Condition of Secrecy

by Inger Christensen

  Right away, why and how they’re created becomes a far more complex matter. But just as the artist has her paints, the composer his musical notes, and the mathematician her numbers and formulae, which are, in principle, things that every human being has, in the same way the poet has his words, which are things that every human being has not only in principle, but also in practice.

  So then why doesn’t everyone write poems? Since we all do possess enough words — in fact an abundance, a veritable excess of words.

  It’s understandable that not everyone paints; paints are expensive, and it’s a lot of trouble to live with all the equipment in a studio apartment. And in the same way it’s understandable that not everyone composes music, because musical instruments are expensive, too, and none of us learn musical notation in daycare. And later, mathematics becomes too hard — among other reasons, because schools make it too hard and too exotic. But words — we can all understand them, and we have them with us everywhere, so to create poems all we really need is paper and something to write with — actually not even that, because I can imagine that if I were in some prison or somewhere else without access to paper, I’d try to write poems in my mind, and every day I’d work on memorizing them, possibly by muttering them out loud to the nearest cockroach.

  And that may be what the question boils down to. Is it at all possible to learn to write poems in a way that will make it seem important to read them out loud to a cockroach? Is it even possible to prepare for that extreme situation? A situation that can also be privileged, though psychologically very exposed and vulnerable. As Rilke writes:

  Exposed upon the mountains of the heart. Look, how small there!

  look: the last village of words, and higher,

  but again how small, still one last

  homestead of feeling. Can you make it out?

  We can ask, then, if it’s possible to learn to be “exposed upon the mountains of the heart.” Isn’t that just something we are, something we’re born into, a destiny that we take on because we can’t do anything else, or because there isn’t anything else we can do?

  Can we learn to create a destiny, or is a destiny something we learn how to have because it’s what we’ve been granted?

  This question may not require an examination of the word destiny, nor of everything either granted or self-created in our lives, but rather an examination of the meaning of learn.

  Learn, in German lernen, comes from the Proto-Germanic root leisjan, “make known by searching.” That root comes from Proto-Germanic lais, “I know, have traveled through, have experienced,” and is also related to the root of the German word leisten (accomplish), which originally meant “to follow a trail/track,” and which comes very close to our theme here: that language, merely by existing, offers poets (among others) myriad tracks, tracks that become reality by being followed.

  This is hard to explain, especially in words: how words, as one follows these imaginary tracks, find their place in a poem being written. And of course it’s no easier to describe what these word-places in a poem mean.

  But I think I found some help with this as I was reading Bruce Chatwin’s book The Songlines. In Danish, the book is called Drømmespor, “Dreamtracks,” a title that fits the content perfectly.

  Bruce Chatwin tells of “the labyrinth of invisible pathways which meander all over Australia and are known to Europeans as ‘Dreaming-tracks’ or ‘Songlines’; to the Aboriginals as the ‘Footprints of the Ancestors’ or the ‘Way of the Law.’”

  Here the Aboriginals tell creation stories about “the legendary totemic beings who had wandered over the country in the Dreamtime, singing out the name of everything that crossed their path — birds, animals, plants, rocks, water holes — and so singing the world into existence.”

  The Australian Aboriginals believe that they must recreate the world again and again by singing it, or else it will stop existing. “An unsung land is a dead land: since, if the songs are forgotten, the land itself will die” — and along with it, of course, the people. This is why, year after year, they must travel these same tracks and sing into being now a stone, now a tree, now a water hole, a desert plant, not because these phenomena exist, but literally in order for them to arise, to continually be brought into existence, so to speak, and accumulate memorability. For me, that’s a very tangible example of the word creating what it names.

  And that’s why it’s not especially hard for me to compare this advanced Australian technique with a modern, or perhaps timeless, way to write poems.

  We can say that luckily or unluckily I don’t have to wander through the Australian outback and with my words sing forth or conjure up all the things in the world so that they emerge into the light of day or directly “enter into existence,” as Kierkegaard would say. Yet as a poet I do face a sort of Australian outback — the blank page — and within the blank page, the invisible dream tracks, the writing of all those who came before, and in my hands a writing implement that hesitates for a very long time, because if stone-age people’s songlines are to be included in what is written, then I must listen not only to the arbitrary present moment, but also to all times past, and to so many people besides myself, as if the paper had become a huge space with all possible kinds of tracks.

  That is the poet’s classic situation. The hours-long, maybe days-long confrontation with the blank page, and with the awareness that “In the beginning was the word,” but which word? The word that will instantly start transforming nothingness into everything.

  For in the beginning there is nothing but the blank page. Not a word.

