Poetry is a never-ending task

Michael March:"To be or not to be." Are we losing sight of the fundamental mystery ofour being-in-the-world, which haunts Hamlet and shakes old Lear to thecore?

Yves Bonnefoy: Are we losingtouch with what you rightly call the fundamental mystery? First of all,we must define what a mystery is and ask ourselves - why can thedilemma "to be or not to be" be lived as a mystery? And then anotherquestion, perhaps the most important of all: is not the very experienceof mystery, of mystery as an actual entity, something that our modernera, at least in the west, has forgotten? I think it is essential tocontemplate these matters that are not only neglected today but badlyreceived when they are discussed, considered to be both pointless andfanciful. We should reflect on the concept of mystery, as this will notdeflect us from our shared concern, the realm of poetry.

Mystery? It is really something quite simple, and keeping thethought alive allows us to explore dimensions within ourselves that areabsolutely vital and that it would be disastrous to ignore. Mystery iswhen an event appears to us as truly ineffable, according to our ownunderstanding of the world, that cannot be explained or justified byour capacity for thought and understanding.

One such phenomenon beyond the bounds of logical thought is, forexample, the undeniable and insoluble paradox: words are simultaneouslysound and meaning. Where does this paradox lie? Well, when we perceivewords as meaning, as means of communication, we use them to interpretaspects of perceivable reality, or existence, and in this way weconstruct the world that we live in, but at the same time we detectsomething in their sound, the noise they make, that is totallyextraneous to what we can think or say, and this sound, this eruptioncan then drag us into its core as can the contemplation of a mass ofshapeless stone or the starry sky at night. Over and above all that wethink we know the harsh sound allows us to perceive reality as itexists beyond the confines of our knowledge, a reality that has notbeen penetrated by the word and is consequently a unity: in short, anexperience of the unity or what we term the mystical, in any event thedissolution of all that language itself allows us to construct foreveryday lives. Words have the ability to drag us in these two oppositedirections, totally separate from one another, and it is precisely thisphenomenon that I consider to be a mystery.

Furthermore, I regard it as the fundamental mystery, which containsall others within it, particularly the one which you identify when youquote "to be or not to be": these words show Hamlet in the throes of adilemma, with a choice to make, but at a deeper level they seem toprove that being and not being are not totally opposite conditions,more a fundamentally indistinct state, a process of rapid changes, intruth - an identity.

And it is true: because, after all, what does happen when we speak,when we deliver a meaning? We construct an intelligible space withinwhich we can believe that "we are a being", as if endowed by a god, andyet we still only know things from the outside, using concepts thatprovide generalisations about aspects of the world and are consequentlyincapable of penetrating the irreducibly personal or specific, ourrelationship as human beings to time, to death and what I would callour transience. It follows that these fundamental aspects of ourrelationships with ourselves become so many enigmas, before which wecan see nothing but "empty shapes of matter" otherwise expressed asnon-being. Yes, but however little we deny ourselves these meanings tolisten simply and intensely to the sound of the words, representing thedeepest level of reality, and so in truth losing all the illusions thatthe word's meaning suggested, we now have the impression of connectingwith the reality of this depth that exists as much within our body aswithin the core of all matter. This is what constitutes the awarenessof being, in a totally immediate way, even if this time it exists inthe silence of words. To have a world, through the word, is to havenothing, to be nothing. To perceive the nothingness within, in thesyncope of the word, is to be, by the mere fact of not being.

Our relationship with language is therefore in both these states "tobe AND not to be", in spite of the paradox. And the question asked byHamlet has perhaps engaged readers of Shakespeare so forcibly becauseit reveals that the Prince of Denmark is no longer able to understandthat he does not have a choice between being and not being, as if thechoice depended upon an act of the intellect, but rather that he mustsearch for the being in the heart of the non-being through listening ata deeper, more inward searching level to the mysterious propositionthat words create.

