Mute Objects of Expression (22 page)

(To grasp the nature of a thing, one can – if unable to seize it initially – induce it to appear through comparison, through successive eliminations: “It's not this, it's not that, etc.” – a metatechnical question, or simply technical.)

 

When G.A. wrote to me recently about
The Pine Woods Notebook:
“The outcome of your efforts runs too great a risk of becoming a quasi-scientific perfection which, for having undergone purification, tends toward a compendium of interchangeable materials. Each thing in itself, rigorously specific and brought to term, is excellent. The whole becomes a patchwork,” he was right on the mark. Yes, I wish to be less a poet than a “savant.” – I have less desire to wind up with a poem than a formula, a clarification of impressions. If it's possible to found a science whose matter would be aesthetic impressions, I want to be the man of that science.

“Stretch out on the ground,” I wrote fifteen years ago, “and start over again with everything right from the beginning.” – Neither a scientific treatise, nor the encyclopedia, nor the
Littré:
something both more and less . . . and the way to avoid patchwork will be to publish not only the formula one might have taken as the conclusion, but to publish the entire history of the research, the journal of one's exploration . . .

And further down Audisio went on: “I believe the artist cannot aspire for better than to eternalize the shared moment of the thing and himself.” But come now, my dear Audisio, when dealing with a lion entangled in a net and a rat who frees him, La Fontaine comes to this:

Where does La Fontaine figure in all this, where is the shared moment between the lion or the rat and himself? Isn't this instead a quasi-scientific perfection, the birth of formula? There's the truth of an action by the lion – entangled strength and rage, and an action by the rat – a gnawed net . . . We often need someone smaller than ourselves. – It is on proverbs much like this that I'd like to conclude. But my chimera would be rather to have no other subject than the lion itself. As though La Fontaine, instead of doing in succession
The Lion and the Rat, The Aged Lion, The Animals Sick with the Plague
, etc., had only written a single fable about
The Lion
. It would have been much more difficult. A fable that gave the nature of the lion. As in Theophrastus and his
Characters
.

Three important readings in the last few days have seemed to correspond in an amazing way to my preoccupations: a)
The Obscurantism of the 20th Century
, an anonymous article in an underground
journal – about Rosenberg's speech at the Palais-Bourbon; b)
The Lesson of Ribérac
by Aragon in
Fontaine
, #14; c)
Vigilantes nar-rare somnia
by Caillois in the
Cahiers du Sud
, June 1941 issue.

The first text, totally convincing, confirms my desire to struggle for enlightenment, reassures me on the urgency of my mission (?), and compels me to rethink the problem of the relationship between my esthetic and political positions. The second also offers several confirmations: closed language preparing for general public acceptance (that's not quite it). The third, rather false in its eloquence, rather conventional despite its pretension, shows me what stringent scruples coupled with constantly renewed acerbic audacity it would take to approach this sort of problem. And when (fourth important text, fifth counting Audisio's) Pia writes to me: “The coffee, the grounds, the filter, the boiling water, etc.” I clearly see that YES, it is interesting to show the process of “my thought.” But that doesn't mean that under this pretext one must abandon all restraint, for that would run counter to my purpose. – Yet it is very legitimate for a savant to describe his discovery in detail, to relate his experiences, etc.

 

(Time to get back to it!)

At the place known as “La Mounine” not far from Aix-en-Provence

One April morning around eight o'clock

The sky though limpid seen through foliage

Appeared to me mingled with shadow.

 

A beautiful day is also a meteor, I thought, and would not give up until I had invented some sort of expression to capture it:

 

At first I thought (it was hardly so) that rancorous night
To avenge its retreat from above these regions
Had wished to drain of blue-black ink
Its octopus heart on that occasion.
Or perhaps, I said to myself (it was hardly) infused drop by drop
Could this be the poison whose dreaded name
Strangely close to its color
Begins like
ciel
and ends like
azure

If I say “veiled by its own luster” I won't be much further along.

Perhaps the sky is so dark only in comparison to other things: trees, houses, etc., which are so brightly lit, storehouses of light!

As when on leaving a brilliantly lit room, the outdoors seems dark . . .

. . .

Comparison with the Northern skies.

 

Something new.

Just as a blotter or a rag moistened with water is darker than when dry – (Why? Does optic science supply the answer?) When dry, they are 1) more brittle, 2) paler – so similarly the blue sky is a blotter saturated with interstellar night.

More or less moistened, it is more or less dark: in Aix-en-Provence it is thoroughly saturated (because there's not much of anything between itself and the interstellar spaces).

In the Midi, there's a lot of sun, of course, but there's also the (concomitant) interstellar night.

They struggle against one another (in the sense that Verlaine says, “the high heels were struggling with the long skirts”).

One could say that in the Midi the sun triumphs less than in the North: to be sure, it triumphs more over the clouds, the fog, etc., but it triumphs less over its principal adversary: the interstellar night.

Why? Because it dries the water vapor, which in the atmosphere constituted the best triumphant screen for it. A screen whose
absence makes itself felt, resulting in a greater transparency and capacity for saturation on the part of the interstellar ether.

It is the interstellar night which on beautiful days one sees by transparency, and which makes the blue of the meridional sky so dark.

Explain this through analogy to the marine milieu (or aquatic rather).

 

At the place known as “La Mounine” not far from Aix-en-Provence
On an April morning around eight o'clock
The sky though limpid through foliage
Appeared to me mingled with shadow

 

I gathered for the first time that rancorous night . . .

a. Verse I

b. then:

c. then:

d. I sat stunned, then distracted by other impressions: our arrival at Aix, the subsequent events, etc.

e. But clearly I was to remember my strong emotional reaction. That is surely the poetic subject, what impels me to write: either the desire to recast the picture, preserving forever its apparent joy, or the desire to comprehend the cause of my emotion, to analyze it.

f. Getting down to work, I met with great difficulties and drew up
several coherent images: an octopus, cyanide, the explosion of petals,

g. knowing full well that I had to get past them, be done with them in order to reach the true (?) explanation, the one about the clearing that opens onto the interstellar night.

The upper abyss (zenithal). The sun is made to blind us, it transforms the sky into a frosted glass pane through which one can no longer see reality: the one that appears at night, the inter-stellar one.

But in some regions the transparency (serenity) of the atmosphere, is such that the presence of this abyss is perceptible even in broad daylight. That is the case in Provence. The sky above Provence constantly offers a clearing, like a pane of clear glass in a frosted skylight.