Once in Japan, as I was travelling from Nikkô to Chuzenji, I saw, although widely separated, juxtaposed by the line of my vision, the green of a maple crown the pattern proposed by a pine tree. These pages are comments on this forest text, on the arboreal enunciation, in June, of a new poetics of the universe, of a new logic. The old logic had the syllogism as an organ, the new has the metaphor, the new word, the operation resulting from the joined simultaneous existence of two different things. The starting point of the first is a general and absolute affirmation, an attribution, for all time, to the subject, of a quality and a character. Without reference to time and place, the sun shines, the sum of the angles of a triangle is equal to two right angles. It creates, by defining them, abstract individuals, it establishes between them invariables. Its procedure is a naming. All the terms, once decided upon, classified by genre and species in the columns of its bookkeeping, by separate analysis, it applies to any subject proposed. I would compare this logic to the first part of grammar which determines the nature and function of different words. The second logic is like syntax which teaches the art of putting the words together, and this is practised before our eyes by nature itself. Science deals only with the general, and creation only with the particular. The metaphor, the basic iamb or the combination of a long and a short accent, are not manifested solely on the pages of books: they are part of the autochthonous art used by everything which comes into being. And do not speak of chance. The planting of this cluster of flowers, the form of that mountain are no more the effect of chance than the Parthenon or this diamond which ages the lapidary in cutting it, but the result of a treasury of plans certainly far richer and more scientific. I allege many proofs of geology and temperature, of n tural and human history; our works and our means do not differ from nature’s. I understand that each thing does not exist alone in itself, but in an infinite set of relationships with all others …