Aqui les comparto un ensayito en el que he trabajado las utlimas tres semanas (eso explica mi planta de desperpento encafeinado ultimamente). Se los comparto principalmente porque mucho del material y de las ideas las he ido tomando en cercana referencia al curso. El ensayo es sobre una toeria de vida poetica la cual esta estructurada alrededor de lo que llamo epifania lirica. Talvez pueda ser una alternativa a la
autenticidad de heidegger, informada tacitamente por la filosofia oriental. Lastimosamente, por fuerzas de globalizacion, mercado y opresion intelectual, lo he tenido que escribir en ingles. Igual, les agradesco su ayuda en discusiones en clase. (Ojo: una tercera parte, la primera, habla en relacion a teoria literaria que talvez no es tan a proposito del curso, pero que tienen que leer y entender si quieren caerme bien, ja! Vean como el estudio literario se ha hecho rigurosamente desde Saussere, para aquellos filosofos que se rien de los literatos. Esto va tambien para vos Chirulo para convencerte que el unico lugar legitimo de espiritualidad hoy en dia, aparte de la meditacion profunda, es el arte)
Poetic Life: Beyond the Narrow Limits of Self
Diego Azurdia
To live in the love of a few, who never ask
that loyalty declare an outward pledge,
and in the gentle light of enclosing dusk
to lean to the tempting whiteness of the page.
Withdraw. Lose touch, let opportunity go,
renounce the world . . .
in this peculiar way
come to a vision of what none can know,
the future as plain before you as today.
A moment's glimpse!
and the prosaic rhyme
wakes to the kiss of genuine surprise,
as if from stiffened fingers, in wintertime,
the sharp scent of a crushed
spring bud could rise.
The Writing Life (Vladimir Sokolov)
It is well known in literary mythology that when Lenin saw that Boris Pasternak was included in a list during the purges, he crossed the name and said: “Don't touch this cloud dweller”. As with any myth, whether or not this actually happened as recounted is not relevant. What is significant is the paradoxical character of evil revealing a legitimate aesthetic sensibility. Considering that revolution is a time in history when everything in the realm of human life is politicized, extending even to the aesthetic realm, here with the imposition of realism as official and legitimate literary form, Lenin´s gesture towards Pasternak is moving. After all, normally, dwelling in clouds must have been a serious accusation for those who insisted in a materialist conception of history. What did Lenin recognize in the poet so as to make an exception to a law which allowed for no exceptions? Why did Pasternak fall outside of the very tangible and all encompassing historical radar in that decisive moment? Whatever might be the reason, it is not difficult to side with Lenin in that Pasternak was extraordinary. And with Pasternak, most poets stand against the unfolding of history as radiant, yet odd characters. As with any sage of virtually every culture, the poet seems to inhabit a liminal space, leading a life that either exonerates him or dooms him in the face of historical forces.
Here we aim to explore such a liminal life. We will find clues towards and understanding of it by studying the difference between regular speech and poetry. Soon we will find that its fundamental characteristic is poetry as a primary event and as an organizing biographical principle. For now, it is enough to say that there is implication of a merger of life and art, of poetry and author. To take poetry as an event connotes such a merger. Odd is to think of the question of the identity of a biographical individual in terms of formal descriptions of his work of art, of its themes. Controversial is the assertion that the most hermetic of poems can find certain clarifying perspectives in observing the life of the poet, or in his notion of life which will generally be described in aesthetic terms. But it is odd and controversial only when poet and work are taken to inhabit different spheres of being. The term I will adopt in order to honor the merger will be poetic life, a term which, from the paradoxical tension of both words, opens up many questions which I hope to clarify as we advance: How and where does language and life intersect? What does poetry mean when it is thought of as the only legitimate event in an individual’s life? How does this influence the poet’s notion of self?
“And the Prosaic Rhime Wakes to the kisss of genuine surprise!”
