I don’t believe that rancorous night, to avenge its retreat from above these regions, had drained its heavy octopus heart of blue-black ink to our detriment.
I don’t believe the octopus night so rancorous for its retreat beyond the horizon as to have wished to drain the blue-black ink from its heavy heart on this occasion.
I don’t believe night so rancorous
As to have wished octopus on this occasion
To drain from its heart a flow of blue-black ink.
I don’t believe night so rancorous
that on retreating behind the horizon
it would have wished to drain the blue-black ink
from its octopus heart on this occasion.
Note (Point) of Order Concerning the Provence Sky
July 19, 1941
The point is to describe the sky clearly, just as it appeared to me and impressed me so deeply.
From this description, or following from it, will rise in simple terms the explanation of my deep emotion.
That I was so moved can undoubtedly be attributed to the revelation, through this form, of an important aesthetic and moral principle.
From the intensity of my emotion, the tenacity of my efforts to account for it, and the scruples that forbade my skimping on the description of it, I can gauge the importance of that law.
I must uncover this law, this lesson (La Fontaine would have said this moral). It could just as readily be a scientific law, a theorem.
. . . So then, initially, a sob, an emotion with no apparent cause (the feeling of beauty is not enough to explain it. Why this feeling? Beauty is a word that replaces another).
This means clarifying and casting light, uncovering the reasons (for my emotions) and the law (of this landscape), making this landscape serve for something other than an aesthetic sob, inducing it to become a logical, moral tool, inducing the mind and spirit to make great strides on its behalf.
My whole philosophic and poetic stance lies within this problem.
Note that I’m undergoing huge difficulties due to the vast number of images that flock to my disposal (and mask, lay masks on, reality) due to the originality of my point of view (strangeness would be more like it) – to my excessive (Protestant) scruples – to my immoderate ambition, etc.
Steadily emphasizing that the whole secret of victory lies in the scrupulous accuracy of the description: “I was impressed by this and that”: there must be no backing down on this, no rearranging, it must be performed in a truly scientific manner.
Once again this means plucking (from the tree of science) the forbidden fruit, with all due deference to the powers of shadow that dominate us, to Monsieur God in particular.
This means actively militating (modestly but effectively) for the “light” and against obscurantism – the obscurantism that threatens to submerge us once again in the 20th century through a return to the barbarous conditions advocated by the bourgeoisie as the sole means of saving its privileges.
(To grasp the nature of a thing, one can – if unable to seize it initially – induce it to appear through comparison, through successive eliminations: “It’s not this, it’s not that, etc.” – a metatechnical question, or simply technical.)
July 19, 1941
When G.A. wrote to me recently about The Pine Woods Notebook: “The outcome of your efforts runs too great a risk of becoming a quasi-scientific perfection which, for having undergone purification, tends toward a compendium of interchangeable materials. Each thing in itself, rigorously specific and brought to term, is excellent. The whole becomes a patchwork,” he was right on the mark. Yes, I wish to be less a poet than a “savant.” – I have less desire to wind up with a poem than a formula, a clarification of impressions. If it’s possible to found a science whose matter would be aesthetic impressions, I want to be the man of that science.
“Stretch out on the ground,” I wrote fifteen years ago, “and start over again with everything right from the beginning.” – Neither a scientific treatise, nor the encyclopedia, nor the Littré: something both more and less . . . and the way to avoid patchwork will be to publish not only the formula one might have taken as the conclusion, but to publish the entire history of the research, the journal of one’s exploration . . .
And further down Audisio went on: “I believe the artist cannot aspire for better than to eternalize the shared moment of the thing and himself.” But come now, my dear Audisio, when dealing with a lion entangled in a net and a rat who frees him, La Fontaine comes to this:
One gnawed mesh won the day.
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Patience and the course of time
Do better than force or rage
Where does La Fontaine figure in all this, where is the shared moment between the lion or the rat and himself? Isn’t this instead a quasi-scientific perfection, the birth of formula? There’s the truth of an action by the lion – entangled strength and rage, and an action by the rat – a gnawed net . . . We often need someone smaller than ourselves. – It is on proverbs much like this that I’d like to conclude. But my chimera would be rather to have no other subject than the lion itself. As though La Fontaine, instead of doing in succession The Lion and the Rat, The Aged Lion, The Animals Sick with the Plague, etc., had only written a single fable about The Lion. It would have been much more difficult. A fable that gave the nature of the lion. As in Theophrastus and his Characters.
