In architecture the author of the Essays admires not proportions, style, or any aesthetic values, but size, singularity, and technical perfection. That is why he likes the leaning tower of Pisa, the Palazzo della Ragione in Padua, because its largest hall is unsupported by columns, and the palace of Urbino, because it has as many rooms as there are days in a year. Nevertheless he devotes most of his attention to religious architecture, writing quite laconically that he liked such-and-such a church best. But generally he likes Italian churches, especially Roman churches, less than German or French churches. The task of religious architecture—as a reading of this traveler’s journal suggests—is not to inspire awe but a religious frame of mind.
To the landscape Montaigne takes the same pragmatic—not aesthetic—attitude. We find in him neither descriptions of mountains nor the sylvan wilderness so beloved of the Romantics. Montaigne’s tastes are in complete harmony with the ancients, who adored an inhabited landscape with the soothing view of vineyards and cultivated fields. Untamed nature aroused terror. In Montaigne’s time, the equilibrium between the virgin earth and civilization had not yet been disturbed.
However, it is the antiquities of Rome that made the greatest impression on Montaigne. The author of the Essays, who spends so much attention during his journey on meals and the cleanliness of bedclothes, falls into a truly poetic and exalted mood at the sight of the Forum. His sobriety, formed by ancient authors (Montaigne often resembles a Renaissance Pliny), does not allow him to melt into sentimental raptures. He studies the topography of the Forum like an archaeologist and is amazed that so many buildings of traditions known from ancient texts fit into such a small area. (This is the characteristic incommensurability of the imagination with what we see with our own eyes, experienced by anyone who comes into contact with places brimming over with history.) He also notes that the earth’s level has risen to such an extent that there is no way of reconstructing what ancient Rome once looked like. He bemoans the fact that the ruins are heaps of bricks and stones, and that he finds no marble facings—not because they’re beautiful but because they held inscriptions; again, the eye of the scholar, not the artist.
How to explain the fact that the only remarks on art in Montaigne’s travel journal are so meager and uninteresting? It seems unjust and simplistic to explain it by a lack of aesthetic sensibility. We should rather draw the conclusion that for people of the Renaissance, a work of art was a much more natural thing than it is for us; there was no need to set it apart from the surrounding reality and bury it in a museum. From that time onward the frames of paintings have grown heavier (for us they are borders between worlds), the air around sculptures has thickened like amber, the walls of cathedrals have been covered with varnish…Montaigne’s glance met them as friends, trustingly, as objects among other objects—connected to the tree, the life growing all around, to the line of the horizon.
Yet a full explanation of the phenomenon should be put off until the time when a history of sensibility will be written. It has been remarked that the French poets and writers of the sixteenth century (Rabelais being an exception here) used smell, taste, and sound in their representations. It appears they were not able to “depict” a person or a place as “real,” visually ascertainable to a reader. Similarly, for ancient authors man was a collection of inner traits; his realness was manifested in words and actions, less in external physical features. Lucien Febvre3 says: “When we become acquainted with the writers of the sixteenth century, we are struck by the fact that, with a very few exceptions, they are not able to draw a sketch for the reader, nor to capture a likeness, create a protagonist of flesh and blood.” The chronicler’s monotony of Montaigne’s descriptions may have its source right here.
Incidentally, with minor stylistic alterations and cuts, the Voyage en Italie could be published today as the latest literary sensation of the nouveau roman school. However, I doubt that this would give the author of the Essays much satisfaction.
Montaigne was more sensitive to the odd, the ingenious, the technically innovative, than to things of beauty. He doesn’t omit to mention a single curiosity he encounters. His interest is particularly stirred by any kind of mechanism, especially waterworks, wells from which water is obtained by means of a pedal, various types of mills, a garden with hidden fountains serving to sprinkle unsuspecting passers-by. He devotes three pages to Augsburg’s defense works. He zealously studies the construction of an organ in Bolzano. He feels an infinite admiration for Pratolino, the estate of the Grand Prince of Tuscany with its artificial grotto, hydraulic organ, moving statues, gun reports, and birds chirping. Montaigne provides this somewhat circus-like spectacle with the comment: “This exceeded anything we had ever seen.”
This book, which we expect to be an excursion into the high realms of the spirit, is more reminiscent of a hotel and restaurant guide. The author seems often to have forgotten cathedrals, but he bends over his dinner plate with unfailing curiosity. He regrets not having brought his cook with him to learn the specialties of German and Swiss cuisine and as if for him Montaigne notes down exactly what he ate. He never neglects to immortalize a town where he has had good bread, wine, or fish. He gives a minute account of the service prices, but also notes whether the linen was clean; he complains that somewhere along the way there were no drapes around the bed and the table napkins were not changed often enough, to which the Italian publisher appends his offended commentary: Frenchmen of the sixteenth century did not use a fork at table, as the more civilized Italians did (see the learned work on cutlery, La forchetta da tavola in Europa by P. Lumbroso).
