Condition of Secrecy Read online

  I see no other solution for humanity than an underground one . . . the secret meal, underground opposition to all forms of oppression . . .

  Someone has said: we must change ourselves, if the world is to be changed. That is not a Christian thought; it’s heathen. That’s the way I see it.

  That’s pretty much the way I see it, too. The individual must change himself. Must show that underneath, there’s someone entirely different.

  What We Do Anyway

  I have, in my imagination, lived . . .”, says Ekelöf. In imagination. That is, in words. He said that he was afraid, and he told us that at last he was no longer afraid of being afraid, because he had figured out that he wasn’t anyone special and had accepted it — “in reality, you are no one” — and he found a kind of comfort in that. The important thing is that he had the courage to keep telling it to others, to say it again and again: I’m afraid. I’m no one. Isn’t that the way it is for you too? . . . How else can we put aside the lust for power in all of us?

  What We See Anyway

  Of course we can see perfectly well that that’s the way it is. We just don’t like to face it. And if we finally do face it, we close our eyes tightly afterward, so it can’t slip out and disturb us anymore. We think we’ve put a truth in its place so firmly that it neither will, nor can, move again. But there is no truth. There’s only a movement toward . . . no, not toward a truth, maybe toward a better humanness, a better life with each other. Many people tell themselves that poetry is certainly one thing that has to tell the truth (or at least to tell some truths). But poetry is not truth. It’s not even the dream of truth; poetry is passion — it’s a game, maybe a tragic game, one that we play with a world that plays its own game with us.

  What We Talk About Anyway

  An old Chinese anecdote about pure passion:

  The master said to his followers: “I need someone to carry a message to Hsi-t’ang. Who will take it to him?”

  Wu-feng said, “I will.”

  “How will you get the message to him?”

  “When I see Hsi-t’ang, I’ll tell it to him.”

  “What will you say?”

  “When I come back, I’ll tell you.”

  Through this writing, I’ve been trying to get to the heart of my relationship with my readers.

  I want them to talk about what they don’t talk about. What we talk to ourselves about anyway, deep inside.

  I want them to see what they don’t see. What we see all the time anyway, but are afraid to put into words.

  I want them to do what they don’t do. What we want to do anyway, if we ever could become helpless enough to do it.

  (1969)

  Our Story About the World

  Nature has its necessity, its direction, its force.

  A flower can’t suddenly stop and decide not to bloom.

  A child can’t have second thoughts about being born and stay inside its warm mother.

  And the earth can’t change its route and head out for a trip around Jupiter, or out beyond the solar system.

  But what about art?

  Is there anything called art’s necessity, its direction and force?

  Does art originate from the same necessity that gives rise to beehives, the songs of larks, and the dances of cranes?

  Is it a natural expression that unavoidably bursts forth as an extension of what already exists? A natural phenomenon like all others, something that sets itself in motion, necessitated by the forces of nature, occasionally using a human being as its workplace?

  And is it just as vital for human beings, as necessary for maintaining life, as the hive is for bees, the song is for larks, and the dance is for cranes?

  Granted, it’s hard to call Michelangelo a workplace.

  But if we say that art expresses itself through him, he’s not diminished, just as he isn’t diminished when we say that he expresses himself through art. Surely both are happening.

  And in that single, indivisible, unified expression, both Michelangelo and art itself are in connection with what is puzzling and mysterious about the necessity of natural phenomena.

  It’s true that everything is chance and change, but only because there also is an order.

  Only because simultaneously, beneath what is changing and inexpressible, there is an order and a beauty that can burst forth at any time.

  Because even though we may never swim in the same river twice, it’s still the river called Ganges, Mississippi, or Po that we’re swimming in.

  All that flowing changeability, borne up by what is eternally the same. Michelangelo as a ripple on the surface of art.

  One could say that it’s not the individual works of art that are necessary, but art per se.

  As the earliest humans spoke, we speak too, and our speech, without our noticing how it happens, can lapse into rhythm, become a song or a poem, so that getting up in the morning, for instance, can become a song of joy about getting up.

  And in the same way, all our normal ways of moving can suddenly become dance.

  In the sounds of the tools we use, we suddenly hear music, which we pursue and continue as we go on with our work, or instead of going on with our work.

  And because our senses are always in play, our household items acquire decorative touches, our fabrics acquire colors and designs. Our children receive toys and our dead receive gifts, and it all seems essential.

  For just as the wind can draw patterns in water and sand, and rustle in leaves, and whistle in chimneys, and blow the clouds around so that they dance and die, so Michelangelo can also draw and paint and whistle at the same time, and see swirling visions of what hasn’t yet been created.

  The question is whether humans are at all able to avoid building boats, once they’ve seen a floating branch and their bodies have felt that it can bear their weight.

  Whether we are at all able to do without art, once it has lifted us into a context, no matter how light and temporary, which gives us a glimpse of the unbroken wholeness of the universe.

  Certainly we can drink water from a faucet, just as it is. But once we’ve seen water spurting from the mouth of a sculpted lion or fish, or streaming from the mouths of dragons, swans, or gods, then we thirst for water from those works of art, no matter how much regular tap water we drink.