To phrase that differently: Shakespeare recognised that moment inthe history of the western world when the intellect that analyses theworld but in fact merely considers the surface was beginning to stiflethose intuitions which in previous times had preserved the awareness ofunity and of personal involvement in that unity. It is precisely onthis account that Hamlet is so significant: here we find the hero atthe moment where the "or not to be" replaces the "and not to be", achoice that leads to a preference for a labyrinth of conceptualmeanings with their many enigmas, and consequently induces anguish anddejection to the point of provoking the same cynical outlook exhibitedby Rosencrantz and Guildenstern.

This choice has been consistently accepted by modern man ever since.Why? Because technology is forever becoming a substitute for naturalphenomena - which can be interpreted as symbols, associated with unity- such artificially produced products, starting with simple matter butnot with life. Drinking water or wine preserved our awareness of life,which always leads towards the One along the pathway of individualexistences. Opting for drinks which, like modern medicines, are no morethan syntheses of chemical elements, gives us no more enlightenmentthan shackled concepts, conceptual meanings - quite the contrary. Allwe are imbibing is our self-fragmentation, our non-being.

This being the case, the poetry lies precisely in the memory of theunity of truth buried beneath this fragmentation. And it is Hamlethimself who, in this new condition created on the threshold of the 17thcentury by scientific discoveries, ought to have been a poet, andunderstands moreover that he should have been, but fails to be, suffersand dies as a result. Shakespeare's play simultaneously expresses theneed and the difficulty of poetry.

MM: At the point poetryescapes from ordinary language, can poetry recover our existence? Canpoetry rediscover the unity, the oneness of the world that has beenforgotten?

YB: This is, of course, thegreat question of our time. And, at a glance, the answer is positive.When we hear the sound in the depth of language, our body - which isaware of our transience - can absorb into its rhythms the words,weakening their network of meaning, allowing things and beings toappear before us, within us, with an immediacy by virtue of which weescape the anguish of non-being, which is the fatal consequence ofknowledge through concepts. But it is only there for a fleeting moment,since our desires exploit this word with its greater freedom to projectthe dreams that are still bound by exterior meaning and concepts. Andthus it is the poem which is a compromise that juxtaposes poetry withthe undeniable facts of existence. The truth of poetry lies less in theoriginal memory of the presence of the world beneath the language thanthe obduracy with which it resurfaces, when that presence is fading.Poetry is a never-ending task - the continuous search which couldotherwise, by asking us to think together about what it is in us thatstands in its way, help in the construction of a society based on truth.

MM: What act of consciousness allows us to recognise poetry and to freecit from ordinary speech?

YB: This act is certainlynot the analysis of the meanings which figure in the poems, not even inthe very greatest and mostly intensely poetic. The meanings contributeno more to the mystery of poetry than theologies invoke faith. Thepoetry is in the insight that poets can focus onto aspects of theirexistence, an awareness of its intrinsic transience, as opposed to theviewpoint of those who are limited by the restraints and choices ofconceptual thought. And one can easily see the effects of this greatinsight in the texts. For example, it is basic knowledge thatdistinguished between smells, sounds and colours. From the point ofview of the immediacy that poetry seeks to rediscover, "colours, smellsand sounds" cannot be differentiated. To quote Baudelaire, who refersto their "tenebrous" as well as profound "unity", they "echo oneanother". And also from this point of view, some things appear moreimportant than others and are therefore immediately perceived in a newfashion that is poetry.

Some examples? Baudelaire, during one of his peregrinations acrossParis on an autumn evening, hears the logs thrown down by the deliverymen from their carts onto the paving stones of a courtyard. These logs,before coming to rest, bounce and fall a few times before landing witha dull thump, followed by silence, and the sharp sense of finality thatpoetry keeps alert in Baudelaire allows him to recognise in this sound,that he calls "funereal", a parallel with the human condition betweenlife and death, and to raise it to the highest level of hisconsciousness. This choice, this observation, is the very poetry of"Chant d'automne", one of the peaks of "Fleurs du Mal".

