Tuesday, March 10, 2015
Saturday, March 7, 2015
Mallarmé, The Book: A Spiritual Instrument
The Book: A Spiritual Instrument
by Stéphane Mallarmé
I am the author of a statement to which there have been varying reactions, including praise and blame, and which I shall make again in the present article. Briefly, it is this: all earthly existence must ultimately be contained in a book. It terrifies me to think of the qualities (among them genius, certainly) which the author of such a work will have to possess. I am one of the unpossessed. We will let that pass and imagine that it bears no author’s name. What, then, will the work itself be? I answer: a hymn, all harmony and joy; an immaculate grouping of universal relationships come together for some miraculous and glittering occasion. Man’s duty is to observe with the eyes of the divinity; for if his connection with that divinity is to be made clear, it can be expressed only by the pages of the open book in front of him.
Seated on a garden bench where a recent book is lying, I like to watch a passing gust half open it and breathe life into many of its outer aspects, which are so obvious that no one in the history of literature has ever thought about them. I shall have the chance to do so now, if I can get rid of my overpowering newspaper. I push it aside; it flies about and lands near some roses as if to hush their proud and feverish whispering; finally, it unfolds around them. I will leave it there along with the silent whispering of the flowers. I formally propose now to examine the differences between this rag and the book, which is supreme. The newspaper is the sea; literature flows into it at will.
Now then—
The foldings of a book, in comparison with the large-sized, open newspaper, have an almost religious significance. But an even greater significance lies in their thickness when they are piled together; for then they form a tomb in miniature for our souls.
Every discovery made by printers has hitherto been absorbed in the most elementary fashion by the newspaper, and can be summed up in the word: Press. The result has been simply a plain sheet of paper upon which a flow of words is printed in the most unrefined manner. The immediacy of this system (which preceded the production of books) has undeniable advantages for the writer; with its endless line of posters and proof sheets it makes for improvisation. We have, in other words, a “daily paper.” But who, then, can make the gradual discovery of the meaning of this format, or even of a sort of popular fairyland charm about it? Then again, the leader, which is the most important part, makes its great free way through a thousand obstacles and finally reaches a state of disinterestedness. But what is the result of this victory? It overthrows the advertisement (which is Original Slavery) and, as if it were itself the powered printing press, drives it far back beyond intervening articles onto the fourth page and leaves it there in a mass of incoherent and inarticulate cries. A noble spectacle, without question. After this, what else can the newspaper possibly need in order to overthrow the book (even though at the bottom—or rather at its foundation, i.e. the feuilleton—it resembles the other in its pagination, thus generally regulating the columns)? It will need nothing, in fact; or practically nothing, if the book delays as it is now doing and carelessly continues to be a drain for it. And since even the book’s format is useless, of what avail is that extraordinary addition of foldings (like wings in repose, ready to fly forth again) which constitute its rhythm and the chief reason for the secret contained in its pages? Of what avail the priceless silence living there, and evocative symbols following in its wake, to delight the mind which literature has totally delivered?
Yes, were it not for the folding of the paper and the depths thereby established, that darkness scattered about in the form of black characters could not rise and issue forth in gleams of mystery from the page to which we are about to turn.
The newspaper with its full sheet on display makes improper use of printing—that is, it makes good packing paper. Of course, the obvious and vulgar advantage of it, as everybody knows, lies in its mass production and circulation. But that advantage is secondary to a miracle, in the highest sense of the word: words led back to their origin, which is the twenty-six letters of the alphabet, so gifted with infinity that they will finally consecrate Language. Everything is caught up in their endless variations and then rises out of them in the form of the Principle. Thus typography becomes a rite.
The book, which is a total expansion of the letter, must find its mobility in the letter; and in its spaciousness must establish some nameless system of relationships which will embrace and strengthen fiction.
There is nothing fortuitous in all this, even though ideas may seem to be the slaves of chance. The system guarantees them. Therefore we must pay no attention to the book industry with its materialistic considerations. The making of a book, with respect to its flowering totality, begins with the first sentence. From time immemorial the poet has knowingly placed his verse in the sonnet which he writes upon our minds or upon pure space. We, in turn, will misunderstand the true meaning of this book and the miracle inherent in its structure, if we do not knowingly imagine that a given motif has been properly place at a certain height on the page, according to its own or to the book’s distribution of light. Let us have no more of those successive, incessant, back and forth motions of our eyes, traveling from one line to the next back and forth motions of our eyes, traveling from one line to the next and beginning all over again. Otherwise we will miss that ecstasy in which we become immortal for a brief hour, free of all reality, and raise our obsessions to the level of creation. If we do not actively create in this way (as we would music on the keyboard, turning the pages of a score), we would do better to shut our eyes and dream. I am not asking for any servile obedience. for, on the contrary, each of us has within him that lightning-like initiative which can link the scattered notes together. Thus, in reading, a lonely, quiet concert is given for our minds, and they in turn, less noisily, reach its meaning. All our mental faculties will be present in this symphonic exaltation; but, unlike music, they will be rarefied, for they partake of thought. Poetry, accompanied by the Idea, is perfect Music, and cannot be anything else.
Now, returning to the case at hand and to the question of books which are read in the ordinary way, I raise my knife in protest, like the cook chopping off chickens’ heads.
The virginal foldings of the book are unfortunately exposed to the kind of sacrifice which caused the crimson-edged tomes of ancient times to bleed. I mean that they invite the paper-knife, which stakes out claims to possession of the book. Yet our consciousness alone gives us a far more intimate possession than such a barbarian symbol; for it joins the book now here, now there, varies its melodies, guesses its riddles, and ever re-creates it unaided. The folds will have a mark which remains intact and invites us to open or close the pages according to the author’s desires. There can be only blindness and discourtesy in so murderous and self-destructive an attempt to destroy the fragile, inviolable book. The newspaper holds the advantage here, for it is not exposed to such treatment. But it is nonetheless an annoying influence; for upon the book—upon the divine and intricate organism required by literature—it inflicts the monotonousness of its eternally unbearable columns, which are merely strung down the pages by hundreds.
“But.”
I hear some one say, “how can this situation be changed?” I shall takes space here to answer this question in detail; for the work of art—which is unique or should be—must provide illustrations. A tremendous burst of greatness, of thought, or of emotion, contained in a sentence printed in large type, with one gradually descending line to a page, should keep the reader breathless throughout the book and summon forth his powers of excitement. Around this would be small groups of secondary importance, commenting on the main sentence or derived from it, like a scattering of ornaments.
It will be said, I suppose, that I am attempting to flabbergast the mob with a lofty statement. That is true. But several of my close friends must have noticed that there are connections between this and their own instinct for arranging their writings in an unusual and ornamental fashion, halfway between verse and prose. Shall I be explicit? All right, then, just to maintain that reputation for clarity so avidly pursued by our make-everything-clear-and-easy era. Let us suppose that a given writer reveals one of his ideas in theoretical fashion and, quite possibly, in useless fashion, since he is ahead of his time. He well knows that such revelations, touching as they do on literature, should be brought out in the open. And yet he hesitates to divulge too brusquely things which do not yet exist; and thus, in his modesty, and to the mob’s amazement, he veils them over.
It is because of those daydreams we have before we resume our reading in a garden that our attention strays to a white butterfly flitting here and there, then disappearing; but also leaving behind it the same slight touch of sharpness and frankness with which I have presented these ideas, and flying incessantly back and forth before the people, who stand amazed.
Translation by Bradford Cook
Friday, March 6, 2015
Book Giveaway
Goodreads Book Giveaway
Pearl and Other Poems
by Lee Sharks
Giveaway ends April 06, 2015.
See the giveaway details at Goodreads.
Friday, February 27, 2015
Tradition and the Individual Seismograph
Or, Developing the Historical Poetics of Lee Sharks’ “Pearl”
Johannes Sigil
from Pearl and Other Poems
Here is a little known fact: language is the medium of
time. It is through it that we move to past and future, a “moon through the
tender air.” The poet builds formal structures in language that iterate the
substance of time, which tend it towards futurity. This is easy to see, looking
backwards: “Howl” was a seed of time that grew into a viable present.
It is not so much images of
the past that poetry creates for history (“the petrified remains of metaphor
fragments”)—although it does do this. No, the poem’s most urgent function is to
create that history of the present that disjoints it from itself; to fashion,
within the present, a quality of time disjointed from the present, a pearl of
unintelligibility that generates futures at a lateral angle, tangential to the
course of historical time.
To achieve this, the poet
willingly lives in a kind of temporal hell, “the wasteland a single metaphor
could populate, if only there were any left.” He has doomed himself to this terra damnata of the historical present
because of his allegiance to those other lost souls, called writers. Though the
present hears, in these voices from the past, the chipper inanities of its own
prerecorded voice (“thousands of scientifically identical plastic-flavored
metaphors”), the poet knows they deny his present, just as they denied their
own time. This communion by means of mutually incompatible presents (“an echo
of parallel loneliness”) is a kind of hell, or, at best, a limbo, where Dante
walks with the shade of Virgil: “the fading tactical resonance of what they
used to mean.”
Thus, the poet lives in a
historical hell. As a creature of his time, he is damned, and knows it: “Metaphors
are dead / and moons no longer walk the earth.” Redemption might come to him
through poetry, first in the form of reworking his personal history in such a
way that it is bound to him in hell, a memento of his origins in the abysmal
present, awash with its ugly light, but nonetheless tied to him in his exodus.
