IDYLL I8: ON WRITING AND ON WRITING POETRY
FOREWORD
I won’t say anything new.
I will be repeating Old Masters, I’m afraid.
I remember, I remember here and now.
I have been robbed off some life-giving force, say Helen.
I remember now in pain, but not in vain.
I remember sometime in the future,
A daunting moment in my own history,
Say just B.P. (Before Prufrock),
Or a great moment slightly A.P.,
When they find me in written form.
1.
What is written is the new form of the left-over-fantasy crumblings plundered by the enthusiasm that comes after one says “I wish I could put these into words” while s/he is living through a crazy moment late at night. All this happens just before what is written is presented to the market to be consumed.
What is written is never what is lived. What is lived is that moment. The moment it is put into words, that moment is past. The time dimensions of that moment lived and of what is written are not the same. That moment cannot be put in written form. What’s written is the/a reflection of what is lived, it retains its clues.
What is written is the epitaph of what is lived.
Living is a priori to writing. Some claim the opposite is also true. Possible. The opposite is to believe that fantasy is reality. It is to imprison all time and space to the “I”.
“I” is too short for fantasy, i.e. fantasy is too large for the “I”. That fantasy is of no use to the “I”. If so, what’s lived is the epitaph of what is written. The reader reads this epitaph. This is the only way that the writer assures him/herself that s/he has “really” lived that moment.
Writing is, ipso facto, TRAGIC.
2.
By writing, the writer cannot live again what s/he has lived.
While s/he is trying to write what is lived, the writer sets sail into the fantasy. Fantasy appreciates this heroic act, and does not let its plunderer go. However frightened s/he might be, the writer is happy to be a part of his/her own fantasy, s/he wants this. His/her will gives acceptance to this act because this act resembles marrying another body. Thus, s/He is multiplied, and as s/he is multiplied, s/he is united with him/herself, s/he is completed. S/He wishes this.
If fantasy is not lived without being imprisoned to the “I”, it becomes a nightmare. The writer, then, falls and falls in his/her fantasy. S/He crumbles, and is lost in oblivion. S/He likes this oblivion in his/her fantasy. S/He thinks s/he lives in that fantasy. Thinking becomes his/her experience. Being, as it is squeezed between what he/she has lived and written, is not. S/He tries, in vain, to coincide the dimensions of time, and to intersect time arrows. This makes the writer tragic. What is written may not be tragic. It may be, but not like that.
Writing is, ipso facto, TRAGICOMIC.
3.
It is easy to fill in an empty sheet of paper. What’s onerous is to live, at a crazy moment late at night, a full sheet of paper.
What’s lived is, ipso facto, immortalized. Time is, ipso facto, burnt. Death can only be lived as thus.
Writing, i.e., the word, ipso facto, IS.
