Article
On the connection between ‘I’ and ‘you’ and the development of the poet from one book to the next
January 18, 2006
His first book I Watch Through The Monkeys’ Eyes (1987) addressed ‘nature’, that ecological meaning, that circles around the welling-forth contact areas of human experience in the wild nature. It was a nearly inaugural book, imbued with adolescent belief in the power of the poem to generate something in its readers. Only since his second collection of poems Face (1991), a mature awareness, more bitter and more realistic with regards to the severity and dimension of the illness, appeared in Or’s speech. Or could no longer adhere to some romantic idea about ‘nature’. The question what is that ‘nature’ and what is that modern illness of man, that detaches itself from him, was re-examined from the beginning. Or made a classic choice: Eros. But he approached it at the dimension unique to him – the dimension that is all hesitation between two domains: between man and animal, man and vegetation, masculinity and femininity.
Face, and even more so, Ransoming The Dead (1994) expanded its penetration into those ‘synapses’; the contact points between human consciousness and the biological matter, the instinct, the body and the ‘non-human’ in the human. In those years, Or deepened his reliance on archaic sources (Hebrew, Greek and Indian). His poetic language performed a sort of a meta-historic connection that wished to create a special linguistic modus where that healing connection between the human existence sides, alienated from each other, might take place.
His next book So! (1995) marked a change: opposite the ‘classical’ poems (odes, ballads, short epics ) came the ‘ugly’ poems, written in a loud modus. A sort of a poetic heavy rock style. ‘Crude’ poems. This fascinating collection is the second tactic change: the Eros. ‘Nature’ is revealed here in its authentic shape in the current culture of sex. Painted in heavy make-up, saturated with violence and intense passion, it uses all this to cross the borders of romantic perception of the Eros. The sharp transitions between the sexes, so meaningful and important in previous collections, were its tools in those areas of hesitations and contact. But the connection here was blunt exposure, defiance. Or related in an acute manner to the issue of torture in sexual connection in order to point at the principal of ‘natural’ relation which also takes place between them.
It seems that this ambiguous book is not part of the developing succession of Or’s poetry. It is no longer clear if the therapeutic function, characteristic to him, stands in the center, or is a kind of a desperate identification with sweeping decadence. But precisely in this book, Or’s poetry touched the poetic in the intensities and ‘volume’ it required. In So! Or related to genres and contemporary modes of speech, post-modern, outside-literature, and at once enlarged his range of speech. Precisely in this book Or marked to himself the cultural expanse his poetic act deserves, and conquered the path to the ironic sophistication required to the complicated act he designated for himself from the start, that healing of the emotion.
His following book Poem, is certainly the beginning of Or’s ripe modus. He is no longer dealing with any conception about ‘nature’ but rather with the big conductor of any contact: speech. It is a poem; a long poem that is a complete ‘story’, and is a monologue about speech; about the ability to say some thing. A ‘thing’, in its full meaning of the Hebrew word. ‘Thing’ that is a word, ‘thing’ that is a noun, and ‘thing’ that is a path, law, logos.
The ‘Poem’ in the poem is the main character, and is presented in the opening as a creature hiding under heaps of words, and garbage, like a code in a bottle that will only be revealed in the future. The first exposure of that character (‘Poem’) presents him in its full ridiculous distance. “The poem that will speak of innocence” and only “tardy gods will listen to it . . . from the junk”. What is this ‘innocence’? Is it the excited romantic speech or the call of ancient belief?
In the first chapter of the poem, Or places the final point, the definition of ‘innocence’ that is the ‘Poem’, to that point he intends to reach in a wondrous complicated way. And this ‘innocence’ is not a nostalgic point in the ‘past’ of art or faith, but is a system of negations, of artistic conventions that is destined to expose a new relation between poem and man, between word and thing, and between man and ‘world’. This relationship, the ‘innocence’, is a human state where the boundary of the ‘I’ is erased, from which the ‘Poem’ is generated. It is the most simple and most complicated of all – it is the possibility “of becoming this antiquity/ that has nothing to say other than me, me, without limit/ without you. A dog lies on a step in the afternoon/ sun, and does not distinguish itself from the flies”. The same being of identification, a wholeness, that has no partitioning of conscience, analysis and calculation, will also be between the ‘you’, the second character in the poem, and the ‘Poem’.
On one hand the illustration of ‘innocence’ fits this yearned ‘naivete’ pole of the European classic poetry, such as was phrased by Schiller in his famous essay – ‘About Naivete and Sentimental Poetry’. It is the state of the ‘whole’ inside its being, like Achilles inside his heroism, but a line of differences update the ‘naivete’ of Amir Or and turns it into a new and unique term, though also classical. The ‘naivete’ of Or’s ‘Poem’ is not lost but is humiliated and denied; it is common, available, close, not sublime, and unrelated to anonymous scholars from the past. What covers Or’s naivete is not ‘sentimentalism’ but late urbanism, that recently lost all essential contact, not only with its past but mainly with its present, with its life.
The monologue leads the ‘you’ to a kind of a long lesson about how to read a poem. The lesson is concentrated and convoluted, it holds within itself hidden narrative formats, that occur simultaneously with the growth of the ability to stand again in front of a period, a word and a sentence.
From chapter to chapter the tension between the ‘I’ and the ‘you’ grows and the inner world of the poet is revealed and receives a past, a personal and mythological one. From that an immense conflict between the ‘I’ of the poet and the ‘you’ is divulged. Here, it seems to me, the main issue that is unique to ‘Poem’ is exhibited. Or addressed here the question of poetry’s interest in ‘reality’, through a meta-theoretic description of the construction of the ‘you’ character.
The bridge into the ‘world’ breaks down and an entire conflicting awareness emerges: how much the poet wishes not to say anything to anyone; how much jealousy he has toward his imagined creatures, and how much unwillingness he has in face of them being separate from him, from being the ‘other’, and only if for the grammatical disposition. The knight of naivete that comes to attach ‘words’ to ‘things’ spreads out the romantic glory of the personal creation act, this beyond-sex of narcissistic multiplicity. The ‘you’ without a navel turns into a trap, that detaches also him from the cycle of life and from any certainty regarding his being.
It is worth emphasizing that the surplus of symbolism of the events in this poem would not have worked out if it wasn’t for the emotional power in the speech throughout the poem. The unusual lyrical intensity, which stands at the basis of the poem, is shown in one chapter in full nudity. This is the chapter that deals with the exposure of the mythological character of Narcissus, through a brilliant parody of the ancient story: the chapter’s title is not coincidental ‘Drowning, he breathes living water’:
My Narcissus, in the end you got used to it. You sprouted gills
on the sides of your neck and sliding down down
sprawled among stems and water. And the echo became a wave
and the reflection a place and you looked and looked and looked
toward the skyline of water. And leapt
out again to me.
And the thunder returned to silence, the water to being a screen,
the eye – to marble. You came back into me.
And the echo became a voice and the reflection a face
and you were released.
Come
sit down.
(Chapter 16)
This chapter, the most simple and penetrating among the poem’s chapters, is also the turning point and decisive moment in the plot of the poem: in it the poet reaches the peak of identification with the figure of Narcissus, up to complete acceptance of his drowning. He was the one to surround himself with an ‘I’ of growing dimensions, through mirrors and mirrors of words, and transparencies and duplications of various kinds. To see his complete descent in his own boundaries up to a point of complete blur between reality and fiction, and between ‘I’ and ‘other’.
Narcissus’ leap back, in this poem, is not a simple rescue but a critical decision. The poet consents here to his being an artist with its full alienation and death that derives from such a being. Narcissus, here, leaps back and is imprisoned again in his being ‘I’ whose eye is made of marble and not flesh. Life’s wish in the leap into the reflection was proven false. The poet retreats from the attempt to mate with his reflection and comes to terms with his essential, principled death of the narcissistic creator, and lets his ‘other’ be a real ‘I’. Only then the ‘echo’ becomes a ‘voice’ – a separate entity, only then the poet invites the ‘you’ of his poem to sit down with him in this strange togetherness at this ‘stone-feast’ where a living person sat next to a god-like marble man that addresses him.
In his final chapter of Poem, the yearned way for reading the poem is described, that being of ‘innocence’ without partitions, which is the reader’s constant entrance into the poem, the one that is enabled after the death of the poet into his poem.