This is redemption of the poet to himself. A second, greater redemption—the
redemption that redeems him to eternity—is in the hope of sending this salvaged
history—himself, his life—through time (“out into the night”), of finding the
way—and there is only one—through to those futures which are being born, of
finding his way to you, dear reader; the hope of blasting you from your tepid
future into a timeless, historical hell: “no longer alone.”
This temporality has been
called “the future.” It is the version of the present, in the form of a poem,
that goes out in time, eventually replacing the shattered and abysmally tepid
present with a brighter, historically purer anachronism: “a machine of living
ghosts.” Telling stories about such movements through time is what we call
“literary history.” And literary history, done right, is what we call “the
history of the human race.”
The poet is like a
seismograph, “alert to your Morse-code blink.” The vibrations he records are
frequencies of the future. The vibrations’ medium is tradition: the archive of
the past, “a metaphor museum.” The poet listens for subtle lines of fracture in
language. He scribbles vibrations in the crust of time, listening for the sequence
that will signal the earthquake of the future. The metaphor is almost right,
with one adjustment: if the poet is a seismograph, his object is the tremors
that might CREATE, rather than simply record, the earthquake of the future.
His tools are what Eliot calls
the historical sense, which encompasses both a grounding in one particular
historical period, as well as a more general literacy of tradition, a sense of the
way a tradition develops through time. His medium is the archive—seismographic
records of the total history of vibrations in the substance of time. But though
he learns from the archive, though these records are essential to his education
in the art of time, the poet does not mistake the record for the reality: those
vibrations are dead and gone, the earth has already shifted in that direction.
Those voices show him the pathway that led to the present, and something of the
structure of creating an earthquake. But they cannot show him beyond the
present: “into a time so distant / not even my greatest metaphor could have
walked halfway across.” He is, like they were, without a map: there is only one
path to the future, and the map of the earthquake will be simultaneous with the
instant of terrible shaking.
Perhaps the defining
characteristic of the quotidian poet, the poet who has invested time, energy,
and skill, but who nonetheless remains strikingly unexceptional, is seen in
this historical sense, or rather, its lack. This poet is always mistaking the
record of the earthquake for the thing itself, burnt-out husks for actual
moons. For him, the monument of the earthquake collapses, repeatedly, into the
lifeless shape of its record. He cannot recognize the new, much less fashion
it, because he does not recognize the old.
To put it in another way, the
quotidian poet can see the poem as an artifact of time only from the
perspective of its existence in the present—the way it is now, the meaning its
form has currently, a “husk of the celestial boulder.” He cannot conceive of
the poem as an artifact of charged time, before which time was different (“a
thing, once sent, that cannot be called back”). He cannot conceive that time
had a different shape—that there was no form of time quite like it, before the
poem took shape. Most of all, he cannot begin to consider the poem’s most
urgent message: I might not have been. The time you see in me would not have
been, would not be, if not for me. For him, the history of literature rehearses
what time is.
For the archival poet, the
history of literature warns us of the fragile series of contingent steps by
which we have arrived at the present, a record of the enormous weight of
contingency: “ashborn / a germ of the seasonal fires.” This artifact testifies
to all the shapes that are passing away at this moment, to the pressing demand
of the future, its desire to come to be. The history of literature screams,
“Don’t let us be the last!”
Though the poet does indeed
create the future, bring it into being, this future is no more a random figment
of imagination than is my beating heart. The future’s shape is prescribed on
all sides by the nature of its medium, the archive (“compacted and polished in
the heart of a muscle / around a fossilized shard of shrapnel”). Certain fault
lines might move through this medium, triggering an avalanche. A poet finds
those fault lines, and shapes time along the trajectories of the
possible.
This is not to say that the
future is fixed—far from it. Not only is the shape the future will have up for
grabs, so is the possibility of its existence. It is not historical necessity
that the future come to be, or that the human race be born into it, forward. Nor
is it to fix the past in a particular body of texts, a particular cultural
lineage. We are headed somewhere, all of us, together.
Poetics must turn to the
composition of archival forms that embody possible futures. I say “must,” not
in the colloquial, common-usage sense of exhortation towards urgent action—“We
must stop and ask for directions.” If there is to be a future at all, we must
construct its archive now. Whether we will it or no, history demands an
archival poetics, is calling it into being as we speak.
(c) 2014 Johannes Sigil
from Pearl and Other Poems:
http://www.amazon.com/Pearl-Other-Poems-Crimson-Hexagon/dp/0692313079/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1429895012&sr=8-1&keywords=lee+sharks+pearl
(c) 2014 Johannes Sigil
from Pearl and Other Poems:
http://www.amazon.com/Pearl-Other-Poems-Crimson-Hexagon/dp/0692313079/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1429895012&sr=8-1&keywords=lee+sharks+pearl
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