it is very tempting, when you talk about the events of the past, to impose clarity and order upon what had neither one nor the other. - René Daumal

On an experimental animal subject — the University not yet having authorized us to attempt a trial on a bishop in partibus, as we would prefer — we have tied, one by one, Corti fibers, that living harp, to the cones and rods of the retina. We have obtained, right on the macula lutea (which paradoxical as it may seem, is in keeping with our theory of concrete absences), the exact image of the guinea pig’s scream. The victim’s face presented all the signs of celestial bliss. The day we are allowed to avail ourselves of a subject of our choosing, we will be able to offer their Lordships the Ecclesiastics all the photophloxes of vespers, matins, complines, plainchants, antiphons, neumes, etc., they might need for their confounded ministries.

The path of greatest desires often lies ...through the undesirable.

The angst of paramnesia — the sense of “deja vu” — is not purely and simply erased in poetic feeling; it is overcome by a contact made by consciousness with the universal, it becomes the feeling of a reminiscence of something that has existed for all eternity, that the poet has not created, but unveiled, and that we recognize immediately.