While men of reason and wisdom see only fragmentary figures that are all the more frightening for their incompleteness, the madman sees a whole, unbroken sphere.

This is why the imaginary and the real must be, rather, like two juxtaposable or superimposable parts of a single trajectory, two faces that ceaselessly interchange with one another, a mobile mirror.

Where we do not reflect on myth but truly live in it there is no cleft between the actual reality of perception and the world of mythical fantasy.

A Dionysian machine for producing meaning, where nonsense and meaning are no longer in simple opposition, but co-present to each other in a new discourse. This new discourse is no longer the discourse of form, but not the discourse of the formless: it is rather pure informality.

All this was neither a city, nor a church, nor a river, nor colour, nor light, nor shadow; it was reverie.

The rammed rails crawl underground
In tunnels and craters
To reappear in clear networks of lightning flashes
In the din and the dust.
This is the tentacular city.
And one after the other, the rut grows bigger and bigger.
And rage becomes storm :
The street and its turmoil like cables
Tied around the monuments
Flees and comes back in long enlaces

Everything that remains in the adults of the atmosphere of the enchanted forests, everything that still participates in them of the habit of miracles, everything that breathes in their breath a perfume of fairy tales, under the demented appearance of these poorly invented landscapes is revealed and denounces man with his insane treasure of intellectual glitter, his superstitions, his deliriums.

Whoever looks out through an open window never sees as much as whoever looks out through a closed window. There is no object deeper, more mysterious, more fertile, more dark, more dazzling than a candlelit window. What can be seen in the sun is always less interesting than what happens behind a glass window. In this black or luminous hole lives life, dreams life, suffers life.

Now the objectives of Walt Disney Enterprises are, surely, never to be formulated in exactly this manner. 'Buy homemade cookies from a turn of the century mercenary grandma on Main Street; visit the air conditioned Cinderella's Castle by elevator' ; in Adventureland 'come face to face with a gigantic python, be menaced by trumpeting African elephants;... in Tomorrowland, in seven minutes, ride an earthbound rocket to the moon; and, eventually, exercise the exotic emotions elicited by cheap air travel-Isfahan, Bangkok, Tahiti - in the hotels corresponding to these themes.

I am in an enormous, foreign city. I am on my way toward the forbidden part of town. It is not even some dubious area of ill repute with its steaming flash pots, but something much worse. There the laws of reality and the rules of society cease to exist. Anything can happen and everything does.

Constitution of XY?

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We, the citizens of XY?, in the exercise of our own sovereignty and desirous of the greatest possible fullness of existence, must delve into reality, melting into the chaos-mos of life.

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art.1 The continuous oscillation and movement between these different realities, gives life to XY?. There are two poles : one is rational, driven by reason, the other irrational driven by imagination.

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art.2 The perpetual oscillation dissolves hierarchy. Composed of interwoven realities, like the moment between sleeping and dreaming, the inhabitant drifts and oscillates amongst these in an other dimension.

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art.3 Illusions are true.

I hadn't understood that the myth is above all a reality, and a necessity of the mind, that it is the path of consciousness, its treadmill.

My friend, that is precisely the poet’s work–

To figure out his dreams, mark them down.

Believe me, the truest illusion of mankind

Is revealed to him in dreams:

All poetic art and poeticizing

Is nothing but interpreting true dreams.

Towards a city far away from riots and tocsin,
Where the naked knife of the guillotines gleams,
Suddenly, my heart goes wild with desire.
The deaf drums of so many days
Of rage and storm,
Beat the load in the heads.
The old dial of a black belfry
Shine his disc at the end of the evening,
Against a sky of red stars.
Footsteps are heard
And big fires of twisted roofs
raging out the capitals.

Babel of arcades and stairways,
It was a palace infinite,
Full of basins and of cascades
Falling on dull or burnished gold,

...

Architect of my fairyland,
Whenever it pleased me I made
A vanquished ocean flow
Into a tunnel of jewels;

Clinging to the desire for speed
And surrounding the slowest with lead
The walls no longer face each other.
Multiple beings, arsenal of beings,
Mane of beings,
Sleep in a bloody reflection.
In his tawny rage
The earth shows its palms.
Eyes closed
As the forehead is burning.
Nocturnal courage. Diminishing the shadow
By half. Mirror of the shadow,
Half of the world. Head falling
Between sleeping and dreaming.

Everything has two faces.

I’m not crazy - my reality is just different from yours.

Hallucination is infinitely truer than the view of ordinary reality. Reality being made up of contradictory elements and impressions, is painful, entertaining, fragmentary. It distracts. It can be seen - (mainly as an obstacle).
The hallucination, admirably synergetic, synthetic, "overall", corresponding perfectly without burr, without too much or too little, to the idea, to the aspiration, to the fear, to the inner image, cannot be doubted, questioned.

They are means for architecture to create a virtual space or mental space, it is a way of abusing the senses, and it is above all a way of preserving a territory of destabilisation.

While men of reason and wisdom see only fragmentary figures that are all the more frightening for their incompleteness, the madman sees a whole, unbroken sphere.

At the opposite pole to this nature of darkness, madness also exerts a fascination because it is knowledge.

Only a genius or a madman could so disentangle himself from the bonds of reality as to see the world as his picture-book.

