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A Reference to Andreas Embiricos
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18 januari 2006
“Take my word,” says Andreas Embiricos, “and give me your hand”. Inside this twofold movement, phrased as it is in the most succinct of ways, lies the perception according to which one may extract the poet from the man. Here we have, at long last, a transaction that takes place outside the realms of commerce. You give and take without either selling or buying. If there is anything that is exchanged it is humanness. “The train of the river has been interrupted”. As we might say, let there not be any rupture in our cohesion and let humanness find its way. “Through the leaves in the fields towards the bridge where the sun shines on the harvest the white breasts the flowers inside transparent shirts that were touched at dawn by the girls bend naked or almost naked to crush them and generally caress their bodies and the bodies of flowers”, the poem continues. In other words, when you wink at youth, its grace is sure to visit you. Everything fuses together, so that randomness is forced to articulate a truth as old as nature or the human body; we are thus led to a sensation that does not grow old, nor is ever spent, but allows humans to effortlessly remain new.
Naturally, none of this was included in the intentions of the poet when he wrote ‘Ancient Legendary Couch’ – this must be made absolutely clear. In surrealistic poetry, however, it happens that while copying, the ‘carbon paper’ sometimes produces things that the author never imagined, without this meaning that they do not somehow correspond to his deeper being. The ultimate meaning – that which is most significant – is conceived along the way, just like the landscape of the poem, which “was conceived on the fingertips of destiny”, similarly along the way. If this seems incomprehensible we can turn it around and look at it from a different perspective.
To a certain degree, poetry solves problems; at a higher level, it poses new ones; at its highest level, it annuls them in the sense that they cease to be problems. I am referring to levels that do not lead to perfection (which is a different matter altogether) but to an extremely disinterested treatment of the world. This is something that puts our critique to great embarrassment, and I will promptly explain why it does. Habituated as it is for so many years now to depend on allusions to older texts or mottoes about grand struggles which nevertheless remain unassimilated by the poetic organism, critique is forced (on the occasions when the artistic phenomenon presents itself autonomously and when it tries various moves in order to grip the bull by the horns), to become aware that its hands are veritably numb due to some much idleness. Without any Antigones, without any Oresteses, without panhuman brotherhoods and sisterhoods, the tip of its pen has to conceive something, its mind simply has to come up with something – but what? A thousand times better to keep silent then.
A forty-year old silence of this ilk has sufficed to isolate Andreas Embiricos on an opposite shore, so close and at the same time unapproachable, since there is no harbour from which one might make the journey across. We have all the ease in the world in dealing with murders, yet we have none in our dealings with roses. Roses – at least only as far as the saying goes – for in this case we are not speaking of flowers; we are speaking of their corresponding element within modes of expression, in the sense that the same mystical mechanism that governs the budding of blossoms likewise governs the budding of nascent phrases, phrases that are able to capture that which goes on transcendentally without any other mediation. And that comes to be within the scope of a poem which does not aspire either to elegance of style or to philosophical perusal but solely to what we may call ‘vibration’ or ‘ejection’ in the spiritual sense. Could you or I ever hope to prove that its result causes the same magical and powerful arousal that the Apocalypse used to stir in a susceptible reader of John? Crazy is what we would be called. Be that as it may, once we leave the transference from the divine to the human aside, we still stand before the same de-systematisation of logos, the same iconistic, if you would like to see it this way, prolixity.
Deep down, the absurdity of the first surrealistic texts is no more than a photocopy of the absurdity of events, and, once the shadows of petty interests are eliminated, only the dynamics of each person’s imagination shines clearly forth– that and, a bit beyond that, the free process of life, now vindicated within the language of art, which has extremely far-reaching consequences for every thinking person.