MM: Are we "condemned to hope"?

YB: Yes. This ensues fromthe nature of poetry, this search for the immediacy that is inhibitedby the dream. To renounce this search, this hope, would be to acceptliving oblivious of oneself, like all those Rosencrantz andGuildensterns.

MM: Does art offer immortality?

YB: That question is a trap,but one that allows me to clarify my ideas. Writers like to establishharmonious or interesting relationships of shapes between words,balanced with wisdom, to create a verbal object that exists in its ownright and has the capacity to endure. This object, one can definitelymaintain, has been conceived and created with art, sometimes great art,and for some authors one can call this art "poetry", applying as ahallmark the ancient Greek word for "creating" or "producing". But Icannot accept this recourse to the word "poetry". It is true that in acertain verbal object the words are wrenched from their normal usage atthe heart of a conceptual dialogue, which is weakened to serve thepurpose of whoever is aiming further, into the realm of poetry: butthis will only really happen if the author takes advantage of such aweakening of the meaning to move beyond it to a more intimate andliving relationship with the world, as well as with himself. A reactionto the events of his life that will require him to leave behind thepreoccupation with the verbal object in favour of a newly opened word,a word that acknowledges its limitation and seeks to move itselfforward in the struggle between thought and desire. To put this anotherway: there is an art that is in no way poetry. And as this is notsustained by the hope of fulfilment that characterises the poet, itfollows that he who calls himself the artist is supported by a dream ofimmortality, however relative. They lie ahead, the centuries of gloryawaiting Horace in the form of his "monumentum aere perennius", butpoets will not be hooked by this essentially naive dream.

In poetry, there is no more victory over death than there is inlife: during the moment - that split second before ordinary dialoguerecommences - when the sound that is heard, the mounting rhythm,dissipates exteriority in the perception of things. Any other idea ofimmortality is no more than an extension of generality, of abstraction,that turns a conceptual thought into a simple representation from theoutside, just an empty shell. Anyway, how can we talk about immortalitytoday when it is becoming apparent that within a more or less shorttime span, it is human society that is going to crumble into pieces ona planet that will again become uninhabitable?

MM: Is "absolute dispossession the supreme richness"?

YB: Is this another trap? Orrather an incitement to equivocate? It is possible to believe, ineffect, that the idea of "absolute dispossession" is intimatelyconnectable with what I have just said about poetry, to recognise thatit is a transgression of representations and meanings that rule withinthe word. If we do not concern ourselves with these meanings, thosethings that they fix in our consciousness lose value in our eyes, andso the desire to possess them will be wiped out together with theirimages. No, that is not what poetry is! It is less the transgression ofthe conceptual than the awareness that this transgression is alreadyfalling back on the expression of desire; it is a perpetual cycle, anunderstanding of the endless contradictions of words, seeking toovercome them. And to achieve this it is more necessary to simplify thedesire than to attempt to reduce it to nothingness. Poetry is not toshed everything, as is generally supposed, but rather to attach itselfto acts of existence and to recognise their intrinsic value. It is tolove these few positives, to love them without deviation and for whatthey are. Never to cease desiring, but rather to continue sheddinglight on desire.

MM: What images remain of your past visits to Czechoslovakia?

YB: One especially, fromafter the velvet revolution. It was on the day that the Pope arrived tovisit Prague, when the loudspeakers that the old political regime hadinstalled on the streets (and which had helped to overthrow it) werebeing used to broadcast a very long mass across the city. I can seemyself once more in that huge square, just a few steps from themonument that commemorates the sacrifice of Jan Palatsch, listening tothe music of a rock group intermingling with the Latin voices broadcastfrom the rooftops. A policeman, who had stopped close to us, was alsolistening, his gun at rest on his shoulder.