  Not for the sake of entertainment. But because works of art can be experienced as pieces of our story about the world, in which we tell each other, in pictures, words, shapes, figures, that the world has an overarching meaning, even though it is hidden.

  A meaning that’s not always dependent on whether we can see what the individual parts of the story are supposed to represent. Because meaning can emerge just as clearly, maybe more clearly, without any directly representational elements, as in music or abstract art.

  Although artistic movements away from representational realism have not been without their problems.

  For example, when the visual arts began moving toward abstract depictions of motion — the motion that permeates reality itself.

  And stopped depicting things, but instead depicted the relationships that matter for things. The breakdowns and shifts that create or fail to create harmony.

  Also by highlighting the pure, unbridled joy of trying to grasp the shared life of color and form.

  “Anyone at all could have painted that,” people say. “A chimp could have painted that.” “My kid could have painted that.” “Heck, I could have painted that myself, if I’d wanted to.”

  And that is both true and completely untrue.

  No matter what, the fact that all of us can paint, and think we can paint, and generally can reach preliminary agreement about it, is an expression of the necessity of art.

  That’s why it must be considered remarkable that artists have been able to paint exactly what anyone else could have painted.<
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  This “anyone else,” whether chimps or children or anyone at all, also includes the artist. And what the artist has always already expressed. Michelangelo too. Also when he paints what no one else at all could have painted.

  What I’m getting at here is the connections and differences among all entities on earth.

  Our abilities, development, and understanding as a shared project.

  Stones and insects, rainforests, humans, and cloud formations, all as a collective necessity.

  If we couldn’t sing, play instruments, and dance, if we couldn’t tell stories and describe the world for each other, we would never be able to understand the world, nor would the world ever be able to understand itself through us.

  All the knowledge we have is, in a certain sense, already gathered in the great works of art.

  For that reason it’s also impossible to imagine intellectual or scientific creativity that doesn’t draw on forgotten childhood experiences, on experiences of nature, literature, music, etc. — of everything that has brought us wonder, everything we remember without knowing we remember it, everything that makes us wish and hope, everything we love, or worship, or feel ourselves part of. But also everything we hate. Including our hatred of the fact that we can destroy, and we can die. And kill.

  In the second volume of his memoirs, The Torch in My Ear, Elias Canetti describes how day after day in Frankfurt, he sought out Rembrandt’s painting The Blinding of Samson, in order to learn about himself. The painting shows two soldiers gouging out Samson’s eyes, while Delilah, who hired the soldiers, exults in the background.

  “I often stood in front of this painting, and from it I learned what hatred is. I had felt hatred when very young, much too young, at five, when I had tried to kill Laurica with an ax. But you don’t know what you have felt: you have to see it in front of you, in others, in order to recognize it and know it. Something you recognize and know becomes real only if you have experienced it previously. It lies dormant in you, and you can’t name it; then all at once, it is there, as a painting, and something happening to others creates itself in you as a memory: now, it is real.”

  When we write poetry, the process can often start in contemplation of language.

  And it’s exactly that concentration on words and combinations of words, which, in themselves, are essentially empty, that can elicit key memories.

  Memories that will make it possible for readers to access their own memories.

  In this way we come to live in a shared linguistic process, where experience and the creation of art are interwoven.

  Just the fact that I can both see and be seen. And that I can see myself. And see myself see. See myself being seen. Also by others. Who themselves see and are seen. This already comprises the seed of art’s necessity.

  “Is this waterfall of images really a house?”

  That’s a quote from one of my own poetry volumes, Letter in April, but it was originally a comment made by my son — six years old at the time — as we watched a TV program about the architecture of India.

  The program featured the temple of Shiva in Madurai, the camera slowly panning over the whole vast wealth of figures adorning the outer walls. “Is this waterfall of images really a house?”

  Yes, it is. One needs only to have experienced a waterfall. Or to know what it is. To know that there is something called images. And one needs to be able to see the images as a coursing stream, as opposed to the static thing one previously thought of as a house.

  And this image-stream of a house, which belongs to consciousness, could easily be called beehive, lark-song, and crane-dance.

  For as human beings, we can’t avoid being part of the artistic process, where source, creation, and effect are inextricably bound together.

  Here in our necessity.

  (1989)

  Silk, the Universe, Language, the Heart

  Silk is a noun. All nouns are very lonely. They’re like crystals, each enclosing its own little piece of our knowledge about the world. But examine them thoroughly, in all their degrees of transparency, and sooner or later they’ll reveal their knowledge. Say the word silk, and it vanishes with the sound, but your senses, your memory and knowledge cast back an echo. Write it on a piece of paper, and it stays there, unmoving, but your thoughts and feelings are already on their way to the farthest corners of the world. That’s what I mean about the loneliness of nouns; each one has to be self-contained, as if it were the only word that existed. As if silk were the only word, and is therefore able at any time to awaken our encapsuled knowledge not only of silk, but of the world itself. Even of forgetting. Just try to forget the word silk, and you’ll be reminded of it next time you see the summer sky, a flower petal, or the membrane between two muscles in a butchered chicken.

