Poetry as Fidelity

POETRY IS THE MIRROR OF LIFE, BUT AT THE SAME TIME IT IS ITSELF LIFE. IN the first dimension, it is that expressive plane where life becomes image. The poet does more than reflect things; he sees things already reflected in reality, already made into real images, as if his vision in certain moments had the faculty of surprising, in the heart of a beam, an unfolding which establishes a tension, a painful and strange tautness between the fleeting phenomenon and its ritardando reflection. This quality of fantastical delay in the marrow of change is that which we call the mirror of life; or, in other words, the glance which is neither speculative nor reflexive, but called to testify by living transparency, which wants to save change as such, without destroying it.

In its turn, poetry is life, and this means: first, experience of a life, of a personal history; second, a body animated by a breath, energy. And just like everything that is alive in this last sense, offering a solidity to others, it consists in a secret welling up. The solidity of this shell which displays the sacred signs of writing is what rhetoricians, scholars, and many readers enjoy to varying degrees. That object is beautiful and withstands public contemplation without losing its self-absorbed solitude; it exists in its own right and it can engender idolatry, like all individualized surfaces. It is a hieratization of life. But life gushes forth and throbs inside, and the act of poetizing is, essentially, a fidelity. Because poetry is the absolute testimony that we believe in life blindly and without conditions. It does not have any other business. In its light we understand that, in our misery and our limitation, we live like unworried kings, like gods of reality, gods of time.

To what do we owe this regal lack of worry? I do not believe that the notion of death does not appear habitually in the clear sphere of consciousness as an effect of a healthy repression which determines a vital impulse (which is to say, a vitally useful one) and that it makes possible that which Scheler calls the "metaphysical frivolousness of man." In effect, this species of frivolousness, if we want to call it that, exists, but it does not seem to be the negative result of an impulse that acts by anesthetizing us ahead of time against the immediate idea of death, with the end of leaving all our vital potency for free and unworried action before a span of time and indefinite, vitalizable matter. The radical vivacity of man is centered here, but in an absolutely positive sense, and I could even say, in principle, in an exultant sense. We are talking about the very vitality of life as something indestructible.

Only in the moment of anguish would we say that this intuition fails; in that moment both the vitality of life (as personal, conscious activity) and the vitality of death (as the cessation of that activity) are annihilated. In anguish it seems that the very foundation of death might cease. But in his normal state, even in his trivial state (let us not speak here of those states which are particularly bursting with significance and transcendence), man does not act on account of frivolity but, rigorously, out of fidelity; that which in him is revealed is not simply a repression, an instinctive obfuscation or distancing of the idea of death. Although this act might occur, what is revealed positively in it, giving always a minimal meaning to its activity, is a faith, no longer an intuition, but a radical faith in life as something miraculous, spontaneous, omnipotent.

Until the time when death shows itself to us and, to put it another way, until we incorporate death in all its terrible integrity, that is, in the...