Let us work backwards: a merger of life and poetry, if we are to believe in such a thing, allows for an exploration of the matter at hand from either realm taken independently, postponing the usual messiness, characteristic of lyric poetry, of the relationship between the author and his work. Eventually what will emerge is a link between language and life by identifying coordinates connoting spatial and temporal poles within both taken independently. For now we begin with poetry from the vantage point of the recent theory of literature, which stems from the formalist tradition, continuing with structuralism influenced by semiotics, even up to its derivative refutation found in deconstruction. Ideal for our purposes at the moment are two characteristics common to all. First, they all insist on studying, in one way or another, the literary text as an autonomous entity. The formalists, for instance, no longer thought of the work in terms of form and content, so that meaning, vulnerable to external factors through reference, could no longer constitute the main concern in the study of literature (as opposed to the hermeneutic tradition). In other words, when it came to literature, what could be studied “scientifically” was formal, and thus, what must be described was the way in which a work was put together. With structuralism came an alternative approach. If poetry is a speech act, it must be studied like any other verbal message focusing on its verbal structure. Poetics strictly speaking was to be taken as a subdivision of linguistics. Historical references, reader, ideologies, truth value, and most importantly authorial factors such as intention, creative process and autobiographical elements, because they are extralinguistic, were not relevant to literary analysis.
Second, and most importantly, the theory of literature has a long tradition of thinking and analyzing poetry in opposition to everyday speech. What comes to mind, in anticipation of a later discussion, is the contrast between poetic and ordinary life. The formalist, for instance, insisted that literariness (their term for the poetic device) deters meaning within the communicative process of language in its familiar usage. In fact, the concept of defamiliarization as distinctive of the literariness of texts was fundamental to formalist theory. Jakobson, a central figure of structuralism, expressed the same idea stating that the poetic function “by promoting the palpability of signs, deepens the fundamental dichotomy of signs and objects”[1]. In other words, poetry as such downplays the stiffened referential function of words, a function related primarily to meaning in a semantic sense. But, as we all know, for Jakobson what ultimately distinguishes poetry from other types of speech acts is the predominance of the poetic function of language, a function which “projects the principle of equivalence from the axis of selection into the axis of combination.” [2]
Jacobson´s famous formulation rests on a dichotomy that has been at the heart of the theory of literature since Sauserre. It has been expressed in different corresponding terms that flesh out the initial intuition: historic_linguistics-structural_linguistics, langue-parole, language–speech, synchronic-diachronic, selection-combination, metaphor-metonymy, rhetoric-grammar etc. It might be helpful to think of a general dichotomy in the form of simultaneity-succession, terms connoting spatial and temporal categories, crucial to understanding in general, especially after Kant. Language is simultaneous in that it constitutes a fixed system at a given point, while speech unfolds in time as it connects signs one after another in a successive manner. When we speak we select a word from the totality of signs existing in a kind of virtual space simultaneously in that point in time and we combine it successively to another word chosen also from a system of signs existing simultaneously in another point in time. The choice, due to the very nature of language as a system of referential and arbitrary signs, is done according to what Jakobson calls the principle of equivalence, a principle which discriminates and chooses based on equality (synonyms) and inequality (antonyms), considering that all signs are defined as that which they are not (defined negatively). The combination is generally done according to grammatical, syntactical or logical rules, but always, strictly speaking, in time.
Sticking to a strcturalist view, the formulation points to a primarily phonological account of poetry. The principle of equivalence, as Jakobson sees it, is projected to the axis of combination in that what can be equalized in successive signs is primarily phonetic units, as in rhyme, or recurring meter patterns. Even if this view is in fact reductive, it gives clue to what is happening when we speak poetically. For one, the idea that musicality, sound, is essential to poetry opens up many interesting theoretical considerations about the interrelation of signs as referential units and signs as phonetic units. Jakobson himself noticed that in a sequence “where similarity is superimposed on contiguity, . . . words similar in sound are drawn together in meaning” (Jakobson 50). Taking it further, Boris Pasternak has set music as a kind of horizon for poetic art: “We drag everyday things into prose for the sake of poetry. We entice prose into poetry for the sake of music. This, then, in the widest sense of the word, I called art” (Pasternak 30). From prose, to poetry, to music, we see a succession of ways in which language can be organized, in which the referential function and meaning is slowly liquefies into sound. But poetry is not music, and even Jakobson knows that the poetic function never appears alone (no speech function ever shows up alone). Also he acknowledges that poetic language is also characterized by the constant use of tropes, even if it’s not its primary characteristic. Here, however, there is still a predominance of the access of combination because tropes compare, in one way or another, signs to each other.
