‘The object of conscious man is consciousness itself.’ (‘L’objet de l’homme conscient est la conscience même.’) And his faithful critic, George Poulet,9 explains: Moi qui pense et qui me pense, je m’avére le même que le moi qui est pensé . . . Sujet et objet ne font qu’un, un seule moi pensent et se pensent. (‘I who thinks and that which thinks me, I realize, is the same as the I who is thought of . . . The subject and object are one, the I thinking and thinking [on] itself.’) Thus the pure ‘I’ of Valéry. ‘What could be more “poetic” than to start working than this irreducible power, which is the same for each one of us, which coincides exactly with ourselves, which moves us, which speaks to us and speaks to itself in us.’ So once again the ‘I’ (the Aham of Sanskrit poetics), the ‘I’ is—poetry.

‘If I have,’ says Valéry in his famous essay called ‘Introduction to the Method of Leonardo da Vinci’, ‘if I have brought the reader to this solitude, and to this desperate clarity, it is because it was necessary to carry the idea that I have formed of intellectual power to its ultimate consequence. The human characteristic is consciousness . . . the pure ego then becomes, as it were, “no less real than the centre of gravity of a planetary system”. In this condition,’ continues Valéry, he, being, ‘immolates in one instant, his individuality. He feels himself pure consciousness, and two of that cannot exist. He is the I, the pronoun of universality, the name of that which has no relation to existence.’

Pure ego then is the state of being, in its natural state, the condition of the end of Becoming, as the Buddha has defined. And later, in his celebrated hymn, the Nirvanashatakam, Sri Sankara the greatest sage and metaphysician after the Buddha, has sung, Mano buddhi, ahankara chittani naham . . . Shivoham, Shivoham, I am not the mind, intelligence, the myness, or conceptual activity . . . I am Shiva, the Absolute.

What then is this condition of pure being? There are many, many statements on the Pure Ego state or the I state (to go back to Valéry) but I will take the description from Mallarmé, the unique teacher, le Maitre of Paul Valéry—Mallarmé the founder of modern poetry. There would never have been not only a Paul Valéry wihout Mallarmé, but neither Joyce nor Eliot, neither Stefan Georg nor even Alexander Blok. Or again, Rainer Maria Rilke.