If Andreas Embiricos succeeds in something it is to defuse reality. He does not apply automation so much in order to follow the flow of the unconscious but in order to question the fundamental laws of the way we function and – in direct contrast to Mallarmé – to find himself an owner of texts in which, not only words but their semantic content and even their syntax and ultimate meaning show a divergence from conventional speech. Putting on equal footing things rational and things absurd, things significant or inconsequential, elements of folk or pure language, Embiricos eliminates the distinctions that have from time immemorial underpinned Greek-Western thought, arousing our revolutionary instinct to an excitement that aims beyond the sphere of socio-political aspirations to embrace humans in the totality of their psychosomatic being.
After all, the same thing also happens in his struggle for our complete emancipation from love. This struggle chiefly took place in his later years and seems to be of little consequence anymore. Even so, because of the way this struggle took place, it has left a gap – a fact that the poet had foreseen. There must be something else, then, an organ that is able to activate the magical forces of our psyche forevermore, a ‘machine’ that automatically replenishes that which it itself expends, a Faust whose dealings are with angels – that is what love is in Embiricos’ view. Love – in the way the poet perceives it and seeks to translate it into deed – is able to cancel out even the verbosity to which we resort – this text being a blatant example of it – so that we might somehow pinpoint the phenomenon.
The words that dominate Embiricos’ first period (the second comprising his prosaic pieces, whilst the third one his poems ‘Today as Yesterday and Tomorrow’, ‘Octana’, and ‘The White Whale’, all of which still remain unpublished) are: stear (animal fat), eune (bed, mattress or nest), choane (crucible), vostrychos (tress), thysanos (tuft, crest or tassel), thryallis (wick or fuse), marmaryge (scintillation), anaflexe (ignition or conflagration), lampse (glow), anaphonese (exclamation), ektinaxe (ejection, squirt or bound). This is exactly what I was trying to say when I spoke metaphorically about vibration or ejection and – allow me now to add – ejaculation. And that because all these phrasal forms of eloquence, which can apparently be filled with anything at all, are no different from our own days, they are indeed our own days – hour by hour – as we might see them on a radiograph of our biological being. The “flowers that resemble hands” are much closer to the truth of our lives, and the “fingers that caress and give off sweet aromas” carry, by poetic standards, such unfathomable force within that no demagogue’s high-pitched cries could ever possibly reach, by prose literature standards.
After all, one only needs to delve a little into humans to see that it is not solely social unrest that defines our destinies but, more often than not, also incidents that we consider to be are unimportant and which we pass by as they evolve, develop and are at work according to their own determinism.
From Report on Andreas Embeirikos. Ypsilon, Athens, 1980.
Naturally, none of this was included in the intentions of the poet when he wrote ‘Ancient Legendary Couch’ – this must be made absolutely clear. In surrealistic poetry, however, it happens that while copying, the ‘carbon paper’ sometimes produces things that the author never imagined, without this meaning that they do not somehow correspond to his deeper being. The ultimate meaning – that which is most significant – is conceived along the way, just like the landscape of the poem, which “was conceived on the fingertips of destiny”, similarly along the way. If this seems incomprehensible we can turn it around and look at it from a different perspective.
To a certain degree, poetry solves problems; at a higher level, it poses new ones; at its highest level, it annuls them in the sense that they cease to be problems. I am referring to levels that do not lead to perfection (which is a different matter altogether) but to an extremely disinterested treatment of the world. This is something that puts our critique to great embarrassment, and I will promptly explain why it does. Habituated as it is for so many years now to depend on allusions to older texts or mottoes about grand struggles which nevertheless remain unassimilated by the poetic organism, critique is forced (on the occasions when the artistic phenomenon presents itself autonomously and when it tries various moves in order to grip the bull by the horns), to become aware that its hands are veritably numb due to some much idleness. Without any Antigones, without any Oresteses, without panhuman brotherhoods and sisterhoods, the tip of its pen has to conceive something, its mind simply has to come up with something – but what? A thousand times better to keep silent then.