In any case what is important in Jakobson´s formulation about the poetic function is that it suggests a certain self referentiality of language in poetic speech, a certain self awareness of the message, a folding upon itself. In other words, in poetic utterances, words thicken, become pregnant with meaning because, as unity increases in a work by playing with symmetries (sound, semantic, symbolic, etc.) words not only become meaningful in terms of a specific signifier/signified in relation to a referent, as in everyday speech, but also as parts of a whole which is constructed while we read. What is achieved then is a kind of simultaneity within the necessarily successive nature of speech or written language. We can see this happening in a lovely Robert Frost poem:
Where had I heard this wind before
Change like this to a deeper roar?
What would it take my standing there for,
Holding open a restive door,
Looking down hill to a frothy shore?
Summer was past and the day was past.
Somber clouds in the west were massed.
Out on the porch's sagging floor,
Leaves got up in a coil and hissed,
Blindly striking at my knee and missed.
Something sinister in the tone
Told me my secret may be known:
Word I was in the house alone
Somehow must have gotten abroad,
Word I was in my life alone,
Word I had no one left but God.
Bereft (Rober Frost)
Let’s focus on the hissing of the leaves. The metaphor at the level of image is straightforward: Subject A is the pile of leaves and subject B is the snake. What can we make of it? Leaves, moved by the wind, sign of an upcoming storm, are equated to a hissing snake that is out to strike at the knee. The choice of animal signals the nature of the storm, as seen by the speaker. Is it saying something about the leaves? Not precisely. Is it saying something about the snake? Less so. What is it doing? We can at least begin to see that it is highly successful at equating leaves to snakes. Why? For one, we think of a pile of leaves as a malleable totality. But the form here suggested is special in that it works better with the malleability of a pile of leaves than, for instance, if the author were to use a knife instead as subject B (also a menacing entity), or in the spirit of the poem, the form of a dried up dead tree (this would make it a metonymy). It works better because the movement of that which is shaping them, namely swirling wind, suggests the form. The wind slithers, and does so when a storm is forming at a distance (in a different tone: think of an overcast sky, kids playing in an autumn to winter afternoon, they are called in early, leaves are moving in twirls). Onomatopoeia present in the hissing, we can almost hear the leaves moving into snakelike form: the storm is coming, it has been sent to a house that the speaker inhabits alone. Dangling on top of the poem, a single word to which each and everyone points: bereft.
Who doesn’t recognize in the poem the very sense of bereavement? In a way, after such a poem, the dictionary definition of the word is no longer relevant. What does bereavement mean? It can only mean bereavement, and nothing else. The abyss of loss (lord how painful!) that takes over is tied up to snake, leaves, storm, loneliness, distance. Words have extended beyond their position in a virtual language along the axis of selection and spilled over their content within the axes of combination in writing. Each word brings its constitutive parts as a sign to build up a greater unity. But the unity which has been formed around the word bereft is not like language itself, a system of interdependent terms in which the value of each results solely from the simultaneous presence of the others. The simultaneous presence of others in language is structured so that “a segment of language can never in the final analysis be based on anything except its noncoincidence with the rest.” [3] But when equivalence works in successive signs through parallelisms, dissimilar or even opposites begin to coincide. Snakes and leaves moved by wind reveal their unity. This fact has been wrongly characterized by New Critics and even by structuralists as a kind of ambiguity, for metaphor as the basic trope, the pole on the side of the axis of combination, tackles a fundamental rule of logic: something is equal only to itself. In the words of Arendt “the metaphor has born that element of the poetic which conveys cognition; its use establishes the correspondences between physically most remote things… Metaphors are the means by which the oneness of the world is poetically brought about.” [4] From here we can head towards an analysis of life as poetry.
“Withdraw. Lose touch, let opportunity go, renounce the world . . . in this peculiar way come to a vision of what none can know.”
