Condition of Secrecy

by Inger Christensen

  Lu Chi’s whole book consists for the most part of these parallel structures, in two-line stanzas that rhyme, but that don’t function as formal couplets, because each individual line is irregular, as in prose poems. This specific form is called fu in Chinese. Earlier, the fu form was used for long narrative poems about historical events or for praise poems to royals and other leaders. But Lu Chi renovated the fu form by using it in his Ars Poetica. In fact, the word makes up half the title of his book: Wen Fu. It’s not an outwardly prepossessing book. Around thirty pages, with twenty-one sections whose concise titles highlight what matters most when poets work with words. The sections deal with simple but very complex things like how to begin and how to choose words, or with harmony, originality, fear, inspiration, or how to find a form. Lu Chi even presents a direct overview of existing forms, calling one section simply “Catalog of Genres.” Despite this single-minded concentration on the practice of writing, there are also silk, the universe, language, and the heart in numerous sections, woven together in a living pattern. A pattern that is ceaselessly created and transformed, as things arise consecutively with words. So the world, which once came into being on its own, and which, via human beings, let words come into being, now comes into further being in the poem, in an awareness of itself, of its own origin and its ongoing existence.

  All verbs are very agreeable. They come into being on their own whenever there’s movement. They move and let themselves be moved. They keep everything in motion, including themselves. They shift, change identity, and undo every noun’s loneliness for a while. They’re always wandering around, and they’re always thrusting themselves forward to ask, investigate, and specify things, and to come up with new possibilities. So all verbs are very open and multiply very easily. In countless variations, they express the verb to be, although a few verbs do keep more or less completely to themselves. For example, shall, can, must, and will keep to themselves, outside verbs’ normal interchangeability. They function as constant markers of sorts, occasionally stepping in to give other verbs a push in the right direction. But on the whole, verbs fluctuate so much that one is tempted to say the whole course of language is the course of verbs. It’s due in large part to verbs that language becomes a Great Flood, a story that deluges everything. This total deluge that from a small corner of the heart becomes language — this silk that contains the infinite universe, this ceaseless streaming back and forth between consciousness and vision — is unthinkable without the energy of verbs, united in the verb to be. Which makes it possible simultaneously to differentiate and to not differentiate between what is in what. Language is in the heart, which is in language. The universe is in silk, which is in the universe.

  In Wen Fu, Lu Chi tries to grasp this mysterious miracle play as the natural phenomenon that it is. Significantly, he tries to grasp it by using the word wen. In Chinese, wen is one of the oldest words of all, at least three thousand years old. Even that far back, when people were casting oracle bones onto black stones so they could shine into the universe as letters, wen meant “art,” in the form of either literature or sculpture. Etymologically, at its most basic, wen simply means “design” or “structure,” a structure where meaning and form are so indissolubly bound together that one is inconceivable without the other — no form without meaning, and no meaning without form. This is why wen, also meaning “to write,” is the most natural way to express the deepest part of consciousness, the center, expressed in a Chinese character that blends “heart” and “mind.” So Lu Chi’s use of the word wen gains a multitude of meanings. It’s only on the surface that it means “literature”; in reality, it also means “responsibility,” including a responsibility to tell the truth, which can be defined along the lines of calling things by their true names.

  If we call things by their true names, that doesn’t mean that the names are being used to represent things, and it doesn’t mean that language mimics reality as a thing that is separate from language. Rather, a kind of threshold condition arises, where language and the world express themselves with the help of each other. The world, with its natural extension in language, comes to a consciousness of itself, and language, with its background in the world, becomes a world in itself, one steadily unfolding further. That’s why it can be said that by writing poetry, we’re trying to produce something that we ourselves are already a product of. The heart, which from its own small corner overflows with all sorts of random occurrences gathered with the help of a lifetime of heartbeats, perhaps trying to recognize an order in it all before it stops beating — and silk, which, in its interwoven synthesis of nature and culture, plays with an empty space so utterly newly created and full of possibility that it can take in the universe and encompass it, working it in on itself like a Möbius strip and letting it stay in that unfathomable flux between outside and inside. These concepts and their relationship (silk, the universe, language, and the heart) would be impossible for us to talk about if all we could use were nouns, adjectives, adverbs, and verbs. Or more accurately, our use of all these very lonely, helpless, strong-willed, and agreeable words would be impossible if they weren’t anchored in all the comparisons and relationships that the world consists of, discreetly expressed by nearly invisible prepositions, which we can best love by using them as precisely as possible.