This description of reading brings back the reader of Poem to the opening point, and thus the ending of this composition is woven into its beginning, though here, both the real reader and the fictionalized ‘you’ are already woven into the poem itself. The poem is understood here as a ‘place’ where the gaze occurs. That is the place that is carved out of Narcissus’ gaze that dropped his whole living being into the act of looking: the poet that turned his whole life into a gaze and sacrificed his life until he fully turned into an eye.
By the complex weaving that is formed between processes of life and the process of creation, and between the process of reading and the life and death story of Narcissus, Poem constructs a move that is directly contradictory to the post-modern dialogue in culture. Poem exits from it and turns against it, feeling that the undermining of the status of the sign in the post-modern dialogue created a dangerous disconnection between art and the ‘world’.
Or’s way of treating the story of Narcissus is, among other things, an analytical treatment fascinating in its spirals. It created the post-modern dialogue and ties this dialogue, not only to the Narcissistic labyrinth of mirrors, that sterile autonomy of the ‘dialogue’ around itself, but to the eternal moral weakness, the instinctive and creative, that it loosens and generates.
Poem goes against the feebleness of speech, the weakness of words, and the flimsy intentions of post-modernism, not out of aversion or loathing but out of deep anxiety from the deep disconnection between poetry and spirit in general and between man. What is impressive in Poem is this area, the handling of sign as image, that denotes as a code and a communication tool, the reversed operation that he creates throughout it, of the post-modern procedures, until he exits them toward a new (and perhaps ancient) possibility of signifying and speech.
The mythic poems of Or are in fact a search after forms of expression to ancient layers of existence, present in man in each period, in order to use them to approach human life in the present. His interest in myth is in the construction of an alternative form of direct speech, obligatory and symbolic, in the full dimension of language.
Translated by Helena Berg
Reprinted with permission from an article by Ariel Hirschfeld originally appearing in Haaretz and adapted by him to accompany the publication of a selection of Or’s poetry in Macedonia.
Israeli critic Ariel Hirshfeld surveys Amir Or’s work from his first book until Poem (1996), discussing the development of relations between the addresser and the addressee, and Or’s link to myth, to language and to world poetry.
The poetry of Amir Or comes to heal. In each of Or’s collections of poems another door opens to the big illness that the poet speaks about and against; the illness that is the big Other of his poetry. This illness that is known in its generalized name ‘the current state of man’ is certainly one of the eternal subjects of poetry, and one of the most banal fields in the current cultural dialogue. But few are the places where it is expressed as active pain, as a galloping process of destruction and ruin, as it is expressed in Or’s poems. As if his collections of poems diagnose each time another side or another limb in the sick body, and search for a remedy. His first book I Watch Through The Monkeys’ Eyes (1987) addressed ‘nature’, that ecological meaning, that circles around the welling-forth contact areas of human experience in the wild nature. It was a nearly inaugural book, imbued with adolescent belief in the power of the poem to generate something in its readers. Only since his second collection of poems Face (1991), a mature awareness, more bitter and more realistic with regards to the severity and dimension of the illness, appeared in Or’s speech. Or could no longer adhere to some romantic idea about ‘nature’. The question what is that ‘nature’ and what is that modern illness of man, that detaches itself from him, was re-examined from the beginning. Or made a classic choice: Eros. But he approached it at the dimension unique to him – the dimension that is all hesitation between two domains: between man and animal, man and vegetation, masculinity and femininity.
Face, and even more so, Ransoming The Dead (1994) expanded its penetration into those ‘synapses’; the contact points between human consciousness and the biological matter, the instinct, the body and the ‘non-human’ in the human. In those years, Or deepened his reliance on archaic sources (Hebrew, Greek and Indian). His poetic language performed a sort of a meta-historic connection that wished to create a special linguistic modus where that healing connection between the human existence sides, alienated from each other, might take place.
His next book So! (1995) marked a change: opposite the ‘classical’ poems (odes, ballads, short epics ) came the ‘ugly’ poems, written in a loud modus. A sort of a poetic heavy rock style. ‘Crude’ poems. This fascinating collection is the second tactic change: the Eros. ‘Nature’ is revealed here in its authentic shape in the current culture of sex. Painted in heavy make-up, saturated with violence and intense passion, it uses all this to cross the borders of romantic perception of the Eros. The sharp transitions between the sexes, so meaningful and important in previous collections, were its tools in those areas of hesitations and contact. But the connection here was blunt exposure, defiance. Or related in an acute manner to the issue of torture in sexual connection in order to point at the principal of ‘natural’ relation which also takes place between them.
