The Collected Prose

by Zbigniew Herbert

  SHIELD US FROM THE DARK WORD…1

  IT IS SAID that language is the material of poetry, what stone is to the sculptor and sound to the musician. This similitude can be further developed to say that stone is used not only to sculpt heroes but to make flagstones, and a trumpet has one meaning in a Weber opera and another as a traffic signal.

  Let us carry over these observations to the sphere of language and take for example the word “moon.” For an astronomer, or in the language of science, it is a specific well-defined heavenly body. For us, or in everyday language, when we say “the moon was full last night,” it is simply a bright disc suspended in the sky. So far, so good, but here the devil suddenly pops out of the box. For there is one among us, a normal person even if a poet, who says that the moon is “…my full inkwell, sold me by a traveling peddler…” (Gałczynski2). Of course “the moon equals an inkwell” is logical nonsense and it’s not the poet’s intention to pull the wool over our eyes in such a naïve way. But hence the dislike of poetry felt by all those who read it literally, that is, ascribe to the poetic word its common meaning. What Gałczynski said doesn’t topple Copernicus’s system, doesn’t create any new scientific truth; it may be an expression of intimate affinity with the moon as a source of poetic inspiration. For poets are obliged to use the same signs as market stallholders, magistrates, and journalists, but poets give them another, uncommon meaning of their own, and that way they create a poetic language.

  This happens because the expression of thought, emotion, imagination—in short, inner content—demands a more delicate material than our impoverished, sloppy everyday speech. Someone who doesn’t know many words in a foreign language can’t find any subtle feelings or profound thoughts in that language.

  Every great poetry is a creation of a new language out of old words.

  All outstanding poets feel deeply this fundamental problem of literature—the problem of the word. They see their chief task as developing, strengthening, and creating meanings of words in order to express themselves more perfectly.

  But there are also poets for whom the word detaches itself from the object, acquiring physical characteristics, living a life of its own. The poet doesn’t merely think in words, but words turn into beings that can be heard, touched, seen. We find an excellent example of this poetic oversensitivity in Słowacki:

  …who would know what it means3

  without looking into the soul’s realm,

  that some words have a bloodier color

  and others are as of rainbows spun:

  and others, having spilt their odor,

  coming to the desperate bard as tone,

  fall into a long column of rhyme,

  still and soundless corpses in a tomb.

  The Symbolists—that group of poets at the end of the nineteenth century (Mallarmé, Verlaine, Rimbaud, Baudelaire, Régnier, and others) who still have a powerful influence on contemporary poetry—ignited a veritable riot over this question.

  Rimbaud, the great magus of the word and of Symbolism, says: “I regulated4 the form and movement of each consonant and with instinctive rhythms I prided myself on inventing a poetic language accessible some day to all the senses…I wrote silences, I wrote the night. I recorded the inexpressible. I fixed frenzies in their flight.”

  The greatest vertigo of this word-drunk poet is the famous sonnet in which he reveals the colors of vowels:

  Black A5, White E, Red I, Green U, Blue O: vowels.

  Someday I’ll explain your burgeoning births:

  A, a corset, black and hairy, buzzing with flies

  Bumbling like bees around a merciless stench,

  And shadowy gulfs…

  His epigones went on to develop this fine paradox into a system. To Rimbaud’s colors one (and fortunately only one) René Ghil6 added sounds and emotional states corresponding to those sounds. Poets were to be like magicians pulling rabbits from empty top hats. They outdid each other in subtleties. Huysmans, a remarkable novelist, determined the musical impressions aroused by taste. If there is any meaning to the claim that the letter “z” expresses the instinct of altruistic love or that cumin liqueur corresponds to a nasal oboe, it slips through our fingers, and that isn’t our fault. A poet who loved a girl in a green dress, appointed green to be the symbol of love. Poetry turned into a mysterious code for personal experience, losing its communicative, human meaning.

  The sad legacy of Symbolist anarchy was passed on to the Dadaists, and the lettrists who, having destroyed the meaning of words, now assemble weird arabesques suited only for a cabinet of literary curiosities.

