
DARK MATTER
IN 1979, Bernard Ceysson, then the director of the Musée d’Art Moderne et Contemporain in Saint-Étienne, France, published a monograph devoted to the painter Pierre Soulages. He began his absorbing text with a long epigraph drawn from a collection of prose poems first published by Victor Segalen in Beijing between 1912 and 1914 (and reissued in France in 1955). The suggestive excerpt describes the inscriptions on stone tablets the French polymath had observed at tomb sites in central China:
Linked by laws as clear as ancient thought & as simple as musical scales, the Characters hang from one