Category: Poetry

I set out on a journey of a thousand leagues, packing no provisions …

Why does Basho travel? To spread word of his style, his aesthetic and his own reputation – he needed disciples as a poet master. Then there is the desire to visit beautiful scenes – Mount Yoshino, Sarashina and the islands of Matsushima which had, of course, been written about by other poets. Nature and culture thus come together as one, as David Barnhill notes in his introduction to his indispensible edition of Basho’s writings which I am paraphrasing here; the Japanese have a word – utamakura – for those places that have associations with literature.

Basho – an ancient to us – also sought to bring himself into contact with the ancients. But then, more than literary, Basho’s journeys were religious, and his poetry was part of his religious life. To travel means to leave behind attachments, and to cultivate that desirelessness that is the goal of Buddhism. Wasn’t life itself a journey? And each day? After a sleepless night, Basho writes in a travel journal, as Barnhill quotes,

My distant journey remained, I was anxious about my illness, and yet this was a pilgrimage to far places, a resignation to self-abandonment and impernanence. Death might come by the roadside but that is heaven’s will.

A journey then, is a way of experiencing life in its transience, to welcome the uncertainty of fate, of heaven’s will.

Barnhill reminds us of the East Asian view of nature with great elegance.

What is natural is what exists according to its true nature. It is an ‘adverbial’ sense of natural, since it refers to a way of being. Humans are fully a part of nature: essentially we are natural. However, we have the distinctive ability to act contrary to our nature: existentially we usually live unnaturally.

Basho’s asceticism, then, the desire to cultivate and discipline himself through journeying is an attempt to rejoin nature. To create poetry is to partake of the greater creation that is nature; one must not strive to write poems, acting according to the desires of the self, but let them arise. Culture and nature are not be thought in opposition in Basho’s poetic practice. Just as the notion of utamakura joins a place of natural beauty celebrated in literary history, his poems and travel journals are both part of a long literary tradition and its reawakening in the face of a fresh encounter with the natural world.

Barnhill teaches us another word – zōka, the Creative as a term ‘for the world’s unceasing and spontaneous disposition to give rise to beautiful and skillful transformations throughout the natural world. True art is a participation in nature’s own creativity’. We should note, too, that Basho took his name (how wonderful, the idea a poet should take a name – or was he given it? was it what he received from nature’s zōka?) from the banana or plantain tree ‘precisely because it was so vulnerable to nature elements and "useless"’.

A secret: I enjoy reading of a poet’s literary philosophy as much (more than?) as reading the poems themselves (if there is such a thing: the poems themselves). Basho was a great master of haibun, haikai prose, which usually include a hokku poem, but can be considered as a form of prose poetry. Can’t commentary on poetry, on another’s poems become a similar form of poetry, partaking of the same creative act – or is it upon the Creative itself, zōka that they would both draw?

What does Rilke mean by the Open? Certainly it is not unambiguous presence; it needs to be approached with caution, with patience, with the relinquishment of the desire to possess and of the measure of possession, the rejection of security and stability, of the desire for certainty. Then what we call the real must be rejected in its entirety; a profounder intimacy beckons to us – a connection to things that stills the desire to do and to act. This is what it would mean to become ‘as fully conscious as possible of our existence’.

The Open. Is this what Rilke experienced at Capri and Dunio: the Weltinnenraum, the inner space of the world: our intimacy with ourselves and with things? Rilke: ‘Through all beings spreads the one space: / the world’s inner space. Silently fly the birds / all through us. O I who want to grow, / I look outside, and it is in me that the tree grows!’

What is this experience? There is a purification, an interiorisation through which things lose their falsified nature, their narrow limitations. In a letter, Rilke wrote of ‘becoming as fully conscious as possible of our existence’; ‘All the configurations of the here and now are to be used not in a time-bound way, but, as far as we are able, to be placed in those superior significances in which we have a share’.

