Sometimes, in my inner dialogues on exquisite afternoons of Imagination, as I carry on weary conversations in imaginary sitting rooms at twilight, it can happen during a lull in the discussion that, finding myself alone with an interlocutor who’s more I than the others, I start to wonder why our scientific age’s will to understand hasn’t been extended to artificial, inorganic things. And one of the questions that I most languidly ponder is why we don’t develop, along with the usual psychology of human and subhuman creatures, a psychology (for surely they have one) of artificial figures and of creatures whose existence takes place only in rugs and in pictures. It’s a sad view of reality that would limit it to the organic realm and not place the idea of soul in statuettes and needlework. Where there’s form there’s a soul.

These private deliberations aren’t an idle pastime but a scientific lucubration like any other. And so, before having an answer and without knowing if I’ll ever have one, I think of what’s possible as if it already existed, and with inner analyses and intense concentration I envision the likely results of this actualized desideratum. As soon as I start thinking this way, scientists immediately appear in my mind, hunched over illustrations that they know to be real lives; microscopists of warp and weft emerge from the rugs, physicists emerge from the broad, swirling patterns around their borders, chemists from the idea of shapes and colours in pictures, geologists from the stratified layers in cameos, and finally (and most importantly) psychologists who record and classify – one by one – the sensations that a statuette must feel, the ideas that pass through the hazy psyche of a figure in a painting or a stained-glass window, the wild impulses, the unbridled passions, the occasional hatreds and sympathies and? found in these special universes marked by death and immobility – whether in the eternal gestures of bas-reliefs or in the immortal consciousnesses of painted figures.

More than the other arts, literature and music are fertile territory for the subtleties of a psychologist. Novelistic figures, as we all know, are as real as any of us. Certain aspects of sounds have a swift, winged soul, but they are still susceptible to psychology and sociology. Let all the ignorant be informed: veritable societies exist in colours, sounds and sentences, even as regimes and revolutions, reigns, politics and ..... exist literally, not metaphorically, in the instrumental ensembles of symphonies, in the structured wholes of novels, and in the square feet of a complex painting, where the colourful poses of warriors, lovers or symbolic figures find enjoyment, suffer, and mingle together.

When one of my Japanese teacups is broken, I imagine that the real cause was not the careless hand of a maid but the anxieties of the figures inhabiting the curves of that porcelain ..... . Their grim decision to commit suicide doesn’t shock me: they used the maid as one of us might use a gun. To know this (and with what precision I know it!) is to have gone beyond modern science.