FRIENDS
INDEX
PLACES
MYSPACE
There is a before Artaud and an after Artaud.
There is a breakage in literature, a cataclysm, a beautiful and yet profoundly disturbing opus, which tears good intentions and formal pretensions to shreds with some of the most vicious, moving, sublime poetry in the universal academy of words.
I am still reeling from the effects of my first encounter in the 80’s! And there isn’t a day when I do not meditate on something the extraordinary Antonin Artaud has written.
My encounter with Artaud began with his masterpiece on Van Gogh. I wonder if we are yet capable of grasping the portent of this man’s vision, whether it be in its prophetic dimension, its revolutionary style or its exploration of the deep mind and body of the poet.
Artaud is still alive and breathing poetry in this afterlife between emotion and pulse, between stretched skin and blood, between the anvil and a new oration, between opium and the belting of stones against the flesh.
“A man possesses himself in flashes, and even when he possesses himself; he does not reach himself completely. He does not realize the constant cohesion of his forces without which all true creation is impossible. Nevertheless, this man exists. I mean to say that he has a distinct reality which redeems him. Should he be condemned to oblivion simply because he can give only fragments of himself? You yourself do not think so, and the proof of this is the importance which you attach to these fragments. For a long time I have been meaning to suggest to you that we put them together. I did not dare, and now your letter answers my desire. This is to tell you with what satisfaction I welcome the idea that you propose.
I am perfectly aware of the sudden stops and starts in my poems, they are related to the very essence of inspiration and proceed from my chronic inability to concentrate on an object. Because of a psychological weakness which affects the very substance of that which is usually called the soul and which is the emanation of our nervous force coagulated around objects. But this weakness affects the whole age, as witness Tristan Tzara, André Breton, Pierre Reverdy. But in their case the should is not psychologically damaged, it is not damaged substantially, but it is damaged at all points where it joins something else, it is not damaged outside of thought; what, then, is the source of the trouble, is it really the atmosphere of the age, a miracle floating in the air, a cosmic and evil anomaly, or the discovery of a new world, an actual expansion of reality? The fact nevertheless remains that they do not suffer and that I do suffer, not only in the mind but in the flesh and in my everyday soul. This lack of connection to the object which characterizes all of literature is in me a lack of connection to life. As for myself, I can truly say that I am not in the world, and this is not merely an attitude of the mind. My last poems seemed to me to show serious progress. Are they really so unpublishable in their totality? But what does it matter, I would rather show myself as I am, in my nonexistence and my rootlessness. One could in any case publish large fragments of them. And I believe that most of the stanzas, taken separately, are good. It is only putting them together that destroys their value. You will choose these fragments yourself, you will arrange the letters. In this area I can no longer be judge. But my primary concern is that no ambiguity arise as to the nature of the phenomena which I call to my defence. The reader must believe in a real sickness and not in a phenomenon of the age,
a sickness which touches the essence of being and its central possibilities of expression, and which applies to a whole life.
A sickness which affects the soul in its most profound reality, and which infects its manifestations. The poison of being. A veritable paralysis. A sickness which deprives you of speech, memory, which uproots your thought.”
I was in a bookshop in Saint Germain, Paris and I begun to glance through Césaire’s Cahier du Retour au Pays Natal. I remember being mesmerized by the language. I quickly bought the brown covered text and rushed away to read it in one sitting. It was a very physical shock to hear this new rhythm, these strange words which had me grasping for my French dictionary. I made copious notes within the booklet and on my faithful Beaux Arts notebook I carried with me everywhere I went. Then I read it again and again. The sheer power, the anger, the beauty, the absolute validity of the moral stance against colonialism I espoused immediately. ‘Streets of Subservience’ soon after was my most inadequate response to Césaire’s greatness.
Later on, I studied Ethnography at Nanterre University (Paris) and read all the classics on Racism, Colonialism, etc… but nothing was ever as eloquent as this poetic masterpiece.
Below is a short unpunctuated poem by Césaire. I have always loved non punctuated writing. It has always seemed to me to be the language of desire. Picasso had intuitively stated that punctuation was a ‘cache sexe.’ Faulkner was a master, see the intensity of some of his passages in The Sound and the Fury. Joyce too. In the French language there is the extraordinary unpunctuated language of Philippe Sollers in his two volumes of Paradis and in passages of his previous experimental novels: Lois and H. These texts are punctuated as much by the ear as the eye. Rhythmic punctuation.
