Je est un autre. (I is someone else).

I am alone in possessing a key to this barbarous sideshow.

For a long time I found the celebrities of modern painting and poetry ridiculous. I loved absurd pictures, fanlights, stage scenery, mountebanks backcloths, inn-signs, cheap colored prints; unfashionable literature, church Latin, pornographic books badly spelt, grandmothers novels, fairy stories, little books for children, old operas, empty refrains, simple rhythms.

The poet makes himself a voyant through a long, immense reasoned deranging of all his senses. All the forms of love, of suffering, of madness; he tries to find himself, he exhausts in himself all the poisons, to keep only their quintessences.

In the great glasshouses streaming with condensation, the children in mourning-dress beheld marvels.

It began as research. I wrote of silences, of nights, I scribbled the indescribable. I tied down the vertigo.

I have stretched ropes from steeple to steeple; garlands from window to window; golden chains from star to star, and I dance.