Three important readings in the last few days have seemed to correspond in an amazing way to my preoccupations: a) The Obscurantism of the 20th Century, an anonymous article in an underground journal – about Rosenberg’s speech at the Palais-Bourbon; b) The Lesson of Ribérac by Aragon in Fontaine, #14; c) Vigilantes nar-rare somnia by Caillois in the Cahiers du Sud, June 1941 issue.
The first text, totally convincing, confirms my desire to struggle for enlightenment, reassures me on the urgency of my mission (?), and compels me to rethink the problem of the relationship between my esthetic and political positions. The second also offers several confirmations: closed language preparing for general public acceptance (that’s not quite it). The third, rather false in its eloquence, rather conventional despite its pretension, shows me what stringent scruples coupled with constantly renewed acerbic audacity it would take to approach this sort of problem. And when (fourth important text, fifth counting Audisio’s) Pia writes to me: “The coffee, the grounds, the filter, the boiling water, etc.” I clearly see that YES, it is interesting to show the process of “my thought.” But that doesn’t mean that under this pretext one must abandon all restraint, for that would run counter to my purpose. – Yet it is very legitimate for a savant to describe his discovery in detail, to relate his experiences, etc.
Roanne, July 19 to 28
(Time to get back to it!)
At the place known as “La Mounine” not far from Aix-en-Provence
One April morning around eight o’clock
The sky though limpid seen through foliage
Appeared to me mingled with shadow.
A beautiful day is also a meteor, I thought, and would not give up until I had invented some sort of expression to capture it:
At first I thought (it was hardly so) that rancorous night
To avenge its retreat from above these regions
Had wished to drain of blue-black ink
Its octopus heart on that occasion.
Or perhaps, I said to myself (it was hardly) infused drop by drop
Could this be the poison whose dreaded name
Strangely close to its color
Begins like ciel and ends like azure
If I say “veiled by its own luster” I won’t be much further along.
Perhaps the sky is so dark only in comparison to other things: trees, houses, etc., which are so brightly lit, storehouses of light!
As when on leaving a brilliantly lit room, the outdoors seems dark . . .
. . .
Comparison with the Northern skies.
July 25, 1941, 1:30 in the morning
Something new.
Just as a blotter or a rag moistened with water is darker than when dry – (Why? Does optic science supply the answer?) When dry, they are 1) more brittle, 2) paler – so similarly the blue sky is a blotter saturated with interstellar night.
More or less moistened, it is more or less dark: in Aix-en-Provence it is thoroughly saturated (because there’s not much of anything between itself and the interstellar spaces).
In the Midi, there’s a lot of sun, of course, but there’s also the (concomitant) interstellar night.
They struggle against one another (in the sense that Verlaine says, “the high heels were struggling with the long skirts”).
One could say that in the Midi the sun triumphs less than in the North: to be sure, it triumphs more over the clouds, the fog, etc., but it triumphs less over its principal adversary: the interstellar night.
Why? Because it dries the water vapor, which in the atmosphere constituted the best triumphant screen for it. A screen whose absence makes itself felt, resulting in a greater transparency and capacity for saturation on the part of the interstellar ether.
It is the interstellar night which on beautiful days one sees by transparency, and which makes the blue of the meridional sky so dark.
Explain this through analogy to the marine milieu (or aquatic rather).
July 29 to August 5
At the place known as “La Mounine” not far from Aix-en-Provence
On an April morning around eight o’clock
The sky though limpid through foliage
Appeared to me mingled with shadow
I gathered for the first time that rancorous night . . .
La Mounine
a. Verse I
b. then:For the moment I was struck dumb
A beautiful day is also a meteor, I thought,
Not one expression came to mind
I was succumbing in to the effects of that meteor
Like an overwhelming wave, like a damnation
I felt a sense of the tragic
Of the implacable.
At the same time – perhaps through conventional eyes –
I found it beautiful.
Overwhelmed by the intensity of the phenomenon
Each time I looked up
I noticed that shadow again
mingled with daylight
that reproach
c. then:that was the moment when the statues appeared and I was seized by a sob,
the human element introduced by the statues
struck me as wrenching
d. I sat stunned, then distracted by other impressions: our arrival at Aix, the subsequent events, etc.
e. But clearly I was to remember my strong emotional reaction. That is surely the poetic subject, what impels me to write: either the desire to recast the picture, preserving forever its apparent joy, or the desire to comprehend the cause of my emotion, to analyze it.
f. Getting down to work, I met with great difficulties and drew up several coherent images: an octopus, cyanide, the explosion of petals,
g. knowing full well that I had to get past them, be done with them in order to reach the true (?) explanation, the one about the clearing that opens onto the interstellar night.
