Thus, throughout this “crisis of words” – which I evoked in the previous essay – searching blindly beyond what had bitterly appeared to me as illusions of words, fallacies, artificial and abusive constructions, seeking a substance of an elementary language – I would almost have said material – on which I could build, in which I could, in a sense, recognise myself in order to reconstitute myself as a speaking being, I had found poetry – found it anew, recognised it.
But what I then noticed, and what I have continued to see since, is that the practice of the art called poetry, which consists of nothing other than the work of language on itself to rediscover, to re-inhabit, what is deep down, that this practice, therefore, far from being admitted into the circle of common conversation through which women and men talk to each other about their lives, both private and public, is strictly excluded. The very words with which I thought I was proving myself to myself that I had learned to speak again turned out to be inaudible. And it is obvious that today any statement that risks being qualified as poetic produces in this current conversation of members of society not even a silence, or a bafflement, but a blank, a space of insignificance over which flows, without feeling anything, the stream of remarks deemed sensible, that is to say, useful.
It was not always this way. Since time immemorial and perhaps until the 19th century, society reserved a place for a word artisan, responsible for creating – it was sometimes said to be found – in a particular mode, verse, words capable of evoking the spirit of all the troubled, more or less dizzying moments of common experience: love, pain, the mystical élan, the apprehension of death, glory…
Today, from societies that describe themselves as developed, poetry has obviously not disappeared. Obviously, since no social or cultural judgment can reduce it to a historically or sociologically localized particularity of language: it is its very essence. Simply, it finds itself idle, confined in a corner of the cultural zoo, where a few individuals who, like me, consider the exercise of poetry as vital, develop writings intended almost immediately for the pestle – ignored, denied, as if its voice could no longer be picked up by a normal human ear – even though it acts in so many crude, rigorously prosaic remarks.
This ignorance, and if necessary denial, of poetry betrays the injunction given to us to confine language very closely to an instrumental function – language, and therefore ourselves – and to stop our thinking at the materiality of the facts supposedly established, in order to blind us to the limitlessness of ourselves and of the world (I will return to this in a later chapter).
But in this way, the misunderstanding also negatively reveals something of what poetry is, or at least of what it does – something that comes to light through a “crisis of words” like the one I have related in the previous chapter, that is to say, of a sort of critical state of the intimate being. Not a mystical crisis, obviously, or a metaphysical illumination: this state proves itself to be critical in that it makes one hear with a clarity which momentarily suspends the course of thoughts, the singular note of the here and now, – singular within the somewhat musical ensemble of so many other possible times and places. A critical state, therefore, which is not strictly speaking poetry but which opens into what is most concrete and most familiar in everyday life, the moment of poetry: this moment when, in the emergence of a few words, a form surfaces and and when articulated language asserts itself as that aspect of the world which involves and carries us, or as the intermediary thanks to which we understand, we know, that the world encompasses us.
This knowledge though does not leave us inert; it moves us, it is “this emotion called poetry” of which Pierre Reverdy speaks so precisely. It moves us, moves us out of our obtuse and opaque subjectivity and pours us into that of us, in us, which infinitely exceeds us: that which is language.
So I can, following the thread of a few words, rediscover, so to speak, through memory, such an emotion, which had surprised me one day, a long time ago, at the seaside.
In the past, I liked to spend hours at the seaside, contemplating the movement of the waves – now, age has made me impatient and quickly tired. What was it that captivated me, seduced me like this? I obviously think of Baudelaire’s verses:
Homme libre, toujours tu chériras la mer! La mer est ton miroir, tu contemples ton âme Dans le déroulement infini de sa lame…
[Free man, you will always cherish the sea! The sea is your mirror; you contemplate your soul In the infinite rolling of its surface …][1]
… yes, it is this freedom, of which the sea gave me the image, and much more: the example, the inspiration – this breaking of limits and mental and physical constraints – the opening, in short, of a critical condition.
It was in Monterosso-al-mare, in the Cinque Terre, between Genoa and La Spezia. I see myself sitting on a rock, insatiably contemplating the sea, below me, in front of me, heavily agitated, alive. And I feel like a taste emerge again, the deaf desolation with which I allowed myself to be invaded, and the few words form with which at one moment it said to itself: “Ah, to weigh, only to weigh, like this rock, or like the sea agitated by the wind, by its deep currents, the sea that never makes the same gesture twice.” Yes, I envied the sea, me who stiffened in my left posture, and I felt the muscles of my legs vibrate with tension, as if threatened by my own gravity of sliding down from this rock… But – I was then very much in love – what saddened me above all, comparing myself to the sea, “which never makes the same gesture twice”, was the stubborn resistance of my being to marry the fluctuating impulses of my desires and those of my friend, it was this sort of constraint to persevere in my petty, artificial identity, to repeat myself in order to survive, rather than letting myself constantly renew, following the order, the course of things – even though the repetition subjected me inexorably to this order of things, being only the spiral towards death.
These words which then came to my lips as a direct emanation – an “expression” – of my sadness, in reality offered it an outlet: they were carried by “this emotion called poetry”. In the sentence cited above, a word illuminates this emotion and, so to speak, moves it: the word gesture. This word compares us, the sea and me, we meet in this word – and all the emotion that the brief poem (or rather the outline of a poem) traces of this moment lies in this meeting, in the discovery that the sea and I, that we can meet and compare ourselves, that we therefore belong to the same world, however heartbreaking the comparison of my gestures with those of the sea may be for me.
But that this meeting is possible (possible in this mode, symbolic) highlights a quality of this world which would bring joy, and hope, to the human species if only it dared to realise it. It is that it is not already there, that it is not a realised reality, past, so to speak, in its very present, but an event: it takes place, it constantly takes place, it is produced. It begins, and in this perpetual beginning, it includes us, involves us: “this emotion called poetry” teaches us this. More: it calls on us to participate in this beginning. In this sense, the moment of poetry also appears to me as that of a test of truth: are we at this event, at this beginning? Are we ready to throw ourselves into the dizzying course of things? A moment of truth, a moment of freedom, in the sense that Hannah Arendt gave to this word: the ability to begin.
