"Crumbling is not an instant's Act," wrote Emily Dickinson. "Dilapidation's processes / Are organized Decays' (Poems 463). Picasso called his art a 'sum of destructions' (Evans 81). Despite the apparent stability of his rectilinear compositional grids, Piet Mondrian was of like mind: "I think that the destructive element is too much neglected in art" (Golding 45). "In New York, when asked why he was reworking earlier canvases rather than simply painting new ones, he replied, "I don't want pictures. I just want to find things out"" (Golding 46). Almost fifty years earlier, Jarry's Père Ubu declared: "We shall not have succeeded in demolishing everything unless we demolish the ruins as well" (106), and Arthur Symons approvingly cited Eleanor Duse's opinion: "To save the theatre, the theatre must be destroyed" (Collected 217). Symons, who entertained the prospect that "There is such a thing as perfecting form that form may be annihilated" (Symbolist 5), inherited his outlook from Mallarmé, who confided to a correspondent, "Destruction was my Beatrice" (Letters 77). In Valéry's clarification, "Destroying and constructing are equal in importance, and we must have souls for the one and the other" (Dialogues 70). Italian poet Eugenio Montale, who admired Valéry, recalled his early struggle to achieve an idiom: "I wanted to twist the neck of the eloquence of our old aulic language, even at the cost of a counter-eloquence" (Biasin 8). Louis Aragon concluded Paysan de Paris with the ringing exhortation, "Push the idea of the destruction of individuals as far as it will go; then, go beyond it" (167).