Open Book
One does not renew oneself through love by renouncing women; one simply becomes a masturbator. And I believe that there is always more to learn from a virgin eye which has just returned from making the rounds of things familiar to us than from a common eye which has been privileged to wander in virgin territories. To understand this point, we only have to recall how Aragon of Le paysan de Paris saw a city, that had been described a thousand times, on the morrow of World War I and how the astronaut Leonov saw the unknown emptiness on the morrow of his exit into space.
It is the absence of imagination that changes man into a cripple unable to appreciate reality; and let practical men say what they may, men who one day depart from life without having even stammered it out are doubly ignorant. "La seule imagination me rend compte de ce qui peut etre, et c'est assez pour lever un peu le terrible intertid."
And yet if you move from what is to what may be, you pass over a bridge which takes you from Hell to Paradise. And the strangest thing: a Paradise made of precisely the same material of which Hell is made. It is only the perception of the order of the materials that differs"one must imagine this in relation to the architectures of morality and feeling to understand" but this perception is nevertheless sufficient to determine the immeasurable difference. If reality, which is shaped by half of man´s sensual and emotional dynamism, does not for the time being, and perhaps never will, allow the other architecture"or, putting it differently, the revolutionary re-creation" then the spirit stays free and, as I perceive it, remains the only thing which can undertake it. This is indeed the common characteristic that distinguishes the race of the poets: their separation from current reality. Beyond that, their manner of reaction "which also inevitably classifies them into separate groups" can for no reason whatsoever constitute a significant criterion.
My eyes were dazzled by the infinite gashes of the sun in the waves on a July midday; even if the olive groves did not exist I would have contrived them at such a moment; the same with the cicadas. In like fashion, I imagine, in another age, the world must have been created. And if it did not become better, it is undoubtedly because of man´s fear to look at himself and to accept who he is before he speaks. I speak. I want to descend the steps, to fall into this flourishing fire and then to ascend like an angel of the Lord¡.
The asynchronism of nature and man brought the asynchronism of body and soul. Where nightingales are silent, Molotov cocktails are heard. Birds take vengeance. They never attended Sunday school. And young people, starting from Hungary of Sweden and reaching Czechoslovakia and France, seek through the cars which they overturn and the fires which they set, basically the rights of the black seed. It is imperative, since life cannot regress, that human beings progress even more, for fear that they might take it again, as someone could say, by its tail.
At the moment when the invisible but precisely for this reason more substantial and thrilling thaumaturgy continues in the form of a simple flower which opens its petals or of a sea which shines brilliantly in the sun, one has the right to hope that in the midst of formidable cyclotrons and electronic brains, some day just like between two Maltese stones, Poetry will shoot forth again like an all-red poppy. I am not talking about the ability to compose verses but, rather, the ability to re-create the world, literally and metaphorically, in such a way that the more the Poet¡¯s desires manage to materialize, the more they will contribute toward the realization of a Good acceptable by the totality of mankind. For a dreaming and chimerical Greek, which I do not hesitate to admit that I am, the meaning of this kind of Good cannot be in its final state anything but an ideal point, nevertheless made of soil and water, an "Island of the Blessed,not at all drowned in natural or some other kind of wealth, but moderate and demanding at the same time, like the Parthenon, naked and adapted to the golden slashing of the winds, with the whitewashed little wall of a church above the most dazzling sea.
I wrote because poetry begins from the point where the last word does not belong to death. It is the end of one life and the beginning of another, which is the same as the first one expect that it goes very deep, to the most extreme point that the soul has managed to investigate, to the boundaries of the opposites where the Sun and Hades touch each other. It is the interminable course toward the light which is the Word and the Uncreated Light which is God.
A metaphorical summer was waiting for me, entirely the same, eternal, with the crackings of wood, the fragrances of wild herbs, the figs of Archilochos and the moon of Sappho. I was traveling as if I were walking in a diaphanous deep; my body was shining as green and blue currents were passing through it; I was caressing the speechless stone female figures, and in the reflections I was hearing by the thousands the chirpings of the glances; an endless row of ancestors, fierce, tortured, proud, moved each one of my muscles. Oh yes, it is not a small thing to have the centuries on your side, I kept saying all the time, and I went on.
Thus I passed through the indifferent "great public" nd the "hostile Authorities" as I did through the Symplegades. And it is a lie that there is no Golden Fleece. Each one of us is our self´s Golden Fleece. And it is a deception that death does not allow us to see it and recognize it. We must empty death from everything with which is has been overstuffed, and reach it in absolute purity, in order to begin to distinguish through it the true mountains and the true grass, the sickly world full of cool drops which shine purer than the most precious tears.
