A Defense of Ardor Page 13
What is the spiritual life? It’s aggravating that the question must even be raised; but whenever I pronounce these words, perhaps especially in the United States, my interlocutors look at me slightly askance, as if to say: Get thee to a monastery! The spiritual life doesn’t need to hide beneath a Cistercian’s habit, though; it’s often simply close observation of the things of this world with the imagination’s eye. It may also be a way station on a religious quest, but how much of this remains in contemporary poetry is difficult to say: isn’t poetry rather mysticism for beginners? The Catholic philosopher Jacques Maritain urged poets to concentrate on the material and craft of poetry as well.
Poetry is an art and thus cannot be reduced to spiritual activity. We need to bear in mind, nonetheless, that only in the inner life, as in a broken mirror, do we occasionally catch glimpses of eternity’s small, mobile flame, whatever the mocking (or not) reader may understand this to be.
At the same time, though, the inner life must be concealed, it can’t be flaunted in public. Like the poor stokers in Hofmannsthal’s famous “Manche freilich,” it must be confined beneath the ship’s deck. It can’t come out for two reasons. First of all, it’s not photogenic; it’s as transparent as May air. And second, the minute it decides to draw public attention, it becomes a narcissistic clown. But—and the comparison with the stoker is apt here—this invisible, discrete inner life is, in its passion, its naïveté, its bitterness and its indefatigable, vivifying enthusiasm, the final and indispensable energy propelling both poetry and people.
Contemporary mass culture, entertaining and at times harmless as it may be, is marked by its complete ignorance of the inner life. Not only can it not create this life; it drains it, corrodes it, undermines it. Science, caught up in other problems, likewise neglects it. Thus only a few artists, philosophers, and theologians are left to defend this fragile, besieged fortress.
Defending the spiritual life is not merely a sop thrown to the radical aesthetes. I see the spiritual life, the inner voice that speaks to us, or perhaps only whispers, in Polish, English, Russian, or Greek, as the mainstay and foundation of our freedom, the indispensable territory of reflection and independence shielding us from the mighty blows and temptations of modern life.
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Poetry’s second wing, on the other hand, is distinguished by its more intellectual, cognitive character. It pays courageous heed to our world’s changing face, it seeks the truth about us, it conducts tireless reconnaissance missions in reality’s countless corridors, it opposes lies. Poetry must be on the watch for history; it can’t rely exclusively upon private experience as understood by the English poet and philosopher Kathleen Raine, for example, that is, an ahistorical return to the models and motifs of the sacrum set forth by a very few poets in the English tradition (Blake, Keats, Yeats). Recognizing historical change, standing guard on the square before the president’s palace, reflecting on the gradual or rapid metamorphoses of our civilization: all this is vital too. A thoroughly sober gaze directed toward the historical world thus makes up the second pillar of poetry, which stands alongside the inner experience springing from some source unknown to us.
Sometimes the search for truth takes the shape of a rather different investigation: the attempt to create a common human measure. Each writer, each poet is also a judge of the human world (he also judges himself upon occasion); a poem’s every line submits the world to a verdict based on earlier reflection. Every line conceals the sufferings of Cambodia and Auschwitz (I know this sounds bombastic, but so be it). Every line also holds a spring day’s joy. Tragedy and joy collide in every line.
And another thing. In poetry we must always take at least two things into consideration: that which is, and that which we are. We must see the human comedy clearly and cruelly, we must see the vanity and foolishness both of ourselves and of those near to us. But we shouldn’t hastily abandon all aspirations to a higher world, a higher order, even though the spectacle of human folly may discourage us. We don’t lack for superb reporters to remind us of human poverty; but who will remind us simultaneously of what uplifts us? These two visions should ideally always work in tandem. An account of human degradation alone—however scrupulous—can lead only to dreary naturalism. When divorced from sober judgment, raptures over life’s ecstatic potentials, its theological dimension, can create only an insufferable rhetoric bursting with unjustified pride. But it’s extremely difficult to maintain both viewpoints simultaneously; poetry is finally impossible (just as human life is impossible according to Simone Weil).