Then the experience Rilke seeks is the attempt to approach the source of meanings, an enhanced, deeper consciousness. Though this great conversion, this inward-turning, the exterior realm is regained; the world is transmuted; the visible is taken into invisible and is reborn. ‘We are the bees of the Invisible. We ardently suck the honey of the visible in order to accumulate it in the great golden hive of the Invisible’. ‘Our task is to impregnate the provisional and perishable earth so profoundly in our mind, with so much patience and passion, that its essence can be reborn in us invisible’.

Beautiful lines. But how do we achieve this task when the Open, for the most part is closed to us? One approach: the movement of love. But only when your beloved is only the focus through which another space can be discerned. The risk is that love is always drawn back to the beloved. Perhaps the Open only reveals itself in our childhood (but isn’t there a way of awakening a childhood in our adulthood?) . But Rilke writes ‘the young child, already / we turn him around and force him to look backwards / at the world of forms and not into the Open, which / in the animal’s face is so profound’. The child is not innocent enough.

Is it left to the beast, to, the one who exists unreflectively, who lives in proximity to the Open? Perhaps. But what does the Open mean for us? Rilke writes in a letter of February 25, 1926 that it is by virtue of a low ‘degree of consciousness’ that the animal can enter reality. The creature belongs to the Open.

By Open we do not mean the sky, the air, space — which for the observer are still objects, and thus opaque. The animal, the flower is all that without realizing it, and has thus before itself, beyond itself, that indescribably open freedom which, for us, has its extremely short-lived equivalents perhaps only in the first instants of love — when one being sees in the other, in the beloved, his own extension — or again in the outpouring to God.

Human consciousness is closed upon itself. The animal’s look reaches out into the things; it is where it looks. ‘With all its eyes / the creature sees / the Open. Our eyes only are/ as if reversed’. We lose the thing through our representation of the thing; making of it an object, fitting it into an objective reality, it answers a utilitarian demand. (It is as though what Husserl called the reduction was possible only for a child within childhood, an animal within the animal. And yet is there a way to recover this childhood, this animality, in our own lives?)

How to achieve this? Rilke invokes that death which opens its eyes in our own such that ‘we look out with a great animal gaze’, so that we gaze upon ‘the world’s inner space’. ‘Death is the side of life that is turned away from, and unillumined by, us’. Death is not a beyond; it is not removed from life so much as turned from it. We are turned from death, from a relation which now appears impossible for us. We are limited; the limit turns us back to ourselves.

My consciousness may seem to leap beyond me, to go about among the things of the world, but I can encounter nothing other than myself. Death must become transparent (Rilke: ‘For close to death one no longer sees death, and one stares outward, perhaps with a great animal gaze’) – but is it not, in so doing, volatilised out of existence?

Death must become transparent, the authentic yea-saying; death must only say yes. But what does this mean? Recall Rilke’s prayer: ‘Oh Lord, grant to each his own death, the dying which truly evolves from this life where he found love, meaning and distress’. The effort is to return death to itself, to raise death to its proper level in order to maintain a responsibility towards things and the world.

Death is what Rilke calls ‘the pure relation’ – a purified relation which leaps beyond consciousness. Through death it is possible to achieve a new intimacy with things, replacing the imperious desire to master the world, the purposive activity which allows us to be content only with results. To save things is to turn towards the invisible, to allow death to affirm itself. What is this death? An enlarged consciousness – the broadening which reinstates a lost unity, a larger understanding. It reassures our faith in the oneness of things. Would this be the experience which would lead us into the profound intimacy we seek?

Death is our chance. Yet Rilke will say the animal that lives in the Open is ‘free of death’. We are not free; our perspective is limited and this is the point: ‘Death, we see only death; the free animal always has its decline behind it, and before it God, and when it moves, it moves in Eternity, as springs flow’. But then what chance does death offer us?

Death, for Rilke, is double. On the one hand, it is delimitation such that our freedom must be a freedom from death. And on the other? If, for Rilke, death no longer provides the passage for a soul to the heavenly beyond, it retains a kind of transcendence. There is, in Rilke, a movement to purge death of its pain, its brutality. But how is this to be achieved?