  What Rimbaud did was driven by his astonishing imagination and talent. Many of his successors were stunted by pedantic rules and dry schemas. The word as the element set free in Goethe’s ballad would not obey the sorcerer’s reckless apprentices.

  From all of this a certain lesson can be drawn for readers: let them try to penetrate the value of a word not only by way of its meaning but also by its back stairs, its lining. Let them try to hear its sound, see its shade, its light and weight. And let them not be ashamed of naïve perceptions. If Słowacki’s stanza dazzles them with bright radiance, or they hear in Norwid’s7 funeral rhapsody the harsh rattle of armies, they will be closer to poetry than those who conceal their literary deafness under a wreath of learned platitudes.

  But the word must return to its mother port—meaning. This is not just an aesthetic problem but also a moral one. Naming objects and things human conduces to their understanding and judgment. Particularly after a chaos of ideas, after the last war, after a flood of lies, poetry must take on the labor of the moral reconstruction of the world by rebuilding the value of words. We have to part good from evil, light from darkness once again.

  For that reason the last stanza of a beautiful poem by Jerzy Liebert is the prayer of all poets concerned not only with aesthetic problems but also with the ethical, social dimension of poetry:

  Breathe in us, may your hand8

  pour olive oil onto our breast.

  Shield us from the dark word,

  From the dark word, save us!

  1948

  CHARACTER SKETCHES

  Augustyn1

  To Mr Zygmunt Jakimiak

  Ama et quod vis fac2!

  Every character is some kind of error!

  IF YOU ASKED ME what strikes me most about Augustyn, I’d say: his eyes. They are like inverted mirrors—gray and dysfunctional, as if they were not supposed to reflect light but were turned into the depths of the person looking, Augustyn himself. This is so profoundly at odds with the essence of ordinary common-or-garden eyes that it arouses prejudice from the outset.

  Apart from that, I don’t like it when Augustyn…but here I tell myself I can’t go on like this. After all, this is the mistake made by all who, wishing to characterize this unusual man, begin by enumerating his oddities and flaws. One accusation doesn’t exhaust Augustyn’s case but draws others on after it, and the more that inventory grows we enter heedlessly into common slander, and annoyed by the fact we multiply our negative comments from a frustrated sense that none of them is accurate, that they neither delineate the man clearly nor erase his form. No, no, you really can’t begin by listing Augustyn’s sins: I strongly suspect they are virtues which offend us.

  Some say Augustyn is a frivolous person. In the most profound discussion he confuses the issue and comes to conclusions so unexpected they make everyone laugh. This laughter isn’t directed at Augustyn; it contains the liberated joy of someone who suddenly discovers a startling color in the sky, or the hilarity of a poet who finds a metaphor so absurd it’s funny while also being true.

  In his reasoning Augustyn is consistent. In his own way, of course, that is to say—without limits. At a certain point we like to say “enough,” here a pleasant shade reigns, this is where it’s convenient and practical to stop. Augustyn provokes our terror of the absurd, our fear of a boundary, the anxiety of the abyss that opens up only a few steps
from the manicured garden of our concepts and values. Speaking of his consistency, I’m also thinking of the fact that it’s not objective, external, logical, but on the contrary, internal: a consistency with the world of his own contradictions, as befits a man who does battle with himself, which in Augustyn’s case is to say—no mean opponent.

  Of course this is not an attempt to explain, but the fact that Augustyn made the long journey from the primordial to the heights of civilization on his own strength, that is, without the involvement of ancestors, may cast a certain light on the matter. We find the traces of this pilgrimage in his mind, where a naïve totemic superstition exists next to a powerfully delineated system full of subtle distinctions and abstractions suspended in air. For example, Augustyn cannot rid himself of a visceral image of hell, as his carnal nature and carnal sins are too deeply rooted to bolt from a dazzle of syllogisms and the five proofs of God’s existence.

  This is precisely what led one of us to call Augustyn a philosopher in a state of nature.

