 |
| Henri Bergson |
toward
the end --
just so
(John Martone)
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I've recently revisited Henri Bergson's
Time and Free Will, a work that though possessing remarkable insights into the nature of time and human perception, and the celebrated defense of free will, also makes (to my mind) the even more remarkable claim that the elements of artistic activity are almost always antithetical to language itself, leaving Bergson with the inescapable fact that "there is no common measure between mind and language." What type of poetry can come of this?
In his view (and mine) the data ("states of consciousness") from which the artist (the poet) draws reveal a source that's deeply temporal, deeply personal and whose greatest legacy to art will be its ability to disclose how the "fusion" and "interpenetration" of its objects--a sort of melting of qualities into each other so that objects can never be easily distinguishable from each other, leaving in their wake a spectral residue-- always give this hauntingly penumbral state for the poet who assimilates them to literary production. It's when the mind forms a "space" (as of the page or canvas) for these intuitive states and devises a decidedly more "impersonal" form by juxtaposing the primary data of artistic consciousness in linear fashion and employing the symbolism of language to represent the "feelings and ideas", or the true "living and original individuality", of artistic consciousness--it's when the poet, in short, looks for a more overarching medium of artistic "space" that "the thousand emotions that stir the soul" in "time" become the deadpan expression of mere language. The 'thing' appears always as a certain "shade" or "quality" of itself as it was once perceived: the poem that ensues is a veritable Eurydice who is tragically torn from our affections the moment she's glimpsed.
Bergson's example of the rose is illuminating:
I smell a rose and immediately confused recollections of childhood come back to my memory. In truth, these recollections have not been called up by the perfume of the rose: I breathe them in with the very scent; it means all that to me. To others it will smell differently.--It is always the same scent, you will say, but associated with different ideas.--I am quite willing that you should express yourself in this way; but do not forget that you have first removed the personal element from the different impressions which the rose makes on each one of us; you have retained only the objective aspect, that part of the scent of the rose which is public property and thereby belongs to space. Only thus was it possible to give a name to the rose and its perfume...And you now say that our different impressions, our personal impressions, result from the fact that we associate different recollections with rose-scent (162)
To give expression to the "inner" without resorting to the conventions of the "outer" conditions of artistic sensibility is the poet's fate. S/he faces the unenviable task of relating only the more hauntingly beautiful nuances of deeply interrelated human perceptions: the conventions and symbolism of language itself must, on the other hand, always militate against the ineffable and sublime qualities of a poetic mind. The world will reveal, and the poet is always fated to try to write, that which cannot be easily written, if at all. The 'maker' works with very recalcitrant materials that jealously hoard their interior riches.The "self", as Bergson says, "comes into contact with the external world at its surface." The poem's rose-scent and the feelings it elicits will be lost in the act of transmission. The chronicler of feelings can only provide a single one of what were successive states in the perception of the single object or event: the rose-scent in its final form as the poem. The only way a reader can intuit the poet's own inner experience is by impossibly recreating or reimagining, somehow, the exact "shading" or "colouring" or "intensity" of the experience that gave rise to the object that gave rise to the poem itself.
I've always believed this but not as some sort of conscious artistic manifesto of my own: it has always been intuitively obvious to me that the poet must look deep below the conventions of spatial configurations of reality (of which language and all conceptual thinking are primary exemplars) and record the exuberantly errant colourings of human perception at its most elemental. Bergson's true heir is Gilles Deleuze who I believe used precisely this Bergsonian sense of the "primary psychic phenomena" of human perception in his discussion of "the principle of the emission of singularities" to elucidate the source of every type of concrete expression (
The Logic of Sense). To intuit the outlines of a mood or feeling or insight without the aid of the "word" is what I've always attempted to do, albeit at times clumsily and imprecisely. Language can do nothing (if it is to be poetic, above all) but try recording the essential evanescent and heterogeneous qualities of the world. It's a way of writing about things that by nature flee from where they've been necessarily accessed. And yet, at the same time, nothing has always appeared to me to be more liberatory.
I offer the following as another poem-offering to Bergonsian time and free will: a wildly exuberant way, that is, to voice a feeling and the only image of it available to me at that time. I can do no more without solidifying the form into a real prayer. Its aim is to show how agitated is the suppliant and how moody and changeable at the same time. That prayers go unanswered only attest to their living dynamism and liquidity. And since 'prayer' is at best a "symbolical representation" and a thing there's no way to predict a reader's response to it for, after all, one can really read the poem in its present state only. And the poem in that state will necessarily be imprecise and spontaneous like the perceptions that birthed it. There's no help for it.
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"Prayer"
You say, 'Blot out the leaves first, & pray', and so I do
creeping along as I have for some fifty odd years been
just this insanely cold, tired & rhapsodical
In the annals of heart, it was the eeriest light-greyish
type by far
So by praying I can hope the ground to harden— but You,
up there with nowhere to go, star-fetish at best, a sky god
in the same wintery way a sparrow-bill can poke
into me anytime & tear like a bad tooth, wheresoever
And I hear myself say everyday, to you alone in my car
'With eyes like clouds, son-eager,& wise, see me through'.
The reply's the same, tho: all leaves turn each into a crow
and not just one but a whole tetchy gang of them, today
I'd even go for a more blanketing swarm to drop stone-fruit
down on me, and santana winds to turn or carry me like snow,
the road swept ahead like a lovely, pure sacrifice--ha!
even that'd be a little like prayer to a star-fetish, on the road