Poetry provides one approach. Rilke’s Orpheus, of the Sonnets which bear his name, is a mediator. A task which resonates with that of Hölderlin. To recall: for Hölderlin, the poet’s destiny is to expose himself to the undetermined and to endure its extraordinary force and violence, such that he might, in his poems, give it form. For Rilke, similarly, the poet’s task is to determine the indeterminable, to give it exactitude and form, rendering it decisive in order to speak the Open in a determined form.

Rilke: ‘To sing in truth is a different breath \ A breath around nothing. A stirring in God. The wind’. The poem breathes, it becomes passage, it lets resound a kind of song in which the Open sings. This is how poetry saves things, lifting them out of oblivion, preserving a world from representation. Poetry accomplishes that conversion, translating things from a debased, exterior language to an interior one – to a kind of silence within language, a kind of silent space through the poem. A metamorphosis of the visible into the invisible, a speaking that allows us to settle back into our intimacy with things. A language of the silent and the invisible when the Open has become the poem, when the depth of being reveals itself in the poem’s space.

In 1924, a young poet submits his work to Jacques Rivière, editor of the Nouvelle Revue Française. The editor rejects his work but, finding it interesting, seeks to make acquaintance with the poet; they meet and a correspondence ensues. That poet is Antonin Artaud; the correspondence has become famous.

These questions as I reread the Correspondence: Does Artaud want to write poetry? Or is it, in contrast, to plunge literature into a kind of incapacity, the ‘uncan’ [impouvoir] such that it speaks not of the world in which we live happily or unhappily but a kind of tear which passes through this world, a privation which divides the world in itself such that it calls for a writing that is likewise torn? An eroded writing, half-destroyed, a writing which is cracked and fissured whose refusal to bring itself into a finished and well-rounded form is an answer to what calls it into being: this is the work – To Have Done With the Judgement of God, The Theatre of Cruelty – for which Artaud will be celebrated; at this time, however, even Umbilical Limbo and Nerve Scales are ahead of him. The poems he submits are relatively polite and well formed; yet what he wants his correspondent to grasp is that this poetry corresponds to his own mental ruin.

I suffer from a fearful mental disease. My thought abandons me at every stage. From the mere fact of thought itself to the external fact of its materialisation on words. Words, the forms of phrases, inner directions of thought, the mind’s simplest reactions, I am in constant pursuit of my intellectual being. Thus, when I am able to grasp a form, however imperfect, I hold on to it, afraid to lose all thought. As I know I do not do myself justice, I suffer from it, but I accept it in fear of complete death.

Artaud complains he falls short of thought; yet he seems to have the faith that such thinking, were he to receive the power to determine its form, would be possible. A view subtly different to that of his correspondent.

At first Rivière wants to comfort his correspondent by telling him he will one day come into the full possession of his powers: Artaud’s suffering will be part of that work he will one day realise; the fragmentation of his mind will be overcome. Yet it is not reassurance Artaud seeks; in his acute and patient letters, Artaud watches over his own poetry as it attests to the impossibility of thinking.

Why, though, express this impossibility? Why not take refuge in silence? Artaud: ‘Well, my weakness and my absurdity is I must write at all costs and express myself. I am a man whose mind has greatly suffered and as such I have a right to speak’. A right to speak? But what permits such a right?

Artaud links his name to Tzara, Breton and Reverdy; all of them, he writes, are touched by a ‘weakness’ that is similar to Artaud’s own ‘physiological weakness’ – yet what distinguishes him is his relationship to what is ‘outside thought’. Whatever the source of the malaise of a time, it is only Artaud who suffers, who physically suffers. ‘Speaking for myself, I can honestly say I am not in this world and such a statement is not merely an intellectual pose’. Then it is the extent of this suffering that lends him this right. It is the truth of the testimony that he, Artaud, can give in his ruined, unpublishable poetry.