Hiedegger begins his search for the meaning of Being, after recognizing the advantages to look for it in the specific entity called human being, in everyday existence. It is closest to us, and therefore Heidegger being a good phenomenologist, the only legitimate starting point. He finds that constitutively, existentially, Dasein is being-in-the-world, entailing human beings are always already in a world (he is thrown) in an everyday setting (he is fallen). The world is not a spatial location holding all the entities, but a referential totality in which entities are not seen as such but are literarily ready-at-hand in order to be used for some task. A hammer, for instance, is not primarily seen as a hammer but as “that which I am using to hammer this nail…”, and it is only significant as part of a referential totality which is world, in this case most likely, the world of a carpenter. But being-in-the-world also refers to our being-with other people, in a way different from how we relate to entities, mainly equipmentally. Very significant to our discussion is the fact that the consideration of being-with (others) as a existential category stems from the question of who of Dasein, of that “which maintains itself as something identical throughout changes in its experience and ways of behavior, an which relates itself to this changing multiplicity in so doing.” (Heidegger 150) From Descartes we get the self evidence of the I, the self, of the subject in order to answer the question of the “who” of Dasein. But such self evident answer assumes a substratum which is not originally given in experience. Heidegger discovers a surprising possibility: “It could be that the who of everyday Dasein just is not the I myself ” (Heidegger 150)
In fact what is given first in experience as a clue of the who of Dasein is that we are with others, meaning, we are being-with(-others) first, and “I” later as conceptualized entity. We are with others intimately, and always, because being-with is primarily caring-for or ‘solicitude’ (in a neutral sense), a existential mode. Thus Dasein in its everyday being with others, primarily in solicitude with others as an existential state, is characterized by averageness, publicness. Heidegger calls this Das Man, the they-self, an ambiguous, dispersed structure. Kierkegaard, while calling it “the public”, describes it best:
The public is not a people, it is not a generation, it is not a simultaneity, it is not a community, it is not a society, it is not an association, it is not those particular men over there, because all these exist because they are concrete and real; however, no single individual who belongs to the public has any real commitment; some times during the day he belongs to the public, namely, in those times in which he is nothing; in those times that he is a particular person, he does not belong to the public. Consisting of such individuals, who as individuals are nothing, the public becomes a huge something, a nothing, an abstract desert and emptiness, which is everything and nothing. (Kierkegaard 55)
Here Kierkegaard also points to the possibility of being a particular person as opposed to the public. This opposition of course does not represent a state of solipsism, which in any case cannot exist given that being-with is an existential structure (we are being-with even when we are alone). Heidegger calls it self-understanding and opposes it to they-self, the self of everyday existence. There are many considerations of self-understanding that are far beyond the scope of our specific concerns in the discussion of poetic lives, but we must keep in mind that once again we encounter an opposition of a kind of self awareness and of everyday state of affairs which runs parallel to poetic speech and everyday speech. We will talk more about this link later on.
For now, we must also mention that the self-understanding is related to what Heidegger calls authentic self (self that is mine) and that there is in fact the possibility of an existentiell (from an ontic perspective) shift that would render possible a modification at the level of everyday being in order to gather back from the what the author calls the dispersement of the they. Heidegger will find it in angst, a phenomenal structure that serves such purposes. It is in this sense that we must understand Rilke´s angels:
Who, if I cried out, would hear me among the angels' hierarchies?
and even if one of them pressed me suddenly against his heart:
I would be consumed in that overwhelming existence.
For beauty is nothing but the beginning of terror, which we are still just able to endure,
and we are so awed because it serenely disdains to annihilate us.
Every angel is terrifying.
And so I hold myself back and swallow the call-note of my dark sobbing.
Ah, whom can we ever turn to in our need?
Not angels, not humans, and already the knowing animals are aware
that we are not really at home in our interpreted world.
From the The First Elegy (Rainer Maria Rilke)
Rilke’s theological terms also resonate with Heidegger´s falling of Dasein: “this absorption-in has mostly the character of Being-lost in the publicness of the they. Dasein has in the first instance, fallen away from itself as an authentic potentiality for Being its Self, and has fallen into the ‘world’. Fallenness into the world means an absorption in Being-with-one-another in so far the latter is guided by idle talk”. (Heidegger 220) Being plunged into the they of everydayness is continuously tempting because in its ambiguity it offers a kind of self-certainty, a kind of inauthentic ground that brings tranquility. Ultimately, however, because the they is itself being-in-the-world, the Dasein in the they is tangled up in itself, like a Leibnizian monad. We can all relate to this falleness if we think of ourselves completely absorbed in our daily lives, concerned and constantly planning ahead. The tranquility brought by falling within the world is therefore not static but constantly dynamically projecting forward. It is only when we dwell in anxiety as a state of mind that we are able to resist the plunge towards publicness: “anxiety thus takes away from Dasein the possibility of understanding itself, as it falls, in terms of the world and the way thing have been publicly interpreted. ” (Heidegger 232) Anxiety is here to be understood as an existential state of mind, most famously articulated literarily in Sartre´s Nausea in the passage of the tree and the park. It is the reason poetry, like the Jewish day, begins at night. It is the reason that most great poets must first descend to hell, early in life.