This is the question I hear Giacomo Leopardi answer in his brief and magnificent poem, L’Infinito:
Sempre caro mi fu quest’ermo colle, E questa siepe, che da tanta parte Dell’ultimo orizzonte il guardo esclude. Ma sedendo e mirando, interminati Spazi di là da quella, e sovrumani Silenzi, e profondissima quiete Io nel pensier mi fingo ; ove per poco Il cor non si spaura. E come il vento Odo stormir tra queste piante, io quel Infinito silenzio a questa voce Vo comparando : e mi sovvien l’eterno, E le morte stagioni, e la presente E viva, e il suon di lei. Così tra questa Immensità s’annega il pensier mio : E il naufragar m’è dolce il questo mare.
[I’ve always loved this solitary hill, I’ve always loved this hedge that hides from me So much of what my earthly eyes can see. For as I sit and gaze, all calm and still, I conjure up my thoughts; my mind I fill With distances that stretch out boundlessly And silences that somehow cannot be Heard by my heart, which feels a sudden chill. It seems these rustling leaves, this silence vast Blend into one. Eternity draws nigh. The present sounds and seasons, those long past Become one sea of endless lives and deaths. My thought is drowned, and yet it does not die: It plunges into sweet, refreshing depths.
An explicit response, certainly, in the story, which one could say is the prose of the poem, and which, posing the words as steps, seems in a hurry to carry out the journey of a manifest meaning, as one speaks of the manifest content of a dream. But here, the meaning cannot be confined in what Mallarmé describes as the “easy and representative numerical function” of words. What is poetry here, what this poem does, is to accomplish this meaning: it does what it says. The meaning radiates out of the words until the dry note of each of them is lost in an infinite term – “a total, incantatory word,” “above all dreams and songs,” music “as the set of relationships existing in everything” (Mallarmé, again). Music, yes, when the sound of the words, their design, their accentuation, the gestures of the sentence, the flow, similar to that of life, rhythmic and cursive, almost liquid sometimes, of Leopardi’s hendecasyllable, are no longer but one with the shimmer of images composing the semblance of a hinterland for each word, with the scene where the meeting of each word with all the others occurs.
Thus, “E il naufragar m’è dolce in questo mare” says and, at the same time, accomplishes the disappearance – the “annegarsi” – of the local, contingent, accidental self, in language, which is, in fact, the infinity of space and time combined that Leopardi sees in his mind unfolding before him. As if one could hear, from one word to another, what the stride, the spanning of space, the ellipse has passed over in silence: the inexhaustible qualities of the world. Osip Mandelstam: “It is not me who says what I say there, these are words extracted from the earth like grains of petrified wheat.” The memory of this world, in short: this moment of poetry is the one through which intimate memory flows and melts into the ocean of memory of language.
“It’s not me who says what I say there…” – “It’s not me who sees what I see there,” Leopardi seems to confide; it is the poem, it is language itself.
Seeing the world, seeing the things around me as if I were not there: I too have sometimes dared to attempt this paradoxical test – and these attempts will have at least made me sense where the outcome lies: at the cost of a sort of psychic acrobatics, or asceticism, or metamorphosis…, extinguishing my indiscreet presence which mixes with everything here and alters it and, so to speak, not keeping a me in life, active, but that which is language and which is connection or affinity, in the chemical sense, with here – and virtually everything else. Then, the same substance of words establishes a homogeneity between me and what I perceive – between the first person of Francis Ponge, for example, and the thing of which he has taken sides and which he scrutinises, which he surprises, as if he was not here.
But it is not that which constitutes not only poetry, but prose as well, and all art, no doubt: painting, sculpture, music… Writing – or painting, or composing music… -, contrary to a received idea, is not looking at oneself in a mirror (and, possibly, looking, through oneself, at the world); it is looking at oneself from the outside, from this outside that language is within us, or more generally the form which, writes Pierre Reverdy “is the state of matter in which it becomes intelligible and sensitive to the mind.”
As if it was not me who was looking at myself, or rather as if, having crossed the threshold of the French doors and having advanced onto the balcony to meet the breeze, the flowering branches of the cherry tree the courtyard and, over the ridges of the roofs, of everything I know that fills the space up to the horizon, – as if I were turning around and looking from outside into the interior of the living room, where I am to place on the table a jug full of clear water, where I am realizing, so to speak, in a flash of inattention, that the clear water is there, both in my gaze and in the jug , hugging the hollow of its curve, contained by the hard terracotta glazed with blue, and its weight is there, in my fist clenched on the handle and in my wrist and also in my ear, which receives the dry and serious ringing from the bottom of the jug hitting the wood of the table, whose brown walnut top extends halfway up into the clear air, the air which moulds all the shapes scattered in the room, with what fidelity, what tact!, and sets them in the ample crumbling light of the immense day through the window, and lets each colour sing for itself and for my eyes, which are colour too, and sing… – so that everything that exists in this room and I too, we emerge, united and distinct like the voices of a numerous choir – who would sing what? This is a deeply felt yes, a joyful acquiescence to the order of reality, to its incontestable necessity? A yes that says more than that, than this acquiescence: an impulse towards this reality, an exaltation of each thing – or shape, or colour, or me… – to be what it is.
A yes which gives the fundamental note, the elementary particle of meaning of the word which is thus formed beyond me, overhanging, cantilevered, among the breaths of the air and the abundance of appearances, – this word which has come out, which is an adventure outside of me and my present, so much so that this self which speaks thus from the outside is no longer the one which, in this sojourn, lives and will die.
What about prose, at least the most prosaic, that of the story or that of discourse – that, for example, which strives to explain all this? Prose has a purpose, each prose has its purpose and sticks to it. Its words, it does not expose them to the risk of being carried away by a current of air towards an “immensità” or an “sovrumani silenzi”. The images, which are the matrices of almost all words and which haunt them, sometimes in a very distant but perceptible way, like a background or a disorder, prose erases them or rigorously surrounds them so that they do not efface the meaning, this “easy and representative numerical function…” This musical, polyphonic yes, that language says to the world, the latter does not want to hear it and, even less, let it be heard. Above all, prose is the very meaning of the word, it goes, it advances, it passes, from one point of thought to another, a weight of meaning, which it delivers safely. Poetry, on the élan of this “emotion” of which Pierre Reverdy speaks, plunges and sinks into the “interminati spazi” and the “sovrumani silenzi” and “deepissima quiete”; it does not complete the crossing of this “sea”; it remains here and now, from where it set out; but it has captured, from this “immensità” a brilliance which restores the entire spectrum.
