symposium on love by guggenheim public

When the poet says I

"I is an Other       –       is Another       –       is someone else"

I + I = you = we ? 

Arthur Rimbaud’s famous "Je est un Autre" is not describing a methodology, but simply claiming the fact of the poet’s migrating from unknown self towards another. In seeking a methodology of love as integration, we should perhaps try to define the kind of love we are contemplating. Obviously the word is one of those that have a different meaning for each of us, just like light, which someone wrote everyone shares but is different for each person. I would like to see if perhaps the modalities of love to be found in poetry could contribute elements towards a definition, towards a methodology of integration through an enlarged awareness.

Let’s follow Rimbaud - he also writes:
"The key to the ancient feast, that might give me back my appetite. Charity is that key. (That inspiration proves I was dreaming!)"

Despite the ironic parenthesis, he is serious. The ancient feast is the one shared by men and the gods, now separated. The two essential words here are appetite and charity. The latter is not to be interpreted in its modern sense of "doing good", but in the original sense of cherishing (caritas, caro). This love is bound to desire, ever-renewed desire.

For love cannot be the result of will, of reasoning, of a sense of duty, of the intellect. But such desire is not the desire for possession. When Lorenzo the Magnificent defined love, he said: "L’Amore è un appetito di bellezza", meaning Beauty in the Platonic sense. It is that sort of desire: a gravitation. Thus Ortega and Gasset describes it: "We abandon the tranquility and permanence within ourselves and virtually migrate towards the object." This motion towards the other is a "positive affirmation of the existence of the other".

Let us see what poetry can tell us about such a vision of love, by exploring the "I" in the poem.

"I sing…" the Homeric poet recited to his audience: his poem was performed in society, he was a professional surrounded by listeners. To what end? Alcmane wrote: "It is possible to transmit the memory of present things". Even then the poet was not a subjective presence, he was a voice gathering that audience not around himself but around past things. His own identity was unimportant, he was a mere voice. With Greek tragedy this gathering of single listeners shared catharsis through poetry, being purged of evil and grief.

Despite St. Augustine’s claims, we know the Greeks also practiced silent reading, "eye-reading", although their Gods were "illiterate". But we know little of what it meant to the Greek reader.
Orpheus’ song, with his lyre, precedes speech, offers the original incantation. When he was decapitated, his voice cast written signs onto the tablets, his song created writing. The reader of Orpheus’ book is an initiate of the origins.
The English Romantics, longing to be at one with the universe, feared being cast out of that participation. Wordsworth strives to be that lyre, and cries to the West Wind:

"Make me thy lyre, even as the forest is :
What if my leaves are falling like its own !
The tumult of thy mighty harmonies
Will take from both a deep, autumnal tone,
Sweet though in sadness. Be thou, Spirit fierce,
My spirit ! Be thou me, impetuous one !"

"Be thou me!" : an amazing expression, announcing Rimbaud’s claim.

And Dionysus and his mirror?
"When Dionysus saw his reflection in the mirror, he rushed after that reflection and was broken to bits amongst the All".

So, Narcissus? If for Schlegel Narcissus is the image of the poet, seeking his double, for Nerval, the poet seeks his double in a many-faceted crystal and thereby creates, like biology, in couples. Dashing to pieces the mirror of self.
Mallarmé placed Herodias before her mirror: poetry is reflexive, seeking salvation through speech. The poet seeks not to save himself, but all that is, perhaps the Here and Now of Hölderlin’s Bread and Wine communion. His is not a mission, but a task. The mystery of language remains always beyond.

But modern poetry has lost those myths. Hölderlin was the last to renew the promise of the return of the Gods. Later Eliot announced the end of the alchemical, mythical poet. Yet, the myth ever returns.

The poet’s task is not self-expression. He has no personal I. When he says I he means an identity where personal and impersonal are no longer antimonies.
This has been expressed in so many ways, at so many different times, in different languages! This non-self, this solitude, this contemplation. In view of some union, imagination allowing to connect the outer aspects with the inner mystery of our existence. From the visible to the invisible and back into the visible.
Poetry is written for readers, not for professors. The poet strives to create an effect in the reader: that effect is desire. The love relationship created is between the reader and the poem (not the poet, who must learn to disappear, to be transparent, to become a filter). The poem is the brief halting-place of union, which then frees the reader.
Wallace Stevens expresses several of these notions in a long poem where he associates lover and poet, and evokes self and other. I have to quote a certain length to convey the meaning I am trying to demonstrate:

"[…]
One poem proves another and the whole,
For the clairvoyant men that need no proof:
The lover, the believer and the poet.
Their words are chosen out of their desire,
The joy of language, when it is themselves.
With these they celebrate the central poem,
The fulfillment of fulfillments, in opulent,
Last terms, the largest, bulging still with more,

Until the used-to earth and sky, and the tree
And cloud, the used-to tree and used-to cloud,
Lose the old uses that they made of them,
And they: these men, and earth and sky, inform
Each other by sharp informations, sharp,
Free knowledges, secreted until then,
Breaches of that which held them fast. It is
As if the central poem became the world,

And the world the central poem, each one the mate
Of the other, as if summer was a spouse,
Espoused each morning, each long afternoon,
And the mate of summer: her mirror and her look,
Her only place and person, a self of her
That speaks, denouncing separate selves, both one.
The essential poem begets the others.
The light Of it is not a light apart, up-hill."

Jean Paul, the German Romantic poet wrote:
"All of our desires are but fragments of a single infinite desire", and also: "He to whom I can bring the impulsion of a desire, of an undefined leaning, to him I bring and give, strictly speaking, life".
"I look upon fine phrases like a lover", Keats wrote in a letter.