Cities, like dreams, are made of desires and fears, even if thread of their discourse is secret, their rules are absurd, their perspectives deceitful, and everything conceals something else.

So in a certain sense disintegration may have its advantages. But of course it's dangerous, horribly dangerous. Suppose you couldn't get back, out of the chaos...

The frontier between being and non-being, appearance and illusion, conciousness and dream, become vague. When there is more than one figure it is hard to be sure whether each is real or only the dream projection of the other. Did I see it ? Or did I dream it ? If I shut my eyes, it is dark again.

We lose ourselves in what we read, only to return to ourselves, transformed and part of a more expansive world.

If the doors of perception were cleansed every thing would appear to man as it is, Infinite. For man has closed himself up, till he sees all things thro' narrow chinks of his cavern.

He symbolizes those dark forces which well up from the unconcious. He is the God who presides over the outbursts inspired by intoxication. He is a God of many shapes, creator of illusion and worker of miracles.

The ship is a symbol of a sudden unease that appears on the horizon of European culture towards the end of the Middle Ages. Madness and the figure of the madman take
on a new importance for the ambiguousness of their role: they are both threat and derision, the vertiginous unreason of the world, and the shallow ridiculousness of men.

There is a sane state of the mind that resembles madness in every respect, in which we find the same associations of ideas as we do in lunacy, the same peculiar logic as in a fixed idea. This state is that of dreams.

The Middle Void that resides within the Yin-Yang couple also resides at the heart of all things.

Engaged in a continuous movement, repeats itself, and we don't see, since without reason it repeats itself, why it would not repeat itself without end, without end, forever.

The eerie calm of their exteriors is ensured through the Great Lobotomy. But inside, where the Vertical Schism accommodates all possible change, life is in a continuous state of frenzy. Manhattan is now a quiet metropolitan plain marked by the self contained universes of the Mountains, the concept of the Real definitively left behind, superseded.

The heterotopia has the power to juxtapose in a single real place several spaces, several emplacements that are in themselves incompatible

I go alone to try my fanciful fencing,
Scenting in every corner the chance of a rhyme,
Stumbling over words as over paving stones,
Colliding at times with lines dreamed of long ago.

A voluptuous vibration constantly stirs Chloe, the most chaste of cities. If men and women began to live their ephemeral dreams, every phantom would become a person with whom to begin a story of pursuits, pretenses, misunderstandings, clashes, oppressions, and the carousel of fantasies would stop.

I have always thought that poets and novelists are able to impart mystery to individuals who are seemingly overwhelmed by day-to-day life, and to things which are ostensibly banal – and the reason they can do this that they have observed them time and again with sustained attention, almost hypnotically. Under their gaze, everyday life ends up being enshrouded in mystery and taking on a kind of glow-in-the-dark quality which it did not have at first sight but which was hidden deep down.

Maybe that's what I feel,
that there's one outside and one inside and I'm in the middle,

Maybe that's what I am,
the thing that divides the world in two,
on the one hand the outside, on the other hand the inside,

It can be as thin as a blade,
I am neither on one side nor the other,
I am in the middle, I am the partition,

I have two sides and no thickness,
[ ... ]
I am neither of one
or the other.

There exists a great chasm between those, on one side, who relate everything to a single central vision, one system less or more coherent or articulate, in terms of which they understand think and feel - a single universal, organizing principle in terms of which all that they are and say has signficance - and, on the other side, those who pursue many ends, often unrelated and even contradictory (...) ; these last lead lives, perform acts, and entertain ideas that are centrifugal rather than centripetal, their thought is scattered or diffused, moving on many levels, (...) without conciously or unconciously seeking to fit them into or exclude them from any one unchanging... at times fanatical, unitary inner vision.

I believe that the moment is near when by a procedure of active paranoiac thought, it will be possible to systematize confusion and contribute to the total discrediting of the world of reality.

Wisdom, like all precious materials, must be ripped from the entrails of the earth.

Man calls himself man only by drawing limits excluding his other from the play of supplementarity: the purity of nature, of animality, primitivism, childhood, madness, divinity. The approach to these limits is at once feared as a threat of death, and desired as access to a life without difference. The history of man calling himself man is the articulation of all these limits among themselves.

On the great scale of things, all things are Madness; on the small scale, the whole itself is madness.

XY? is a cyclic process inscribed in a perpetual shift between polarities. The marvellous journey weaving the real and the imaginary, reconciles oppositions and inscribes them in a continuity capable of revealing a cathartic vision of a whole.

I think that from Baudelaire I learnt (...) the sordid aspects of the modern metropolis, the possibility of merging the most sordid realism and phantasmagoria into one, the possibility of juxtaposing the banal and the fantastic.

Fantasies and threats, the fleeting fragments of dreams and the secret destiny of the world, where madness has a primitive, prophetic force, revealing that the dream-like is real and that a thin surface of illusion opens onto bottomless depths, and that the glittering surface of images opens the way to worrying figures that shine forever in the darkness.

Just as there are two different groups of Mad Women, so there are two faces of Dionysos. To those who accept the god and integrate his claim for reverence into the rituals of their lives, he shows the benign face. To those who reject him, however, he shows the face of destruction and death.

Entire understanding none can have, before he's not experienced the immensity of art and life.