Searching for truth, recognising – in both senses of the word – reality, is something that is of concern to each person, particularly as a speaking being, and is therefore part of making poetry. Now is it not a received idea that the very word of poetry be understood as a denial of reality? Unlike fantasy, delirium, or intellectual productions such as religious discourse or political discourse, poetry does not come into conflict with reality; it does not come up against it as against an abutment, a painful limit of perception, thought or affect. On the contrary, it goes to meet reality, as I said above, it is an élan towards reality, which does not manifest itself to poetry as a principle, a rule that would be external to it, but as the vanishing point of its own movement. It opens and discovers reality through a series of hinged windows. Because, once again, poetry does not give us, and even less does it impose on us, reality as fact, as past; it offers it to us as a future, invites us to participate in its event.
What then is the content of this doing that we understand in the very word poetry? The spirit of the times, and its discourse which more and more often resembles advertising, readily applies to poetry, as if it were particularly appropriate to it, the word, both emphatic and overused, of creation. If it is true, as I tried to say, that it maintains a relationship of participation with the world, in a mode which affirms the compatibility and even the continuity of the symbolic and the real, as a form, it that is to say, “this state of matter in which it becomes intelligible and sensitive to the spirit”, we cannot overwhelm it with this word creation, which comes from the myth of Genesis. This would be but Paltry hyperbole. Here the blindness of the time as to what is true of poetry and reality is betrayed. Poetry does not create anything, it manifests: in this sense, it acts, it works, or rather, it “works” [œuvre: works-acts, without creating or making; it unveils, reveals]. It “works” as and, at the same time, in memory and language, in the moment where intimate memory and language meet and mutually fertilise each other. It “works”, to speak like geology, by accumulation of materials, which sediment and metamorphose, that is to say, it changes physical and chemical nature by simple contact but also under the effect of the formidable pressures exerted by the the very accumulation of living in memory. This is how she comes to bring to light words “extracted from the earth like grains of petrified wheat.” So much so that – to borrow from Cesare Pavese a very simple sentence which basically sums up my whole point –, “If it gives us a thrill of joy to encounter, happily coupled, an adjective and a noun that we had never seen together, it is not astonishment at the elegance of the thing, the power of invention or the skill of the poet, but wonder at a new reality brought to light.”
*
Note on poetry and revolution, the work of a childhood memory
The child listens to his father’s words – the words overwhelm his spirit, like a light, like a burning, they will remain there, they will always travel there. The father recounts the battles he has just fought with his comrades in the mountains, the three days and three nights of retreat across the high ridges to escape the German troops, the fraternisation with the Italian partisans… Through the narrow window of the farm abandoned where the family found refuge, the child follows with his eyes his father’s story on the summit of the Ubac mountain, on the other side of the valley – and a few words, spoken by the father, vast and vague words, but without emphasis – freedom, revolution, comrades, war against war… – shine in his ten-year-old mind with the blinding brilliance of the azure of the south against the gray rock of the ridge.
It was on that day, when my father reappeared early in the morning after weeks of agonising absence; it was in the brilliance of the fabulous news he brought that words such as revolution became poetry in my mind. Because to the words of these stories my father’s voice gave an almost incantatory power – this dull, almost murmuring voice, his simple and sober sentences, his barely marked intonations, whether they betrayed sadness or laughter – this voice of a father whose every inflection brought out in me the admiration and love that I had for him then. So much so that in my mind, these down-to-earth stories, weighed down by the bottomless sadness and the insurmountable fatigue of war, unfolded with the excess of myth, of epic, stamped with the same seal of authenticity as the words of a poem; these images which make our senses waver on the edge of the immensity of the world. A poem and maybe even music. If I closed my eyes and let myself be overcome by the resonance of these words, I could imagine myself back at home, hidden under the swathes of the large table cloth that covered the dining room table, to listen to my father playing Bach on the piano. Yes: his stories struck my imagination with the evocative power of a Bach fugue: they were, so to speak, absolute because without content.
Without content: the word revolution certainly did not have any, then, much less than the word freedom, to which friendship, evoking the close frankness of chosen relationships, for a ten year old, to which could be lent a little flesh, and less even than poetry, except for a certain dazzling splendor. And I said to myself, since then, having read a little history and thought about it, that such a link between these words – poetry and revolution – could only have been established in bedazzlement, that is to say, blindness. So much so, I was able to note with a smile, that in the experience of my ten years was reflected, so to speak, a whole trail of history. A bitter smile, however, because what the story told me was a sad and banal adventure: the marriage of love between the poets of all Europe and the Revolution of 1789, quickly cut off by the guillotine, renewed, warmed by the romanticism of the forties, re-celebrated sometimes with sincerity, but often also with an emphasis of bad quality and rehashed like a cliché, only to finally sink into imposture.
It is true that these two words evoke moments in our lives – that of the intimate experience of our belonging to the world through language and that of our inscription through history in the social and political – which almost seem to split us into two, so much so that it would seem plausible that we could only connect them in the vagueness of the cliché or by the violence of the paradox or the imposture. And very often, when the word revolution claimed to fraternise with the word poetry, it was to “put it at its service” and call poetry back to the order of the instrumental function of language – at the very moment when the revolution, in its nightmarish aftermath, was determined to transform the whole of society into an instrument for the seizure of power. Thus, in June 1848, Alphonse de Lamartine, haranguing the rebellious Parisian workers from the balcony of the City Hall, proclaimed: “We are going to create together the most sublime poetry”, that is to say the republican and bourgeois revolution, stopped, frozen in a state. More bluntly, in the 20th century, the surrealist movement, which wanted to be poetry itself, spontaneously placed itself “at the service of the revolution.” It is true that in the initial, sincere – and naive – moment of this movement, it still thought of it in the lineage of “revolutionary romanticism”, which associated the poet and the insurgent in the same indignant protest against the bourgeois and philistine order. But very quickly, this “service” offered to the revolution degraded into utilitarian subordination, pushed by some to the point of cynical propaganda.
The association between the two words is then denounced as an imposture: an imposture to cover over with the word poetry the active complicity with the devious and brutal maneuvers of a group of men to seize the State by using and even exploiting in language its powers of fallacious seduction, distortion and concealment of reality.
