The Persimmon Tree

     A Swiss painter would always ask the guests that came to admire
his paintings whether they would rather see or hear them, whether the
paintings should be sung or read to them.  When his guests asked him
to sing or read, he would place the paintings with their backs to the
audience and with great pathos sing or recite their contents.
     The text of one of those sung paintings was strangely familiar to
one of my poems:
     "This venerable white flower, whose veracity is beyond suspicion,
claims that it is not a flower but the echo, the song of joy and lament
of a rugged being that, in the ether, materializes as a flower and is
thus visible, audible, and tactile."
     It is in music, poetry, painting, and sculpture that man can fully
realize and develop himself on this earth.  Music, poetry, painting, and
sculpture are the real world in which the rustling forests, the unmuti-
lated mountains, and men without registration numbers still have the 
right to live.  There will never be too much music, too much poetry,
too much painting, or too much sculpture.  No one ever dreams too much.
The souls of music, of poetry, of painting, and of sculpture mingle and
flow together as in dreams.
     I would hesitate to say whether I prefer singing, painting, or sculp-
ting a persimmon tree.  I am never against any art, even traditional art;
but I am against the enraged progress and rhinoceronian conscience to which
we owe the centaur machines and the hydrogen bombs.
     To be succesful, music, poetry, and art have to form a whole, like
the warp, the woof, and the yarn in weaving.  And the thing that always
ranks first is the dream, the fairy tale.  Nor should we forget the
divine sparks, my friends the distichs, the Alexandrines that sparkle
mysteriously, the castles in the air, the thousand and first cricket 
of yesteryear...
     Let us dream then beyond laughter and tears, beyond summit and
abyss, beyond the coterie of atheists, beyond frontiers, beyond flags,
beyond those possessed with money or power.  Let us dream then of
transcendent light.
     Every earthly object has a real and essential sense if it manages
to live in the divine world of dream, in the world of divine dream.
     Before a persimmon tree-- as I have already said-- I stood for
a long time and mooned about, dreaming whether I ought to transmute
it into a collage or a poem.  I finally decided to turn it into a
collage, sat down, and wrote the following poem:

          The persimmon trees stand in the air
          like jugglers' balls frozen in dream.
          The bottomless azure points out the vault-road
          to the erudite serpents frozen in dream.

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