This is what I await every year with one more wrinkle on my forehead and one less wrinkle in my soul: the complete antistrophe, absolute diaphaneity¡
The grip of childhood years is, in the area of sensitivity, a demonic machine whose dissolution, when the moment arrives, leaves us dumbfounded. Gradually, we reach the point of not believing in ourselves for the sake of those who do not believe - who do not want to believe-in their own selves. But then why do we write? Why do we make poetry? I ask in the same manner that I would ask: Why do we make love? On the cheeks of a girl as on the verses of a poem, from the sender to the receiver nothing mediates. The translation occurs without an interpreter and the gold-dust which remains on our fingers looks sufficient. Nevertheless, if the wind blows it again, the whole of nature will be inhabited by thousands of secret signs; and the insatiable ghost which lies in wait inside us will open its mouth asking for more and more.
As a whole, poets, musicians, artists, despite their great differences, and occasionally thanks to them, in the depth and breadth of the ages constitute a second state of the world. It is open to everyone, and there has not yet been found a military demon strong enough to cut off the narrow streets. Only the access sometimes becomes difficult, a difficulty corresponding to the degree of human stupidity. No one is obliged to be interested in Poetry. Once he becomes interested, however, he is obliged to "know how to move"in this second state, to walk both in air and on water.
When I had the opportunity for the first time to find myself on the deck of a ship sailing south to Santorini, I had the feeling of a landlord surveying his ancestral estate which he is about to inherit. These expanses curly with waves were the arable lands, where all that had to be done was to plant cypress trees for boundary signs. I took stock of my flocks. I owned my silos, my winepresses, my outbuildings. Neither did I lack shops. On the hillside was the little monastery, there were two or three country houses, and on the edge of the rock the pigeonholes and the mills. I felt pre-existing in me an immense familiarity, which made me exchange with the greatest ease properties and characters of things and which embellished all that the Atlantis of others had not managed to drag with her into the deep.
If there were a way for someone to transcribe in visual symbols the kinetic phenomena which I felt taking place around me in that blinding golden blue space, he would have followed, by way of tracing the course from the sun to the roots of the plants and from the roots of the plants to the sun, the exchange between the properties of the herbs and the exhortations of men, the analogy between the exhortations of men and their daily objects, houses, boats, tools. And these he would have followed with so much clarity, consequence and frugality of means that their precise moment he would have very soon been convinced could not be anything else but the only and ideal justice; because justice is a precise moment and nothing else.
Poetry is a mechanism that demechanizes man and his relations with things. The poet reaches the point where he goes into partnership with his own contradiction. On the level of language, the temptation for one to subject to a test the resistance of abnegation frequently leads him to a different type of acceptance. This is man, and what poet will dare define it? The truth remains to be discovered. In the meantime, let´s talk about simpler things.
For me, in my youth, Greece was a dazzle. I have been neither a patriot not a nature worshipper, or at least I experienced great surprise when I noticed that these qualities were attributed to me. Approximately what someone would have experienced in olden times if in the midst of storms he has suspected the existence of electricity and those around him had called him an autumn romantic.
During the years of Buchenwald and Auschwitz, Matisse painted the most juicy and unripe, the most charming flowers or fruit which were ever made, as if the very miracle of life had found a way to coil within them for good. That´s why today they still speak more eloquently than the most macabre, cadaverous description of the period: because their creator refused to "punt" (may I be forgiven for this word) the so-called "feeling" and its homeopathic properties and preferred to obey not the phenomena but the reaction which such phenomena caused in his conscience.
A whole literature in our time has made the mistake of competing with the events, of going beyond them in presenting horror instead of counterbalancing it. But when the artistic word simply competes with the deed, it is as if it is asking to walk with the help of foreign crutches and to resemble a cripple because it has refused its own legs.
It is indeed strange what happens to man. It is difficult, impossible for him to believe that what he imagines is identical with what he sees, and to admit that the natural phenomena, too, are phenomena, of the spirit. And he prefers to repeat twice the wretchedness of his life-once for his own sake and once for the sake of his art -instead of transforming it into some other, some different reality, creating, as we might say, from two certain deteriorations an eventual durability.
Primitive peoples, poets before the age of poems, not having at their disposal mirrors (literally and metaphorically) to behave in unseemly fashion, overcame evil by reciting frightful and incomperhensible words, In the same fashion, until a few years ago our island nurses, with utter seriousness, chased evil spirits from above our cradles by uttering words without meaning, holding a tiny leaf of a modest herb which received God knows what strange powers exclusively from the innocence of its own nature.
Poetry is precisely this tiny leaf with the unknown powers of innocence and the strange words which accompany it.