After having been thus sullied by this “putting into the service” of Stalinism, poetry has, since then, ostensibly avoided any association with revolution. What these two words have in common now is that they are no longer in use. The prudishness of the time relegated them to the hell of language – and to the vocabulary of marketing, which in turn “put them at its service.” So it is only in my heart of hearts that I encounter these two words, or rather in the limbo of memory where the aura of the paternal word makes their rapprochement possible and even fruitful: fruitful in that it gives birth to other words, such as freedom, solidarity, friendship, truth…, which are also worn out and abused by history and which, however, remain a clear source of emotion in me. This is how, all my life, beyond what reason and history and the bitterness of experience have instilled in me. The arid or crushing concepts of society, of the people, of the proletariat, have only spoken to me in human language in moments of emergence when, adorned with virgin youth, I could translate them with one of these words.
Already, in the past, with my imagination, transported by my father’s stories to the summit the Ubac mountain, irradiated with the azure of the overexposed image of the small troop of partisans, I projected their actions – their exploits – and they accomplished in my eyes, in a way magnified by their adult strength and know-how and by the seriousness of the issues of life and death, the ideal of life that our childhood games passionately simulated on a paltry scale, what we already called the real life. What was true then was – once the lures, the masks, the subjugation imposed by the established order, itself struck by facticity, had been thwarted or refused – the accomplishment of an authenticity – of our desires, of our ideals, of our loves, of our infinite dreamed potentialities.
Even today, poetry and revolution have retained their power of exaltation over me, like a delicious embrace. And if I pronounce these two words together, however distant they may be in my reason, as the intimate is from the social and the political, I feel at the centre of their expressive power the same movement of reversal – of an existing, agreed upon, established, imposed order… – of the shift and rupture of a fallacious and oppressive glaze – and oppressive like the repetitive lie of dictatorship (a word that Blanchot translated as “imperious repetition”) – and this rupture alone would give access to reality, to truth, it alone would open everyone to their truth… A “word of rupture”, wrote André du Bouchet of May 1968, because of the energy with which freedom and truth, without being confused, illuminate themselves in mirroring each other. What bullfighting describes as the “moment of freedom”, for the matador, is this moment of truth when he so reveals himself as s/he deeply is, capable or not of finding within her/himself the courage, the audacity, skill, elegance that the extreme danger requires, that is to say, the moment when s/he chooses her/himself as such. Extreme, exquisite freedom, because under the constraint of the most inflexible necessity. Is it not this same “moment of freedom” that poetry lives, when everyone must discover in their most contingent intimacy, in their most singular qualities, the resource which makes them capable of assuming the universality and objectivity of language?
But the revolution – understood here obviously as the broad and sincere popular uprising against an oppressive power and not as a putsch or a coup d’état -, how can we conceive that it can open up for the individual or the community such a moment of truth, in other words, “of freedom”, when it subjects them to the most rigorous and often the most cruel influence of politics and society? Precisely: it is then that the political and the social acquire such importance that they appear as the field of expression and possible realisation of the desires and ideals of each person; it is that, at least in its inaugural moment, the revolution seems to promise individuals freedom from their alienation from society and power: freedom, in short, and authenticity, the truth.
Freedom, for Hannah Arendt, is the ability to begin. The revolution, for Cornelius Castoriadis, is the first act of autonomy, through which the community begins to define its own ends and rules. It is at the beginning that poetry takes hold of, and always takes again, speech – at its source, always before it finds itself contained in the channels of strict signification; it is the first movement of speech, when words discover a little the depths of things – infinitely – beyond what they say: in the shimmer of the image. Thus it is not content to signify, it figures. In this sense again it is a beginning. To support its saying, it carries with it a little – a shadow, a rumor… – of the thing. This is the musicality of the poem, this composition of images, sounds, rhythms…, through which meaning begins to receive the sensitive qualities of reality.
The poem holds to this beginning; it always leaves it open, in a sustained momentum; it does not rush, does not petrify meaning in the thing itself; it does not fall into the madness of the Academicians of Lagado imagined by Jonathan Swift, who claimed to remedy the polysemy of words and the uncontrollable movement which is characteristic of meaning, by replacing the exchange of words with the exchange of things.
Is it not this incoercible movement of meaning, this perpetual beginning of speech and this appeal that it addresses to our spirit, reason and sensitivity at the same time, by its very materiality, which establishes our freedom to think, to speak, to act? In this sense, poetry fully assumes our responsibility as a “political animal”, as Aristotle defined us. Is not a society that refuses to hear poetry one that renounces its aspiration to freedom, locking itself into the reassuring fantasy of being nothing more than an apparatus of tools and means, men and things confounded?
Homme libre, toujours tu chériras la mer! La mer est ton miroir; tu contemples ton âme Dans le déroulement infini de sa lame, Et ton esprit n’est pas un gouffre moins amer.
Tu te plais à plonger au sein de ton image; Tu l’embrasses des yeux et des bras, et ton coeur Se distrait quelquefois de sa propre rumeur Au bruit de cette plainte indomptable et sauvage.
Vous êtes tous les deux ténébreux et discrets: Homme, nul n’a sondé le fond de tes abîmes; Ô mer, nul ne connaît tes richesses intimes, Tant vous êtes jaloux de garder vos secrets!
Et cependant voilà des siècles innombrables Que vous vous combattez sans pitié ni remords, Tellement vous aimez le carnage et la mort, Ô lutteurs éternels, ô frères implacables!
Charles Baudelaire, Les fleurs du mal [Flowers of Evil], 1857
[Man and The Sea
Free man, you will always cherish the sea! The sea is your mirror; you contemplate your soul In the infinite rolling of its surface, And your spirit is not a less bitter abyss.
You take pleasure in plunging into the heart of your image; You embrace it with your eyes and your arms, and your heart At times forgets its own rhythm In the noise of that wild and tameless complaint.
Both of you are dark and discreet: Man, no one has sounded the depths of your being, Sea, no one knows your intimate secrets, So eager are you to retain your secrets!
And yet for countless centuries You have fought without pity and without remorse, So much do you love carnage and death, O eternal fighters, O implacable brothers!
Wallace Fowlie, Flowers of Evil, New York: Dover Publications, 1964]
Espai en blanc – Tomar la palabra: “À Propos de ce que fait la poésie”, Daniel Blanchard (01/11/2009). This essay is preceded by another, entitled “Crisis de palabras/Crisis of words”. (See here)
Daniel Blanchard: Regarding what poetry does
For Daniel Blanchard, the second part of an essay that began with the “Crisis of words“.
To men who discover the world by looking for a rhyme.
