Collected Prose: Autobiographical Writings, True Stories, Critical Essays, Prefaces, Collaborations With Artists, and Interviews (59 page)

“Our hope is for knowledge,” said Reb Mendel. But not all his disciples were of his opinion.

“We have first to agree on the sense you give to the word ‘knowledge’,” said the oldest of them.

“Knowledge means questioning,” answered Reb Mendel.

“What will we get out of these questions? What will we get out of all the answers which only lead to more questions, since questions are born of unsatisfactory answers?” asked the second disciple.

“The promise of a new question,” replied Reb Mendel.

“There will be a moment,” the oldest disciple continued, “when we will have to stop interrogating. Either because there will be no answer possible, or because we will not be able to formulate any further questions. So why should we begin?”

“You see,” said Reb Mendel, “at the end of an argument, there is always a decisive question unsettled.”

“Questioning means taking the road to despair,” continued the second disciple. “We will never know what we are trying to learn.”

Although Jabès’s imagery and sources are for the most part derived from Judaism,
The Book of Questions
is not a Jewish work in the same way that one can speak of
Paradise Lost
as a Christian work. While Jabès is, to my knowledge, the first modern poet consciously to assimilate the forms and idiosyncrasies of Jewish thought, his relationship to Jewish teaching is emotional and metaphorical rather than one of strict adherence. The Book is his central image — but it is not only the Book of the Jews (the spirals of commentary around commentary in the Midrash), but an allusion to Mallarmé’s ideal Book as well (the Book that contains the world, endlessly folding in upon itself). Finally, Jabès’s work must be considered as part of the on-going French poetic tradition that began in the late nineteenth century. What Jabès has done is to fuse this tradition with a certain type of Jewish discourse, and he has done so with such conviction that the marriage between the two is almost imperceptible.
The Book of Questions
came into being because Jabès found himself as a writer in the act of discovering himself as a Jew. Similar in spirit to an idea expressed by Marina Tsvetaeva — “In this most Christian of worlds / all poets are Jews” — this equation is located at the exact center of Jabès’s work, is the kernel from which everything else springs. To Jabès, nothing can be written about the Holocaust unless writing itself is first put into question. If language is to be pushed to the limit, then the writer must condemn himself to an exile of doubt, to a desert of uncertainty. What he must do, in effect, is create a poetics of absence. The dead cannot be brought back to life. But they can be heard, and their voices live in the Book.

1976

*
Le Livre de Yukel
(1964),
Le Retour au Livre
(1965),
Yaël
(1967),
Elya
(1969),
Aély
(1972),
El, ou le dernier livre
(1973), which are followed by three volumes of
Le Livre des Resemblances
. Four books are available in English, all of them admirably translated by Rosmarie Waldrop:
The Book of Questions, The Book of Yukel, Return to the Book
(Wesleyan University Press), and
Elya
(Tree Books).

Reznikoff ×2

1.
THE DECISIVE MOMENT

Charles Reznikoff is a poet of the eye. To cross the threshold of his work is to penetrate the prehistory of matter, to find oneself exposed to a world in which language has not yet been invented. Seeing, in his poetry, always comes before speech. Each poetic utterance is an emanation of the eye, a transcription of the visible into the brute, undeciphered code of being. The act of writing, therefore, is not so much an ordering of the real as a discovery of it. It is a process by which one places oneself between things and the names of things, a way of standing watch in this interval of silence and allowing things to be seen — as if for the first time — and henceforth to be given their names. The poet, who is the first man to be born, is also the last. He is Adam, but he is also the end of all generations: the mute heir of the builders of Babel. For it is he who must learn to speak from his eye — and cure himself of seeing with his mouth.

The poem, then, not as a telling, but as a taking hold. The world can never be assumed to exist. It comes into being only in the act of moving towards it.
Esse est percipii:
no American poet has ever adhered so faithfully to the Berkeleyan formula as Reznikoff. It is more than just the guiding principle of his work — it is
embedded
in the work, and it contains all the force of a moral dogma. To read Reznikoff is to understand that nothing can be taken for granted: we do not find ourselves in the midst of an already established world, we do not, as if by preordained birthright, automatically take possession of our surroundings. Each moment, each thing, must be earned, wrested away from the confusion of inert matter by a steadiness of gaze, a purity of perception so intense that the effort, in itself, takes on the value of a religious act. The slate has been wiped clean. It is up to the poet to write his own book.

Tiny poems, many of them barely a sentence long, make up the core of Reznikoff’s work. Although his total output includes fiction, biography, drama, long narrative poems, historical meditations, and book-length documentary poems, these short lyrics are the Ur-texts of Reznikoff’s imagination: everything else follows from them. Notable for their precision and simplicity, they also run counter to normal assumptions about what a poem should aspire to be. Consider these three examples:

April

The stiff lines of the twigs

blurred by buds.

Moonlit Night

The trees’ shadows lie in black pools in the lawns.

The Bridge

In a cloud bones of steel.