The upper abyss (zenithal). The sun is made to blind us, it transforms the sky into a frosted glass pane through which one can no longer see reality: the one that appears at night, the inter-stellar one.
But in some regions the transparency (serenity) of the atmosphere, is such that the presence of this abyss is perceptible even in broad daylight. That is the case in Provence. The sky above Provence constantly offers a clearing, like a pane of clear glass in a frosted skylight.
True, the sun prevents us from seeing the stars in daylight, but one imagines the interstellar night, darkening the sky, giving it this leaded appearance.
If we so love to come to the Mediterranean region, it’s because of this, to enjoy the night in broad daylight and under the sun, to relish this marriage of day and night, this constant presence of the interstellar infinity, which lends its gravity to human existence. Alliance rather than marriage. Here no illusions as in the North, no distraction by the phantasmagoria of clouds. Here everything comes about beneath the gaze of temporal eternity and spatial infinity.
Thus everything assumes its eternal character, its gravity.
Events like an overcast sky, a thunderstorm, a hurricane, seem to me of a sordid nature: they are routine procedures, terrestrial laundry. I like areas where this tedious hydrotherapy occurs as seldom as possible, happens briefly.
A thunderstorm like a shower, the ensuing sun as a dryer; really, my dear Beethoven, was it worth making such a grandiose production of this? Instead, take a look at Leonardo da Vinci’s storm, in which the importance of such a meteor is put in its rightful place.
It’s along the lines of what just precedes that there should be a continuation and completion of the poem whose opening would be fairly close to what follows:
La Mounine
At the place known as “La Mounine” not far from Aix-en- Provence
One April morning around eight o’clock
The sky though limpid through the foliage
Appeared to me mingled with shadow.
One might have said that the rancorous night
To avenge its retreat from above these regions
Had wished to drain the blue-black ink
From its octopus heart on this occasion
Or perhaps, I reflected, infused drop by drop,
Are we dealing with the poison whose dread name
Strangely close to its color
Begins like ciel and ends like azure
Why no! The atmosphere was such
That I couldn’t for whatever reason
Hope to see some term of comparison
Provided by the liquid element.
What we have here is a heavy gas either from congestion
Or else the result of some explosion
Within a sealed chamber of a billion or just one
Petal of blue violet . . .
Etc. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
But what matters now is to set our mind to rest, let it forget this, take up other things, and meanwhile feed slowly, in small bites – from the mucous layers, from the pulp – of this truth whose bark we’ve scarcely nicked.
One day, in a few months or a few years, when this truth at the core of our being has become habitual, taken for granted – maybe, upon rereading the awkward, labored pages just above, or else on contemplating afresh a Provence sky – I may in one simple, leisurely sweep write this Poem Struck in Afterthought on a Provence Sky, which was promised by the notebook title, but which – through excessive passion, infirmity, scruples – we’ve not yet been able to enjoy.
Roanne, May – August 1941
Designed by David Bullen Design
Typeset in MVB Verdigris with Perpetua display
Printed at Kromar of Winnipeg, Manitoba
The paper is 55 lb. recycled vellum
1 The Carnation is but one of them.
2 At La Suchère, I had no way to get hold of a Littré. So I simply noted the words to look up. Those kept of the Littré definitions were inserted opposite these words several weeks later, around the end of September.
3 M.P. refers to Michel Pontremoli and G.A. to Gabriel Audisio.
4 Ci anure. Cyanide.
Copyright © Editions Gallimard, Paris, 1976
English translation copyright © Lee Fahnestock, 2008
First Archipelago Books Edition, 2008
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form without the prior written permission of the publisher.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Ponge, Francis.
[Rage de l’expression. English]
Mute objects of expression / by Francis Po
nge ;
translated from the French by Lee Fahnestock.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references.
eISBN : 978-1-935-74449-8
Archipelago Books
232 Third Street, #A111
Brooklyn, New York 11215
www.archipelagobooks.org
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Portions of “Carnation” and “Mimosa” first appeared in Vegetation (1988, Red Dust) and The Nature of Things (1995, Red Dust)
This publication was made possible with support from Lannan Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, the New York State Council on the Arts, a state agency, and the French Ministry of Culture – Centre National du Livre.
Mute Objects of Expression Page 9