Italo Svevo
Thus, throughout this “crisis of words” – which I evoked in the previous essay – searching blindly beyond what had bitterly appeared to me as illusions of words, fallacies, artificial and abusive constructions, seeking a substance of an elementary language – I would almost have said material – on which I could build, in which I could, in a sense, recognise myself in order to reconstitute myself as a speaking being, I had found poetry – found it anew, recognised it.
But what I then noticed, and what I have continued to see since, is that the practice of the art called poetry, which consists of nothing other than the work of language on itself to rediscover, to re-inhabit, what is deep down, that this practice, therefore, far from being admitted into the circle of common conversation through which women and men talk to each other about their lives, both private and public, is strictly excluded. The very words with which I thought I was proving myself to myself that I had learned to speak again turned out to be inaudible. And it is obvious that today any statement that risks being qualified as poetic produces in this current conversation of members of society not even a silence, or a bafflement, but a blank, a space of insignificance over which flows, without feeling anything, the stream of remarks deemed sensible, that is to say, useful.
It was not always this way. Since time immemorial and perhaps until the 19th century, society reserved a place for a word artisan, responsible for creating – it was sometimes said to be found – in a particular mode, verse, words capable of evoking the spirit of all the troubled, more or less dizzying moments of common experience: love, pain, the mystical élan, the apprehension of death, glory…
Today, from societies that describe themselves as developed, poetry has obviously not disappeared. Obviously, since no social or cultural judgment can reduce it to a historically or sociologically localized particularity of language: it is its very essence. Simply, it finds itself idle, confined in a corner of the cultural zoo, where a few individuals who, like me, consider the exercise of poetry as vital, develop writings intended almost immediately for the pestle – ignored, denied, as if its voice could no longer be picked up by a normal human ear – even though it acts in so many crude, rigorously prosaic remarks.
This ignorance, and if necessary denial, of poetry betrays the injunction given to us to confine language very closely to an instrumental function – language, and therefore ourselves – and to stop our thinking at the materiality of the facts supposedly established, in order to blind us to the limitlessness of ourselves and of the world (I will return to this in a later chapter).
But in this way, the misunderstanding also negatively reveals something of what poetry is, or at least of what it does – something that comes to light through a “crisis of words” like the one I have related in the previous chapter, that is to say, of a sort of critical state of the intimate being. Not a mystical crisis, obviously, or a metaphysical illumination: this state proves itself to be critical in that it makes one hear with a clarity which momentarily suspends the course of thoughts, the singular note of the here and now, – singular within the somewhat musical ensemble of so many other possible times and places. A critical state, therefore, which is not strictly speaking poetry but which opens into what is most concrete and most familiar in everyday life, the moment of poetry: this moment when, in the emergence of a few words, a form surfaces and and when articulated language asserts itself as that aspect of the world which involves and carries us, or as the intermediary thanks to which we understand, we know, that the world encompasses us.
This knowledge though does not leave us inert; it moves us, it is “this emotion called poetry” of which Pierre Reverdy speaks so precisely. It moves us, moves us out of our obtuse and opaque subjectivity and pours us into that of us, in us, which infinitely exceeds us: that which is language.
So I can, following the thread of a few words, rediscover, so to speak, through memory, such an emotion, which had surprised me one day, a long time ago, at the seaside.
In the past, I liked to spend hours at the seaside, contemplating the movement of the waves – now, age has made me impatient and quickly tired. What was it that captivated me, seduced me like this? I obviously think of Baudelaire’s verses:
Homme libre, toujours tu chériras la mer!
La mer est ton miroir, tu contemples ton âme
Dans le déroulement infini de sa lame…
[Free man, you will always cherish the sea!
The sea is your mirror; you contemplate your soul
In the infinite rolling of its surface …][1]
… yes, it is this freedom, of which the sea gave me the image, and much more: the example, the inspiration – this breaking of limits and mental and physical constraints – the opening, in short, of a critical condition.
It was in Monterosso-al-mare, in the Cinque Terre, between Genoa and La Spezia. I see myself sitting on a rock, insatiably contemplating the sea, below me, in front of me, heavily agitated, alive. And I feel like a taste emerge again, the deaf desolation with which I allowed myself to be invaded, and the few words form with which at one moment it said to itself: “Ah, to weigh, only to weigh, like this rock, or like the sea agitated by the wind, by its deep currents, the sea that never makes the same gesture twice.” Yes, I envied the sea, me who stiffened in my left posture, and I felt the muscles of my legs vibrate with tension, as if threatened by my own gravity of sliding down from this rock… But – I was then very much in love – what saddened me above all, comparing myself to the sea, “which never makes the same gesture twice”, was the stubborn resistance of my being to marry the fluctuating impulses of my desires and those of my friend, it was this sort of constraint to persevere in my petty, artificial identity, to repeat myself in order to survive, rather than letting myself constantly renew, following the order, the course of things – even though the repetition subjected me inexorably to this order of things, being only the spiral towards death.
These words which then came to my lips as a direct emanation – an “expression” – of my sadness, in reality offered it an outlet: they were carried by “this emotion called poetry”. In the sentence cited above, a word illuminates this emotion and, so to speak, moves it: the word gesture. This word compares us, the sea and me, we meet in this word – and all the emotion that the brief poem (or rather the outline of a poem) traces of this moment lies in this meeting, in the discovery that the sea and I, that we can meet and compare ourselves, that we therefore belong to the same world, however heartbreaking the comparison of my gestures with those of the sea may be for me.
But that this meeting is possible (possible in this mode, symbolic) highlights a quality of this world which would bring joy, and hope, to the human species if only it dared to realise it. It is that it is not already there, that it is not a realised reality, past, so to speak, in its very present, but an event: it takes place, it constantly takes place, it is produced. It begins, and in this perpetual beginning, it includes us, involves us: “this emotion called poetry” teaches us this. More: it calls on us to participate in this beginning. In this sense, the moment of poetry also appears to me as that of a test of truth: are we at this event, at this beginning? Are we ready to throw ourselves into the dizzying course of things? A moment of truth, a moment of freedom, in the sense that Hannah Arendt gave to this word: the ability to begin.
This is the question I hear Giacomo Leopardi answer in his brief and magnificent poem, L’Infinito:
Sempre caro mi fu quest’ermo colle,
E questa siepe, che da tanta parte
Dell’ultimo orizzonte il guardo esclude.