What does anxiety makes manifest? Heidegger would say it is a key, so to speak, towards authentic self. By authentic self, Heidegger means a great deal, but we need to point out at least that as a state of mind, in anxiety we feel uncanny because we step out from the familiarity of the they into a space in which we do not feel at home. Not-being-at-home here corresponds to the unfamiliarity of the formalists, and the ambiguity of structuralists. Rilke however reminds us that we are already not at home in our interpreted world (in the familiar world), meaning that the not-being-at-home brought by anxiety works as a double negative. Authenticity, defamiliarization, anxiety bringing us back out of the dispersement in the averageness of the they, is crucial to what we have called the poetic life.
While the experience of an average everyday life unfolds within the security and the vagueness of the they, the poetic life is organized, so to speak, around an event which Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht calls epiphany, closely related to what he calls presence. Notice how we associate the poetic life with an event, and the average life with experience. According to Gumbrecht, “ most philosophical traditions associate the concept of experience with interpretation, that is, with acts of meaning attribution.” (Gumbrecht 100) Here we encounter again a binarism that could very well fit with the ones we have already discussed. For Gumbrecht, presence and meaning function as two poles, the former connoting purely spatial states: presence “does not refer to a temporal but to a spatial relationship to the world and its objects. Something that is `present` is supposed to be tangible for human hand, which implies that, conversely, it can have an immediate impact on human bodies” (Gumbrecht xiii) Meaning on the other hand points to mediated world, a mediation through metaphysical worldview, an understanding as hermeneutics (interpretation), based on the subject-object paradigm, basically a type of relation to the world based on meaning which organizes experience in a non spatial, one could argue, temporal way. Presence is opposite therefore to everyday experience and the historical dimension in which it unfolds. It manifests itself as a kind of extreme intensity which has been long associated to the notion of “aesthetic experience”. It shows up as disruptive of the everyday experience described by Heidegger, and the metaphysical distance required by “meaning” of traditional academia based on interpretation, as described by Gumbrecht. In short it shows up as an epiphany, an event that strictly speaking emerges as if out of nothing in the sense that “no such substance and form were present to us before… an event because it undoes itself while it emerges” (Gumbrecht 113) This of course also shows up in the notion of truth according to Heidegger, in relation to being, as a deconcealment which ends up concealing itself.
Emerging and interrupting the everydayness constitutive of the they-being, the epiphany is registered temporally as a moment (even if strictly speaking, it has duration). Such temporality corresponds to the synchronic axis which also corresponds more generally to simultaneity as opposed to succession. Thus the experience is unmediated, immediate, and in a sense ineffable from a conceptual perspective. However, it can be represented a posteriori, and it can be done so lyrically. Of the representation of epiphany in lyric expression, Paul Friedrich says: “when it comes to the breakout of lyric epiphany, the abstraction of gist, the mobilization of power, sundry linguistic features, first person expressiveness, and other factors are all subordinate, and complementary to the conjoined factors that we began with: immediate, instantaneous presentness and synoptic unity, the temporal switch into an illusion of unity, and the master qualities of density and intensity.” (Friedrich 220)
Epiphany can also deposit its sediment in poetry by informing (being) poetic speech. In fact, it is in this density and intensity that we find a fundamental link between poetic utterance and epiphany as the central event in a life. Intensity, of course is strictly speaking a characteristic of poetic experience, and density a characteristic of poetic speech. We have seen how poetic speech thickens every word by layering meaning, and that taking it to the extreme, such density dissolves the difference between normally distinct entities. Metaphor, of course is the paradigmatic trope in this specific sense. The intensity of the event we have called epiphany is characterized by a sense of simultaneity (spatial dimension without the deforming pressure of time) and unity, a oneness, says Arendt, which is best brought about poetically through metaphor. The legitimate referential linkage between a metaphor and epiphany is evidenced by the aptness of a metaphor. In a sense a good metaphor hides its craftiness and reveals itself as apt, in the sense that the two separate entities that are being merged and understood in metaphor reveal a unity that is beyond the rhetorical powers of a wordsmith. A good metaphor is judged as apt immediately, not as a result of later interpretation. In the words of Jane Hirshfield in her collection of essays about the art of poetry titled Nine Gates: “underlying the mind of [poetic] language is the undeniable interconnection of each thing and being on earth.” (Hirshfield 117)
