‘Je viens de passer,’ Mallarmé wrote to his closest friend, the poet Henri Cazalis (Jean Lahor), ‘une anné effrayante: Ma Pensee s’est pensée, et est arrivée a une Conception pure. Tout ce que, par contrecoup, mon être a souffert, pendant cette longue agonie est inénarable, mais, heureusement, je suis parfaitement mort, et la region la plus impure ou mon Esprit puisse aventurer est l’eternité, mon Esprit, ce solitaire habitual de sa propré Purete, qu n’obscurcit plus le reflet du Temps.’

‘Malheureusement, je en suis arrivéde la par une horrible sensibilite . . . Mais combien plus je l’etais il ya plusieurs mois, dabord dans ma lutte avec ce vieux et méchant plummage terraseé heureusement, Dieu. Mais.’ But the terrible fight against god took me to the great Darkness, Tenebres, after which the poet fell, ‘victorious, lost, and infinitely’, till one day he saw himself in a mirror and recognized himself as he was many months earlier. But, he continues, the devastation left by that experience was so great, if he were not before the mirror now, ‘I will rebecome Nothingness: Je rédeviendrai le Neant.’—‘C’est t’apprendre que je suis maintenant impersonnel and non plus Stéphane que tu as connu mais une aptitude qua l’Universe spirituel a se voir et se developper, a travers ce qui qui fut moi.’10 Then he goes on to say: ‘Poetry takes the place in me of love, because it is, poetry is, is in love with itself, and its sensuousness falls deliciously on my soul.’ And he remarks, it would be a great and painful heart pang, despair, in case when he enters his supreme Disappearance, he had not finished his ‘work, which is The Work, the Great Work, as said the great alchemists, our ancestors’.

To another friend, also a poet, Eugene Lefèbure, he writes: ‘Destruction was my Beatrice.’ And in a letter to Villers d’Isle Adam, he states he would now like to write a book on Absolute beauty. ‘You will be terrified to know that I have come to the Idea of the Universe only through sensation (and that, for example, to keep an ineffaceable notion of pure Nothingness, I had to impose on my mind the sensation of absolute emptiness).’

And again and again Mallarmé protests, his Nothingness was not the Buddhist Nothingness. But does it matter? Where one is, is there a name, Buddhist or Non-Buddhist, for that state. The Buddha, as all oriental scholars know, refused to name that condition. It is a state where every impression has vanished, except It. Isness is. Is is all that remains: the Pure Ego, of Valéry.

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