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« One's head may trip, the same way as feet skid » (Alfred de Vigny)
« He who writes verse dances on a rope. He walks, he smiles, he bows, and there's nothing weird in that until one finds out that such a plain and clever man is able to achieve this on a rope as thin as a finger. » (Paul Valéry)
The poet walks on earth
His life, his landscape, his sojourn and his horizon rest on this very earth. Here is his transience, here, his fellow creatures meet. A passer-by, a go-between and a passenger, he finds himself in transit, stuck between birth and disappearance he has no decision on, having almost no mastery but of his tos and fros. The latter take place more or less by chance, they are more or less far away. A wanderer or a prowler, a pedestrian or a peasant from Paris, the poet is a man in walking. Slow moving both in life and in the language, he questions both origin and destination. He keeps on saying : « I do not need anything else but moving forward ». He knows he is bound to die and he starts packing. Poetry is a matter of feet, of counted feet, elastic shoe lace and worn out shoes.
The poet walks on his head
This mortal, in transit, ogles towards the sky. He is a man of concern getting worse, of a persisting imaginary, of a lingering daydream, of a long-lasting quest. His mind wanders elsewhere. Walking on his head, he seems to be delusional. Sometimes one may even believe he's lost all good sense. Listen to him, speaking just to himself ! He starts a dialogue with some animals, some plants, some inanimate objects or some bygone souls. He proceeds « with his ego deliberately forgetful of himself towards those areas of the unusual and the weird » (Celan). He moves forward towards the unknown, the unsayable and the ununderstandable. He proceeds through riddles.
« Whosoever walks on his head has indeed the abyss of the sky underneath » (Celan) One might as well say that the earth gives way beneath him or that he rests on the very void. The poet is thus he who transformed the sky into a new ground, he who turns and tosses over the horizon, he to whom the infinite gives impulse. His questions come and knock almost as if the door would forvever remain shut.
Wandering about over the earth and on his head, he limps. His « wings of a giant » prevent him from walking. He stumbles over them. He will never become a God, he is not quite a man yet. « A stroller on both banks », he goes to and fro between two sides and gradually limps more and more as the divine fainters away. Baudelaire's foot is not Victor Hugo's. Verlaine's, like his rime is no longer Ronsard's. Even less is it Achilles' foot or Mercury's winged one fluttering about between the earth and the sky.
From one poet to the other, limping grows worse up to the point of becoming, with Verlaine, the essential element of a new poetics, in the image of those puppets crossing the deserted park of the Fêtes Galantes,
« Playing on the lute and dancing,
almost sad under their whimsical guise »
The poet has the task of having a dance with his limping without any excessive appeal to lyrical chevilles, nor to the accidental lame rime.
The poet walks on his hands
He moves forward in the language with his hands, his quill going to and fro on the page, hence such is the art of writing.
What rest in this hand delineating lines but, once more, some more lines ? Lines of life, of the heart, of luck, some sometimes dare say … What does the writing poet do ? But setting down the lasting stamp of the latter over the very whiteness up to the point of signing the text with his own identity ? The identity of a destiny (the line of life) and of a destined word (the line of the heart of a voice « outstretched towards the Other »).
« I never made a difference between a poem and a handshake », Paul Celan wrote. What does one mean by « reading a poem » if not seeing it before our eyes, shaking and mingling to our own eyes (as in the very gesture when two palms touch, come close, prime and temporarily exchange their warmth) lines of life, of heart, of cleverness, of a destiny destined to us. Reading is one's share of a destiny, from that moment when the poet starts speaking « within the very angle of his own existence ». A gently sloping gradient of one's own existence towards an otherness : that very one to which each person is confronted in himself, that same one which the poet has the task of moving outside oneself. Neither he nor his poem is aimed at someone in particular but at « nobody's hand », at anyone's. Like a bottle thrown in the open sea, the poem is addressed to he who finds it. Hence the poet becomes a trouvère finding words, turns and shapes for that unknown addressee of a troubadour-reader, the latter discovering, welcoming, acknowledging and taking in his turn this providential word whose specificity rests precisely in waiting to be found in order to exist.
The pace of the tightrope walker
That man who walks on earth, on his head and on his hands, is an acrobat per se. He moves heaven and earth to try and follow a rightful path. Daring the splits between the skies and the earth, here he goes, limping and wobbling as rime does. The truth of the poem rests in the difficult handling of these three gaits : walking on the earth, on the head and on the hands means wandering, thinking and destining.
As a thightrope walker, the poet walks further on a rope sparing his steps. His existence hangs by a thread : that of the lines which his hand delineates and which, page after page, opens up the web of his own life. He dances on the garlands and gold chains which he hung between windows or stars. The virtuosic writer of transient and relative altitude, he so-so frees himself from gravity. Such a dancer is no bird. He is well aware of the weight of his flesh on his own body. He doesn't fly in the sky, he tries to walk there and paces up there with steps from here below. Such a go-between links worlds one to the other through the joining of metaphors and connections. Such a passer-by exacerbates the risk inherent to finiteness. He's a dare devil, risking the part for the whole. Chastised for having dreamt the impossible, he is sometimes to be found hanging from the very rope of his style as if it were a strangling gibbet, very close to let people hear « the last false note », forlorn as he is by the gods and cursed by men.
What is a poem but a matter of weft and spinning with words drawn from one's self or silk [in French, there's a play on words between « soi » = « self » and « soie » = « silk », n.d.T.] : The horizontal thread of his lines crosses the vertical thread of rime. Rime means a return, the movement of the meshing needle, the knot of identity. The poem inscribes all the way within its shape the very fever of departure, the desire of soaring and the reality principle with which these aspirations must assume as far as to produce a dancing and thinking object surveying, affixing, and taking the right measurements of both desire and its lack.
If destiny is a river whose flow every one is doomed to follow, the poem drifts away on the stream, crosses it and throws a bridge over it. Leaning over the pont Mirabeau, very close to throwing himself down from it, the rope dancer watches the sky from underneath, as it reflects and opens « as an abyss » under him. Indeed he looks upon the very spot wherefrom the unattainable comes to mirror and decides to die.