  I found silk in the writings of Lu Chi, in his Ars Poetica. He was born in China in 261 A.D. and executed, age forty-two, in 303 A.D. Like his father and grandfather, he held a high military rank, but he was summarily executed after a violent battle by the Yangtze River, when he lost so many soldiers that their corpses blocked the river’s flow. For ten years of his short life he lived in seclusion, immersed in studies. He left behind three hundred poems and essays, among them a little book about the art of writing, where I found silk.

  “In a single meter of silk, the infinite universe exists.” That’s what Lu Chi writes. He writes the Chinese word for silk, paints the word with his brush, as he must have done so often, on a piece of silk. I think I can see him sitting there, his brush dipped in ink but still only partly lifted, listening within himself, while the only thing visible to his inward-turned gaze is the silk, the emptiness and boundlessness, the infinite universe, from which he pulls in his perspective at the moment that he lifts the brush and writes the word silk.

  Maybe the silk was blue. All adjectives are very helpless. They never really have much substance. Day after day, they have to cling to all the nouns they can find. So blue always has to cling to the sky, to the iris of the eye, to chicory, bluebells, and copper sulfate, to the reflection of the sky in lakes and seas. It would be the same if the silk were white. Then white would have had to cling to snow and rice, to lilies and pearls and cooked fish, to stars and teeth. And now the silk, white or blue, with the help of these helpless adjectives has already become able to leave its aloneness as a noun, and is on its way toward snow or the sky, chicory or the pearl, and farther on into the infinite. Or else the infinite is on its way into the silk. Maybe I should say the apparently infinite. Or does the infinite already encompass that, the apparently infinite? For instance, the longest silk thread in the world could never be called apparently infinite if the concept of infinity didn’t already exist.

  Lu Chi must have known that, because he had known silk all his life. His family was very well off and owned large rice fields and mulberry groves near the Yangtze delta, and bamboo groves in the hill country by Lake Hangzhou. Of course Lu Chi could easily have written the word silk on silk without thinking of the silk moth; but often enough he probably thought of it, and maybe especially of its larva, the silkworm, which lives on mulberry leaves, and of its silken web, where it pupates in a small cocoon. The outer part is densely matted, the inner part almost parchment-like, the middle part best of all for silk production, but it turns out to be one continuous silk thread approximately four thousand meters long. So maybe Lu Chi never could write the word silk without thinking of the four thousand meters of thread inside every single cocoon. Summer after summer, he saw silkworms by the thousands in the mulberry groves, transforming their small bites of mulberry leaves into cloaks of apparently infinite silk thread. Apparently infinite, or infinite? Maybe Lu Chi just told himself that the apparently infinite is what looks like infinity, if infinity could be seen. Or maybe he thought that infinity not only encompasses the apparently infinite, but that in its infinite nature, it is also encompassed by its own apparency, so that at
the moment when the silk thread was shuttling back and forth across the loom, Lu Chi truly was able to see infinity woven into its every single meter.

  But maybe Lu Chi didn’t use adverbs at all. The parts of speech that we call adverbs may not even exist in Chinese. I could look it up. But ultimately it’s beside the point here. I should simply avoid adverbs. As far as possible. But adverbs are quite strong-willed. And fairly insistent. They always find a way in. Like apparently, for example. It absolutely had to position itself before the adjective infinite. Regrettably, when with no problem at all it could have put itself in front of so many other adjectives. Apparently alone, apparently helpless, apparently motionless. But right is right. It does seem that the space in front of infinite is glaringly empty, and there aren’t very many adverbs that want to position themselves there. Not quite infinite, or rather infinite, or very infinite. Not even insanely or just unusually. Maybe constantly. But apparently got there first. Apparently infinite. And like all other adverbs, it wants to take control, weigh values, pronounce judgments. So that nouns and adjectives can barely manage to be alone together and move about on their own. Just look at the quote from Lu Chi. Adverbs would have ruined everything: “In a single meter of silk the apparently infinite universe exists.” That’s not how silk should be treated. Especially not by a person like Lu Chi, who trusts his own and others’ capacity to conceptualize.

  If we think we can cast the shadow of logical questions over Lu Chi’s silk sentence, if we flatly think that what he writes about silk and the universe is wrong, or if we reduce it to a so-called poetic metaphor, then we haven’t understood Lu Chi. According to Lu Chi, logical questions have nothing to do with poetry. The language of poetry is infinite, but the language of logic is only apparently infinite. All in all, language is pre-logical, while logic is a specialty with a limited range, a very useful specialty that lets us speak objectively about what we call an objective world. But it is also a very dangerous specialty, because we clearly have a tendency to confuse this objective world with the world itself. Yet Lu Chi doesn’t let himself be fooled into making language less than the reality it’s connected to. Language can’t be separated from the world without separating the world from itself. That’s why Lu Chi answers, even before these predictable questions are asked, by presenting his silk clause in conjunction with another, about language: “In a single meter of silk, the infinite universe exists; language is a Great Flood from a small corner of the heart.” Silk, the universe, language, and the heart — he links them by creating two parallel clauses that flow into each other and unite only when they have reached far beyond our field of vision.