Foreword

(Foreword published at the opening of the first issue of Le Grand Jeu, Summer 1928)

The Great Game is irremediable; it is only played once. We want to play it every moment of our lives. It's still "he who loses wins". Because it’s about getting lost. We want to win. Now, the Great Game is a game of chance, that is to say, of skill, or better of "grace": the grace of God, and the grace of gestures.

Having grace is a matter of attitude and talisman. Seeking the favorable attitude and the sign that forces the worlds is our goal. Because we believe in all miracles. Attitude: you must put yourself in a state of complete receptivity, to do this you must be pure, you must have emptied yourself. Hence our ideal tendency to question everything at all times. A certain habit of this emptiness shapes our minds from day to day. An immense surge of innocence has broken down for all of us the frameworks of constraints that a social being is accustomed to accepting. We do not accept because we no longer understand. No more rights than duties and their so-called vital necessities. Faced with these corpses, we gradually foresee a new ethic which will be constructed in these pages. On the level of human morality, the perpetual changes in our future only demand the right to what they call cowardice. And it's not just to use it for us. This cowardice is only caused by our good faith; we are sincere actors. When we walk, there are within us men who look at each other, who follow in step, who crawl below, fly above, get ahead of each other, flee from each other, cheer, boo and look at each other impassively. But then we only want to be the action of walking. This is why we are sincere actors. Bad are those who do not give themselves entirely to their choice. We simply have a sense of action.

Why do we write? We don't want to write, we let ourselves be written. It is also to recognize ourselves and each other: I look at myself in a mirror every morning to create a human figure with a long-term identity. Without mirrors I would have the faces of the changing beasts of my desires, and, on certain days when the miracle touches me, I would no longer have a face. For, delivered, we are both brutes brandishing the amulets of their sex and blood instincts, and also the gods who seek through their confusion to form an infinite total. The “homo sapiens” compromise fades between the two. Discursive knowledge and the human sciences only interest us as long as they serve our immediate needs. All the great mystics of all religions would be ours if they had broken the shackles of their religions which we cannot endure.

We will always give ourselves with all our strength to all new revolutions. Changes in ministry or regime do not matter to us. We attach to the very act of revolt a power capable of many miracles.

Also we are not individualists: instead of locking ourselves in our past, we all walk united together, each carrying their own corpse on their back.

This is our last act together; art, literature are only means for us.

The grace linked to the attitude needs, as we have said, talismans which communicate to it their powers, foods which nourish its life. One of us recently said that his mind was primarily looking for food. Among his sensations he seeks above all that which can nourish him. In vain his hunger drags himself from museums to libraries. But a spectacle, seemingly insignificant, suddenly gives him food (a fence, a living oyster). The overwhelming sensation of an instant suddenly restored incalculable strength to his troubled life.

It is these eternal moments that we seek everywhere, that our texts, our drawings will perhaps give rise to in some, that they often gave to their creators in the shock of their discoveries and for which our essays seek the recipes.

It is in such moments that we will absorb everything, that we will swallow God to become transparent until we disappear.

R. Gilbert-Lecomte.

In complete agreement: Hendrik Carmer — René Daumal — Artür Harfaux — Maurice Henry — Pierre Minet — A. Rolland de Renéville — Josef Sima — Roger Vailland.

We announce for the next issues:

STUDY ON RIMBAUD

UNITY OF DREAMS: Coincidence of everything.
Attempt at union to establish the objective value of the dream and its unique substance.

WHAT ABOUT HAPPINESS?
Investigation into the value of Happiness for those who play the Great Game.

THE MYSTICS AND US

OUR ENTRY INTO MEN
Are we obliged to participate in social movements?
Which political party allows the Great Game?