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And perhaps these two wings just get in each other’s way—like the poor albatross whose clumsy steps across the ship’s deck were described by a sympathetic poet. At times they even seem to operate at cross-purposes. The bee-like gathering of spirituality is elegaic, a purely meditative activity (almost passive, slightly Buddhist) located between expression and recognition, while the intellectual apprehension of the world demands an alert mind, quick intelligence, a different form of inner orientation. They interfere with each other’s moods, they search in different directions, they’re curious about different things.
In a certain limited sense the two mutually obstructive wings of lyric poetry might be compared to the classical symbols of reason and revelation, to Athens and Jerusalem. (This was how Lev Shestov and Leo Strauss saw this dilemma, with Shestov choosing Jerusalem while Strauss found the conflict insoluble.) Hence poets—along with a certain percentage of thinking people—are doomed to life in the rift between Athens and Jerusalem, between a finally unreachable truth and beauty, between sober analysis and religious feeling, between astonishment and piety, between thought and inspiration.
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“How do poets live?” someone may ask. “Do they really toss and turn between faith and reflection?” I suspect that they usually live differently. They live defending poetry. Poets live like the defenders of a besieged citadel, checking to see whether the enemy is approaching and where he’s coming from. This isn’t a healthy way of life; it often makes for a lack of generosity and self-criticism. It may render poets incapable of thinking against themselves—and against the age, which is generally mistaken.
Do they seek truth? Don’t they too easily fall prey to frivolous prophets, chaotic philosophers, whom they can neither understand nor renounce? Poetry’s poverty lies precisely in the excessive faith it places in the day’s reigning thinkers—and politicians. This is what happened, after all, in the middle of the last century, whose heavy lid still presses down on us. Poets possessed by great emotion, subservient to the energies of talent, no longer perceive reality. Why did Brecht serve Stalin? Why did Neruda adore him? Why did Gottfried Benn place his faith in Hitler for several months? Why did the French poets believe in the structuralists? Why do young American poets pay so much attention to their immediate family and neglect a deeper reality? Why are there so many mediocre poets, whose triteness drives us to despair? Why do contemporary poets—those hundreds and thousands of poets—agree to spiritual tepidity, to those small, well-crafted, ironic jokes, to elegant, at times rather pleasant, nihilism?
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In conclusion I must confess (as the reader has already guessed) that I’m not entirely opposed to a free, wise, splendid poetry that manages to link near and far, high and low, the earthly and the divine, a poetry that manages to transcribe the soul’s motions, lovers’ quarrels, the scene on a city street, and can, at the same time, attend to history’s footsteps, a tyrant’s lies, that won’t fail in the hour of trial. I’m angered only by small poetry, mean-spirited, unintelligent, a lackey poetry, slavishly intent on the promptings of the spirit of the age, that lazy bureaucrat flitting just above the earth in a dirty cloud of illusion.
8 Poetry and Doubt
A moralist is someone who appeals to the better side of human nature, an orator mindful of the primary choice between good and evil, someone who reminds us of our basic obligations and condemns our failings and mistakes. It�
��s a person who speaks like an angel. So at any rate—perhaps rather naively—we’re accustomed to thinking in Poland. In France, though, a moralist is a writer who speaks ill of others. The best moralist is he who hits hardest. This worthy tradition was born under the sign of La Rochefoucauld and Chamfort (and the greatest of them all, Pascal!); it is a tradition of malicious mockery that conceals a rarely expressed maximalist ideal of humanity with religious overtones. In the twentieth century it found a successor who didn’t resemble his venerable progenitors in the slightest (it’s true that Cioran notes with satisfaction that Prince La Rochefoucauld was a timid person by nature). This was a poor immigrant from Romania, an Orthodox priest’s son, a typical Central European intellectual in some respects, one of those scribes nesting in Parisian attics whose source of livelihood and precise origins are unknown; is he from Budapest or Bucharest? (The Parisians never ask in any case, since they couldn’t care less.)