Ma sedendo e mirando, interminati
Spazi di là da quella, e sovrumani
Silenzi, e profondissima quiete
Io nel pensier mi fingo ; ove per poco
Il cor non si spaura. E come il vento
Odo stormir tra queste piante, io quel
Infinito silenzio a questa voce
Vo comparando : e mi sovvien l’eterno,
E le morte stagioni, e la presente
E viva, e il suon di lei. Così tra questa
Immensità s’annega il pensier mio :
E il naufragar m’è dolce il questo mare.
[I’ve always loved this solitary hill,
I’ve always loved this hedge that hides from me
So much of what my earthly eyes can see.
For as I sit and gaze, all calm and still,
I conjure up my thoughts; my mind I fill
With distances that stretch out boundlessly
And silences that somehow cannot be
Heard by my heart, which feels a sudden chill.
It seems these rustling leaves, this silence vast
Blend into one. Eternity draws nigh.
The present sounds and seasons, those long past
Become one sea of endless lives and deaths.
My thought is drowned, and yet it does not die:
It plunges into sweet, refreshing depths.
(translated by Z.G., with the title “Boundless Depths”; Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L%27infinito)]
An explicit response, certainly, in the story, which one could say is the prose of the poem, and which, posing the words as steps, seems in a hurry to carry out the journey of a manifest meaning, as one speaks of the manifest content of a dream. But here, the meaning cannot be confined in what Mallarmé describes as the “easy and representative numerical function” of words. What is poetry here, what this poem does, is to accomplish this meaning: it does what it says. The meaning radiates out of the words until the dry note of each of them is lost in an infinite term – “a total, incantatory word,” “above all dreams and songs,” music “as the set of relationships existing in everything” (Mallarmé, again). Music, yes, when the sound of the words, their design, their accentuation, the gestures of the sentence, the flow, similar to that of life, rhythmic and cursive, almost liquid sometimes, of Leopardi’s hendecasyllable, are no longer but one with the shimmer of images composing the semblance of a hinterland for each word, with the scene where the meeting of each word with all the others occurs.
Thus, “E il naufragar m’è dolce in questo mare” says and, at the same time, accomplishes the disappearance – the “annegarsi” – of the local, contingent, accidental self, in language, which is, in fact, the infinity of space and time combined that Leopardi sees in his mind unfolding before him. As if one could hear, from one word to another, what the stride, the spanning of space, the ellipse has passed over in silence: the inexhaustible qualities of the world. Osip Mandelstam: “It is not me who says what I say there, these are words extracted from the earth like grains of petrified wheat.” The memory of this world, in short: this moment of poetry is the one through which intimate memory flows and melts into the ocean of memory of language.
“It’s not me who says what I say there…” – “It’s not me who sees what I see there,” Leopardi seems to confide; it is the poem, it is language itself.
Seeing the world, seeing the things around me as if I were not there: I too have sometimes dared to attempt this paradoxical test – and these attempts will have at least made me sense where the outcome lies: at the cost of a sort of psychic acrobatics, or asceticism, or metamorphosis…, extinguishing my indiscreet presence which mixes with everything here and alters it and, so to speak, not keeping a me in life, active, but that which is language and which is connection or affinity, in the chemical sense, with here – and virtually everything else. Then, the same substance of words establishes a homogeneity between me and what I perceive – between the first person of Francis Ponge, for example, and the thing of which he has taken sides and which he scrutinises, which he surprises, as if he was not here.
But it is not that which constitutes not only poetry, but prose as well, and all art, no doubt: painting, sculpture, music… Writing – or painting, or composing music… -, contrary to a received idea, is not looking at oneself in a mirror (and, possibly, looking, through oneself, at the world); it is looking at oneself from the outside, from this outside that language is within us, or more generally the form which, writes Pierre Reverdy “is the state of matter in which it becomes intelligible and sensitive to the mind.”
As if it was not me who was looking at myself, or rather as if, having crossed the threshold of the French doors and having advanced onto the balcony to meet the breeze, the flowering branches of the cherry tree the courtyard and, over the ridges of the roofs, of everything I know that fills the space up to the horizon, – as if I were turning around and looking from outside into the interior of the living room, where I am to place on the table a jug full of clear water, where I am realizing, so to speak, in a flash of inattention, that the clear water is there, both in my gaze and in the jug , hugging the hollow of its curve, contained by the hard terracotta glazed with blue, and its weight is there, in my fist clenched on the handle and in my wrist and also in my ear, which receives the dry and serious ringing from the bottom of the jug hitting the wood of the table, whose brown walnut top extends halfway up into the clear air, the air which moulds all the shapes scattered in the room, with what fidelity, what tact!, and sets them in the ample crumbling light of the immense day through the window, and lets each colour sing for itself and for my eyes, which are colour too, and sing… – so that everything that exists in this room and I too, we emerge, united and distinct like the voices of a numerous choir – who would sing what? This is a deeply felt yes, a joyful acquiescence to the order of reality, to its incontestable necessity? A yes that says more than that, than this acquiescence: an impulse towards this reality, an exaltation of each thing – or shape, or colour, or me… – to be what it is.
A yes which gives the fundamental note, the elementary particle of meaning of the word which is thus formed beyond me, overhanging, cantilevered, among the breaths of the air and the abundance of appearances, – this word which has come out, which is an adventure outside of me and my present, so much so that this self which speaks thus from the outside is no longer the one which, in this sojourn, lives and will die.
What about prose, at least the most prosaic, that of the story or that of discourse – that, for example, which strives to explain all this? Prose has a purpose, each prose has its purpose and sticks to it. Its words, it does not expose them to the risk of being carried away by a current of air towards an “immensità” or an “sovrumani silenzi”. The images, which are the matrices of almost all words and which haunt them, sometimes in a very distant but perceptible way, like a background or a disorder, prose erases them or rigorously surrounds them so that they do not efface the meaning, this “easy and representative numerical function…” This musical, polyphonic yes, that language says to the world, the latter does not want to hear it and, even less, let it be heard. Above all, prose is the very meaning of the word, it goes, it advances, it passes, from one point of thought to another, a weight of meaning, which it delivers safely. Poetry, on the élan of this “emotion” of which Pierre Reverdy speaks, plunges and sinks into the “interminati spazi” and the “sovrumani silenzi” and “deepissima quiete”; it does not complete the crossing of this “sea”; it remains here and now, from where it set out; but it has captured, from this “immensità” a brilliance which restores the entire spectrum.