  And this is the right place, the moment to elaborate on Augustyn’s system. But I won’t, because in my view a man who fights so hard has only tactics, and what he says is more a manifestation of temptations than a formulation of the truth about the world. To conclude this brief introduction to Augustyn, I have to close it down with one word. I will say the word: ardor.

  “PATRYK”

  1950

  Sylvester

  THIS IS HOW I met Sylvester: he sent me a letter and twenty-four poems linked by a common title. I can’t remember exactly what it was called: Sonata, Quartet, something like that. I just know the word had in it the high, resonant voice of a flute. It made me eager to read the poems, especially as the letter asking for a review was reserved and unpretentious.

  Leafing through the pages I noticed the poems were untitled, which for me is an impediment to reading. I’m in the habit of picking a title from the list of contents, letting my mind dwell on the subject for a moment, and only then reading what the poet thinks about it. That’s where the charming and exciting exchange trade of the imagination begins. But here there was no point of contact, everything was marked with three stars (***), and how to make friends with that astronomy?

  My initial enthusiasm faded, and when I saw the poems were typed on a German typewriter and, read literally, turned into helpless mumbo-jumbo, I put them away in the bottom lefthand drawer of my desk, where I keep old concert and theater programs. I wrote back that I was leaving town and I’d write a full letter in a month’s time.

  Of course I forgot. But after a month had passed Sylvester turned up in person, introduced himself and asked for his poems back. That set me against him a little: calls himself a poet, and yet he’s so fussy. So I asked him for two more days’ time and said the poems were interesting (that adjective seemed most elastic and non-committal). Right after Sylvester left I sat down to read them.

  The first words confirmed my sense that I was dealing with an authentic poet. Without any preliminaries he soared heavenward on the wings of a dazzlingly bold metaphor. An image emerged after the metaphor, but without a transition, without any visible necessity, driven by the pulse of a restless imagination. The image was suffused with air, filled with quivering possibilities, so that it was hard to ascribe to it any lasting shape. It was like a landscape summed up in a sketch by a few lines about to be wiped out by someone’s sleeve.

  After that image, I thought, the poet will rest and the reflective part will begin. But no, the image again entered the figurative; metaphors now came hard and fast and after a meteoric flight, exploded on the very edge of sight, sailing high in the sky like a display of fireworks. I read as if with my head thrown back. I don’t know why, but the image of a poet with the tired mouth of a circus artist flashed before me. That’s where I got the title of my review: On a Trapeze of Dizzy Metaphors.

  I began it enthusiastically by promising a literary revelation: a new lyrical frisson. But on second thought I crossed out the introduction, as its green enthusiasm betrayed my age, pitifully tender for a critic.

  Then I started, at first without great conviction, to look for things with which to reproach him. What had knocked me out before, those metaphors, now seemed to me artificial and forced.

  In Sylvester I saw a hypertrophism of that fine poetic resource: call it his arrogance. I felt in many cases it destroyed his poetic construction. It was as if someone were building cathedrals solely out of bare Gothic arches, scorning mere bricks and common craftsmanship. That’s why the lyricism was replaced by dazzlement, or rather, disorientation. And at the end of the poem, a feeling of loneliness and deprivation: after a splendid show of lightning, when we’re waiting for thunder, the poet shoves a handful of loose magnesium powder in our face. In saying “thunder,” of course I’m not thinking of an acoustic effect but of an emotion or perhaps a mood, or rather, of the poet’s lyrical presence. Whereas Sylvester, having put out a stage set and bathed it in an extraordinary light, left the stage. Writing this I remembered his brief dry handshake and was pleased by the memory, as if I had found in it a confirmation of my own remarks.

  Reading through what I had written again, I was appalled. The review was far from precise; it was full of comparisons, impressions, and images. Not wishing to praise Sylvester directly, I had employed his methods. It was some kind of Sylvestrian spite or revenge, or an involuntary approbation of his poetry.

  In the end I didn’t know whether the review was favorable or too harsh, so to soften it a little I wrote that in treating Sylvester as severely as if he were a mature poet, I was giving expression to the great hopes I cherished for his poetic future.