Montaigne writes so little about palaces and churches, it is as if visible things, there for all to see, to him were less worthy of attention than hidden ones, to which one is led by one’s own perspicacity and curiosity. In a town famous for its cathedral he directs his steps to a little-known abbey where he admires—he says—the bones of the knights buried there, and visits a monk from Jerusalem, who shows him the library and the interesting features of the garden. And these are precisely the objects of Montaigne’s traveler’s quest: a fine library, a garden with rare plants, an interesting man. Throughout his journey he does not neglect an occasion to meet renowned theologians (discussions with them were a passion of his). In order to hear all the voices of the world he also spends time chatting with the courtesans of Venice and Rome. In the Eternal City he pays his respects to a beloved book. Thanks to his good relations with the Church he is permitted to peruse a rare manuscript of the Aeneid in the Vatican Library. He notes with satisfaction that he did not find in the manuscript the first four lines, which he had always considered a later addition.
He listens. He listens to everyone and everything. To the sufferers in Villa, who tell him about their ailments, miraculous recoveries, about some mysterious stone from India; implausible stories told in villages and small towns: about a man before whom a church floor opened up, and a girl who, jumping over a puddle, suddenly changed into a boy. With unfailing attention he studies differences in religious rites. He attends a circumcision ritual and devotes five pages to what—he reckons—is the oldest religious custom.
Montaigne’s journey was long and exhausting. The landscape moves slowly. Details settle in the memory like dust on the face. In those times the sense of melting into the concrete otherness of passing landscapes, people, and phenomena was much stronger than it is for a contemporary traveler. The latter is shielded from the surrounding world by international hotels, the conventionality of tourism, guide books, maps, the hasty touching of things worthy of closer attention, the commandment to associate with universal works instead of with the inimitable, individual beauty of life. Spaces are void (the foam of forests and towns, continents, and seas is broken on the windshield). Nowadays we travel “to and fro,” without the benign deities of Nature and Accident, as if merely to compare a familiar reproduction with the original.
Should we then not envy Monsieur Montaigne, in whose undercarriage the sa
nd sang somniferously, monotonously, and long.
1966
THE POET AND THE PRESENT1
I HAVE TO ADMIT that I had a negative response to the theme of this encounter, the poet and the present, because of its rather stubborn association with the barren pseudo-discussions of the era of socialist realism, and with normative poetics as a whole, which is alien to me.
Fortunately there are not many people today (so at least I think) who would defend arrogant and compromised theses on a poetry as a force that transforms the world and brings about sudden upheavals in social consciousness, or whose task is engagement on the one correct side of the so-called barricade.
History does not know a single example of art or an artist anywhere ever exerting a direct influence on the world’s destiny—and from this sad truth follows the conclusion that we should be modest, conscious of our limited role and strength.
This sounds like an aesthete’s avowal, an encouragement to lock oneself up in an ivory tower, but that stance, too, is quite alien to me. My concern is to oppose the tyranny of dichotomies chopping up complicated human reality, and to draw the borders of poetry—as I understand them—without usurpation but also without an inferiority complex.
A few months ago I returned from America; the necessity of “engagement” came up regularly in private conversations with my American friends. The term itself is vague enough to put one off using it. The majority of young people in the West who dabble in film, art, or literature, loudly declare they are on the side of the “Left”—variously understood, or rather, read. And I often wonder why the work that results from this essentially noble stance is intellectually immature, as if the proclamation of humanist ideals led the artist into the realm of banality. I’ve often asked myself if it isn’t too cruel a punishment that political kindheartedness should cancel out a work’s artistic value.
In one of his essays Thomas Mann2 reflects on the paradoxical pluriformity and contradictoriness of the spirit and its relation to the problem of man. The spirit, says Mann, is mani-layered, and it may take any attitude to human matters, including a non-humanist and anti-humanist attitude. The spirit is not a monolith, a cohesive force intent on shaping the world, life, or society in its image. It is true there have been efforts to proclaim the solidarity of all intellectuals but, the author of The Magic Mountain argues, that is a completely impossible undertaking. There is no deeper antagonism or more contemptuous and hateful intolerance than that between representatives of particular forms of thought and spiritual striving. There is something arbitrary about the idea that the spirit by its very nature—to use a social-political term—stands on the “left,” and that therefore it is inherently connected to the ideals of freedom, progress, humanism. This is a prejudice that has been toppled many times by now. For the spirit can just as well stand on the “right,” and that with undiminished excellence. Of the brilliant reactionary Joseph de Maistre3, author of the book Du pape, Sainte-Beuve said “of a writer he had only the talent,” a very handsome phrase, which expresses not only the aforementioned view that literature and progress are identical, but at the same time that with the greatest talent, the most excellent wit and brilliance, one may become the bard of the inhuman, executions, pyres, inquisitions, in short everything that progress and liberalism call the kingdom of darkness.