What becomes visible in these letters is that it is the ruin of literature that such thinking demands. Thus he will claim for himself a ‘profound faculty’; he has the capacity to write, except ‘at the instant the soul proposes to coordinate its riches’ this capacity is interrupted; Artaud remains in perpetual pursuit of such coordination; the imperfection of his poems are attributable to the necessities of this pursuit: when he finds, however fleetingly and unsatisfactorily, a form for his thought, he must ‘hold on to it, afraid to lose all thought’; this is the significance of his poems.

This is not a matter of the retreat of poetic inspiration; Artaud is not a writer who is blocked, but a writer dispossessed of the means of writing. ‘This is also why I told you I had nothing further, no work in the offing, the few things I submitted to you being the vestiges of what I was able to salvage from the utter void’, he writes; what he seeks is for Rivière to understand his that his poems, however unsatisfactorily, manifest his mental existence.

Wha, then, does poetry matter? ‘I am unattached to poetry’, he realises in May 1924, yet it is in poetry nevertheless that Artaud was able to give form to the void. The problem is the poetry itself: it remains too weak; it falls short of the experience to which it would belong. Is this why, later that same month, he responds affirmatively to Rivière’s suggestion to publish their correspondence? ‘Why lie, why try to put something which is life’s very cry on a literary level? Why fictionalise something made from the soul’s ineradicable essence, which is like the complaint of reality?’ Artaud agrees to publication on condition that nothing is changed; the correspondence must stand as it is.

Still, one might suspect a sleight of hand: it is as if the poems require supplementing – such that, with an account of their composition, of the vicissitudes of their author, Artaud might overcome their inadequacy. But it is the other way round: it is so they will stand in their incompletion, in the impossibility of thinking to which they answer, that their correspondence must swirl round the poems.

Why did Rivière seek to publish Artaud’s correspondence? I wonder whether he sensed that Artaud’s work answers to one of the fundamental experiences of modern literature, wherein the poem bears upon its own emergence. Here, of course, it is not the splendid realisation of the Dunio Elegies that is at issue, but poems which Rivière deems unpublishable. But this is another side of modernity: broken works can now be understood as issuing from the same source as splendid ones; what matters, perhaps, is a kind of experience to which even the ruined poem would answer. After Surrealism, this experience is linked to a new kind of thinking; a mode of poetic research which supercedes philosophy.

‘Outside thought’: that is Artaud’s expression. Isn’t it the outside, thought’s outside, that Foucault and Deleuze will celebrate?

Common presence: these two words, translating a poem and an anthology by René Char, indicate what I would like to be able to think.

Char’s anthology Commune Présence, published in 1964, includes no records of the dates of the poems it collects in eight main clusters; there is no chronological ordering here. To what does its title refer? To an experience shared by poet and reader – to an experience of the poem that allows a presence to be shared. One cannot help but be reminded of Heraclitus, always an important presence in Char’s poetry, for whom the logos is said to be common. Common presence: does this refer to Char’s version of the logos which maintains itself beyond what we take to be opposites, but which Heraclitus tells us are always in struggle and interchange?

Char’s poems are shards, fragments. Each poem is comprised of autonomous phrases – one leaps from phrase to phrase. There is not harmony here – or if we are to use this word, it would in accordance with Heraclitus, for whom harmonia names a kind of accordance. Do we know what harmonia is? Do we know what this word meant to Heraclitus and how to read Char alongside Heraclitus in view of the stakes of this word harmonia? Thinking of the last few blogs, which were an attempt to understand the phrase ‘commune présence’, I would like argue that Char’s poetry returns us to the harmony-without-harmony of Heraclitus.

‘Harmony-without-harmony’: why this cumbersome and ridiculous phrase? Because the accordance between the fragment and the matter to be thought, to be indicated by the fragment is a harmony of strife, a struggling discord. Here it is a matter of attending to an event which Heidegger indicates when he writes of physis – of the coming-into-appearance of things as it is accompanied by a withdrawal; the process through which things are given such that they come to stand even as this determination is accompanied by an indetermination. Ah, but it’s more complex than that – for are determination and indetermination not given in the event that physis names?