Mallarme
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Divigations
letter to Verlaine:
- "I have always dreamed and attempted something else, with the patience of an alchemist, ready to sacrifice all vanity and all satisfaction, the way they used to burn their furniture and the beams from their ceilings, to stoke the fires of the Great Work. What would it be? It's hard to say: a book, quite simply, in several volumes, a book that would be a real book, architectural and premeditated, and not a collection of chance inspirations, however wonderful . . . I would even go further and say the Book, convinced as I am in the final analysis there's only one, unwittingly attempted by anyone who writes, even Geniuses. The orphic explanation of the Earth, which is the poet's only duty and the literary mechanism par excellence: for the rhythm of the book, then impersonal and alive, right down to its pagination, would line up with the equations of that dream, or Ode." (3)
"The Demon of Analogy" -- man pursued around the street by a single arbitrary phrase; need to go beyond referential reading and think about the *relations* between words
mythical, all-encompassing Book
A Throw of the Dice
Marcel Broodthaers diagrammatic artists's book version: