Selected Essays

The Word & Culture

There is grass in the streets of Petersburg, the first runner-sprouts of the virgin forest that will cover the space of contemporary cities. This bright, tender greenery, with its astonishing freshness, belongs to a new, inspired nature. Petersburg is really the most advanced city in the world. The race to modernity isn’t measured by subways or skyscrapers; but by the speed with which the sprightly grass pushes its way out from under the city stones.

Our blood, our music, our political life—all this will find its continuity in the tender being of a new nature, a nature-Psyche. In this kingdom of the spirit without man every tree will be a dryad, and every phenomenon will speak of its own metamorphosis.

Bring it to a stop? But why? Who will stop the sun as he sweeps in summer harness to his paternal home, seized by a passion for returning? Rather than beg alms from him, isn’t it better to favor him with a dithyramb?

He understood nothing

And he was weak and shy as children are,

Strangers trapped wild animals

And caught fish for him . . .¹

Thanks to you, “strangers,” for such touching concern, for such tender care of the old world, which is no longer “of this world,” which has withdrawn into itself in expectation of and preparation for the coming metamorphosis:

Cum subit illius tristissima noctis imago,

Quae mihi supremum tempus in urbe fuit,

Cum repeto noctem, qua tot mihi cara reliquit,

Labitur ex oculis nunc quoque guttameis.²

Yes, the old world is “not of this world,” yet it is more alive than it has ever been. Culture has become the Church. There has been a separation of Church (i.e., culture) and State. Secular life no longer concerns us; we no longer eat a meal, we take a sacrament; we do not live in a room but a cell; we do not dress, we attire ourselves in garments. At last we have found our inner freedom, real inner joy. We drink water in clay jugs as if it were wine, and the sun likes a refectory better than a restaurant. Apples, bread, the potato—from now on they will appease not merely physical but spiritual hunger as well. The Christian—and every cultivated man is a Christian now—knows not a merely physical hunger or a merely spiritual nourishment. For him, the word is also flesh, and simple bread is happiness and mystery.

Social distinctions and class antagonisms pale before the division of people into friends and enemies of the word. Literally, sheep and goats. I sense, almost physically, the unclean goat smell issuing from the enemies of the word. Here, the argument that arrives last in the course of any serious disagreement is fully appropriate: my opponent smells bad.

The separation of culture from the state is the most significant event of our revolution. The process of the secularization of our political life has not stopped with the separation of church and state as the French Revolution understood it. Our social upheaval has brought a deeper secularization. The state now displays to culture that curious attitude we might best call tolerance. But at the same time, there is a new kind of organic connection binding the state to culture as the appanage princes used to be linked to the monasteries. The princes would support the monasteries for the sake of their counsel. That says all. The state’s exclusion from cultural values places it in full dependence on culture. Cultural values ornament political life, endow it with color, form, and, if you will, even with sex. Inscriptions on government buildings, tombs, gates safeguard the state from the ravages of time.

Poetry is the plow that turns up time so that the deep layers of time, the black soil, appear on top. There are epochs, however, when mankind, not content with the present, longing for time’s deeper layers, like the plowman, thirsts for the virgin soil of time. Revolution in art inevitably tends to Classicism. Not because David³ reaped Robespierre’s harvest, but because that is how the earth would have it.

One often hears: that might be good, but it belongs to yesterday. But I say: yesterday hasn’t been born yet. It has not yet really come to pass. I want Ovid, Pushkin, Catullus afresh, and I will not be satisfied with the historical Ovid, Pushkin, Catullus.

In fact, it’s amazing how everybody keeps fussing over the poets and can’t seem to have done with them. You might think, once they’d been read, that was that. Superseded, as they say now. Nothing of the sort. The silver horn of Catullus—“Ad claras Asiae volemus urbes”⁴—frets and excites more powerfully than any futuristic mystification. It doesn’t exist in Russian; and yet it must. I picked a Latin line so the Russian reader would see that it obviously belongs to the category of Duty; the imperative rings more resonantly in it. Yet this is characteristic of any poetry that is Classical. Classical poetry is perceived as that which must be, not as that which has already been.

Not a single poet has yet appeared. We are free of the weight of memories. For all that, how many rare presentiments: Pushkin, Ovid, Homer. When in the silence a lover gets tangled up in tender names and suddenly remembers that all this has happened before, the words and the hair, and the rooster that crowed outside the window had been crowing in Ovid’s Tristia,⁵ a deep joy of repetition seizes him, a head-spinning joy—

Like dark water I drink the dimmed air,

Time upturned by the plow; that rose was once the earth.

