Michel Leiris > Quotes

“When the human voice is reduced to being no longer a song, a word, or a cry, but the articulation of the unnamable itself, it is natural that there should be no other sound than the grinding of ice in the polar regions, the light, intermittent crackling of silk in the highest zones of the atmosphere, at the moment when the aurora borealis unfurls its strange, cold spangles. Majesty does not tolerate other eyes than these hard crystals”
― Michel Leiris, Brisées

“I am imbued with the notion that a Muse is necessarily a dead woman, inaccessible or absent; that a poetic structure - like the canon, which is only a hole surrounded by steel - can be based only on what one does not have; and that ultimately one can write only to fill a void or at the least to situate, in relation to the most lucid part of ourselves, the place where this incommensurable abyss yawns within us.”
― Michel Leiris

“Pessimism is a towering skyscraper eighty stories high in the suburbs of the soul at the end of a long avenue with waste ground on either side and a few poorly-stocked little shops. Several ultra-fast staircases give access to the building, running up from the cellars to the roof-gardens. The comfort of this place leaves nothing to be desired and only the greatest luxury is acceptable, but every Friday the residents gather on the ground floor to read from a bible bound in the skin of a blind man. The psalmic words they intone rise up through the pipes, sigh in the stoves and sweep the chimneys coated inside with black grease which leaves dirt on the skin. Water runs constantly in the bathrooms and the showers beat down on the numbered bodies, peppering them with sand. On Sundays the bed linen unrolls by itself and nobody makes love. For this tower block, like an obscure phallus scraping the vulva of the sky, is usually a hive of sexual activity. The most beautiful woman lives there, but no-one has ever known her. It is said, that dressed in furs and feathers, she keeps herself shut away in a first-floor apartment as if in a white safe. Her windows are scissors which cut short both shadow and breath. Her name is AURORA.”
― Michel Leiris, Aurora

“poetry’s favourite moment is when one loses one’s footing because of a landslide or seismic shaking of thought”
― Michel Leiris, Brisées

“Eroticism releases, ever so slightly, great lightning flashes that, on occasion, reveal to us the true nature of a given organ, suddenly restoring both its whole reality and its hallucinatory force, while simultaneously installing as sovereign goddess the abolition of hierarchies- those hierarchies within which we habitually grade, for better or for worse, the different parts of the body.”
― Michel Leiris

“Midway between the too soiled ground and the too-sublime vaults, at the level of the air, entering the skin of the role, poetry plays its game.”
― Michel Leiris, Brisées

“…It was this white garment of mourning which he still wore, the white mourning of surgical gowns so much more significant than black, since white is the colour of obliteration whereas black, far from being the colour of emptiness and nothingness, is much more the active shade which makes the deep and therefore dark substance of all things stand out, from the flight of despair whose magical blackness animates the blank parchment of the soul, to the supposedly sinister flight of the raven, whose croakings and cadaverous meals are but the joyful signs of physical metamorphoses, black as congelead blood or charred wood, but much less lugubrious than the deathly restfulness of white. Yet this desert whiteness did not rule out all subsequent possibilities, when it too would coagulate to form directions in blood and when it too would know the three congruences of putrefaction.”
― Michel Leiris, Aurora

“..the sense of a catastrophe perpetually invoked and avoided creates a rapture in whose depths horror and pleasure coincide...”
― Michel Leiris, Manhood: A Journey from Childhood into the Fierce Order of Virility

“Always beneath or above concrete events, I remain a prisoner of this alternative: the world as a real object that dominates me and devours me (like Judith) in suffering and in fear, or else the world as a pure fantasy which dissolves in my hands, which I destroy (like Lucrece thrusting home the dagger) without ever succeeding in possessing it. Perhaps, above all, the question for me is to escape this dilemma by finding a way in which the world and myself--object and subject--confront each other on an equal footing, as the matador stands before the bull.”
― Michel Leiris, Manhood: A Journey from Childhood into the Fierce Order of Virility

“at man’s height the mouth utters its cries, tosses forth its oracles, gives vent to its puns. To allow words to come to life, bare themselves, and show us by chance, for the space of a lightning bolt bony with dice, a few of our reasons for living and dying”
― Michel Leiris, Brisées

“And the beautiful lady, still with her beautiful wasp’s waist, the very beautiful lady whose charms buzz around our childish dreams, will not turn to cigar smoke when the North Star appears.”
― Michel Leiris, Brisées

“Flamme — l’âme s’effile comme une lame.”
― Michel Leiris

“If a dream affords the dreamer some light on himself, it is not the person with closed eyes who makes the discovery but the person with open eyes, lucid enough to fit thoughts together. Dream--a scintillating mirage surrounded by shadows--is essentially poetry.”
― Michel Leiris

“Ese es mi doble deseo: que el acontecimiento pase a ser escritura y que la escritura sea un acontecimiento.”
― Michel Leiris

“Because for the writer, this is the whole point: to transmit into the head or heart of another person the concretions that have been deposited by his present or past life in the depths of his own head or heart and that have had value only for him until then; to communicate something in order to make it more valuable, to let it circulate, so that once it has been cast out to others it will come back to him a little more magical...”
― Michel Leiris, Scratches

“one another, find themselves washed by various different currents, and see their straight lines change into the flat trajectories of bullets, their curves into skids, their closed lines into the flights of boomerangs out and back or the paths of circuits, this is the fault of the spectator alone—craving metaphorical equivalences, or perhaps just learning to read—who projects onto the printed characters a flood of forces that is his alone but is nevertheless enough to give life to these depthless signs locked in a two-dimensional typographical world. On the one hand,”
― Michel Leiris, Scratches: The Rules of the Game, Volume 1

“Assim como Deus -- coincidência de contrários, segundo Nicolau de Cusa (isto é: encruzilhada, interseção de linhas, bifurcação de trajetórias, plataforma ou terreno baldio onde se encontram todos os transeuntes) -- pôde ser patafisicamente definido como "ponto tangente do zero e do infinito", encontra-se entre os inúmeros fatos que constituem nosso universo certa espécie de nós ou pontos críticos que poderíamos geometricamente representar como 'lugares onde o homem tangencia o mundo e a si mesmo'.
Com efeito, certos lugares, certos acontecimentos, certos objetos, certas circunstâncias muito raros suscitam, quando sobrevém que se apresentem ou que nos envolvamos com eles, a sensação de que sua função na ordem geral das coisas consiste em nos pôr em contato com o que há em cada qual de mais profundamente íntimo, de mais quotidianamente turvo e mesmo de mais impenetravelmente oculto. Dir-se-ia que tais lugares, acontecimentos, objetos, circunstâncias têm o poder, por um brevíssimo instante, de trazer à superfície insipidamente uniforme em que habitualmente deslizamos mundo afora alguns dos elementos que pertencem com mais direito à nossa vida abissal, antes de deixar que retornem - acompanhando o ramo descendente da curva - à obscuridade lodacenta donde haviam emergido.”
― Michel Leiris, Mirror of Tauromachy

“The alphabet always remains obediently embedded in the white page, and if it should happen that the letters come to life, intermingle, or oppose”
― Michel Leiris, Scratches: The Rules of the Game, Volume 1

“C'est par pur préjugé moral que nous accordons plus de valeur à la vérité qu'à l'apparence.”
― Michel Leiris