The purpose of rhythm, it has always seemed to me, is to prolong the
moment of contemplation, the moment when we are both asleep and awake,
which is the one moment of creation, by hushing us with an alluring
monotony, while it holds us waking by variety, to keep us in that state
of perhaps real trance, in which the mind liberated from the pressure
of the will is unfolded in symbols. If certain sensitive persons listen
persistently to the ticking of a watch, or gaze persistently on the
monotonous flashing of a light, they fall into the hypnotic trance;
and rhythm is but the ticking of a watch made softer, that one must
needs listen, and various, that one may not be swept beyond memory or
grow weary of listening; while the patterns of the artist are but the
monotonous flash woven to take the eyes in a subtler enchantment. I
have heard in meditation voices that were forgotten the moment they had
spoken; and I have been swept, when in more profound meditation, beyond
all memory but of those things that came from beyond the threshold of
waking life. I was writing once at a very symbolical and abstract poem,
when my pen fell on the ground; and as I stooped to pick it up, I
remembered some phantastic adventure that yet did not seem phantastic,
and then another like adventure, and when I asked myself when these
things had happened, I found that I was remembering my dreams for many
nights. I tried to remember what I had done the day before, and then
what I had done that morning; but all my waking life had perished from
me, and it was only after a struggle that I came to remember it again,
and as I did so that more powerful and startling life perished in its
turn. Had my pen not fallen on the ground and so made me turn from the
images that I was weaving into verse, I would never have known that
meditation had become trance, for I would have been like one who does
not know that he is passing through a wood because his eyes are on the
pathway. So I think that in the making and in the understanding of a
work of art, and the more easily if it is full of patterns and symbols
and music, we are lured to the threshold of sleep, and it may be far
beyond it, without knowing that we have ever set our feet upon the
steps of horn or of ivory.