Children of the Quadrilateral, by Benjamin Péret
Translated by Jane Barnard and A. F. Moritz
Introduced by A. F. Moritz
Bitter Oleander Press, 1977
from Moritz’s Introduction
Péret sees that by man’s decision to limit himself, and by man’s institutionalization of smallnessa dn dullness in society and tradition, the world has been narrowed and deforemd. Man has created a thing he regards as nature which is unnatural, and a thing he calls reality which is unreal. He has deduced the laws of this artificial and perverse construction, and whatever does not oby them he scorns as magic or ‘miracle,’ the illusions of the backward. This attitude is equally arrogant to the miserable people who in their hunger for life create strange patchworks of truth and eror, and to the genuine seer like Péret who stands in the light of actual nature and actual humanity, surreality and the marvelous, which somehow continue to exist elsewhere with a vitality which rebukes us.