  But as soon as there’s even a handful of words, though there’s still almost nothing there, the blank page is totally transformed. What at first was an ordinary sheet of paper — and could easily have been made into a paper airplane — now becomes a sheet of paper that’s in the process of being filled with words. This is not only because I can’t even write “there’s nothing on this page” without something being on the page; it’s also because by doing that, I’m also writing that I expect it to change soon, I expect that words will fill the page, which they eventually do, to such an extent that the page goes, all on its own, from being a piece of paper with nothing on it to being an image of the nothingness that once was nowhere, but that is now between the lines and in the spaces between the words.

  In that way, we can regard the page as an image of the great nothingness where everything exists, uncreated. Not because everything isn’t there; it’s just that the hidden and forgotten and unbounded possibility that it is can’t be brought forth without the help of words.

  Since words, in that way, manage to establish their own written world on the page, the whiteness between the words not only will remain white, but also — because the words are chosen from among countless possibilities — it will appear more and more to be the mandatory backdrop, or abyss, of nothingness that the arbitrariness of the words indicates.

  I’ve experienced that myself, in a deeply upsetting way; I’ve sat facing that nothingness and had no idea which way to turn. Without as much as a single track to follow. A condition where all the words in the world and all the phenomena in the world were totally isolated from themselves and from each other, and where no matter which word’s door I knocked at, no meaning came forth.

  Here it would be natural to put a question mark after the claim that poems are brought forth exclusively from words and from nothingness, in the form of the blank page.

  We want the solace of imagining that a poem might describe an experience the poet has had, an episode from daily life or maybe from travel, an unparalleled sunset, or any other thing at all; or that a poem could build on thoughts the poet has had, for example ideas about how a social system should be structured, or musings about connections among all living creatures on earth.

  But poems aren’t made out of experiences, or out of thoughts, ideas, or musings about
anything. Poems are made out of words.

  It’s through our listening to the words, to their rhythms and timbres, the entirety of their music, that the meanings in them can be set free.

  It’s through our fascination with words, through our marveling at them, at these remarkable human sounds and their broadly encompassing network of interrelationships, that poems can happen at all.

  Along these lines, Novalis, in his “Monologue” from 1798, writes beautifully about his insight into the poet’s relationship to language: “Matters concerning speech and writing are genuinely strange: proper conversation is a mere play of words. We can only marvel at the laughable error people make — believing that they speak about things. No one knows precisely what is peculiar to language, that it concerns itself merely with itself. For that reason, it is a wonderful and fertile mystery — when someone speaks merely in order to speak, one expresses precisely then the most splendid and most original truths. Yet if one wishes to speak of something determinate, then temperamental language has him say the most laughable and perverse things.”

  Later he continues, “If only one could make people grasp that the case of language is similar to that of mathematical formulae — they constitute a world for themselves, they play with themselves alone, express nothing other than their wonderful nature, and precisely for that reason they are so expressive — precisely for that reason they mirror in themselves the curious play of relations in things.”

  The whole monologue ends with Novalis’s assertion about writers, stated as the last part of a question: “. . . inasmuch as a writer is only an enthusiast of language?” (The German Begeisterung means enthusiasm, inspiration.)

  At this point I’d like to turn back to the impossible situation that I experienced, which I mentioned earlier. It happened around 1980, when I was writing, or rather was not yet understanding how I was going to write, the collection of poems called alphabet. I really was sitting in front of a blank sheet of paper, as an almost insanely enthusiastic “enthusiast of language,” whose enthusiasm was leading absolutely nowhere.

  Because, of course, poems are written only with words. But definitely, only if the words can also come to mean something. And there are situations, crises in the individual and in the world, when no word, no matter how beautiful it sounds, can come to have any meaning at all.

  Why write, when the blank page behind the words just gets blanker and blanker? Why write, when the Cold War was at its very coldest and human beings were thinking up more and more irrevocable ways to wipe themselves out?

  Why write, if no one craved poems anymore — if all they craved was blank, white, all-destroying nothingness?

  Those may sound like rhetorical questions now, but at the time it was like suffering from a high fever.

  The work had started as a process of collecting words. A drive that I myself didn’t understand, to write, on sheets and sheets of paper, individual words, preferably nouns, linked to concrete phenomena in the world, everything edible, visible, smellable, available to the senses: apricots, doves, melons, and so on. There they sat, those words, on big pieces of white paper, words starting with a, with b, with c, and so on, and if I’d kept at it much longer it would have looked like an odd, unorganized dictionary, a wilderness of unrelated phenomena.

  Nevertheless, it eventually became clear to me that it was a matter of weaving a kind of spell. A prayer that apricots, doves, melons, and so on could continue to exist in the world. And at the same time, a prayer that atom bombs, hydrogen bombs, dioxin, and so on could disappear.

  But a dictionary, much less a large collection of words on paper, just doesn’t add up to spell-weaving. Only to potential readers possessed of the ultimate goodwill and imagination could I have presented an arbitrary group of words, all starting with a, for instance, on an 8½" by 11" sheet of paper, as if it were a poem.

