The Interior Atlas

She traveled with her eyes, in her atlas, her geography books, in her books, quite simply. "To shut our eyes is Travel." She traveled with names, above all. More than the regions or the countries themselves, it was what their names said to her or what she wished to make them say that interested her. She only kept of them what fed her imagination and her poetry, just as she searched, in landscapes, not for the picturesque but for their meaning:

I never saw a Moor, I never saw the Sea - Yet know I how the Heather looks And what a Billow be -

She composed for herself a sort of interior atlas, where each feeling, each reality, joyful or painful, is incarnated in one or more places.

Cartography of a being stretched between extremes: the near and the far, desire and renunciation.

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Of what was close at hand, of her own country, she makes little mention beyond Amherst. In Heaven, "do they know that this is Amherst?" she asks with either false naivete or evident irony. Besides this she mentions two or three cemeteries, as well as the "Potomac" and "Maryland," in reference to the Civil War, as if the United States represented the rock of hard reality in the midst of an ocean of reverie.

On the other hand, she visits every continent. Each of them, with the exception of Australia, barely represented by Tasmania, has a symbolic value. Europe represents culture; Asia (India in particular, to the curious exclusion of China), wealth; America, exoticism and violence; Africa, the desert, but also exuberance and dreams, somewhat in the manner of the Douanier Rousseau:

With thee, in the Desert - With thee in the thirst - With thee in the Tamarind wood - Leopard breathes - at last!

Borders, however, are barely broached. Place-names awaken echoes unconnected to geography, and obey no hierarchy of distances. The most distant places, the Pyramids, Timbuktu or Van Diemen's Land are situated at the same latitude: poles away from life. Timbuktu, certainly, is a distant place at the heart of Africa, but if those who die become "More distant in an instant / Than Dawn in Timbuctoo, " it is above all because the unexpected sonority, somewhat savage, of that city's name reflects the grotesque absurdity of death.

An overview reveals the salient characteristics of her interior globe. MOUNTAINS: the Alps, the Apennines, the Himalayas, the cordillera of the Andes, obstacles which separate one from the rich plains of seduction but which, besides, touch the eternal. SEAS, inland ones for the most part, as if curled up in the hollows of the earth, the Mediterranean or the Caspian Sea, warm, or on the contrary, frozen like the Baltic or the Arctic Seas. ISLANDS: Sicily, the Canaries, the West Indies, Tasmania, Zanzibar, reserves (sources) of perfumes and spices, images of a voluptuous attraction. VOLCANOES: Aetna and Vesuvius, Chimborazo, Popocatepetl, Tenerife. PORTS: Naples, Gibraltar (because of its surprising shape, no doubt mused upon often, of an "everlasting shoe," Veracruz, Tripoli, Tunis. MINES, source of fabled riches: Potosi, Golconda, Ophir. Beside these recurring landscapes stand out CITIES of lesser or greater renown: Paris, Brussels, Ghent, Naples, Pompeii, Venice, Frankfurt and Geneva, as well as RIVERS such as the Rhine, and DESERTS, the Sahara or Ethiopia.

A map of desires and interdictions, of contained passion. If the symbolism of these locations shows instantly through, the names, often repeated, become a kind of incantation.

"Pure poetry" at times close to certain French lyric poets, to Baudelaire, for example:

"Pity - the Pard - that left her Asia" to Racine or to Marcelline Desbordes-Valmore: "Dews of Thessaly, to fetch / And Hybla Balms - " to Supervielle: "A Moth the hue of this / Haunts Candles in Brazil - "

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At the heart of the interior Atlas freely traced by poetic imagination are inscribed the locations of the Bible, territories indelibly present by default.

Places in a Book, Places of the Book.

These, in contrast, are not places of enchantment seized from the current of an imagination's reverie in geographic space, but places which glow in the distance of time and still...