The point is that there is no point. At least not in any traditional sense. These poems are not trying to drum home universal truths, to impress the reader with the skill of their making, or to invoke the ambiguities of human experience. Their aim, quite simply, is clarity. Of seeing and of speaking. And yet, the unsettling modesty of these poems should not blind us to the boldness of their ambition. For even in these tiniest of poems, the gist of Reznikoff’s poetics is there. It is as much an ethics of the poetic moment as it is a theory of writing, and its message never varies in any of Reznikoff’s work: the poem is always more than just a construction of words. Art, then, for the sake of something — which means that art is almost an incidental by-product of the effort to make it. The poem, in all instances, must be an effort to perceive, must be a moving
outward
. It is less a mode of expressing the world than it is a way of being in the world. Merleau-Ponty’s account of contemplation in
The Phenomenology of Perception
is a nearly exact description of the process that takes place in a Reznikoff poem:

… when I contemplate an object with the sole intention of watching it exist and unfold its riches before my eyes, then it ceases to be an allusion to a general type, and I become aware that each perception, and not merely that of sights which I am discovering for the first time, re-enacts on its own account the birth of intelligence and has some element of creative genius about it: in order that I may recognize the tree as a tree, it is necessary that, beneath this familiar meaning, the momentary arrangement of the visible scene should begin all over again, as on the very first day of the vegetable kingdom, to outline the individual idea of this tree.

Imagism, yes. But only as a source, not as a method. There is no desire on Reznikoff’s part to use the image as a medium for transcendence, to make it quiver ineffably in some ethereal realm of the spirit. The progress from symbolism to imagism to objectivism is more a series of short-circuits than a direct lineage. What Reznikoff learned from the Imagists was the value — the force — of the image in itself, unadorned by the claims of the ego. The poem, in Reznikoff’s hands, is an act of image-ing rather than of imagining. Its impulse is away from metaphor and into the tangible, a desire to take hold of what is rather than what is merely possible. A poem fit to the measure of the perceived world, neither larger than this world nor smaller than it. “I see something,” Reznikoff stated in a 1968 interview with L. S. Dembo, “and I put it down as I see it. In the treatment of it, I abstain from comment. Now, if I’ve done something that moves me — if I’ve portrayed the object well — somebody will come along and also be moved, and somebody else will come along and say, ‘What the devil is this?’ And maybe  they’re both right.”

If the poet’s primary obligation is to see, there is a similar though less obvious injunction upon the poet — the duty of not being seen. The Reznikoff equation, which weds seeing to invisibility, cannot be made except by renunciation. In order to see, the poet must make himself invisible. He must disappear, efface himself in anonymity.

I like the sound of the street—

but I, apart and alone,

beside an open window

and behind a closed door.

*

I am alone—

and glad to be alone;

I do not like people who walk about

so late; who walk slowly after midnight

through the leaves fallen on the sidewalks.

I do not like

my own face

in the little mirrors of the slot-machines

before the closed stores.

It seems no accident that most Reznikoff poems are rooted in the city. For only in the modern city can the one who sees remain unseen, take his stand in space and yet remain transparent. Even as he becomes a part of the landscape he has entered, he continues to be an outsider. Therefore, objectivist. That is to say — to create a world around oneself by seeing as a stranger would. What counts is the thing itself, and the thing that is seen can come to life only when the one who sees it has disappeared. There can never be any movement toward possession. Seeing is the effort to create presence: to possess a thing would be to make it vanish.

And yet, it is
as if
each act of seeing were an attempt to establish a link between the one who sees and the thing that is seen.
As if
the eye were the means by which the stranger could find his place in the world he has been exiled to. For the building of a world is above all the building and recognition of relations. To discover a thing and isolate it in its singularity is only a beginning, a first step. The world is not merely an accumulation, it is a process — and each time the eye enters this world, it partakes in the life of all the disparate things that pass before it. While objectivity is the premise, subjectivity is the tacit organizer. As soon as there is more than one thing, there is memory, and because of memory, there is language: what is born in the eye, and nevertheless beyond it. In which, and out of which, the poem.

In his 1968 interview with Dembo, Reznikoff went on to say: “The world is very large, I think, and I certainly can’t testify to the whole of it. I can only testify to my own feelings; I can only say what I saw and heard, and I try to say it as well as I can. And if your conclusion is that what I saw and heard makes you feel the way I did, then the poem is successful.”

New York was Reznikoff’s home. It was a city he knew as intimately as a woodcutter knows his forest, and in his prime he would walk between ten and twenty miles a day, from Brooklyn to Riverdale and back. Few poets have ever had such a deep feeling for city life, and in dozens of brief poems Reznikoff captures the strange and transitory beauties of the urban landscape.

This smoky winter morning—

do not despise the green jewel among the twigs

because it is a traffic light.

*

Feast, you who cross the bridge

this cold twilight

on these honeycombs of light, the buildings of Manhattan.

*

Rails in the subway,

what did you know of happiness

when you were ore in the earth;

now the electric lights shine upon you.

But Reznikoff’s attention is focused on more than just the objects to be found in the city. He is equally interested in the people who fill the streets of New York, and no encounter, however brief, is too slight to escape his notice, too banal to become a source of epiphany. These two examples, from among many possibilities: