«A
prisoner paints a landscape on the wall of his cell showing a
miniature train entering a tunnel. When his jailers come to get him,
he asks them politely to wait a moment, "to allow me to verify
something in the little train in my picture. As usual, they started
to laugh, because they considered me to be weak-minded. I made myself
very tiny, entered into my picture and climbed into the little train,
which started moving, then disappeared into the darkness of the
tunnel. For a few seconds longer, a bit of flaky smoke could be seen
coming out of the darkness of the round hole. Then this smoke blew
away, and with it the picture, and with the picture, my person…”
How many times poet-painters, in their prisons, have broken through
walls, by way of a tunnel! How many times, as they painted their
dreams, they have escaped through a crack in the wall! …If need be,
mere absurdity can be a source of freedom.»
from "The miniature" in Poetics of Space
by Gaston Bachelard