  All prepositions are nearly invisible. They bear language up in the same way that outer space bears planets up. In their limited numbers, up, down, out, in, over, under, etc. keep our consciousness in the same kind of motion that the world is in. They place all nouns in relationship to each other and mutely assure us that we’re borne up in advance in the world by an inexhaustibly huge, ever-present foundation of comparisons. At one time I immersed myself in the work of Danish linguistics expert Viggo Brøndal, who wrote, among other things, a book called A Theory of Prepositions. There he tries to systematize prepositions to reflect the idea that the relationships they refer to in language are already in place in the world giving rise to language. So he divides the relationships into categories with names like symmetry, transitivity, continuity, connectivity, variability, extension, integrity, and universality, arranged in a taxonomy of increasing complexity. In the concluding section, on universality, he writes, “The most wide-ranging synthesis would ultimately encompass all zones and degrees of relationship: abstract, concrete, and complex; primary and secondary; central and peripheral. That kind of total relationship must, in keeping with its nature, exist at the boundaries of thought; as an expression of the quality of experience, it must be of an almost mystical character.”

  What is the source of this mystical character? Maybe it’s that the forms already exist in the world. A tree exists in its tree-configuration, and so my life too, or my whole family’s lives, can take on that configuration. But not as a resemblance; more nearly as a form that’s the same. And one that could also be the form of a poem. And here, forms must be considered not as static, but as ongoing processes, occasionally made clear, also in an interplay with our sensory systems. When forms are considered in that way, more similarities than differences emerge in a comparison of cells’ chemical workings to support the body as a form, and words’ workings to support the world as a poem. The word has, in principle, the same chemistry that’s needed to set the process of crystallization in motion. Seen from outside, in their random states — for instance in a dictionary — words look like chaos. But fundamentally they’re always in order, at home, so to speak, with their phenomena. Meanwhile we’re thinking that it’s up to us to organize the words into sentences and oppositions before everything can be put in order. Nothing could be more inaccurate. The order we’re trying to organize our way into already exists. The opposition we set up between chaos and order is of our own making. We invent a certain way of looking at things, a way that we think keeps things in order, but without understanding that this way of seeing is itself a kind of order. It’s in this labyrinth of consciousness and the world intertwined that we find ou
rselves, where no one can know which comes first, the world or consciousness. The French poet Bernard Noël has an excellent description of poets’ situation in this context: “We write in order to get to the last word, but the act of writing constantly delays that. In reality, the last word can be anywhere at all in what we write. Or maybe it’s everything we write. In that way, when I write, I’m chasing a shadow — and it’s my chasing it that keeps the shadow in motion.”

  This is how we must view silk, the universe, language, and the heart. They’re parts of the shadow that we’re chasing. Shadows of silk, of the universe, of language, and of the heart; and as we chase them, they merge with each other and even with the shadow of god. Or as Lu Chi didn’t write, but might well have written: Things vanish into the shadows of each other and of themselves; but with the reflections of those shadows, poems return to light.

  (1992)

  The Condition of Secrecy

  What we sense when we read a poem is the motions of the mind. Not only the poet’s mind, and not only our own, but both, intermingled in the poem, as if the poem were our minds’ common ground.

  As we read, we may feel that language is far too light, but if the poem is good, then even the heaviest subjects will be hidden in that lightness; maybe because each individual word is so packed with energy that it contains millions of ways to experience things.

  The same millions of ways to experience things can be used when we write a poem. Everything is contained in everything.

  But only if the poem is what we call beautiful does it contain all those possible ways to experience things; a poem that’s too ordinary contains nothing greater than the poet’s own way of experiencing things; and that can definitely be very ordinary.

  If the poem is good, the words have so much energy that the heaviest subjects can seem almost weightless; if the poem is bad, it not only weighs down everything the reader tries to bring to it; it also weighs itself down.

  There’s no sure way to determine whether a poem will be beautiful or banal, good or bad. The best we can do in practice is not only to read quantities of poems written by others, but also to truly read our own poems — that is, to read them while we’re writing them, and continuously revise them, until at last they reflect some kind of light, some kind of insight, as if they had been written by others, by someone else.

  It may not be so hard to recognize a good poem once it’s there. But how can we find our way to it before it’s there?

  How can we get vague thoughts and impressions to combine with the reality that will evoke them, so that not only the thoughts, but also the reality itself will be expressed? And how can we get form and content to live and grow with and within each other, as plants, for example, grow in the natural world?

  This is all something that we can study and read and write theory books about, and that’s all useful, but only the kind of usefulness that has to sink completely into oblivion before it can show what it’s useful for. Because writing poems, no matter what, is always about being at square one and starting from scratch; every time, about writing the individual poem as if it were the first poem in the world.

  But only as if it were the first. The best thing, though impossible, would be to be able to read and remember all the poems that have ever been written, in order to forget them at the decisive moment. To forget them in the same way that we, as children in school, learned handwriting, and suddenly one day forgot about making the specified motions with our hands and pencils and could just write, on our own, spontaneously. A small and mysterious miracle, when one thinks about it.