In poetic speech informed by epiphany, expression and experience are made one. No longer idle talk, poetry brings the entire being of the writer into utterance, so that mediation is eliminated between subject and speech. The very movement of the tongue when speaking in verse is registered in meter and rhyme, while the worldhood of the being-in-the world is grasped in its totality by speaking from the encounter of being and world, a non encounter in the sense that being is already being-in-the-world. An important consequence of the event is the necessary dissolution of the subject, of the difference between subject and world, in an overcoming of the subject-object paradigm. This is the reason behind the ambiguous ever shifting, almost trickster like “I” in lyric poetry, which has baffled critiques for so long. And with the subject, the notion of author also vanishes so that the creative process is one of revelation. Most famously, Rilke embodies a poetics of revelation in which poetry is nothing but a transcript of the way things present themselves as they are, in their gorgeous radiance. According to Rick Anthony Furtak in an introduction to his translation of Rilke`s Sonnets to Orpheus:
“Since the prevailing bias is to regard quantitative measurement as the only legitimate rout to knowledge, our world of color, sound, and emotional is undermined by the notion that what truly exists is nothing but dull matter. By contrast, the poet employs a different method of ‘taking measure’, abiding by the insight that real qualitative features of the world may be revealed through our affective experience. Poetry can redeem life by illuminating an aspect of things that is concealed from the scientist´s view. This delivers us back to a world that is fit to be inhabited by human beings, in which meaning has once again become apparent.” (Furtak 8)
Notice how this process reveals “truth” in a sense that is at least as legitimate as “truth” emerging from the scientific eye. Behind this idea is Heidegger´s notion that understanding is necessarily coupled with a state-of-mind, that even the scientific view and a “metaphysically” informed perspective (In Gumbrecht`s words, in a meaning-based relation to the world) come with a certain mood which is close to us, which is us. In other words “the way you look at things and who you are will determine what you will see” and “an awareness resides in the things we wish to observe and know, and that the way we come to them matters” (Hirshfield 119)
Rounding up: epiphany, from which poetic speech truly emerges, is an event in which spatial dimensions are revealed in unity through emotional intensity, brought about by the world that touches the vanishing poet, who in his increasingly openness is able to grasp being’s true significance (as opposed to mere interpreted meaning) expressible only poetically. What we will now see is that there is a catch to such an epiphany. Rilke is well aware, and places a devastating warning at the end of his Archaic Torso of Apollo (non coincidently, the god of music and poetry):
“ You must change your life.”
Pablo Neruda recounts his first encounter with poetry:
| And it was at that age...Poetry arrived
in search of me. I don't know, I don't know where
it came from, from winter or a river.
I don't know how or when,
no, they were not voices, they were not
words, nor silence,
but from a street I was summoned,
from the branches of night,
abruptly from the others,
among violent fires
or returning alone,
there I was without a face
and it touched me.
I did not know what to say, my mouth
had no way
with names
my eyes were blind,
and something started in my soul,
fever or forgotten wings,
and I made my own way,
deciphering
that fire
and I wrote the first faint line,
faint, without substance, pure
nonsense, planets,
palpitating plantations,
| pure wisdom
of someone who knows nothing,
and suddenly I saw
the heavens
unfastened
and open,
shadow perforated,
riddled
with arrows, fire and flowers,
the winding night, the universe.
And I, infinitesimal being,
drunk with the great starry
void,
likeness, image of
mystery,
I felt myself a pure part
of the abyss,
I wheeled with the stars,
my heart broke loose on the wind.
Poetry (Pablo Neruda) |
An event that occurred very early in life, it marks his legitimate birth in a very tangible sense. There is a telling biographical gesture that helps to understand how much this encounter with poetry marked his life. Ricardo Eliécer Neftalí Reyes Basoalto must write under the name of Pablo Neruda because his father strongly opposes his son`s poetic aspirations in favor of a “real” profession. Eventually, Pablo Neruda will change his name officially and today we no longer recognize him under his biological birth name. Neruda recognized the true significance of renaming himself: he is a poet first and foremost, and as such, Pablo Neruda is in fact his birth name.