A forty-year old silence of this ilk has sufficed to isolate Andreas Embiricos on an opposite shore, so close and at the same time unapproachable, since there is no harbour from which one might make the journey across. We have all the ease in the world in dealing with murders, yet we have none in our dealings with roses. Roses – at least only as far as the saying goes – for in this case we are not speaking of flowers; we are speaking of their corresponding element within modes of expression, in the sense that the same mystical mechanism that governs the budding of blossoms likewise governs the budding of nascent phrases, phrases that are able to capture that which goes on transcendentally without any other mediation. And that comes to be within the scope of a poem which does not aspire either to elegance of style or to philosophical perusal but solely to what we may call ‘vibration’ or ‘ejection’ in the spiritual sense. Could you or I ever hope to prove that its result causes the same magical and powerful arousal that the Apocalypse used to stir in a susceptible reader of John? Crazy is what we would be called. Be that as it may, once we leave the transference from the divine to the human aside, we still stand before the same de-systematisation of logos, the same iconistic, if you would like to see it this way, prolixity.
Deep down, the absurdity of the first surrealistic texts is no more than a photocopy of the absurdity of events, and, once the shadows of petty interests are eliminated, only the dynamics of each person’s imagination shines clearly forth– that and, a bit beyond that, the free process of life, now vindicated within the language of art, which has extremely far-reaching consequences for every thinking person.
If Andreas Embiricos succeeds in something it is to defuse reality. He does not apply automation so much in order to follow the flow of the unconscious but in order to question the fundamental laws of the way we function and – in direct contrast to Mallarmé – to find himself an owner of texts in which, not only words but their semantic content and even their syntax and ultimate meaning show a divergence from conventional speech. Putting on equal footing things rational and things absurd, things significant or inconsequential, elements of folk or pure language, Embiricos eliminates the distinctions that have from time immemorial underpinned Greek-Western thought, arousing our revolutionary instinct to an excitement that aims beyond the sphere of socio-political aspirations to embrace humans in the totality of their psychosomatic being.
After all, the same thing also happens in his struggle for our complete emancipation from love. This struggle chiefly took place in his later years and seems to be of little consequence anymore. Even so, because of the way this struggle took place, it has left a gap – a fact that the poet had foreseen. There must be something else, then, an organ that is able to activate the magical forces of our psyche forevermore, a ‘machine’ that automatically replenishes that which it itself expends, a Faust whose dealings are with angels – that is what love is in Embiricos’ view. Love – in the way the poet perceives it and seeks to translate it into deed – is able to cancel out even the verbosity to which we resort – this text being a blatant example of it – so that we might somehow pinpoint the phenomenon.
The words that dominate Embiricos’ first period (the second comprising his prosaic pieces, whilst the third one his poems ‘Today as Yesterday and Tomorrow’, ‘Octana’, and ‘The White Whale’, all of which still remain unpublished) are: stear (animal fat), eune (bed, mattress or nest), choane (crucible), vostrychos (tress), thysanos (tuft, crest or tassel), thryallis (wick or fuse), marmaryge (scintillation), anaflexe (ignition or conflagration), lampse (glow), anaphonese (exclamation), ektinaxe (ejection, squirt or bound). This is exactly what I was trying to say when I spoke metaphorically about vibration or ejection and – allow me now to add – ejaculation. And that because all these phrasal forms of eloquence, which can apparently be filled with anything at all, are no different from our own days, they are indeed our own days – hour by hour – as we might see them on a radiograph of our biological being. The “flowers that resemble hands” are much closer to the truth of our lives, and the “fingers that caress and give off sweet aromas” carry, by poetic standards, such unfathomable force within that no demagogue’s high-pitched cries could ever possibly reach, by prose literature standards.
After all, one only needs to delve a little into humans to see that it is not solely social unrest that defines our destinies but, more often than not, also incidents that we consider to be are unimportant and which we pass by as they evolve, develop and are at work according to their own determinism.
From Report on Andreas Embeirikos. Ypsilon, Athens, 1980.
© Odysseus Elytis
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