It seems that this ambiguous book is not part of the developing succession of Or’s poetry. It is no longer clear if the therapeutic function, characteristic to him, stands in the center, or is a kind of a desperate identification with sweeping decadence. But precisely in this book, Or’s poetry touched the poetic in the intensities and ‘volume’ it required. In So! Or related to genres and contemporary modes of speech, post-modern, outside-literature, and at once enlarged his range of speech. Precisely in this book Or marked to himself the cultural expanse his poetic act deserves, and conquered the path to the ironic sophistication required to the complicated act he designated for himself from the start, that healing of the emotion.
His following book Poem, is certainly the beginning of Or’s ripe modus. He is no longer dealing with any conception about ‘nature’ but rather with the big conductor of any contact: speech. It is a poem; a long poem that is a complete ‘story’, and is a monologue about speech; about the ability to say some thing. A ‘thing’, in its full meaning of the Hebrew word. ‘Thing’ that is a word, ‘thing’ that is a noun, and ‘thing’ that is a path, law, logos.
The ‘Poem’ in the poem is the main character, and is presented in the opening as a creature hiding under heaps of words, and garbage, like a code in a bottle that will only be revealed in the future. The first exposure of that character (‘Poem’) presents him in its full ridiculous distance. “The poem that will speak of innocence” and only “tardy gods will listen to it . . . from the junk”. What is this ‘innocence’? Is it the excited romantic speech or the call of ancient belief?
In the first chapter of the poem, Or places the final point, the definition of ‘innocence’ that is the ‘Poem’, to that point he intends to reach in a wondrous complicated way. And this ‘innocence’ is not a nostalgic point in the ‘past’ of art or faith, but is a system of negations, of artistic conventions that is destined to expose a new relation between poem and man, between word and thing, and between man and ‘world’. This relationship, the ‘innocence’, is a human state where the boundary of the ‘I’ is erased, from which the ‘Poem’ is generated. It is the most simple and most complicated of all – it is the possibility “of becoming this antiquity/ that has nothing to say other than me, me, without limit/ without you. A dog lies on a step in the afternoon/ sun, and does not distinguish itself from the flies”. The same being of identification, a wholeness, that has no partitioning of conscience, analysis and calculation, will also be between the ‘you’, the second character in the poem, and the ‘Poem’.
On one hand the illustration of ‘innocence’ fits this yearned ‘naivete’ pole of the European classic poetry, such as was phrased by Schiller in his famous essay – ‘About Naivete and Sentimental Poetry’. It is the state of the ‘whole’ inside its being, like Achilles inside his heroism, but a line of differences update the ‘naivete’ of Amir Or and turns it into a new and unique term, though also classical. The ‘naivete’ of Or’s ‘Poem’ is not lost but is humiliated and denied; it is common, available, close, not sublime, and unrelated to anonymous scholars from the past. What covers Or’s naivete is not ‘sentimentalism’ but late urbanism, that recently lost all essential contact, not only with its past but mainly with its present, with its life.
The monologue leads the ‘you’ to a kind of a long lesson about how to read a poem. The lesson is concentrated and convoluted, it holds within itself hidden narrative formats, that occur simultaneously with the growth of the ability to stand again in front of a period, a word and a sentence.
From chapter to chapter the tension between the ‘I’ and the ‘you’ grows and the inner world of the poet is revealed and receives a past, a personal and mythological one. From that an immense conflict between the ‘I’ of the poet and the ‘you’ is divulged. Here, it seems to me, the main issue that is unique to ‘Poem’ is exhibited. Or addressed here the question of poetry’s interest in ‘reality’, through a meta-theoretic description of the construction of the ‘you’ character.
The bridge into the ‘world’ breaks down and an entire conflicting awareness emerges: how much the poet wishes not to say anything to anyone; how much jealousy he has toward his imagined creatures, and how much unwillingness he has in face of them being separate from him, from being the ‘other’, and only if for the grammatical disposition. The knight of naivete that comes to attach ‘words’ to ‘things’ spreads out the romantic glory of the personal creation act, this beyond-sex of narcissistic multiplicity. The ‘you’ without a navel turns into a trap, that detaches also him from the cycle of life and from any certainty regarding his being.