Searching for truth, recognising – in both senses of the word – reality, is something that is of concern to each person, particularly as a speaking being, and is therefore part of making poetry. Now is it not a received idea that the very word of poetry be understood as a denial of reality? Unlike fantasy, delirium, or intellectual productions such as religious discourse or political discourse, poetry does not come into conflict with reality; it does not come up against it as against an abutment, a painful limit of perception, thought or affect. On the contrary, it goes to meet reality, as I said above, it is an élan towards reality, which does not manifest itself to poetry as a principle, a rule that would be external to it, but as the vanishing point of its own movement. It opens and discovers reality through a series of hinged windows. Because, once again, poetry does not give us, and even less does it impose on us, reality as fact, as past; it offers it to us as a future, invites us to participate in its event.
What then is the content of this doing that we understand in the very word poetry? The spirit of the times, and its discourse which more and more often resembles advertising, readily applies to poetry, as if it were particularly appropriate to it, the word, both emphatic and overused, of creation. If it is true, as I tried to say, that it maintains a relationship of participation with the world, in a mode which affirms the compatibility and even the continuity of the symbolic and the real, as a form, it that is to say, “this state of matter in which it becomes intelligible and sensitive to the spirit”, we cannot overwhelm it with this word creation, which comes from the myth of Genesis. This would be but Paltry hyperbole. Here the blindness of the time as to what is true of poetry and reality is betrayed. Poetry does not create anything, it manifests: in this sense, it acts, it works, or rather, it “works” [œuvre: works-acts, without creating or making; it unveils, reveals]. It “works” as and, at the same time, in memory and language, in the moment where intimate memory and language meet and mutually fertilise each other. It “works”, to speak like geology, by accumulation of materials, which sediment and metamorphose, that is to say, it changes physical and chemical nature by simple contact but also under the effect of the formidable pressures exerted by the the very accumulation of living in memory. This is how she comes to bring to light words “extracted from the earth like grains of petrified wheat.” So much so that – to borrow from Cesare Pavese a very simple sentence which basically sums up my whole point –, “If it gives us a thrill of joy to encounter, happily coupled, an adjective and a noun that we had never seen together, it is not astonishment at the elegance of the thing, the power of invention or the skill of the poet, but wonder at a new reality brought to light.”
*
Note on poetry and revolution, the work of a childhood memory
The child listens to his father’s words – the words overwhelm his spirit, like a light, like a burning, they will remain there, they will always travel there. The father recounts the battles he has just fought with his comrades in the mountains, the three days and three nights of retreat across the high ridges to escape the German troops, the fraternisation with the Italian partisans… Through the narrow window of the farm abandoned where the family found refuge, the child follows with his eyes his father’s story on the summit of the Ubac mountain, on the other side of the valley – and a few words, spoken by the father, vast and vague words, but without emphasis – freedom, revolution, comrades, war against war… – shine in his ten-year-old mind with the blinding brilliance of the azure of the south against the gray rock of the ridge.
It was on that day, when my father reappeared early in the morning after weeks of agonising absence; it was in the brilliance of the fabulous news he brought that words such as revolution became poetry in my mind. Because to the words of these stories my father’s voice gave an almost incantatory power – this dull, almost murmuring voice, his simple and sober sentences, his barely marked intonations, whether they betrayed sadness or laughter – this voice of a father whose every inflection brought out in me the admiration and love that I had for him then. So much so that in my mind, these down-to-earth stories, weighed down by the bottomless sadness and the insurmountable fatigue of war, unfolded with the excess of myth, of epic, stamped with the same seal of authenticity as the words of a poem; these images which make our senses waver on the edge of the immensity of the world. A poem and maybe even music. If I closed my eyes and let myself be overcome by the resonance of these words, I could imagine myself back at home, hidden under the swathes of the large table cloth that covered the dining room table, to listen to my father playing Bach on the piano. Yes: his stories struck my imagination with the evocative power of a Bach fugue: they were, so to speak, absolute because without content.
Without content: the word revolution certainly did not have any, then, much less than the word freedom, to which friendship, evoking the close frankness of chosen relationships, for a ten year old, to which could be lent a little flesh, and less even than poetry, except for a certain dazzling splendor. And I said to myself, since then, having read a little history and thought about it, that such a link between these words – poetry and revolution – could only have been established in bedazzlement, that is to say, blindness. So much so, I was able to note with a smile, that in the experience of my ten years was reflected, so to speak, a whole trail of history. A bitter smile, however, because what the story told me was a sad and banal adventure: the marriage of love between the poets of all Europe and the Revolution of 1789, quickly cut off by the guillotine, renewed, warmed by the romanticism of the forties, re-celebrated sometimes with sincerity, but often also with an emphasis of bad quality and rehashed like a cliché, only to finally sink into imposture.
It is true that these two words evoke moments in our lives – that of the intimate experience of our belonging to the world through language and that of our inscription through history in the social and political – which almost seem to split us into two, so much so that it would seem plausible that we could only connect them in the vagueness of the cliché or by the violence of the paradox or the imposture. And very often, when the word revolution claimed to fraternise with the word poetry, it was to “put it at its service” and call poetry back to the order of the instrumental function of language – at the very moment when the revolution, in its nightmarish aftermath, was determined to transform the whole of society into an instrument for the seizure of power. Thus, in June 1848, Alphonse de Lamartine, haranguing the rebellious Parisian workers from the balcony of the City Hall, proclaimed: “We are going to create together the most sublime poetry”, that is to say the republican and bourgeois revolution, stopped, frozen in a state. More bluntly, in the 20th century, the surrealist movement, which wanted to be poetry itself, spontaneously placed itself “at the service of the revolution.” It is true that in the initial, sincere – and naive – moment of this movement, it still thought of it in the lineage of “revolutionary romanticism”, which associated the poet and the insurgent in the same indignant protest against the bourgeois and philistine order. But very quickly, this “service” offered to the revolution degraded into utilitarian subordination, pushed by some to the point of cynical propaganda.
The association between the two words is then denounced as an imposture: an imposture to cover over with the word poetry the active complicity with the devious and brutal maneuvers of a group of men to seize the State by using and even exploiting in language its powers of fallacious seduction, distortion and concealment of reality.
