The Poetic Image, and the stain of Memory
With Gaston Bachelard and Jorge Luis Borges
When the evening light streams in through the french windows, it forms an archaic face, nose pressed against the transparent glass. The day returns in the eyes of somnolent workers slowly beating their weariness into the hungry earth. Space acquires patience, and parks it in the creases carved into its forehead. The poet creates the poetic image without knowing how, outside of the house on whose door, the brass knocker stands unused, because whomsoever has felt the gust, has blundered right in. shellshocked. Free.
I believe steadfastly in the divinity of the poetic image. I am that drop in the Platonic torrent. I have stepped in it twice, and found reality wanting. What is seen is a screen - the world ferments around the living, animating the surface. Language smarts on the edges of perception, and feeling crystallises on the polythene epidermis. A quiet efflorescence begins. We must take the world in whole. This is the only way. To find eternity stacked along the brow of the seeing eye takes practice. “We write to taste life twice/ in the moment and in retrospect.” (Anais Nin)
I am positive that sensed reality is but an approximation of the object in its purest form. I can say this with some conviction, because I feel, routinely, the blood flowing redder, in the veins of things. I plant the flag of this dream, with a utopian jingoism, in the wet earth of the imagination. The city lives in the imagination. The amber hue of a traffic signal, the twitch in an angry forehead, is writ sharper in the eye of the mind. It appears, always, as a lack, as lacuna which needs to be filled, again and again. The poetic image, as Bachelard, would have it, “flares up”, outside of causality. It has an ontology of excitement, a “sonority of being” made up of reverberations that even “the distant past resounds with echoes”.
Consider the burden of the poet, in this light. When the image grips the body, the fingers tickle with epiphany. Poetry emerges, sheepishly naked, unkempt, flaming. The image comes fully formed on the page. We did not know it was part of the design. In its absence, it was outside of our ken. But as soon as it has arrived, we feel what would have been lost without its becoming. The poetic image is real, because it is always moving, with the charge of its birth. It lives in sensation, and breaks out as contagion. Language takes the throat of the monkey, and rattles laughter into the atmosphere. In the word, lives the entirety of landscape.
“… Since a philosophy of poetry must be given the entire force of the vocabulary, it should not simplify, not harden anything. For such a philosophy, mind and soul are not synonymous, and by taking them as such, we bar translation of certain invaluable texts, we distort documents brought to light thanks to the archeologists of the image. The word “soul” is an immortal word. In certain poems it cannot be effaced, for it is a word born of our breath. The vocal importance alone of a word should arrest the attention of a phenomenologist of poetry. The word “soul” can, in fact, be poetically spoken with such conviction that it constitutes a commitment for the entire poem. The poetic register that corresponds to the soul must therefore remain open to our phenomenological investigations.”
The Poetics of Space, Gaston Bachelard
The poetic image is the beginning of form. The romanticism inherent in Bachelard’s articulation is a lived politics that moves away from the certainty of scientific method and the painstaking accumulation of evidential machinery in service of the proof. This is not to dismiss the other, but to suggest even adjacence as harmony. Excavating in a phenomenology of poetry, Bachelard quotes the poet Pierre Jean Jouve:
“Poetry is a soul inaugurating a form.” The soul inaugurates. Here it is the supreme power. It is human dignity. Even if the “form” was already well-known, previously discovered, carved from “commonplaces,” before the interior poetic light was turned upon it, it was a mere object for the mind. But the soul comes and inaugurates the form, dwells in it, takes pleasure in it. ”
The Poetics of Space, Gaston Bachelard
I am caught in the vortex of Bachelard’s expansion of space. His reading, like the frothing sea murmuring to the shore, always over reaches, pushing the envelope slowly, and surely. The ocean croons in that reaching. The entire heft of its slumber, and its pent up soul moans slowly into being. This is how it must live - the reverberation - of the poetic image; not even as it slumps into the page, but as poetic thought; poetics. The seed of a concept lives in even a sapling of new thought. The feeling motors on without the sails of language. It is uttered, without speech. It comes together, designed into untranslatable shape, in the work of memory. Think of the person for whom the stain never leaves - memory.
