If I suddenly look at my true thoughts, I find no consolation in having to suffer this inner word without a person or origin; these ephemeral figures; and this infinity of undertakings interrupted by their own ease, which transform into one another without anything changing with them. Incoherent without seeming so, instantly null as it is spontaneous, thought, by its very nature, lacks style.
But I do not have the power to bring to my attention every day some necessary beings, nor to feign the spiritual obstacles that would form an appearance of beginning, fullness, and end, instead of my unbearable flight.
A poem is a duration, in the course of which, reader, I breathe a law that was prepared; I give my breath and the artifices of my voice; or only its power that is reconciled with silence.
I abandon myself to the adorable passage: reading, living where words rule. Their appearance is written. Their sounds are concerted. Their tremor is composed according to a previous meditation; and they will rush in magnificent or pure groups, in resonance. Even my amazements are assured, they are hidden in advance, and they are part of the number.
Moved by fatal writing, and if the ever-future meter chains my memory with no possible return, I feel each word in all its strength, because I have waited for it indefinitely. This measure that transports me and that I color protects me from the true and the false. Neither doubt divides me nor reason works on me. No chance, but extraordinary luck fortifies itself. I effortlessly find the language of that luck; and I think, thanks to an artifice, a totally true thought, wonderfully cautious, with calculated gaps, without involuntary darkness, whose movement commands me and whose quantity fills me: a singularly finished thought.
Image: Nocturne in Black and Gold – The Falling Rocket (1875), by James Abbott McNeill Whistler.