Allo allo encore une nuit pas la peine de chercher c’est moi l’homme des cavernes il y a les cigales qui étourdissent leur vie comme leur mort il y a aussi l’eau verte des lagunes même noyé je n’aurai jamais cette couleur là pour penser à toi j’ai déposé tous mes mots au mont-de-piété un fleuve de traineaux de baigneuses dans le courant de la journée blonde comme le pain et l’alcool de tes seins allo allo je voudrais être à l’envers clair de la terre le bout de tes seins a la couleur et le gout de cette terre là allo allo encore une nuit il y a la pluie et ses doigts de fossoyeur il y a la pluie qui met ses pieds dans le plat sur les toits la pluie a mangé le soleil avec des baguettes de chinois allo allo l’accroissement du cristal c’est toi…. c’est toi o absence dans le vent et baigneuse de lombric quand viendra l’aube c’est toi qui poindras tes yeux de rivière sur l’émail bougé des iles et dans ma tête c’est toi le maguey éblouissant d’un ressac d’aigles sous le banyan
Hello hello another night don’t bother looking it’s me the caveman there’s the grasshoppers whose lives are as deafeningly dizzy as their deaths then there’s the green water of the lagoon even if they drowned me I wouldn’t be that colour to think of you
I have pawned all my words at the mont-de-piété a river of sleds full of bathing beauties in the current of the day blond like the bread and wine of your breasts hello hello I’d like to be upside down on the light side of the earth the tip of your breasts look and taste like that earth hello hello another night it’s raining rain with its gravedigger fingers rain putting its feet in it again on the roofs the rain has eaten the sun with chinese chopsticks hello hello the magnifying crystal is you…. it’s you absent in the wind it’s you the earthworm bathing at dawn it’s you breaking with your streaming eyes on the blurry enamel of the islands and in my mind you are the dazzling manguey tree in the surf of eagles under the banian
Jabès seems to abdicate all forms of personal autonomy in the pursuit of a language which is always on the verge of disappear- ing into darkness, a language despite its author, beyond his worldly intervention, a mystical prose crossed by visions and illuminations. Words fill the desert, the desert empties words. Unknowing does not come before knowing but very long after. Jabès writes from beyond himself, from behind and beside, from the depth of his unknowing. In his work, aphorisms follow imaginary debates and dialogues, poems shine, gems for the future. Without hatred, adverse to all manner of violence and revenge, his very particular narratives weave mysterious webs
of a future wisdom which heralds to an immemorial past.
Words sometimes lie in order to seduce.
The book never.
Given Jabès’ personal story, it is an incredible achievement to avoid the illusory magnets of anger and madness. Only rarely does he castigate his ‘racist’ persecutors along his infinite journey. From Surrealism where his writing began, Jabès has always followed his own path without belonging to any school, any fashionable trend. His vocation was to invent, to chisel words and poems in the manner of an artisan, to listen to the infinite and become its scribe. His wonderful poems are collected in Le Seuil, Le Sable. To all races of persecutors whatever their creed, his challenge is unequivocal: May your thought be not a blade that kills, but a simple nourishing blade of wheat.
Being is at the heart of the question and questioning at the heart of being. In his Book of Questions, his characters voice myriad interrogations. Who can renounce himself for words? Who can fulfil himself without turning against himself? Who can live without identity? Without destroying the language of the other? Who can accept the foreigner and welcome him inside himself, recognizing himself as that selfsame foreigner? How can one live without turning our anger against ourselves at our frustration and pain? How can we accept God in his absence? Who can be so humble as to accept greatness in others? Words are our only answer to this unending labyrinth of questions. “He said to me: ‘You see, I have no face. The one I am showing is a face of the moment. The writer is a foreigner precisely because, to reveal himself, he must borrow a face from language.………… The writer is the foreigner par excellence. Denied domicile every- where, he takes refuge in the book, from which the word will evict him. Every new book is his temporary salvation.’” French words written by an Egyptian Jew.
And finally: the desert. Nothing but sand, grains of sand. That’s all we ever were and all we’ll ever be. Sand and the soul between.
- God‘s indifference toward us is perhaps only neglect of His responsibilities to the world
- Is God so cowardly?
- No. But having lost His way, He fell into the abyss He looked out on.
Quotations in Italics are some excerpts from A Foreigner Carrying in the Crook of his Arm a Tiny Book, translated by Rosmarie Waldrop.
Life’s experience runs parallel with the flow of words which explain us and unravel our complex histories.
Some of us take it upon ourselves to live simultaneously in life and in words, some of us discover that this engenders a different sense of temporality, an excruciating intuition into what could be called the truth, death, love….
Our words constitute a search, a quest destined to fail as we stumble on the impossibility of naming what we discover. So we circle around it. We draw sketches and ask questions which are answers to other questions. We untie knots with names such as ‘paradox’ or ‘God’ or ‘Time.’
On this poetic journey, we need to stretch out to strangers we shall never know and yet they become our friends.
The Argentinean author Roberto Juarroz’s poetic meditations bear the title Vertical Poetry and are gathered in a long series of numbered volumes.
La barbarie de la muerte,
la rùstica pantomoma de la muerte
y su cruel y vulgar inhumanidad
no hacen juego con el pensamiento.
