Song without Words

We normally advert to eloquence when we note the exuberance with which a word, a phrase, a sentence, or a line of verse presents itself as if it had broken free from its setting and declared its independence. This explains why we remember a certain eloquent moment and, a split second or an hour later or never, the context in which it appeared. A selection from my own failing memory: "She should have died hereafter." "The seal's wide spindrift gaze toward paradise." "The troubled midnight and the noon's repose." "In the mountains, there you feel free." "Cover her face; mine eyes dazzle; she died young." "And sweet reluctant amorous delay." "J'ai tout lu, se disait-elle." "I coulda bin a contender." "You talkin' to me?" "Blown hair is sweet, brown hair over the mouth blown." "Agnosco veteris vestigia flammae." "So have I heard and do in part believe it." "And my poor fool is hanged!" "Those are pearls that were his eyes." "Thou art indeed just, Lord, if I contend with thee." "The fire that stirs about her when she stirs." "Inns are not residences." "But the snows and summer grieve and dream." "A bracelet of bright hair about the bone." "Did he who made the Lamb make thee?" "Twice no one dies." "On his wise shoulders through the checkerwork of leaves the sun flung spangles, dancing coins." "Dear incomprehension, it's thanks to you I'll be myself, in the end."

What these have in common in my mind is their irreducibility: each has a context which in some cases I have forgotten, but each seems surrounded by empty space. Each exists in an eternal present moment. And each is so independent in that moment that it doesn't need to declare its independence. When one or another of these items comes to my mind, it makes me feel that nothing else in the whole world matters; that this is what life amounts to. The narrator in Blanchot's L'Arrêt de mort says:

Je parle de faits qui semblent infimes et je laisse de cöté les événements publics. Ces événements ont été très grands et ils m'ont occupé tous les jours. Mais, aujourd'hui, ils pourrissent, leur histoire est morte et mortes aussi ces heures et cette vie qui alors ont été les miennes. Ce qui parle, c'est la minute présente et celle qui va la suivre. A tous ceux qu'elle abrite, l'ombre du monde d'hier plait encore, mais elle sera effacée.

Lydia Davis's translation, which I have slightly modified, reads:

I am talking about things that seem negligible, and I am ignoring public events. These events were very important and they occupied my attention all the time. But now they are rotting away, their story is dead, and the hours and the life that were then mine are dead too. What is eloquent is the passing moment and the moment that will come after it. The shadow of yesterday's world is still pleasant for people who take refuge in it, but it will fade.

II

In "The Second Coming" Yeats tries to conceive an image of the impending historical dispensation, as he takes it for granted, dreadfully, but also with the force of desire for it, an image antithetical to that of the Christ child born two thousand years ago. What occurs to him is "a shape with lion body and the head of a man / . . . / moving its slow thighs, while all about it / Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds." Not birds but their shadows, the only parts of them that cannot escape from the weird shape in the sand. The eloquence of the passage breaks forth in "indignant." It is astonishing that the birds should be thought to feel what we would feel, faced with a new wild image that would govern our lives. Reel: to stagger or whirl, as here probably to whirl in circles, the birds being unable to release themselves from the appalling image below them in the desert. Indignant in this poem is the word...