  A few weeks later he came to see me again. He brought some new poems and said he now lived on the same street as I did. I felt I should spend some time on him, especially as his reading even in the sphere of poetry left a great deal to be desired. I borrowed some classic volumes from the library and made him read aloud. I was astonished to find that Sylvester couldn’t read properly and that this inability was organic. Sylvester mixed up words, turned syntax upside down, faltered, and you could tell he couldn’t simply follow a text word by word, line by line. This led to little improvisations full of puns and slips of the tongue which cracked both of us up, but sometimes gave birth to an unexpected metaphor. I was usually lying on the couch listening to him with my eyes closed. Just once I saw Sylvester stealthily writing down one of these unearned metaphors on the back of a tram ticket.

  Sylvester’s consciousness, full of evasions, gaps, and obscurities, functions like a faulty power station. Power failures are compensated for by periods of illumination of the kind nobody with a regular stream of perceptions and emotions will ever know. Hence the blank spots in his images, hence the desire to assemble fragments of reality into a whole, hence those metaphors.

  And hence, finally—if I may end this observation on a personal note—hence the thorny problem I acquired. The title of the problem—perhaps I will one day write another, spiteful article about it—is Poetry as Handicap.

  1950

  Anastatius, Or Good Morning

  “GOOD MORNING, GOOD MORNING, Mrs. Gut,” says Anastatius when he leaves the building early in the morning. Mrs. Gut never answers, although everyone knows she is up by that time, and you might think that with this daily greeting Anastatius is merely checking that the world cannot accept him and that the mechanism of indifference is working without a hitch.

  In the opinion of his neighbors, people characterized by an extraordinary inquisitiveness who have invented a curious defense against disappointments, which is to think the worst of everyone—in the opinion of his neighbors, Anastatius is a tramp and a good-for-nothing. The epithet “good-for-nothing” doesn’t fit the name Anastatius, if only in terms of sound, nor does it harmonize with his gray hair and the fundamentally industrious life he leads.

  As for the epithet “tramp,” it could have only arisen in the minds of people who judge from appearances. It’s
true that Anastatius does a lot of walking and his tempo is slow, but his walking has nothing of the frivolous levity of the tramp, nor the shaky gait of the beggar.

  For Anastatius, it must finally be said, is an honest finder by profession. Yes, you heard me right, and there’s no need to shrug. Please understand the work of a man who covers long city streets and park lanes in the early morning when garbagemen are still asleep, who bends down for every scrap of paper, taps sewers with a cane, or calls out affectionately to a frightened little Pinscher, luring it with a bit of sausage.

  Who does not know the feeling of annoyance that comes with losing something? It is not just regret for a lost item of value, there is a much more profound feeling in it: doubt in the order of the world, caused by the sudden intrusion of chance. There is also the natural irritation of a person discovering that objects removed from our sight and grasp cease to exist for us.

  Of course, Anastatius is not entirely aware of the philosophical dimension of his profession, however much he has built up a sense of the dignity and weight of his endeavors. The only thing that worries him is how people reveal their robust egoism at moments of joy. Glad at regaining what they lost, they disappear into their apartments, leaving Anastatius in the hall, or they invite him in for a cup of tea, afraid of insulting the nice old man by offering him money. In fact the business is more complicated than that and has nothing of the relationship of a butcher to a lover of sausages. Anastatius never asks for any reward, he drinks the tea, which is an additional sacrifice—I don’t know if you know what tea can do to an empty stomach.

  As we have done so much to clear Anastatius of slander, let us see this matter to an end. Let us defend him against two charges that Mrs. Gut sums up with the unsophisticated terms “glutton” and “palmist.”

  There’s no use denying Anastatius likes poppy-seed pastries. But this does no one any harm, though the pleasure of eating sweets before bed may bother those who don’t understand the joys of life to which our little weaknesses contribute. On the other hand, the hunt for poppy-seeds around Anastatius’ bed says more about Mrs. Gut than the strongest language.