  Writing poems is just as much a mysterious miracle. Not that there’s anything mystical or ceremonial about it. Or anything religious. It’s a neutral miracle, so to speak, granted in advance, because in the process of writing we need to use language in its whole, indissoluble connection with reality. It’s that connection that’s a mysterious miracle And that’s what poetry has to enter into.

  Unlike our logical-practical language, poetry can’t ignore parts of reality and, under conditions that we’ve set in advance, act as if it were humanly possible to tell the truth about the world.

  Maybe poetry can’t tell any truths at all. But it can be true, because the reality that accompanies the words is true. This secret-filled correlation between language and reality is how poetry becomes insight. A mysterious miracle that may well be the condition of secrecy Novalis speaks of when he says, “Das Äusere ist ein in einen Geheimniszustand aufgehobenes Innere.” (The outer world is the inner world, raised to a condition of secrecy.)

  It’s difficult to find our way into this condition of secrecy. Of course we dream of being able to say that it happens as easily and lightly as a plant sprouts leaves and flowers. So that the poem in the seed’s internal sky is lifted into its whole outer unfolding as exactly that plant, exactly that poem.

  In this condition of secrecy, the poet stands at the center of a universe that has no center. In order to raise the inner world to the outer we have to start in the outer, start in all that’s visible, everything that throughout our whole lives, in corresponding forms of visibility, has been preserved yet forgotten in our inner world. It’s unclear which has to awaken which, the inner or the outer, but it’s certain that — because we know how things have been connected with each other ever since we were children — our first and best help will come from random chance: maybe in the form of a spring rain or an autumn storm, summer’s bright nights or winter’s rime frost, any phenomenon at all that can set our inner world in motion to such a degree that threads, pathways of thoughts, are created, branching out and trying to find ways to fuse words and phenomena.

  Before we sit down with our paper in order to (maybe, maybe not) write a poem, as well as during the many hours we sit there, that’s the way it is: as if we’ve become lost. The world, which a moment ago, when we were drinking our morning coffee, was perfectly manageable and normal, has once more suddenly become far too big, and even if our consciousness wanders in all directions, bringing its small bits of language along, it can’t locate exactly the stone, the plant, the situation, perhaps the incomprehensibility, from which it can find its way back to the world with the aid of a word.

  Sometimes it helps to avert our gaze and simply listen to the sounds and rhythms of words, feel our way and listen to that music for so long that we eventually know the music itself has a meaning needing only to be lured out; so the words aren’t left on their own in their own melodiousness, but through this steadfast listening, this freighting of flow, speed, and color, can at last be brought forth through our astonished eyes to meet the spring rain or the rime frost or whatever it is, and can begin to gather new words and seen or unseen things.

  That’s how it is in the beginning: great anxiety and confusion, but also patience with our fear of leaping in, because we know that others have made the leap before us. Deep inside we know that the beginning is a bridge already built, even though it’s not until we step out into empty space that we can feel the bridge beneath our feet.

  The fear of stepping out into empty space is understandable. It’s true that the history of poetry includes maps of all kinds of landscapes, with all possible bridges sketched in, but at the moment when we have to take the first step, we realize that this specific landscape has moved, or the bridge has moved; either they’ve both moved at once or they’ve each moved separately; and the map, which otherwise seemed indispensable as an overview of all of world literature, is now functioning only as a possibility, maybe just a suggestion, of how some landscape or other might conceivably look on the day we get there. So we really are lost, in a very odd way. We need to find our way through the landscape in order to draw the map, and at the same time we need to draw the map in order to find our way through the landscape.

  It’s here, as we’re realizing that the bridge has to be built before we make a move, that we have to choose our words with care. And care doesn
’t necessarily mean “carefulness.” It can also mean courage and determination, clear-sightedness and generosity. We can inch forward or leap for all we’re worth, and either way we’ll find that there is solid ground beneath our feet. We can creep and crawl, dance and sway, or give ourselves over to walking completely normally. Under any circumstances, the only thing that means anything, if we choose our words with that kind of care, is that phenomena meet the words, so the bridge can be walked on and the empty space filled with a landscape.

  Choosing with care also means more than choosing among all random words. We have to choose exactly the random word that can be made necessary. To make a word necessary means to interweave or fuse it with its phenomenon. Not that the randomness is done away with, because even after we choose it, the word is still as random as ever. But in its randomness the word, along with the phenomenon, will enter into that condition of secrecy where inner and outer worlds exist together, as if they had never been separated.

  When the first stations have been set up in this condition of secrecy, the poem begins to take shape, the landscape broadens out, and images begin, on their own, to keep words and phenomena together. Where before there was nothing, now there is something; and along with it something else that continues the process, because all the widespread outposts in the landscape start to report in, all the little enclaves of coinciding language and meaning that now are functioning as realities, everything that has entered into the condition of secrecy, reports back now and shows unequivocally not only how we should write but first and foremost why and what we can write, what was always meant to be written about, even if along the way we thought, or maybe frankly hoped, that it was something completely different.