An unusual book appeared in France in November of this year—the posthumously published diaries of Emil Cioran, entitled Cahiers, that is, Notebooks, which were prepared for publication by the writer’s longtime companion, Simone Boué (herself no longer living). The book caused a sensation for a simple reason. Cioran, the famed author of fascinating philosophical essays, bleak, exceptionally pessimistic works translated into many languages and grounded in the principle that “only he who was never born is happy,” suddenly produces what may well be his greatest book two years after his death (his dates are 1911–1995). It doesn’t precisely contradict his earlier work; still it serves as a kind of corrective, it supplements the earlier writings in fascinating ways. Cioran emerges here as a religious thinker, a personality richer than his previous essays had suggested. The earlier essays called to mind a scrupulously pruned French garden, while the diary reveals at times a different person, less consistent than he’d seemed earlier, a different, more complex philosopher, even at times a poet.
The Notebooks—they span the years 1957–72, so they don’t go all the way to the end—were published, like Kafka’s work, against the wishes of the author, who didn’t want his private notes made public (although he didn’t burn them! In our times you can’t rely on others, you have to destroy your manuscripts yourself). The book is uncommonly irritating—as it should be, a personal diary that doesn’t bother anyone has clearly been falsified. Cioran irritates us with his extreme narcissism (the book contains at least two hundred self-definitions), his ill humor, his hypochondria, his radical misanthropy: he experiences a shock of revulsion at the sight of common humanity each time he happens to enter a subway car or suburban train. This narcissism distinguishes him from La Rochefoucauld, who never wrote about himself.
He irritates us both with the obsessions themselves and with the conviction, articulated on more than one occasion, that great art is born only of obsessions. He arouses impatience, aggravation, and pity—but also admiration for the courage with which he reveals his own failings. But he doesn’t stop there; after all, that’s not so extraordinary, young American poets do little else in their flawed poems. In his diaries he constructs a brilliant philosophical treatise written in installments and filled with wrenching contradictions, the confession of a woeful, gifted child of his century.
Who was Cioran? He was born in a Romanian village, which he affectionately remembered as a lost paradise to the end of his life. The son, as I mentioned, of a provincial priest, he was extraordinarily talented and began publishing early on. He was also afflicted early on by his maniacally intense spiritual life, by various neurasthenias and by his greatest foe, an ominous monster called insomnia. (Or rather, Insomnia; this complaint, to which Cioran sometimes ascribes philosophical virtues, was to plague him for years to come.) He settled in France before the war, but only in the immediate postwar years did he begin writing in French (he had already written and published several books in Romanian). He soon won the reputation as one of the best stylists in French literature, although he retained his Romanian accent in speaking. A perfectionist, Cioran never spoke on French television or radio; he doubtless couldn’t tolerate the thought that the flawless stylist might mangle the spoken language by mispronouncing all the French variants of the vowel e.
His fascist episode, a period of genuine enthusiasm for the Romanian Iron Guard, casts a shadow on his biography (in his diaries he notes that “my affirmations only add to my troubles, my negations are received enthusiastically”).
He developed an uncanny knack for attracting paradoxical living conditions to his apartment in the very heart of Paris (21, rue de l’Odéon). He never prospered and lived very modestly to the end (although in his diary of the sixties he notes with something like astonishment that he now owns five or six suits!). He didn’t accept literary honors; in his diary he notes that it doesn’t befit Job, after all, to receive literary awards … He was considered a recluse, an ascetic, and so he was, up to a point. At the same time, though, he led an exceptionally active “Parisian” social life and knew “all Paris” (le tout-Paris). He was at times considered “fashionable”; he became a specialist in suicide … He befriended Beckett (if two such eccentrics could really be friends), Ionesco, Henri Michaux, he knew Celan. Whom didn’t he know!
