Condition of Secrecy

by Inger Christensen

  Over time, many poets have tried to describe this inconceivable situation, and their statements almost always center on something about having the words suddenly take over, or finding that the poem writes itself, things along those lines.

  At any rate we’re no longer staring at the words “cloud layer,” for example, or at the cloud layer itself in the sky outside, and wondering if it should or shouldn’t be part of the poem. That was already determined long before.

  In the same way, regardless of the decision about using the words “cloud layer,” it’s already been determined whether or not that’s really what we’re writing about. Because at the very moment that the words take over, it’s the poem’s images, comparisons, and relationships that decide whether a word should be included or not, in order for what’s written about to be precisely that word.

  And at the happy moment when all decisions become part and parcel of the poem’s writing of itself, it may even be decided that what’s being written about is something we had never remotely considered writing about, something we’d completely forgotten, something we’d never spoken of, something that has kept itself hidden until now, finally luring our consciousness out with some important thing like war, peace, happiness, death, and so on, all signs that those big words have their own inaccessible condition of secrecy: for example, the war that for years, long before our piece of writing started, we had grown used to thinking and feeling was permanently impossible to write about — impossible in a poem, at any rate.

  When I chose to write about this condition of secrecy in terms of writing poetry, it was definitely not because there’s anything special about poetry.

  Poetry is just one of human beings’ many ways of recognizing things, and the same schism runs through each of the other ways, be it philosophy, mathematics, or the natural sciences.

  There is a schism between those who believe that we human beings, with our language, are set apart from the world, and those who experience human beings’ use of language as part of the world, so it becomes evident that whenever we express ourselves through language, the world too is expressing itself.

  We probably all hear on a daily basis that the condition of the rainforests — their life, and their breathing — are expressions of the condition of the planet. But why shouldn’t another expression of the condition of the planet be the way that we human beings live and breathe and express ourselves — and that, for example, expresses the condition of the rainforests?

  We need to realize that we can’t set ourselves apart from the world. We can act as if we could. But the fact that we can act as if we could is yet another aspect of that which we can’t set ourselves apart from. We can’t recognize anything without using recognition itself.

  Wars — including those of ideology — can be waged only because people believe that it’s possible to set themselves apart and to cordon off a specific reality.

  Occasionally, I wish there were a weather report for human beings’ motions, for the motion of the mind that causes us to topple walls, the hunger that causes us to wander like denuded trees through desert sands, the white-collar swarm that attracts us like insects to the stock market — I don’t understand why the heights of recognition haven’t brought me the weather report that would explain all these human high pressure areas, or low pressure areas, or human cyclones that are part of the current condition of the planet.

  Especially since I’ve learned from meteorologists and other scientists I’ve met that they know about the condition of secrecy. They may not say that words suddenly take over, but they say that the problem suddenly solves itself; they don’t say that a poem writes itself, no, but they do say that things say themselves.

  They plug away for years, trying to get consciousness and vision to hang together, and slog endlessly around assorted university campuses, until the world suddenly inscribes itself in them and the difference between human being and world vanishes, so the world can write itself by means of human consciousness.

  This is possible only because we’re bound to the forms of nature, in that we ourselves are one of its manifold forms.

  This is why recognizing the connections and interrelatedness among all the things in the world isn’t restricted only to poets, scientists, or others who cultivate the relationship between consciousness and the world.

  That recognition is already built into the world. Into all the comparisons that the world itself consists of. For instance, it’s inconceivable that we humans could go without saying, at one time or another, that apples are round just as the sun is round, or without making innumerable similar comparisons.

  The whole web of relationships among all the phenomena that make up our world leads us to an increasingly refined understanding that our forms of culture — all the forms of expression that humans have created, including the many kinds of poetry — can certainly be considered things in themselves, but above all else they are forms of nature.

  This is why I’m appealing to our sense of being borne up by an inconceivably huge, already existing foundation of comparisons. Specifically to our awareness that we as poets must learn to love prepositions — words that express relationships among phenomena — because prepositions, almost unreasonably invisible though they are, keep our consciousness in the same kind of motion as the world.

  So self-realization — for example as a poet — just to feel that something exists in the world, becomes entirely unnecessary, as opposed to de-realizing ourselves, because everything already exists in the world. There is also a kind of comfort in that. If we’re separate from the world, it’s because we have separated ourselves. We believe as much. But we mustn’t believe as much. We must know. That we already are in the condition of secrecy we seek.