  It was then that mathematics came to my rescue.

  For, since phenomena themselves never occur in a complete context just because they’re given names, it was my good fortune that during my search for words (in a dictionary, under f) I happened to stumble upon numbers — specifically, the Fibonacci numbers — which I experienced almost as a mystical vision, an image of the origin and development of the universe, answering to the Big Bang theory, the leading theory at the time. According to the Big Bang theory, here’s what happened when the universe was born: everything, at first compressed into next to nothing, exploded. It began spreading to all sides, and it will continue spreading until the distances become so great that it will all seem to disappear and become nothing again, or next to nothing.

  An image, then. Or a vision of the world as a context that’s mute in terms of words, but that has, in terms of numbers, very telling links among various phenomena, a context and a beauty evidenced, for example, by the fact that Fibonacci numbers are literally present in the growth principles of many kinds of plants, each number in the Fibonacci series coming from the sum of the two previous numbers, so that the numbers grow extremely fast, an exponential curve traveling at top speed toward infinity, but at the same time coming closer and closer to what we humans call the Golden Mean.

  So then it felt like a great adventure to try to combine this wordless universal poem of numbers with the man-made alphabet, or more accurately, to imply the combination by means of an unfinished series of poems.

  And why make the writing of poetry so complicated? One possible answer: it may be precisely what’s very complicated that’s the most simple. A rose, when we think about it, is very complicated, but still very simple. “A rose is a rose is a rose,” as Gertrude Stein says, her insistent repetition highlighting the mystery in the existence of the rose and of language itself.

  Normally we think of a rose as made by nature, a part of nature’s self-realization, while we think of language as man-made, something that we alone hold the patent on.

  But just as we ourselves are a part of the remarkable biology project that makes the earth unique, at least in our part of the universe, so too is language a part of that biology project.

  Applying this line of thought doesn’t mean that we lose free will and can shift the blame for every problem onto biology. We’re still the ones who can write anything and everything, and invent anything and everything, both for good and for ill; but only at a certain level. At a different level, both free will and language lose all meaning. Even the existence of the sun, the fact that it’s burning and will finally burn itself up, and similarly even the existence of death, makes our everyday death here on the earth an illustration that we can indeed decide all sorts of things, but only because we decide nothing. If we really could decide everything, we wouldn’t be here at all, simply because we’d have no reason to want to survive.

  For a long time now, our attempts to survive have managed to make it look like language belongs only to us. As if the word were entirely our own invention, designed to conjure up and master the world around us. Now we’ve finally come so far in that mastery that we’re discovering how our mastery is mastering us. And here I’m not talking about self-mastery, because we still haven’t figured out how to do that, at any rate not when we’re together.

  Maybe that’s why I’m pursuing this idea. Because I don’t feel that it diminishes human beings in any way to say we need only listen to the music of the word in order to hear that it too is created by something beyond us. Without the word necessarily being called divine.

  But the word must necessarily be called dual. Dual, meaning being both inside and outside. Inside the consciousness that calls some things divine, but simultaneously outside, in the divinity that calls consciousness forth. And within the poem a constant conversation between those two levels must be carried on.

  Maybe the function of the word can be described in an image: a membrane between inside and outside, a membrane that regulates the osmotic exchange between consciousness and the surrounding world.
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  And not until enough words have found their places in the poem, and thus enough has been left out, which is the most important thing in life, and brought forth, and general knowledge is connected to inborn knowledge, when these things and many more have happened as words are pulled from thin air or from library shelves, recycling upon recycling, not until then will balance finally be reached, the osmotic pressure equalized, and the membrane cease to function. The word wholly itself.

  That doesn’t mean that we can no longer enter into conversation with the poem. Just the opposite. It means that at least temporarily, a balance has been achieved between inside and outside, that the membrane has been made impermeable — to write poems means to create impermeability — in the sense that there’s no longer any striving to reach and master another level; everything in the poem seems held in suspension, in constant motion yet quite still, as in the eye of a storm, in what Novalis calls “das seltsame Verhältnisspiel der Dinge” (the strange interrelatedness of things).

  And this is definitely a condition very much worth striving for, one that human beings will go to great lengths to achieve. Because maybe for us this condition, which ultimately renders the world understandable, doesn’t actually exist unless words give it a name and thereby create it, again and again, before our wondering eyes.

  (1992)

  The Naive Reader

  When I write poems, I sometimes pretend it’s not me but language itself that’s writing.

  I pretend it’s possible to step back a bit from my human persona and to observe language from the outside, as if I myself had never used it.

  I pretend language and the world have their own connection. Pretend the individual words, without me, are directly related to the phenomena they refer to. So that it becomes possible for the world to find its own meaning. A meaning that’s already there.