So that poet, too, has no fear of repetition and gets easily drunk on Classical wine.

What is true of a single poet is true of all. There’s no point forming schools of any kind. There’s no point inventing one’s own poetics.

The analytic method, applied to style, movement, form, is altogether a legitimate and ingenious approach. Lately, demolition has become a purely formal artistic premise. Disintegration, decay, rot—all this is still décadence. But the Decadents were Christian artists; in their own way, the last Christian martyrs. For them, the music of decay was the music of resurrection. Baudelaire’s “Charogne” is a sublime example of Christian despair. Deliberate demolition of form is quite another matter. Painless suprematism. A denial of the shape of appearances. Calculated suicide, for the sake of mere curiosity. You can take it apart, or you can put it together: it might seem as though form were being tested, but in fact it’s the spirit rotting and disintegrating. (Incidentally, having mentioned Baudelaire, I would like to recall his significance, as an ascetic hero, in the most authentic Christian sense of the word, a martyr.)

A heroic era has begun in the life of the word. The word is flesh and bread. It shares the fate of bread and flesh: suffering. People are hungry. Still hungrier is the state. But there is something even hungrier: time. Time wants to devour the state. Like a trumpet-voice sounds the threat scratched by Derzhavin on his slate board.⁶ Whoever will raise high the word and show it to time, as the priest does the Eucharist, will be a second Joshua, son of Nun. There is nothing hungrier than the contemporary state, and a hungry state is more terrible than a hungry man. To show compassion for the state which denies the word is the contemporary poet’s civic “way,” the heroic feat that awaits him.

Let us praise the fateful burden

Which the people’s leader tearfully bears.

Let us praise the twilight burden of power,

Its intolerable weight.

Whoever has a heart, he must hear, O time,

How your boat goes to the bottom . . .⁷

One shouldn’t demand of poetry any special quiddity, concreteness, materiality. It’s that very same revolutionary hunger. The doubt of Thomas. Why should one have to touch it with the fingers? But the main point is, why should the word be identified with the thing, with the grass, with the object that it signifies?

Is the thing master of the word? The word is a Psyche. The living word does not signify an object, but freely chooses, as though for a dwelling place, this or that objective significance, materiality, some beloved body. And around the thing the word hovers freely, like a soul around a body that has been abandoned but not forgotten.

What’s been said of materiality sounds somewhat different applied to imagery: “Prends l’éloquence et tords-lui son cou!”⁸

Write imageless poems if you can, if you know how. A blind man will recognize a beloved face by just barely having touched it with his seeing fingers; and tears of joy, the authentic joy of recognition, will spurt from his eyes after a long separation. The poem is alive through an inner image, that resounding mold of form, which anticipates the written poem. Not a single word has appeared, but the poem already resounds. What resounds is the inner image; what touches it is the poet’s aural sense.

“And the flash of recognition alone is sweet to us!”⁹

These days, something like glossolalia manifests itself. In sacred frenzy, poets speak in the language of all times, all cultures. Nothing is impossible. Just as a room where a man is dying is opened to all, so the door of the old world is flung wide before the crowd. Suddenly everything has become common property. Come in and help yourself. Everything’s available: all the labyrinths, all the hiding places, all the forbidden paths. The word has become, not a seven-stop, but a thousand-stop reed, instantly animated by the breathing of all the ages. In glossolalia the most striking thing is that the speaker does not know the language in which he speaks. He speaks in a totally obscure tongue. And to everyone, and to him, too, it seems he’s talking Greek or Babylonian. It is something quite the reverse of erudition. Contemporary poetry, for all its complexity and its inner violence, is naïve: “Ecoutez la chanson grise . . .”¹⁰

A synthetic poet of modern life would seem to me to be not a Verhaeren, but a kind of Verlaine of culture. For him the whole complexity of the old world would be like that same old Pushkinian reed. In him, ideas, scientific systems, political theories would sing, just as nightingales and roses used to sing in his predecessors. They say the cause of revolution is hunger in the interplanetary spaces. One has to sow wheat in the ether.

Classical poetry is the poetry of revolution.

Note

Note: This translation was originally published in Arion 2, no. 4 (1976).