All true poetry is vibrant with eroticism, even when it reasons. The creation of a resonance in the reader, of a seduction like in amorous love. The tension of the opposites, in form not in content: the male and female, the rhythm, the pace of the verses, alternating between full and empty, domination and submission, speed and slowness, advances, retreats. Repetition and variation, mass and undulation. The intoxication of desire producing the effect of being "more alive", closer to one’s being. The reader of the poem is returned to himself: he sees a part of himself usually ignored or neglected, that he thinks he doesn’t need ( Marina Tsvetaeva wrote: "Poetry needs things that no one else needs. It’s the poorest place on earth. And it’s a sacred place".), discovers he is someone else, feels he wants "things to change", wants to migrate, to unite. "Every one of my verses is love", Tsvetaeva concluded. Hafiz, the most famous Persian lyric poet wrote: "Show me your face so I can forget my life!".

But the medium, as Tsvetaeva calls the poet, is a figure of solitude, of privacy, even of secrecy. It is his necessity, his school.

"Loneliness, vast inner loneliness. To walk in oneself and to meet no one for hours on end, - that’s what one must be able to attain". Those words of Rilke’s meet with the words of René Char: "Creating: excluding oneself. What creator does not die in despair? But is one in despair if torn apart? Perhaps not". He speaks of the poet’s "exploded solitude", saying: "We belong to no one". And then : "The bestower of freedom is only free in others. The poet only enjoys the freedom of others". This solitude is the striving to go beyond the personal, not towards the impersonal, but the suprapersonal. The loss of sense of self is both the poet’s nature and his task. He is entirely turned towards "someone else". Novalis saw every poem to be "a letter to a beloved".

For Mallarmé the poet seeks the Orphic explanation of the Earth, and his task is to write "The impersonal Book". If all is written in the "book of Nature", the poet is the reader of that book. He must become an instrument resounding through various sensations.
In great pain and solitude, Tsvetaeva wrote: "I don’t exist, I’m absent from my life; I’m not there". "Poverty and privilege" is the title of a book of poems by René Char.
Keats, in several utterly beautiful letters, expresses that sensation:

"As to the poetical Character […] it is not itself — it has no self — it is every thing and nothing — It has no character — it enjoys light and shade; it lives in gusto, be it foul or fair, high or low, rich or poor, mean or elevated — it has as much delight in conceiving an Iago as an Imogen. […] A poet is the most unpoetical of any thing in existence; because he has no Identity — he is continually [..] filling some other body. The Sun, the Moon, the Sea and Men and Women who are creatures of impulse are poetical and have about them an unchangeable attribute — the poet has none; no identity — he is certainly the most unpoetical of all God’s creatures. […] When I am in a room with People if I ever am free from speculating on creations from my brain, then not myself goes home to myself: but the identity of everyone in the room begins so to press upon me that I am in a very little time annihilated […]

And in another letter:

"The roaring of the wind is my wife and the Stars through the window pane are my children. […] I feel more and more every day, as my imagination strengthens, that I do not live in this world alone but in a thousand worlds."

Solitude for Rilke is even more extreme, and self-imposed.
"For my call
Is always full of "Away!"
Like an outstretched arm is my call…"
So
"Be in advance of all parting…"
Because
"Nowhere, beloved, can world exist but within".

The loneliness of not having a Self ! What happens there?
Contemplation in the etymological sense, not of introspection, nor observation, but of being "with", of sharing with what is contemplated. And the poet is the child:

"Solitude for the meditating child is like Agrippa’s mirror of the unseen universe" (Quincey).

For the Word hidden in Nature is the same as the Word hidden in ourselves. The discovery of the myth does not explain the mystery, but deepens it. And the only true experience is that which we have "proved upon our pulses" (Keats again). Because "Thought is swift, feeling is slow, it’s the light coming from the farthest star" (Tsvetaeva).

So the space of encounter with the foregone self and others is the poem. It is a "fraternal" space, a space of sharing. The poet’s loneliness is not narcissism. In reading the poem, the reader is present in the same capacity as the poet. The reading is multiple, at the heart of a convergence. So the reader enters the world of contemplation and shares its space. Which is made of distance and proximity. It is a passing through, like "…water of consecration penetrating always nearer to summer’s heart" (Char).

I sought a few poetic images, or metaphors, whereby various poets have expressed very powerfully and directly what I’ve been trying to explain.

The almond: slow growth, a developing fruit, enclosed and offering: "The hour is at its most upright when the almond springs forth from its stubborn hardness and tranposes your solitude".(Char) "I am not alone because I am abandoned. I am alone because I am alone. An almond between the walls of its enclosure". (Char)

The pleat: a crossing-point, a place of encounter between closed and opening up. Mallarmé: the pleat, the fan, the secret and the unveiling.

The threshold: the poet’s only dwelling-place. Humans as passers-by. It is the place shared, leaving intact the poet’s and the reader’s inviolate space.

The Harp: Novalis: " Immense diversity of the Eolian Harp […] The same with men: man is and must become a Harp".

The fountain: "O fountain-mouth, o giving, o mouth that speaks, exhaustlessly one single, one pure thing" (Rilke)

The Vigil: images of the night-lamp, the lighthouse, the necessary distance, wakefulness for contemplation.  

"Poetry is desire fulfilled still desiring."
That definition by René Char seems to me a suitable conclusion to this tentative approach, one that is more a beginning than an end .

Susan Wise