  (1992)

  In the Beginning Was the Flesh

  Everything has always already begun. The day I realized that I could stand up and walk, I had already been moving around in the world for quite a while. The day I realized what it actually was that I was eating, I had already been consuming the broadest assortment of things for quite a while. The day I realized that human beings are constantly realizing things, my brain had already been busy with the oddest ideas for quite a while. And it still is, I assume. I hope. I wouldn’t be surprised if right now, while I’m writing this, it were covertly manipulating the fragments that it’s stumbled across along our way, trying to arrange them a bit better. So that some day I might be able to wander among them fairly effortlessly. So that some day I might sit down and write something that I don’t know I already know.

  I’d like to tell a little about the fragments that I do know I stumbled across while I was writing the volume of poetry titled It. And maybe also about how their arrangement got a bit better.

  Fragment #1. 1965. An essay by Lars Gustafsson, “The Problem of the Long Poem,” in the journal BLM. Its effect on me was to challenge and invite. Among other things, he wrote:

  1: “The problem of the long poem lies in the struggle with the poem’s length. It arises from the need to unify the long lines, the details, the complexity, and the experience of simultaneity, keeping them all intact.”

  2: “Can we imagine principles of form whose choice of certain fundamental elements determines those same elements’ recurrence elsewhere in the poem — but what is repeated or varied is neither words nor lines, more like compositional patterns or attitudes?”

  3: “If we have enough in common, in the sum of our experiences as they appear in our concepts, in the gestalt of our sciences, in our views of society and tradition, if we have enough common points of departure, then these can provide the foundation for a functional allegorical poem, which in its multiple meanings can encompass both what is factual and what is self-reflective.”

  I thought that nothing less would do. Nothing less than that attempt.

  FRAGMENT #2. Around the same time. Or maybe a little later. An exhibit at Charlottenbo
rg Gallery in Copenhagen, of a series of images by the Swedish graphic artist Per-Gunnar Thelander.

  His point of departure was Botticelli’s The Birth of Venus — that charming, stately, otherworldly lady, washed clean and born of sea-foam, who glides ashore as calmly as if nothing at all out of the ordinary were happening, standing on a symmetrical white seashell in the midst of the unlikeliest blue.

  Thelander had copied Botticelli’s Venus exactly. The copy was not particularly big, and it was set at a slight angle, as if it were just some art postcard that happened to turn up on his drawing board.

  But there the process began in earnest. Again. As the first, the “real Venus,” rose from her sea-foam and landed on Botticelli’s canvas, in the same way Botticelli’s “real Venus” landed back in her true element. Like the image she had become, she was copied and developed, cropped and highlighted in every possible way. She went from chemical bath to chemical bath and was twisted and turned, manipulated, laid out to dry on newspapers in draft after draft, until the woman being born was also the woman giving birth, until the mouth giving birth was also the mouth that speaks, and until the hand shifting the images became the hand that lifts the wisps of foam up to its owner’s mouth, which blows this Venus upward like a bubble. Venus #117, the “real” one lifting herself up by the hair.

  When I saw those images, I wanted Thelander to do the cover of my next book of poetry. And on a little piece of paper, I wrote, “Photocells . . . Biological principles used as words. A growing organism of water, stone, and words.”

  FRAGMENT #3. My acquaintance with Noam Chomsky’s basic principles of generative grammar and transformational grammar, his ideas of an innate faculty for language and of universal rules for structuring sentences, rules that determine linguistic structure but that simultaneously allow the generation of infinite sentences. Chomsky’s vision of language gave me a feeling of fantastic happiness. A proof beyond proof that language is a direct extension of nature. That I had the same “right” to produce language that a tree has to produce leaves. If I could just start in total silence, slip into the first sentences, hide there as in water, flowing, go on until the first little ripples appeared, almost words, almost sentences, more and more.

  Toward the end of It, there’s a poem that reflects this security:

  I see the weightless clouds

  I see the weightless sun

  I see how easily they trace

  An endless course

  As if they trust in me

  Here on the earth

  As if they know that I

  Am their words

  But back when I was collecting those fragments, I was nowhere near the end of It. I wasn’t even at the beginning. I wasn’t even thinking yet of starting. It was May of 1967, and I was working on my novel Azorno. It happened suddenly: on the day I finished, got the manuscript in order, and slipped it into an envelope, I heard myself say, “It. That’s it.” And during the course of the evening I kept going with that — which became the beginning of It.

  It didn’t take me long to realize that it was a kind of creation story. I could tell, by the way those little sentences moved and by the way they constantly referred to each other and to their own movement, and only to that movement, that they would put up terrific resistance if I suddenly, arbitrarily forced a person into them, for example, or a city, or any other random thing. I had to start at the very beginning, and gradually let things fill in more and more, so that it all could unfold naturally.

