Without the incantation of a formula, there is no science. Lacking science, how can one have a poetry of mists and amulets, razors and daisies? If a heart should miss a beat, but then return to its effortful circulation, the circumlocution of its everyday existence, that petty farce and sham, we are brought to a new knowing of the heart, an awareness that it exists. To stop hearts, that is my experiment. If they start back up again…. Well, I tried. My own one day will forget itself.

How to see reality but through enchantment? How to create a vision that enchants yourself? This is the only difficulty: to be made to believe by words alone, so that reality may be completely blotted out, as in an opium stupor, or lonely Poe upon his lover’s tomb chanting verities, and then to dismiss the fiction that has dismissed the world. Ah! That must be what it is like to be alive for a moment. An ocean of feeling–eviscerated!

Is this sanity? Yes, if properly punctuated.

Attend to life, and then depart it. This is how one cultivates the ‘voice from beyond the tomb.’ Velvet weltanschauung!

“Nerval, how shall we blend all effects, all expressions?”

“I forget.”

“Do you really? As a child, I was too new to forget anything; everything was too close, too sudden to forget. I had yet to be touched by that magic wand, Nostalgia. One needs a death.”

“Now I remember.”

“That must be a poem!”