The fallacy was that we left [heroism] behind the door when the bells of peace tolled. The other half, the victors, turned it against other victors, so that we have had perpetual war on our hands. The only thing that we did not think of doing was to change its face, its panoply and its sword-edge, to transfer it -I mean heroism always - directly to the peaceful projects which were awaiting us, solid in the boldness and watchfulness of the soul, at the disposal of change and sacrifice. And yet from it societies expected not only their economic and administrative reorganization but, above all, their moral reform and biological revolution. Love, the senses, dreams were expiring from a new, unheard-of atrophy in the history of human imagination. And what else could the poet be at such moments but an oxygen donor? How else would he have felt that he was fulfilling his purpose other than by providing with his poems an example, by assuming legitimately the place vacated by the Robber, the Corsair, the Leader, the Conqueror or whatever, by continuing their active intervention into things, the accumulation of spoils and games, the discovery of unknown treasures, the annexation of territories distant and undiscovered.
Human units are like chemical elements. From their union result unanticipated powers capable of altering or corroding what up to that moment was consider unassailable to such a degree that one reaches the point of optimism that someday progress in the moral field, like that which is taking place in the scientific field today, will succeed in solving the world´s problem. Alas. In this case, and despite deterministic theories, the great Chemist remains invisible, cantankerous, irrational. And just when you think that the moment for him to discover the secret powder of his soul has arrived, with one push he upsets all the sensitive instruments, shatters the glass tubes, mixes up the prescriptions in such a way that no one else can continue his work. And "the game for the game´s sake" starts all over again. Let the wretched individual wait for his salvation. It is all over, finished; the hydrogen remains hydrogen and oxygen oxygen. They do not become water.
One step above the realization that Poetry is a simple confession, I could see the horizon changing, could see the whole landscape, just as from the top of one of our islands, where suddenly the familiar reliefs of the mainland change their shape and reveal to you unsuspected bays and promontories, distant backs of other islands, a new world, broader and richer in its variety. And the sieve of conscience you begin to discard and retain, retain and discard, until one day you feel yourself clear and diaphanous, such as all your secret inclinations wanted you to be and all conditions around you conspired to alter. It is difficult, so difficult to allow your epoch to set its seal on you without distorting you.
I demanded from the ideal poem that it consist of a miniature of a heliacal system, complete with the same tranquility and the same expression of eternity in its totality, the same perpetual motion in its isolated component parts. Even today this is how I perceive the nuclear formation of a poem, like a closed unit, as well as its final self-powered centrifugation, always from the point of view of the meaning of the perceptible, which is consistently localized, isolated and illuminated by inspiration. The difference is that, in order to acquire substance and effectively replace the sun as well as fulfill its mission in the system of images and meanings which it carries along, it is imperative that this meaning develop uninterruptedly and parallel with a symbolic transcription of its own in signs of rhythmic and metrical weaving analogous to those which render the meaning of time sensible to human understanding.
I apologize for such a complex statement. I shall try to say it differently. The entire mechanism of the articulation of a calendar of holidays or of the mutual transmutation of natural and intelligible elements in a mythology must operate anew from the collective to the individual scale and through one means¡ªthe one and only means of lyrical action. Or, again, in other words: in each and every instance the development which is defined and the distribution of meanings must dictate a definite development and distribution of the parts; and simultaneously, such a development and distribution of the parts must constitute a sine qua non of the fullness of the result.
Beyond that point, we can say that the place of the sun in the moral world plays the same role that it does in the nature of things. But the poet is a cutting edge of the moral and the real world. The part of the darkness which is neutralized within him, because of his conscience, is added onto a light which repeatedly returns to him in order to render constantly purer his idol, man. If there is a humanistic view about the mission of Art, this, I believe, is the only way it can be understood: like an invisible operation, which is a facsimile of the mechanism we call "Justice" and naturally I am not talking about the Justice of the courts but about the other Justice, which is consummated slowly and equally painfully in the teachings of the great magistrates of mankind, in the political struggles for social liberation and in the loftiest poetic accomplishments. From such a great effort, the drops of light fall slowly every now and then into the vast night of the soul like lemon drops into polluted water.
The poet must be generous. Not wishing to lose even a moment from your supposed talent is like not wishing to lose even a drachma from the interest of the small capital donated to you. But Poetry is not a bank. On the contrary, it is the conception which actually opposes the bank. If it becomes a written text communicable to others, so much the better. If not, it does not matter. That which must happen and happen uninterruptedly, endlessly, without the slightest irregularity, is anti-servility, irreconcilability, independence. Poetry is the other face of Pride.
From: Books abroad, vol. 49, no 4 Autumn 1975
