In a place that he reached, by rejecting what he saw

And denying what he heard. He would arrive.

He had only not to live, to walk in the dark,

To be projected by one void into

Another.

It was his nature to suppose,

To receive what others had supposed, without

Accepting. He received what he denied.

But as truth to be accepted, he supposed

A truth beyond all truths.

He never supposed

That he might be truth, himself, or part of it,

That the things that he rejected might be part

And the irregular turquoise, part, the perceptible blue

Grown denser, part, the eye so touched, so played

Upon by clouds, the ear so magnified

By thunder, parts, and all these things together,

Parts, and more things, parts. He never supposed divine

Things might not look divine, nor that if nothing

Was divine then all things were, the world itself,

And that if nothing was the truth, then all

Things were the truth, the world itself was the truth.

Had he been better able to suppose:

He might sit on a sofa on a balcony

Above the Mediterranean, emerald

Becoming emeralds. He might watch the palms

Flap green ears in the heat. He might observe

A yellow wine and follow a steamer’s track

And say, “The thing I hum appears to be

The rhythm of this celestial pantomime.”

Extracts from Addresses to the Academy of Fine Ideas

I

A crinkled paper makes a brilliant sound.

The wrinkled roses tinkle, the paper ones,

And the ear is glass, in which the noises pelt,

The false roses—Compare the silent rose of the sun

And rain, the blood-rose living in its smell,

With this paper, this dust. That states the point.

Messieurs,

It is an artificial world. The rose

Of paper is of the nature of its world.

The sea is so many written words; the sky

Is blue, clear, cloudy, high, dark, wide and round;

The mountains inscribe themselves upon the walls.

And, otherwise, the rainy rose belongs

To naked men, to women naked as rain.

Where is that summer warm enough to walk

Among the lascivious poisons, clean of them,

And in what covert may we, naked, be

Beyond the knowledge of nakedness, as part

Of reality, beyond the knowledge of what

Is real, part of a land beyond the mind?

Rain is an unbearable tyranny. Sun is

A monster-maker, an eye, only an eye,

A shapener of shapes for only the eye,

Of things no better than paper things, of days

That are paper days. The false and true are one.

II

The eye believes and its communion takes.

The spirit laughs to see the eye believe

And its communion take. And now of that.

Let the Secretary for Porcelain observe

That evil made magic, as in catastrophe,

If neatly glazed, becomes the same as the fruit

Of an emperor, the egg-plant of a prince.

The good is evil’s last invention. Thus

The maker of catastrophe invents the eye