The Penrose Triangle, The Impossible Shape
I turn to Borges, now, who has lit the fire in the heart, on many a vacant dusk, with the impossibility of perception, as transmitted ontology, and fiction. Think of his Funes, who was trapped in the curse of memory:
“With one quick look, you and I perceive three wineglasses on a table; Funes perceived every grape that had been pressed into the wine and all the stalks and tendrils of its vineyard. He knew the forms of the clouds in the southern sky on the morning of April 30,1882, and he could compare them in his memory with the veins in the marbled binding of a book he had seen only once, or with the feathers of spray lifted by an oar on the Rio Negro on the eve of the Battle of Quebracho. Nor were those memories simple – every visual image was linked to muscular sensations, thermal sensations, and so on. He was able to reconstruct every dream, every daydream he had ever had. Two or three times he had reconstructed an entire day; he had never once erred or faltered, but each reconstruction had itself taken an entire day. ”I, myself, alone, have more memories than all mankind since the world began,” he said to me. And also: ”My dreams are like other people's waking hours.” And again, toward dawn: ”My memory, sir, is like a garbage heap.” A circle drawn on a blackboard, a right “triangle, a rhombus – all these are forms we can fully intuit; Ireneo could do the same with the stormy mane of a young colt, a small herd of cattle on a mountainside, a flickering fire and its uncountable ashes, and the many faces of a dead man at a wake.
I have no idea how many stars he saw in the sky.”
Collected Fictions. Jorge Francisco Isidoro Luis Borges.
Consider this burden. This boon. To know the world, in each moment, each gesture. To feel it cut up and reformed - what knowledge would that be, what pain of comprehension, what imperiousness of observation. This is true vantage. Borges’s stories are always transmitted. He has heard a tale of a place that lives outside of dimension (Is this a character of the poetic image? that it does not fit into the empirical dimensions?). He is narrating the story of a poet who has discovered a fable of a “garden of forking paths” in some ancient archive, or the account of a “Library of Babel” that contained all the books ever written, or going to be written. And so it is, that towards the end of that fantastic tale of Funes the Memorious, when the narrator becomes aware of his own subjectivity in the transmission of this paragon of apprehension, we see the difference between the perceived real of normal life, and the perfection of Ireneo Funes:
“Funes could continually perceive the quiet advances of corruption, of tooth decay, of weariness. He saw – he noticed – the progress of death, of humidity. He was the solitary, lucid spectator of a multiform, momentaneous, and almost unbearably precise world. Babylon, London, and New York dazzle mankind's imagination with their fierce splendor; no one in the populous towers or urgent avenues of those cities has ever felt the heat and pressure of a reality as inexhaustible as that which battered Ireneo, day and night, in his poor South American hinterland. It was hard for him to sleep. To sleep is to take one's mind from the world; Funes, lying on his back on his cot, in the dimness of his room, could picture every crack in the wall, every molding of the precise houses that surrounded him. (I repeat that the most trivial of his memories was more detailed, more vivid than our own perception of a physical pleasure or a physical torment.) Off toward the east, in an area that had not yet been cut up into city blocks, there were new houses, unfamiliar to Ireneo. He pictured them to himself as black, compact, made of homogeneous shadow; he would turn his head in that direction to sleep. He would also imagine himself at the bottom of a river, rocked (and negated) by the current.
He had effortlessly learned English, French, Portuguese, Latin. I suspect, nevertheless, that he was not very good at thinking. To think is to ignore (or forget) differences, to generalize, to abstract. In the teeming world of Ireneo Funes there was nothing but particulars – and they were virtually immediate particulars.
The leery light of dawn entered the patio of packed earth.
It was then that I saw the face that belonged to the voice that had been talking all night long. Ireneo was nineteen, he had been born in 1868; he looked to me as monumental as bronze – older than Egypt, older than the prophecies and the pyramids. I was struck by the thought that every word I spoke, every expression of my face or motion of my hand would endure in his implacable memory; I was rendered clumsy by the fear of making pointless gestures.
Ireneo Funes died in 1889 of pulmonary congestion.”
Collected Fictions. Jorge Francisco Isidoro Luis Borges.
I have shared the complete last part because, I did not want to truncate the flow. In marvelling at the man of perfect memory, there is a tinge of poetic craft. The poet’s toolbox lives in intuition - the split second that is lost when voiced as emotion. The sensation of knowing something, is alive in the possibility of always suggesting more than what it encircles. This is the nature of poetic reach, but also, of metaphor. Funes is extraterrestrial almost, with a memory that is painfully present, continuously changing, and precise to the point of no return. The poet, on the other hand, is erringly human. Poetry is the world grabbing the poet by the scruff of his neck, and flaying his body to the sky, as he smiles weakly intoxicated by the wind that courses through him; his arms outstretched like the sleeves of a transparent marigold-printed shirt, clipped to the clothesline.
An aura leaks from the poetic image, cracked with creative fervour, complete, only because it is broken.
April is here. The days are long now, and simmering.
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Excellent piece of writing.