On the limits of language, dream, truth, witness, and not knowing with Martin Heidegger, Mary Ruefle, and Jack Gilbert
“My inability to express myself/ is astounding”
I keep returning to the impossibility of communication; and birds. It is the inside joke of poets that when we are confronted by the paradox of presence as a continuous slippage, when we know a feeling more in its absence or the trail it leaves as it recedes, a bird, spied in the corner of vision, might suddenly be planted at the centre of our poetic landscape. The bird as metaphorical object is that moving freedom shaped hole in the insurmountable emptiness of the sky that can be imprisoned in language, and suggestive of transcendence.
This morning I woke up in a sweat. It was a terrible dream, and as nightmares are wont to be, it was realistic, wedged into the body with the immediacy, and the startling terror that begins in the mind, but leaves traces in the shivering silence after waking. As I opened my eyes, letting in the fog of morning, my body slipped into that familiar placelesness of two realities colliding into each other. The placelessness of memory, or the sudden nostalgic burst is different. It contains a certain movement of desire that displaces - say, for instance, when a letter chanced upon unexpectedly reminds you of a loved one lost. The collision of realities in dreaming implodes upon itself. It forms a third space that is as swift in its disappearance, as it is infused with presence.
One must collect the dream quickly after waking, and in this, the limit of memory in capturing image is not very different from the limit of language in capturing experience. The beautiful struggle of the poet lies in the description of that which cannot be described, to ears they will never know fully. The mind dreams only images, rarely text. The language part of our brains are said to be inactive while dreaming - this is what the experts say. But then I have woken up many a time with a poem fully formed only requiring a quick jotting down, and I have heard many poets testify to this. The dream then is that synaesthetic bridge that curls between image and word, vision and language. In the intensity of the vision just passed, of falling, or impending death, or murderous rage, that begins in the body to spume into a scream that shatters in the waking, language congeals, and poetry, not truth, is born.
One of the most fascinating things about dreams is the cinematic potential of the mind’s editing studio. And so it is that, my dream narrative started in a university, to suddenly transform into perilous mountainous terrain where a military dictatorship was operating (and I was out after curfew even after being warned), to the steely opulent mansion of a tyrannous lord who had caught me and Randeep Hooda and a beloved professor of film (Venkatesh Chakravarty) from my past. Hooda and Chaks were given guns to shoot each other, and I was transported to a large dining hall, saved for the moment. I did not know what happened to them, but I woke just as I tried to slip past the guard (plainclothes - the aesthetic was very much the kind of regime which is clean, expensive, sophisticated; a kind of capitalistic, modern fascist enterprise). I remember him telling me to go to the basement to the office of a “U.G. Menon” who, it seemed, would take care of the problem of my mortality.
Why do I tell you these unnecessary details? Partly also to remind myself of the dream, and to convey the very real sense of dread that a dream can bring. Can one think of the dream as text? as an ethnographic foray into the realm of narrative informed by reality, and memory? What is the dream’s relationship with truth? What, of language? In thinking about the dream, I succumbed to the melodramatic urge to conflate mediated realities - the police using Navratri as an excuse to clamp down on Muslim neighbourhoods and shops selling beef, or any non vegetarian food items (personal witness), or this recorded incident of mob justice, where 9 muslim men were publicly flogged for allegedly stoning a garba event.
I want to quote, at this point, Heidegger from his essay “What are poets for?” delivered on the occasion of Rilke’s death, as he thinks through the role of the poet in a destitute world, and the role of truth. He was writing in a perilous time, struck by the rubble of the world war, and the fear of the cold war, among other things.
