Arpadian Encyclopedia

     During the twenties I was especially interested in objects, by
which I also mean man, that obelisk-bonbon.  The interpretation and
the realization of these objects were as variable as the weather. 
Sometimes the sun or the navel indicated midnight for weeks on end.
That is why I did clocks in reliefs and collages.

     
The Clock
     A watch sometimes has one, sometimes several arms, which only
rarely look like arms, and more often like garbled speech, like a 
bolt of lightning materialized as an arrow, like a long lapicide
tongue, like an asparagus, like the lugubrious tone of brass and
like its brother, the poniard that looks for food even in the jaws
of crocodiles.  The arms of the clock ordinarily show fine, simple
objects: a mustache, a bottle, a necktie, and other parts of man:
lips, the leaf that fans the mouth.  Preferably, the hands of the
clock indicate the navel.  There are clocks on which navels-- nothing
but navels, albeit countless-- are fixed on the face of the clock.
The hours merely play a secondary part.  Who would be disturbed by
the "naveling" sound of the clock that announces the time.  The pen-
dulum is imponderable for it puns at will.  Even with the help of a
compass or a yardstick, it is difficult to determine the arrival of the
tropic of capricorn accompanied by its goats and kids.  The pendulum
generally distributes its hours by the dozen.  For weeks on end it
will indicate, say, an autonomous and inanimate hump that had its
head, its torso, its arms, and its legs amputated.  The cut-off parts
of the hump are summarily protected by cigar-box lids.  Thus the hump
seems rejuvenated and even disfigured.  It breathes in deep relief
despite its lack of nose.

     
Navels-- Navel-Columns and Navel-Watch
     Yound bearded column-navels, flowering and noisy, skip rope.
Trumpets with Boeotian navels.  When their kernels dry up, their
hair turns gray, and bodices squeeze them, they laugh so hard that
they sprout delectable branches.  They merely have to set their
navel-watches by the rising of the navel to become as nude and 
young as on the first day.

     
A Bouquet of Navels
     A bouquet of navels on a naveled midsummer night.

     
Navel-Windows and Navel-Doors
     If the navel-windows and navel-doors fly away, the human being
vegetates in a hole.  He doesn't dream or play anymore and his pyra-
mids shrink and become whipped gray dots with organ-toes.

     
Navel
     The navel is a ball of earth encircled by a crown of fire, commas,
cedillas, and depilatory rhymes.

     
The Seismic Plant and the Navels
     In its millenial hole that's made up as a foetus, the seismic plant
whirls greedily like the white sap of the end with the black sap of the
beginning and the ferociousness of its glimpses chases the navels around
the earth.

     
Glove and Navel
     Three flowers offer a nubile diamond to the celestial glove.  Laugh
laugh laugh like the diamonds.  The flowers wear gloves of light.  The
navel strolls about in sulphur slippers.  A veddy fashionable sweetness.
Curliness of down.  Petrification of thrill.  Vegetation of exhumed breath.
Geometric fire.  Laugh laugh laugh like vanilla.  The three flowers offer
their gloves to the navels.

     
Bust and Hat
     The bust of your hat tenderly greets the walnut of the closed doors.

     
Leaf
     Leaves never grow on trees.  Like a mountain in bird's-eye view
they have no perspective no soap no hybrid shirt front no Scottish
cheeks no crypt.  The onlooker is always in the wrong vis-à-vis a leaf.
He feels as if he were carrying his head in his navel his feet in his
mouth his unwashed eyes in his hands.  As for the branches trunks and
roots I declare that they are phantasmagorias that they are bald lies.
The branches trunks and roots do not exist.

     
The Eagle
     The eagle has gestures of presumed void.  His udder is swollen
with lightning.

     
The Crayfish
     The crayfish has the bestial voice of a raspberry, the good breeding
of an apple, the compassion of a plum, the lechery of a pumpkin.

     
The Butterfly
     A stuffed butterfly becomes a stuffed stutterfly.  The stuffed
stutterfly grows up and becomes a big stuttering stutterfly.

     
The Chairs and the Tables
     The chairs and the tables wear slippers and gloves of foam.
The chairs and the tables are divine nudities.  They don't care
about shirts that bang open and shut.

     
The Hat
     The hat is a square navel.

     
The Egg-Plank the Navel Bottle and the Glove
     The egg-plank, an outdooor and parlor game for the upper crust
in which the players are smeared with egg yolk from head to foot by
the time they leave the arena; the "navel bottle", a monstrous house-
hold implement in which a bicycle, a sea-serpent, a brassière, and a
Pernod spoon copulated; the "glove" that can be worn instead of the
old-fashioned head were all meant to show the bourgeoisie the unreality
of their world.

     
The Skeleton
     The skeleton was as overjoyed as a lunatic having his strait jacket
removed.  It was a true release for him to be able to stroll about with-
out the burden of flesh.  The mosquitoes no longer bit him.  He no longer
had to have his hair cut.  He was no longer hungry, thirsty, cold, or hot.
He was far from the lizard of love and its bourgeois, far from the milk of
concubines, far from the lunar mucus.  The tenor-mushrooms that grew on 
the meridians no longer preoccupied his mind.

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