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

I don't love women. Love has to be reinvented, we know that. The only thing women can ultimately imagine is security. Once they get that, love, beauty, everything else goes out the window. All they have left is cold disdain; that's what marriages live on nowadays. Sometimes I see women who ought to be happy, with whom I could have found companionship, already swallowed up by brutes with as much feeling as an old log.

I'm now making myself as scummy as I can. Why? I want to be a poet, and I'm working at turning myself into a seer. You won't understand any of this, and I'm almost incapable of explaining it to you. The idea is to reach the unknown by the derangement of all the senses. It involves enormous suffering, but one must be strong and be a born poet. It's really not my fault.

What a life! True life is elsewhere. We are not in the world.

Your memory and your senses will be nourishment for your creativity.

I may die of earthly love, or of devotion.

As I descended into impassable rivers I no longer felt guided by the ferrymen.