The Wind and the Source: In the Shadow of Mont Ventoux

4. Breath

. . . to airy nothing /A local habitation and a name. —William Shakespeare, A Midsummer Night’s Dream Several years ago, I was intrigued by the extraordinary reading of the irregular wave patterns on sixth-century B.C. Ionico-Massalian pottery offered by Gustaf Sobin in Luminous Debris: these waves represent an originary rhythm, before rationalizing Greek thought would regulate motion by transmuting it into cadence, meter, good form. The rhythm of these waves—before Logos succumbed to the rule of Eidos—revealed “the fluid architecture of each given instance,” a rhythm characterized as, “iridescent chaos, as Cézanne once put it: a place from which the virginity of the world might, once again, be experienced.”1 I knew not why at the time, but these meditations spoke to something that had been profoundly troubling me about the Ventoux project, so I contacted the author. He generously entered into correspondence, and sent, as an offering, a copy of his book of poetry, The Earth as Air, whose title is an unusually suggestive oxymoron , bearing all the contradictions of the fact that the god Vinturius inhabits both wind and mountain. It was inscribed to me with the following words: “Per fumum, through smoke.” 63 IV Breath 64 FIGURE 13. Mont Ventoux seen from Lacoste. 鵹鵺 t seems that it is the sky that has the last word. But it is pronounced in a voice so low that no one ever hears it.”2 So writes Char in “Les Dentelles de Montmirail,” just after mention of the broken terra-cotta trumpets found on the summit of Mont Ventoux. This voice is the whisper of the wind. There are poets of the wind, poets who celebrate the very breath of the word. Gaston Bachelard, in L’air et les songes [Air and Dreams], suggests that “to all immanence is joined a transcendence.” It is the role of the aerian imagination to articulate this metaphysical relationship at the heart of poetry. It is the very law of poetic expression to surpass thought. Without a doubt, this transcendence often appears as rough, false, broken. Sometimes it also succeeds too quickly, it is illusory, evaporated, dispersive . For the reflective being, it is a mirage. But this mirage fascinates . It entails a special dynamic, which is already an undeniable psychological reality. One could therefore class poets according to their response to the question: “Tell me which is your infinity, and I shall know the meaning of your universe. Is it the infinity of the sea or the sky, is it the infinity of the depths of the earth or of the pyre?”3 According to what Bachelard terms the “dynamics of dematerialization ,” the pure aerian imagination is allied to infinity, to total openness , to emptiness; and it unfolds its elemental corollary in the open sky, the azure of the heavens, the black of the moonless night.4 This is a solitary, imageless, iconoclastic imagination, a form of poetic meditation that replaces the Cartesian “method of doubt” with a “method of erasure.”5 Air is the element of lightness, of the ephemeral, inspiring dreams of flight, demanding a vectorial imagination exemplified by the existence of the wind. Compare this to the weightiness of the earthly imagination: “One would never end if one wanted to follow all the dialectics of rock and cloud, if one wanted to live the intumescence of the mountain. In its swellings and its points, in its rounded earth and in its rocks, the mountain is stomach and teeth, it devours the cloudy sky, it swallows the bones of the storm and even the bronze of thunder.”6 And yet, what can be said of the paradoxical case of the Ventoux, where wind and mountain are, in a strange sense, one and the same? 65 Breath “I 鵹鵺 Gustaf Sobin, American born, has lived in the Luberon for the last four decades, just a few kilometers from La Coste, the chateau of the Marquis de Sade.7 His work—poetry, fiction, and essays, much of which is devoted to Provençal art, landscape, and toponymy—is imbued with the spirit, and the words, of Petrarch, Mallarmé, Heidegger , Blanchot, Char. He writes in a small hut constructed on a hillside near his house, overlooking the valley and the mountains, in full view of Mont Ventoux. He has never mentioned the Ventoux in his writings. Sobin is a poet of breath and wind, immanance and void. In “The Earth...