  Then I started thinking a little about this sentence: “In the beginning was the Word . . . and the Word was made flesh.” I thought, what if we could think the unthinkable: that flesh could speak, that one cell could signal to another, so that the whole inarticulate world suddenly partook in the following impossible (to human awareness) experience: In the beginning was the flesh, and the flesh was made words . . .

  And in my attempt to keep a firm grip on the concurrent duality of those two sentences, those paradoxical conditions, I began to produce something that I myself was a product of.

  In the beginning I actually acted as if I weren’t there, as if it (“I”) were just a bit of flesh talking, a bit of protoplasm, acted as if I were just following along, while a language, a world, took shape. That’s why I called the first part PROLOGOS: the part, even if it’s only fictive, that comes before the word, before consciousness. Background, starting point, vantage point. Prologue, in the theater.

  After that it made sense to call the “piece” itself LOGOS. The word as creative principle. The place where things are consciously staged, put into action, into relationship.

  And then I would have been stymied if I hadn’t gotten hold of Præpositioners teori (A Theory of Prepositions) by Viggo Brøndal. His attempt to analyze and categorize the words that languages use to show relationship can be read as applying to the network of relationships that writing builds up as it goes along. From his book I chose eight terms that could stay in a state of flux and at the same time give order to the indistinctness that a state of flux necessarily must produce: symmetry, transitivity, continuity, connectivity, variability, extension, integrity, and universality.

  I noticed that, concerning universality, Brøndal had written, “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.”

  And when the piece is over, there’s the EPILOGOS. After the word. Where I could act as if the word weren’t the creative principle, as if the word were only communication. That’s how it was. Or: that’s how it seemed to me that it was (is).

  As life is a writing within death.

  (1970)

  It’s All Words

  The word creates what it names.” But what does it mean when we say that a word, by naming something, creates that something? Can I, just by mentioning the word rose, bring a rose into being somewhere? No, of course I can’t say “rose” and poof, hocus-pocus, a rose appears in the visible world. That kind of thing happens only in the world of fairy tales, where things regularly happen as soon as the right word is said: “Hocus pocus,” and the rose hedge bursts into bloom; “Open, sesame,” and the mountain opens; “Table, set yourself,” and all sorts of the tastiest dishes are served forth; “And God said, Let there be light: and there was light.”

  But, as I said, that kind of thing happens only in the world of fairy tales — in the world of fantasy, the whole world of our thoughts and imaginings. And in this inner world, the word does create what it names.

  It’s in this world of imaginings that I can say “rose,” and if I close my eyes, a rose will appear before my inner eye, maybe not entirely as visible as it would be in a garden, but visible, and if I open my eyes again and say “rose,” as I’m doing while I prepare this talk, one rose after another will appear, a whole world of roses, in my memory: the first rose that a boyfriend ever gave me, the bouquet of roses when my son was born, rose gardens here and there in the world, the great rose window in Sainte-Chapelle in Paris, and the rose catalog I used when I was writing my novel Azorno, all those rose names: “Rosa hugonis, Rosa pimpinellifolia, Blaze Superior, Virgo and Rosa rugosa, Rosa rubiginosa, Rosa ‘Nevada.’ These continuous destructions” — and soon all those words would be so busy creating what they name that I would be tempted to toss aside the draft of my talk and write a long string of rose poems instead.

  As I resist the temptation to set this talk aside, I realize that the way it now begins is not at all the way I intended to begin, because I originally wanted to start with “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God” — but now it’s too late. And maybe that’s a very good thing.

  B
ecause I notice that the way I’ve actually begun is already busy putting its mark on the coming course of the talk — a mark that, even as I was inserting the verse from the Gospel of John, is changing that verse, and giving me permission to leave John the Evangelist to the theologians, and to focus on John the poet.

  To focus specifically on his bold phrase “the Word was God” as a foundation for the concept that “the word creates what it names,” and to interpret his statements first and foremost as an introduction to a story about what creation is, and then afterward to a story about how the world was created.

  Seen in that way it becomes a matter of humans’ faith in the word as such, in its innate magic, its self-generating ability to create an imaginary world. John the poet knew all this when he wrote his introductory verse, and he especially knew that it’s all words. But where do the words come from?

  As it is now, when the world has existed for so long, words come from everywhere, and they’re never there for the first time. Not only that. Although there may not be an infinite number of them, nor an infinite number of combinations, nevertheless there is an inexhaustible landscape of words, there are more than any one individual could manage to travel through. This is where it ends and where it begins, if a person is going to write poems: in the imagined concept of this mysterious landscape. For poems are created exclusively from words.