Tal vez el amor o el dolor
puedan pactar con ella
y quizà también la mùsica o el sueno,
pero el pensamiento es una bandera
plantada en otra parte,
como lo es ademàs la poesia.
Ambos enrolan en su indole abierta
las antinomias de la muerte.
Sin embargo,
una cosa es sacar rostros de la nada
y otra cosa es borrarlos.
Lo mismo con testigo o sin ellos.
Precisamente,
la poesia y el pensar
son lo màs opuesto a la muerte
porque son sus testigos mas fieles.
The barbarity of death,
the rustic pantomime of death
and its cruel and vulgar inhumanity,
don’t go with thought.
Perhaps love and pain
can make a pact with death
and maybe also music and dreams,
but thought is a flag
planted somewhere else,
as poetry also is.
Both wrap up the antinomies of death
in their own nature.
Nonetheless,
it’s one thing to draw faces out of nothing
and another to erase them.
It’s the same whether there are witnesses or not.
Poetry and thought
are precisely
the most opposed to death
because they are its most faithful witnesses.
We all have a path. We are composed of lines and we travel down them. Somewhere there is a map, and from some vantage point, these maps can be observed. A writer's map is more readily visible, sign posts can be made clearer even if roads can equally be lost or drowned. The path of a writer is scattered with traps and false hopes, chimeras and muses, gods and collective magnets. And yet some poets are singular. They have neither family nor territory. They partake of the earth itself. They are one with silence and the stars. They will not belong to any collectivity for long. They will shirk both responsibility and fortune. Their maps have no centres. Their trails have no destinations. They are nomads in the true sense. The 83-year-old Tomas Segovia is undoubtedly one.
How is such an existence possible? By remaining faithful to a permanent state of exile, an 'original solitude.' Only then can the magnificence of nature open, only then can the signs of silence write, only then can womens' kindness blossom, only then can the poet look at the storm as
a storm, observe a star as a star, disappear and awaken in words, words forged from the kiln of night, spoken from the 'sonorous lung.' This is a romantic stance? Yes, Segovia is not ashamed of that. He is not ashamed to script odes to silence. He is not afraid to climb into the agony of absence and write to an escaped loved one. Life is about destiny. You either have one or you don't and it isn't good to mistake your destiny for your brother's. Segovia sensed from early on that he was 'a marginal from the start.' You have to be faithful to that even at the expense of being unfaithful to the rest!
I discovered Segovia in French by accident in one of my favourite bookstores - does anything ever happen by accident? A collection entitled 'Cahier du Nomade' had just been published by Gallimard. Don't expect anything in English because, even if Octavio Paz stressed the importance of Segovia, there is something of the becoming dinosaur in British pub- lishing, a strange will to extinction. Given my own nomadic predisposition, this collection excited my curiosity. Quickly, I discovered a poet in the absolute sense. A destiny with a name. Beauty printed on the page. Thought singing in verse. Non-academic poems revealing humble craftsmanship and improvised sentiment at real life situations.
speaking world. There is a library of books by
and about him, translations of Shakespeare,
translations of Racine. He has won numerous prizes
and acknowledgements. Here are some excerpts of
his world in English, translated by me.
Barbarian Language
The man who learnt to model
Words between his hands
So they may express within themselves
A language of traces
Bodily and mobile and free
This man even when he listens
To what he hears said
Looks at what is shown without speaking it
And so in order to think
Of what lives in him and what he is in the shadows
Or in this light where his life
Looks at itself and multiplies
He does not trust the language in his mouth
Preferring to remain silent
And wait for the facts from the abyss
Short Extracts and Maxims
Touch me time
For your fingers I am still naked
****
This poem never stops
These words I write
They write to never finish
They are perpetual birth
****
A woman's torso stretches
From one mouth to another.
To travel this path,
Flesh closes its eyes.
****
Man does not make a promise
But is born from one.
****
And so who will love me
Will be powerless
If life itself does not love me
****
I would like to know a little more
Whether I was expecting someone
And whether this is what it was supposed to be
I would like to know a little more
About where my life has been lived
Whether I have been waiting for this moment
Of mutism I never sought for
Or this desolation which is to seek nothing
Or this moment I was waiting for is itself nothing
And I have been waiting for nothing since the beginning
Since the beginning my language has said
May your kingdom come
Since the beginning I abandoned my name
I have always been called world
Everywhere I have sought to be vanquished
I have never been the vassal of hateful Victory and her deadly efficiency
I have never been inflexibly victorious
Only when I had to resist
Waiting for the centre to subject everything to
At last everywhere and in all types of rain
I recognise the indelible places
All the beloved defeats of my language
Having been a poet is this
Felling all the barricades within my language
But not to rule over words
Not even to free them
But to sign like an occult tide
the supreme armistice with what they harass ...
Tomas Segovia
English translation:
Dom Gabrielli
.