La parole est à Péret

The marvelous meanwhile is all around us, hidden to vulgar eyes but ready to burst out like a time bomb. The drawer I open exhibits among the cotton reels and compasses an absinthe spoon. Through the holes in the spoon a squad of tulips is goose-stepping towards me. In their flowers stand professors of philosophy discovering the categorical imperative. Each word they say is a worthless penny which breaks on the ground bristling with noses which throw them back into the air to form smoke rings. As they dissolve slowly they generate tiny splinters of mirror which each reflect a blade of wet moss. […]

The marvelous, I say again, is all around, at every time and in every age. It is, or should be, life itself, as long as that life is not made deliberately sordid as this society does so cleverly with its schools, religion, law courts, wars occupations and liberations, concentration camps and horrible material and mental poverty.

Benjamin Péret, 1943

translated by Antony Melville, in Death to the Pigs: Selected Writings of Benjamin Péret, Atlas Press 1988