It is worth emphasizing that the surplus of symbolism of the events in this poem would not have worked out if it wasn’t for the emotional power in the speech throughout the poem. The unusual lyrical intensity, which stands at the basis of the poem, is shown in one chapter in full nudity. This is the chapter that deals with the exposure of the mythological character of Narcissus, through a brilliant parody of the ancient story: the chapter’s title is not coincidental ‘Drowning, he breathes living water’:
My Narcissus, in the end you got used to it. You sprouted gills
on the sides of your neck and sliding down down
sprawled among stems and water. And the echo became a wave
and the reflection a place and you looked and looked and looked
toward the skyline of water. And leapt
out again to me.
And the thunder returned to silence, the water to being a screen,
the eye – to marble. You came back into me.
And the echo became a voice and the reflection a face
and you were released.
Come
sit down.
(Chapter 16)
This chapter, the most simple and penetrating among the poem’s chapters, is also the turning point and decisive moment in the plot of the poem: in it the poet reaches the peak of identification with the figure of Narcissus, up to complete acceptance of his drowning. He was the one to surround himself with an ‘I’ of growing dimensions, through mirrors and mirrors of words, and transparencies and duplications of various kinds. To see his complete descent in his own boundaries up to a point of complete blur between reality and fiction, and between ‘I’ and ‘other’.
Narcissus’ leap back, in this poem, is not a simple rescue but a critical decision. The poet consents here to his being an artist with its full alienation and death that derives from such a being. Narcissus, here, leaps back and is imprisoned again in his being ‘I’ whose eye is made of marble and not flesh. Life’s wish in the leap into the reflection was proven false. The poet retreats from the attempt to mate with his reflection and comes to terms with his essential, principled death of the narcissistic creator, and lets his ‘other’ be a real ‘I’. Only then the ‘echo’ becomes a ‘voice’ – a separate entity, only then the poet invites the ‘you’ of his poem to sit down with him in this strange togetherness at this ‘stone-feast’ where a living person sat next to a god-like marble man that addresses him.
In his final chapter of Poem, the yearned way for reading the poem is described, that being of ‘innocence’ without partitions, which is the reader’s constant entrance into the poem, the one that is enabled after the death of the poet into his poem.
This description of reading brings back the reader of Poem to the opening point, and thus the ending of this composition is woven into its beginning, though here, both the real reader and the fictionalized ‘you’ are already woven into the poem itself. The poem is understood here as a ‘place’ where the gaze occurs. That is the place that is carved out of Narcissus’ gaze that dropped his whole living being into the act of looking: the poet that turned his whole life into a gaze and sacrificed his life until he fully turned into an eye.
By the complex weaving that is formed between processes of life and the process of creation, and between the process of reading and the life and death story of Narcissus, Poem constructs a move that is directly contradictory to the post-modern dialogue in culture. Poem exits from it and turns against it, feeling that the undermining of the status of the sign in the post-modern dialogue created a dangerous disconnection between art and the ‘world’.
Or’s way of treating the story of Narcissus is, among other things, an analytical treatment fascinating in its spirals. It created the post-modern dialogue and ties this dialogue, not only to the Narcissistic labyrinth of mirrors, that sterile autonomy of the ‘dialogue’ around itself, but to the eternal moral weakness, the instinctive and creative, that it loosens and generates.
Poem goes against the feebleness of speech, the weakness of words, and the flimsy intentions of post-modernism, not out of aversion or loathing but out of deep anxiety from the deep disconnection between poetry and spirit in general and between man. What is impressive in Poem is this area, the handling of sign as image, that denotes as a code and a communication tool, the reversed operation that he creates throughout it, of the post-modern procedures, until he exits them toward a new (and perhaps ancient) possibility of signifying and speech.
The mythic poems of Or are in fact a search after forms of expression to ancient layers of existence, present in man in each period, in order to use them to approach human life in the present. His interest in myth is in the construction of an alternative form of direct speech, obligatory and symbolic, in the full dimension of language.
Translated by Helena Berg
Reprinted with permission from an article by Ariel Hirschfeld originally appearing in Haaretz and adapted by him to accompany the publication of a selection of Or’s poetry in Macedonia.
© Ariel Hirschfeld
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