideas and the combinations of sounds that express them.  

        When I write an essay, I am completely "dissociated".   If I write a poem I have -- at least momentarily -- the illusion of "totality".  The only question is whether this dissociation, such as it is, is worth less or more than the illusion of totality.  

        The idea of the "gift" according to my mother: my brother Pierre's "gifts" for music.  Opposition of "gifted" and "industrious."  In short, I was raised with a certain contempt for "industrious."  

      Necessary injustice of the sacred: no possibility of justice or measure in trance.  Necessary arbritrariness of the sacred: in the sacred, the fortuitous (or "gratuitious" or "free" or "arbritrary") and the necessary find unity.  The sacred is what I love (something I love so much that I could abide anything in order to protect it); when I say "it," I am speaking not of the sacred object -- which I could be led to destroy or allow to be destroyed -- I am speaking of the bond itself that alone constitutes the sacred, of which the object is merely a support, like a kind of churinga.  
        More simply, the sacred exists not in people or things, but in the relationship I keep with certain things or certain people. 
        Hence, the sacred remains fluid, is never substantialized.  
        To "communicate" would mean to establish an actual relation.
        Establishing a relation solely between things (as the surrealist technique of the image wishes to do) is a purely mechanical practice, enhanced by subterfuge and trickery.  It is crucial that there be an actual (authentic) relation between me and the relation itself, and then, through this second relation, one between myself and the reader or listener.  Metaphor -- or the cataclysm between distinct elements - can only represent the real cataclysm that must intervene between the poet and his reader.  With a handful of very great poets (Villon, Racine), the human cataclysm is produced without even a need for the imagistic one.

                                                                                                                                      from "Notes on the Sacred in Everyday Life"

      In my childhood memories, I rediscover facts (places, events) that appear to me to be marked by the "sacred" -- in which I seem to have felt the impression of the "sacred."  This could simply be because of the sacred character that today I attribute to my childhood memories, because of the sacred attitude that I automatically adopt as soon as I evoke one of these memories, it could be that this attitude pushes me to introduce the sacred there where it never existed.  

     If I have experienced the sense of the sacred while participating in rituals of religions that were not my own (Catholicism, by which I remain marked due to my education), it's doubtless for reasons of exoticism.  That is to say, there may always be something of the "exotic" operating in the sacred: idea of a different world, of a realm without compare, of a radically faraway land.

      The sacred character attached to childhood memories could be explained by the same reasoning of exoticism, if we consider that archaism is in time what exoticism is in space: my memories are sacred to me insofar as they are faraway from me.  

     The prestige of dreams is also, in large part, based in exoticism.  A large part of their emotive value is doubtless due to the emotion that intervenes in the act of remembering them, and the difficulty in remembering them: the effort made to apprehend them so that they become less faraway.  The most moving dream will always be the one that keeps something irreducible, that is to say, something irreducibly sacred or faraway.  

     Role of nostalgia: to leave things in the distance, in order to feel desire or regret.  Weakness: one doesn't dare to seize, one only desires, and must -- without putting oneself in danger -- conserve desire.  It is a man of whims who dreams of unheard-of lands. 

Michel Leiris, from "Notes on the Sacred in Everyday Life"

     In a dream, the substitution of one vowel for another, in the body of a word, or the addition of a consonant, gives me the key to the universe.
  
     "To love love."  Mystery of this notion in childhood: one knows that actual love will be a different feeling of love than what one has -- or is supposed to have -- for one's parents, for example.  Impatience to know this feeling: idea of the lightning bolt, of a state that will be radically different than all that one has known until the present.  Question I have often asked myself: from what age can one fall in love?     

     Eyes closed, my interior landscape expresses my transparency.  Everything I see, I see through my organs.

     Note on the letter V:  I love the letter V because of her angularity, and for her sound as much as her form.  She begins words which count among the most beautiful: Vautour, Vésare, Vorace.  I also have a preference for the number 5, to which she is linked (in the roman alphabet) because of its right angle and the brusque twist of its vapor trails, the dross of its odd meaning. 

     Just as catholics have the scent of incense, I have for the sacred the color of play, color of poetry.

     Confess, when one no longer knows what to write.  Likewise, in order to smash the awkwardness of a conversation where communication is wholly lacking, one begins to speak about oneself, to force communication.  To speak with an open heart, lay one's self bare, reveal as much as possible : a way for something to happen in conversation.
     Every time I start to talk about myself, to confide in someone (not of acts, but of states), I feel malaise: the emptiness of a conversation where "nothing real is exchanged".  We must fill up this empty space at all costs, break up this silence that hides behind words.  And so I talk about myself, I lay myself out with imprudence, I describe a drama that is nothing less than the reflection of my present state of malaise due to communication's absence. 

     A dry and transparent sacred, outside of all the vapor of the church.

     The sacred cannot exist but in moments.  Artificiality of ritual, which proposes to kindle -- or ressurect -- these moments.  Religion as the utmost debasement. 

     I once heard the story of a man condemned to death who, in a Barcelona prison, spent the entire night singing saetas while waiting to be executed.  I envy the heart of this prisoner who, despite imminent danger, was able to give form to his grief.

It's over
the air is dry
the world no longer rises to my lips
vertiginous familiar

Will the "object" be a package wrapped in white paper
-- a multitude of white papers --
like a Christmas present?
or will it be a flint, chocolate-flavored
despite its color of café au lait?
Or will it be a magnificent record
that I've already heard?
Will the "object" be a piece
strictly limited, as the skin of sleep?
Will the object be a piece
a simple, small piece
of something I've never placed beneath my teeth
In my mouth
lightning
-- if it could ever be tamed --
couldn't be better

Michel Leiris, from "Notes on the Sacred in Everyday Life"

28 september 1942

I must uproot this idea once and for all that, in order to write, I need "peace" (as if I needed to interrupt the day-to-day in order to have the spare time to take stock).

4 february 1951

I have, practically, dropped poetry on the pretext of doing something useful.  But I only pretend to be doing things that seem to be useful. 

22 march 1938

Mythic value of the cinema for people of my generation and my type: in these days ruled by anxiety, it's into cinema, more than books, that I withdraw. Serious films, it's true, and no longer frivolous films à la Fred Astaire.

9 march 1937

Dreamt that the war was forecast as inevitable for the month of November. Broke a bottle of iodine upon waking.

July-september 1936

Two crucial events: (1) Because of the Spanish revolution, the world, for the first time, truly fails me; (2) I learn to swim.

from the journal
of Michel Leiris:

May 15 1942

For a while, I've been the plaything of a itch that compels me - mostly while I'm out walking alone - to rush headlong into patisseries to eat cakes. A little like how, in the past, I used to be attracted to bordellos. A hunger owing to restriction? Or is it rather a psychological hunger attesting to a kind of regression, a return to childhood drives? Bad conscience comes of it: losing time, spending foolishly, gaining weight, not knowing how to restrain myself, being nothing but a digestive tract. More often than not, I feel like I'm on the road to ruin. All my little manias (relating, not only like this one, to food, but to clothes, books, the arrangement of the furniture) are beginning to obscure my intellectual life almost entirely. Some time ago, going to the theatre was my greatest pleasure. Since then, I've gone down a notch.