Here I have slid—quite consciously—onto the muddy terrain of politics. For our world, our present time, is described in categories of politics and science, not in categories of art. Hence the complaint of poets that they are homeless—which is true (but was never otherwise)—and the attempt to flirt with politics and science—which is a punishable offense.
The poet’s sphere of action, if he has a serious attitude toward his work, is not the present, by which I mean the current state of socio-political and scientific knowledge, but reality, man’s stubborn dialogue with the concrete reality surrounding him, with this stool, with that person, with this time of day—the cultivation of the vanishing capacity for contemplation.
And above all—building values, building a set of values, determining their hierarchy, which means a conscious moral choice with all the consequences in life and art that it entails—this seems to me the fundamental and most important function of culture.
We cannot be relieved of this task by politics, which is a game of chance and more and more merely a strategy, or an automatic mechanism unconnected to reality, instead of what it should be: the creation of a place for human initiative and courage.
Artists’ attempts to enter into a dialogue with science more often than not yield lamentable results, simply because the physicist’s image of the world is untranslatable into the language of art. Thanks to the avant-garde, the Futurists, we have gained one more disillusionment: the myth has collapsed that saw in the progress of knowledge a guaranteed solution of humanity’s problems and troubles. The paradise of the Positivists turned out to be empty.
From these very general and, I realize, quite banal divigations I would like to move on to the art of poesy.
Now, without any pretensions to infallibility, simply stating my predilections, I would say that in contemporary poetry I like most those poems in which I observe something I’d call the mark of semantic transparency (a term borrowed from Husserl’s logic). Semantic transparency is the characteristic of the sign that when used focuses attention on the signified object and does not draw attention to itself. The word is a window open on reality.
I like less (and sometimes not at all) poems thick with metaphors, with an abstruse syntax, “object poems,” beyond which nothing can be seen, whose aim is to focus the reader’s attention on the author’s mastery.
Hence the simple postulate, beautifully expressed by Thomas More in his prayer; I’m surprised that it has not yet become an important part of a poetic manifesto:
Grant me a soul to which dullness is naught,
knowing no complaint, grumble or sigh,
and do not permit me to give too much thought
to that domineering creature called the “I.”
My Lord, endow me with a sense of humor,
give me the grace of understanding jest,
that I might know the joy that life harbors
and were able to grant it to the rest.
1972
CONVERSATION ON WRITING POETRY
A. I’LL BEGIN with an issue that may seem banal. I’ve noticed that readers at poetry readings often ask about a writer’s beginnings. They simply want to know how you become a writer. Have you been asked questions like that?
B. Sure I have. I think you put it very well, too, because I, also, think that those questions are always or almost always founded in a desire to discover a secret, a mysterious spell, a formula that would help those who dream of a writer’s career to attain it.
A. So what is the secret?
B. I don’t know, sometimes it seems to me there is no secret. Don’t get me wrong: I don’t like so-called inspired writers, ones who pretend to the public that they move in spheres inaccessible to the average reader. Nor do I like those who come up with all kinds of bizarre adventures in their lives that they then say contributed to their becoming artists. That kind of making yourself out to be extraordinary is Romantic and quite alien to me.
A. I’m not giving up so easily. Surely it would be hard to deny that some aspects of a writer’s biography, let’s say experiences, can trigger a writing ability.
B. I venture to say that everybody or almost everybody has an ability to write, just as they have an ability to paint or compose simple pieces of music. If it were any different, poets would be writing for poets, composers would be understood only by their professional colleagues, and painters would paint only for other painters. Luckily, it’s not like that. The perfect audience is an artist too, and a rare one at that. It’s someone who’s able to recreate an aria, a painting’s colors, a poem, in himself and with the same precision, the same disinterested joy, as if he were its author.
&n
bsp; A. OK. Say you’re right. Maybe a reader—or listener or viewer—is a potential author, that is to say, could make things, but neglected to, probably for lack of nerve. But you had the nerve. I’d like to know when and why.
B. All right, I’ll say this: maybe it really is important. I started writing in the war. In this book, the poem “Two Drops” isn’t the first I wrote, if I remember rightly, but it’s the first I can sign off on years later. I was a teenager then. The war was on. During one of the heavy bombings I was running to a shelter and there on the steps I saw in passing—when I was being driven on by fear—a young couple kissing. It was truly extraordinary in that situation.
A. Why extraordinary?
B. Because in situations like the one I described terror takes people over completely, makes them forget about people they love. The survival instinct, awoken in moments of total danger, floods us with a rat-like fear, a single will to save ourselves alone. Whereas those two people opposed the raging cruelty around them with the frail power of love.
A. And you decided to describe it?
B. Not describe so much as express. You see, I didn’t have the words to convey my revolt and opposition. I could have written something like: “Ah, you damned so-and-sos; you’re killing innocent people, you bastards; you wait, you will be punished for this.” I didn’t say that, because I wanted to give the singular situation a broader dimension, or rather, show its deeper, universal human perspective.
The Collected Prose Page 75