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.