…Yet we must think of the world's night as a destiny that takes place this side of pessimism and optimism. Perhaps the world's night is now approaching its midnight. Perhaps the world's time is now becoming the completely destitute time. But also perhaps not, not yet, not even yet, despite the immeasurable need, despite all suffering, despite nameless sorrow, despite the growing and spreading peacelessness, despite the mounting confusion. Long is the time because even terror, taken by itself as a ground for turning, is powerless as long as there is no turn with mortal men. But there is a turn with mortals when these find the way to their own nature. That nature lies in this, that mortals reach into the abyss sooner than the heavenly powers. Mortals, when we think of their nature, remain closer to that absence because they are touched by presence, the ancient name of Being. But because presence conceals itself at the same time, it is itself already absence. Thus the abyss holds and remarks everything.
Heidegger refers to the struggle of dealing with the presence and the absence of the abyss, and one of the things he proposes in reading Holderlin and Rilke is the idea of redemption through a coming close to nature, even the nature of the self. Using Holderlin’s metaphor of divinity, saving and transcendence rooted in immanence, he proposes a reading of the project of poetry.
. . . and what are poets for in a destitute time?
Holderlin shyly puts the answer into the mouth of his poet- friend Heinse, whom he addresses in the elegy:
But they are, you say, like the wine-god's holy priests,
Who fared from land to land in holy night.Poets are the mortals who, singing earnestly of the wine-god, sense the trace of the fugitive gods, stay on the gods' tracks, and so trace for their kindred mortals the way toward the turning.
The prophetic power that Heidegger infuses into the poet’s work is enormous, and a testimony to his assessment of Rilke. As priests who work as the messengers of fugitive gods, poets bring meaning into destitute times. Poetry rescues the mortal from the tyranny of circumstance. The job of poetry, like dream, is not truth, but the opening of a door in the dark “world’s night”, the possibility of imagining a bird flying in the sky (wink wink), even in the “abyss” of destitution.
Now, to truth, and the possibility of witness. Mary Ruefle, in her work, On Imagination, refers to the dream of Adam and the notion of transmission in literature, and truth:
John Keats, in a letter to Benjamin Bailey written in 1817, says this: “The imagination may be compared to Adam’s dream—he awoke and found it truth.” Adam had a dream of Eve the very eve God created her, standing her up before Adam in the morning. This is what Keats is referring to. But in telling you this I am relaying only Keats’s imagination, who in turn is relaying Milton’s imagination, as the dream he cites is from a passage in Book VIII of Paradise Lost, in which Adam tells the angel Raphael what he remembers of creation. Even the words “he awoke and found it truth” probably rely on Cowper, who used the words “woke and found it true” in a poem written in 1789, six years before Keats was born. Whoever’s imagination is at play, none of them match the record. In Genesis nowhere is it written that Adam had a dream.
Gesturing towards the fickleness of imagination, and a problematic notion (burden) of totalising truth, Ruefle’s foray only serves to reflect on how the more we know, and the deeper we traverse the forest of language, the further away we move from a hegemonic way of thinking about truth. Truth, as certitude, as this is what happened, or this is right, and this is wrong, is not the measure of poetry (or of dream?). Even the attempt is futile. How then is the poet to attain depth in the calculation of multiple transmissions of experience? What is the value of witness, if not for truth? When craft seeps into what is being said, it conveys the dualism of a presence constantly “conceal(ing) itself”.
Ours is not to wonder why, but, in our creative particularity, in the brilliant refraction of our unique ways of not knowing, we outline a possibility of narrative, a commonality of experience. I submit to you, today’s poems, the first of which begins with the shocking utterance of vulnerability by Ruefle: “My inability to express myself/ is astounding”
I have so much more to say about ‘The Forgotten Dialect of the heart”, and about “the inability to express” but now I am tired :) So you write to me, if you feel like pa…
P.S. I have curated Ruefle’s writing before Sent to the Monk, and excerpts from her brilliant essay, Poetry and the Moon. Gilbert, of course, is another old favourite, here are poems of his which I have featured before, with commentaries: Michiko Dead, Failing and Flying, Music is in the Piano only when it is played, Tear it Down, I imagine the Gods.
If the poetry and the commentary resonate with you, do consider ‘buying me a coffee’.
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