Poetry as event demands such devotion. For one, like with any revelatory event even in its theological sense, knowledge as revelation comes as a profound modification of being. Moreover, the harnessing of the necessary openness characteristic of a poetic sensibility, in which revelation can take place as encounter, demands a kind of withdrawal from the world. Hirshfield talks about a threshold life: “to abandon rank may also mean abandoning name, (…) anonymity is one mark of the liminal. When a gap opens between the old and the new during a rite of passage, the self enters into an undivided life- both who we are and who we might become vanishes. It is just then, when all is permeable, unparticularized, unborn, that a new way of being may emerge” (Hirshfield 212) A poet is asked by his epiphany to become a liminal being in reference to average everyday existence; a liminal being who defers judgment as the ordering principle of existence. In other words, “the poet must learn from what dwells outside her conception, capacities, and even language: from exile and silence.” (Hirshfield 121)
Finally, stepping out of the familiar world, from the average everyday life and from ordinary speech, has been a recurrent motif in our discussion so far. But we must understand that such a mandate is not to be taken as corresponding to the romantic sense of a lonely individual who sets himself a heroic figure. Mayakovski is what necessarily comes to mind in such a formulation. In fact, quite opposite is the case. As we have seen, a consequence of the event we have called epiphany is the dissolution of self, a vanishing of the self. Placing such an event as the axis of life means that the poet can no longer build an identity in the biographical sense. Pasternak, for instance, states that “the poet gives his whole life such voluntarily steep incline that it is impossible for it to exist in the vertical line of biography where we expect to meet it. It is not to be found under his own name”. (Pasternak 26) Neruda too understands this and claims that “the memories of the writer of memoirs are not the memories of the poet. The former might have lived less, but he took plenty of photographs, and recreates with meticulous detail. The latter hands over a gallery of phantasm shaken by the fire and the shadow of his time (…) My life is a life made out of all lives: the lives of a poet”[5] (Neruda 83) In fact, Pasternak’s autobiography titled Safe Conduct is less a recounting of lived experiences than an aesthetic manifesto, an explanation of how art emerged from the contingencies of life and history. His poetry, on the other hand, serves as a constant celebration of a very particular notion of life. Also, Neruda´s Confieso que He vivido is less a memoir (an interpretation of life and self in memory as a search for underlying patterns), than a poetic articulation of life using distorted memories as material. Suffice is to say that the book’s structure and themes draws heavily from a collection of poems titled Memorial de Isla Negra (Isla Negra Memorial). In a way, Neruda´s only possible and legitimate autobiography is the poem which we have quoted. It seems like memoirs written by poets necessarily avoid what De Man calls the defacement in autobiography: strictly speaking, the defacement has already occurred in an encounter with poetry. [6]
Such are the excruciating demands of poetry on an individual’s life. Poetic speech, as opposed to everyday utterances, can emerge only from a fertile infinitely open being, who is willing to forgo identity and the comfort of an “interpreted world”. Through the hellish passage of primordial angst, the poet emerges in order to lead from and into epiphany, generally opposing the unfolding of the historical drift, like in both Pasternak and Neruda´s case. As the revelation of the possibility of fullness of being, poetry becomes a live testimony of a poetic life that expanded beyond the narrow limits of self.
Works Cited
Furtak, Rick Anthony. Introduction. Sonnets to Orpheus. By Rainer Maria Rilke. Trans. Rick Anthony Furtak. Chicago: University of Scranton Press, 2007.
Gummbrecht, Hans Ulrich. Production of Presence: What Meaning Cannot Convey. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2004.
Heidegger, Martin. Being and Time. Trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson. New York: Harper Perennial, 2008.
Hirshfield, Jane. Nine Gates: Entering the Mind of Poetry. New York: Harper Perennial, 1997.
Kierkegaard, Soren. The Present Age. Trans. Alexander Dru. United States: Harper Torchbook, 1962
Neruda, Pablo. Confieso que He Vivido, Memorias. Buenos Aires: Editorial Losada, 1974.
Pasternak, Boris. Safe Conduct, an Autobiography and Other Writings. Trans. C.M. Bowra. New York: New Directios Paperbook, 1958.
Lodge, David (ed) – Modern Criticism and Theory: A Reader, (Longman)