He attended Parisian parties (and reproached himself bitterly the morning after); when he came across friends, he could talk for hours on end without letting anyone else get a word in edgewise. But how he suffered afterward on that account! He loathed Parisian hypocrisy, the Parisian literary industry, Parisian snobbery—and at the same time he took to it all like a duck takes to water. Once, after visiting an exhibit of Jozef Czapski’s work (he knew him too, and, I think, admired him in his way), he wrote that the people at the show smiled not hypocritically, but sincerely, since they were Poles, not Frenchmen.
His diary is a hymn in praise of solitude and silence; the great conversationalist Cioran loved only quiet. For all that, you have to admire the diary’s honesty. Cioran frequently speaks badly of himself: he doesn’t pass over his countless minor treacheries in silence, he mocks himself, the failed Buddhist halted halfway on the road to mysticism, the disciple of Tao who knows half of Paris. But he betrayed only himself, only his cherished self-image. He longed to be an Asian sage despising the minor matters of this world while making his way toward Nirvana or what the Stoics called ataraxia—but he was forever wrangling with rude barbers, pushy shopgirls, dilatory cashiers, and finally, with himself. He had a litigious nature but was drawn to the Stoic—or Buddhist—ideal of passivity and inner calm.
He likewise dreamed of achieving complete indifference to the fate of his own books. More than this—he dreamed of giving up writing completely and reaching maximal happiness and satisfaction through absolute passivity and intentionally aimless meditation. Nonetheless he would call his publisher to remind him to stock his books in Parisian bookstores, and he suffered when an American editor rejected his essay on Paul Valéry, just as any other writer would in his place. Cioran didn’t want to be who he was; he didn’t want to be Romanian, or a writer, or a crank. Above all, he was revolted by the Parisian man of letters he’d become!
He never abandoned the dream of being “the hangman’s son” with which he used to shock his friends. At the same time, though, he led the thoroughly correct life of a bourgeois intellectual. He wanted to be demonically other, but without effort (he didn’t wish to torture himself, or others, like de Sade or Artaud). He would have preferred to inherit infamy from his parents the way others inherit the color of their eyes. Other people dream of receiving a fortune, he longed for a family disgrace.
He admired Simone Weil and they shared a certain secret similarity; both were drawn to “decreation,” that is, the dissolution of—their own—existence. Suicide was Cioran’s greatest philosophical obsession. At times he dealt with it pragmatically and wrote that those who think about killing themselves never actually do it. Opposites in so many respects—the selfish, lazy (in the Eastern style) Cioran versus Weil the tireles
s activist serving the oppressed—both saw themselves as hampering God.
“My son would undoubtably be a murderer,” the childless Cioran commented. But he also told a friend who was soon to become a father that he was taking a monstrous risk: “Your son may become a murderer.” The continuation of life on earth struck him as insanity, and each new pregnancy was a mistake.
“I go to my Doubt each day the way other people go to the office,” he wrote once in his diary. Diary writing stands under the sign of Doubt, written—in this passage—with a capital letter. The great prompter of doubt is death. Why—why should I do this or that, think this or that, say this or that, when death will come inevitably? Friends’ funerals were torture for Cioran; a cremation at Père Lachaise acts on him more forcibly than all his readings of ancient skeptics and cynics. Yet sometimes there’s a certain majesty in this as well; even an insignificant neighbor whose loud radio had bothered the writer for years undergoes an exceptional metamorphosis in death. Thus we discover the baroque Cioran, who lives constantly with the thought of death; and insomnia stands revealed as death’s cousin, its emissary.
The official world, both political and academic, has been infected by lies; truth lives only in doubt, in opposition, in solitude, in an anarchistic relationship to life. It’s not difficult to discern in this a trace of the writer’s very private resentment. His early, misguided support of Romanian fascism (a ghastly mistake committed by so many prominent Romanian intellectuals, not just by Cioran) surely led him to shun any form of affirmation. Once bitten … To interpret Cioran this way—and it’s an easy reading, a little obvious, too easy—deprives him of much of his dark charm, reduces him automatically to “one of many” intellectuals.