After having been thus sullied by this “putting into the service” of Stalinism, poetry has, since then, ostensibly avoided any association with revolution. What these two words have in common now is that they are no longer in use. The prudishness of the time relegated them to the hell of language – and to the vocabulary of marketing, which in turn “put them at its service.” So it is only in my heart of hearts that I encounter these two words, or rather in the limbo of memory where the aura of the paternal word makes their rapprochement possible and even fruitful: fruitful in that it gives birth to other words, such as freedom, solidarity, friendship, truth…, which are also worn out and abused by history and which, however, remain a clear source of emotion in me. This is how, all my life, beyond what reason and history and the bitterness of experience have instilled in me. The arid or crushing concepts of society, of the people, of the proletariat, have only spoken to me in human language in moments of emergence when, adorned with virgin youth, I could translate them with one of these words.
Already, in the past, with my imagination, transported by my father’s stories to the summit the Ubac mountain, irradiated with the azure of the overexposed image of the small troop of partisans, I projected their actions – their exploits – and they accomplished in my eyes, in a way magnified by their adult strength and know-how and by the seriousness of the issues of life and death, the ideal of life that our childhood games passionately simulated on a paltry scale, what we already called the real life. What was true then was – once the lures, the masks, the subjugation imposed by the established order, itself struck by facticity, had been thwarted or refused – the accomplishment of an authenticity – of our desires, of our ideals, of our loves, of our infinite dreamed potentialities.
Even today, poetry and revolution have retained their power of exaltation over me, like a delicious embrace. And if I pronounce these two words together, however distant they may be in my reason, as the intimate is from the social and the political, I feel at the centre of their expressive power the same movement of reversal – of an existing, agreed upon, established, imposed order… – of the shift and rupture of a fallacious and oppressive glaze – and oppressive like the repetitive lie of dictatorship (a word that Blanchot translated as “imperious repetition”) – and this rupture alone would give access to reality, to truth, it alone would open everyone to their truth… A “word of rupture”, wrote André du Bouchet of May 1968, because of the energy with which freedom and truth, without being confused, illuminate themselves in mirroring each other. What bullfighting describes as the “moment of freedom”, for the matador, is this moment of truth when he so reveals himself as s/he deeply is, capable or not of finding within her/himself the courage, the audacity, skill, elegance that the extreme danger requires, that is to say, the moment when s/he chooses her/himself as such. Extreme, exquisite freedom, because under the constraint of the most inflexible necessity. Is it not this same “moment of freedom” that poetry lives, when everyone must discover in their most contingent intimacy, in their most singular qualities, the resource which makes them capable of assuming the universality and objectivity of language?
But the revolution – understood here obviously as the broad and sincere popular uprising against an oppressive power and not as a putsch or a coup d’état -, how can we conceive that it can open up for the individual or the community such a moment of truth, in other words, “of freedom”, when it subjects them to the most rigorous and often the most cruel influence of politics and society? Precisely: it is then that the political and the social acquire such importance that they appear as the field of expression and possible realisation of the desires and ideals of each person; it is that, at least in its inaugural moment, the revolution seems to promise individuals freedom from their alienation from society and power: freedom, in short, and authenticity, the truth.
Freedom, for Hannah Arendt, is the ability to begin. The revolution, for Cornelius Castoriadis, is the first act of autonomy, through which the community begins to define its own ends and rules. It is at the beginning that poetry takes hold of, and always takes again, speech – at its source, always before it finds itself contained in the channels of strict signification; it is the first movement of speech, when words discover a little the depths of things – infinitely – beyond what they say: in the shimmer of the image. Thus it is not content to signify, it figures. In this sense again it is a beginning. To support its saying, it carries with it a little – a shadow, a rumor… – of the thing. This is the musicality of the poem, this composition of images, sounds, rhythms…, through which meaning begins to receive the sensitive qualities of reality.
The poem holds to this beginning; it always leaves it open, in a sustained momentum; it does not rush, does not petrify meaning in the thing itself; it does not fall into the madness of the Academicians of Lagado imagined by Jonathan Swift, who claimed to remedy the polysemy of words and the uncontrollable movement which is characteristic of meaning, by replacing the exchange of words with the exchange of things.
Is it not this incoercible movement of meaning, this perpetual beginning of speech and this appeal that it addresses to our spirit, reason and sensitivity at the same time, by its very materiality, which establishes our freedom to think, to speak, to act? In this sense, poetry fully assumes our responsibility as a “political animal”, as Aristotle defined us. Is not a society that refuses to hear poetry one that renounces its aspiration to freedom, locking itself into the reassuring fantasy of being nothing more than an apparatus of tools and means, men and things confounded?
[1] L’Homme et la mer
Homme libre, toujours tu chériras la mer!
La mer est ton miroir; tu contemples ton âme
Dans le déroulement infini de sa lame,
Et ton esprit n’est pas un gouffre moins amer.
Tu te plais à plonger au sein de ton image;
Tu l’embrasses des yeux et des bras, et ton coeur
Se distrait quelquefois de sa propre rumeur
Au bruit de cette plainte indomptable et sauvage.
Vous êtes tous les deux ténébreux et discrets:
Homme, nul n’a sondé le fond de tes abîmes;
Ô mer, nul ne connaît tes richesses intimes,
Tant vous êtes jaloux de garder vos secrets!
Et cependant voilà des siècles innombrables
Que vous vous combattez sans pitié ni remords,
Tellement vous aimez le carnage et la mort,
Ô lutteurs éternels, ô frères implacables!
Charles Baudelaire, Les fleurs du mal [Flowers of Evil], 1857
[Man and The Sea
Free man, you will always cherish the sea!
The sea is your mirror; you contemplate your soul
In the infinite rolling of its surface,
And your spirit is not a less bitter abyss.
You take pleasure in plunging into the heart of your image;
You embrace it with your eyes and your arms, and your heart
At times forgets its own rhythm
In the noise of that wild and tameless complaint.
Both of you are dark and discreet:
Man, no one has sounded the depths of your being,
Sea, no one knows your intimate secrets,
So eager are you to retain your secrets!
And yet for countless centuries
You have fought without pity and without remorse,
So much do you love carnage and death,
O eternal fighters, O implacable brothers!
Wallace Fowlie, Flowers of Evil, New York: Dover Publications, 1964]
(Source: https://fleursdumal.org/poem/113)
Espai en blanc – Tomar la palabra: “À Propos de ce que fait la poésie”, Daniel Blanchard (01/11/2009). This essay is preceded by another, entitled “Crisis de palabras/Crisis of words”. (See here)