i could see silences...

"mallarme' finally showed me how the words were arranged on the page. it seemed to me that i was looking at the form and pattern of a thought, placed for the first time in finite space. here space itself truly spoke, dreamed, and gave birth to temporal forms. expectancy, doubt, concentration, all were visible things. with my own eye, i could see silences that had assumed shapes. inappreciable instants became clearly visible; the fraction of a second during which an idea flashes into being and dies away; atoms of time that serve as the germs of infinite consequences lasting through psychological centuries - at last these appeared as beings, each surrounded by palpable emptiness...

we have a record in his own hand of what he planned to do; he was trying to employ thought nakedly and fix its pattern. he dreamed of a mental instrument designed to express the things of the intellect and the abstract imagination."

paul vale'ry, in reference to stephen mallarme's un coup de de's, in the book stripped bare, 1973.(image, 1904 self portrait by e. munch)