When confronted with the
idea of revisiting a Poetic Manifesto, the Poetry of Witness, I keep drawing a
blank wilderness, but then, slowly, I come to realize that the abstraction of
nouns are, at best, a vague idea. That language fails me. I am drawn back to an
imagistic quote, “not ideas, but things.” And I come to realize that the
tangible comfort of concrete things is what defines my poetic world. I think in
things—like a Joseph Cornell box. The abstractions come from the stacking of
things, like so many logs to build that cabin my grandmother who had eight
screaming kids, always longed for in a bee-loud glade.
I inherited her dream.
Yeats’ dream, or collective dreams of medieval Irish monks in search of God,
after getting their mitts on the apochryphal gospel of St. James. Lacking in
desert wilderness, they brought the idea of desert to Ireland and then
transformed it. The Emerald Isle never yet yielded a desert except for a dry
pub on a blue moon), and so the hermit’s hut deep in the woods, or on a lake
isle on Inishfree, became a desert, the idea of witness, a symbol for the
search of God in the wilderness.
Poet Robert Hass, in
“Meditation at Lagunitas” wrote: Each particular erases from the clarity of
a general idea... and the more I try
and define it, the more gets erased. Or the lake waters, ruffled by an offshore
wind, churn and muddy the idea until I’m left adrift on a small boat and the
oars are commas separating things and worlds. A collision of rock and thought.
Yeats was a young man when he wrote that most anthologized of poems, “Lake Isle
of Inisfree”; he later wanted to take it back, calling it a fraud, but there it
was, published for the world to see.
UC Berkeley professor Julian
Boyd said when English was codified in the 17th c. : the correct use of “will”
and “shall” separates men from beasts
was established. Will = duty /oath/
promise/ belief; Shall =
intention/prediction/desire. The
ability to dream and manifestation/ implementation of will... I will
live alone in a bee-loud glade... A performative
speech act of free will is to witness. This process happens between the act of
witness in and the place where the origin of words form a semiotics that we
happen to call reality. What Aristotle called praxis: doing/action. The only
sentences that matter are T/F; everything else is religion or poetry. Roland Barthes states the literal and figurative give
a text its multilingual nature. Metaphor makes a text plural, since with more
synonyms and 'forms of language,' the text is multiplied in both quantity and
meaning. Ergo, metaphor requires
translation. Charles Simic states in his notebooks that something before
language exists, and that everything is translation. He maintains that
poetry is not what gets lost in translation but the orphan of silence because:
I’m one of those who believes that
there is something that preceded language. The usual view is that there is some
kind of equivalence between thought and language, that if you can’t verbalize
it you can’t think it. I’ve always felt there is a stage that precedes
verbalization, a complexity of experience
that consists of things not yet brought into consciousness, not yet
existing as language but as some sort of inner pressure. (Bruce Wiegel, ed. “Charles Simic: Essays on the Poetry”
Univ. of Michigan Press, 1996; Bruce Bond; p157).
According to UCB Celtic
Studies and Rhetoric professor Daniel Melia, that image/idea precedes
thought/language is an age-old debate. That inner pressure is the natal ground
of witness that compels us to act. Something pre-lingual behind the epiglottal
and the tongue. The idea of separation and exile also enters into it, giving us
the distance, the lens by which to observe/write. To witness is an act of
translation. Equivalencies. Simic utilizes the visual cortex as a more accurate
form of witness. Many of his poems are the laying down of multiple visual
images juxtaposed to create a larger picture. The exact combination of cumulative
events whether, real or dreamed, becomes a form of witness.
While Simic never imposes a moral obligation on
poets to reveal truth in this authentic manner, he does say that poets seem to
be able to make more sense of this age of uncertainty than other artists....
Bruce Weigel asks how Simic reconciles the
larger forms of
history...with ‘the more exclusive forms’ of art. (Ibid; Brian Avery, p.88).
And
Simic refers us back to the philosopher Martin Heidegger:
Already Hölderlin asked the
question: ‘...and what are the poets good for in a destitute time?’ And
Heidegger replies: ‘in the age of the world’s night, the abyss of the word must
be experienced and endured....’ ...poetry says more about the psychic life of any age that any other art. Poetry
is the place where all the fundamental questions are asked about the human
condition.... Our situation is impossible, and, therefore, ideal for
philosopher and poets. (Ibid; Brian Avery, p.89).
Our situation is impossible,
therefore ideal. Cosmonauts of the word we are, adrift in a sea of ambiguity.
5/7/03
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