A Few Observations on a Poem, an Essay, and Several Quotes by Sh. A., Placed into a Landscape
Or this: to regard fragments of this city as something else, one mustn’t look at them panoramically—this way something that cannot lurk will inevitably creep in and reveal itself with all its guts. It’s always one and the same: for example, algae—the venerable guts of this reality; the glares adhered to the liquid surface—a sorceress, she strives so hard to lower the bar, to lay bare the bowel, her tearful tar, that you pray for a tide; certain shapes of orifices beneath the crumbling plaster; color—perhaps one should remain silent about it, not ladel out; finally, the particular juxtaposition of stones. But if you take a photo, for example, of a sturdy double door painted dark green recently, so it seems, removed from its hinges and erected again after some works—the building is slowly tilting, the left panel has overlapped the right one, and the door has stopped giving way; they nearly tore it to pieces before they remembered to remove and sand it down—then you might get a sudden comparison from M., one that’s probably apt; this door, wedged into this wall—from the city of F., a certain city of F., I tell myself, endowed in this language with one of its most elegant letters, a label-city to which, like to all of a kind, are adhered too tightly, as glares, poetic schools, all in all, a place remote enough to be plausible. All that’s left for me is to take it on faith that the door to the printers’ workshop is as if from the city of the poet Sh. A. who wrote the finest poem, say, about stones, or about the paroxysm of impatient self-sacrifice—and to conduct an experiment, to grind the stones from different cities, to layer conditions, scenes of frozen motion, or casts of dreams about space (we would not call them as everyone did already—frames) and guess in which of them we will discover ourselves. What if this wastelot, this house surrounded by pristine gaping, or this crimson stone—is actually from my city, the one that always poses itself a panorama, but now has suddenly managed to hide in lines about the south? Today the wind is so heavy that it has swept the slush from the wastelot to the rotten bridge.
Isn't that exactly how the poetic should work?
Perhaps something else is more important to his lines: an outskirt somewhere on a plateau, indifferent to itself—as if only indifference can preserve dignity. The spaces Sh. A. images are full of dignity precisely because no one essentially needs to reside in them besides himself and select characters—a teenager clutching to his chest a disheveled bird dummy with withered feathers, a god-even old man, a friend with a daguerreotype scar on the right shoulder. This inessentiality is all the more striking because, on the outskirts for the rest, meaning us, others, not a single deal involving ready-to-be-allocated space has been prepared in advance, as in different places that presuppose scenarios of your flitting about. The same is true of the town of P. di S., languishing in its inessentiality; it doesn’t even pay attention to the fact that it produced the poet Z-to. One should not be present here; nothing will be issued to you here; here reigns a sense of enduring stillness—a sensation that Sh. A. also knew. Lines of either that one or the other one—whether a manifestation of the outskirts, whether a distant plateau, whether that which moves, probably, via subterranean routes—a sense of connection between certain voices, bestowed upon us by places of indifference, situated now on the plains, now by the sloping fences washed by the river wave, now on the slopes of the rising hills. The marks may be as follows: a faceless bell tower, fences whitewashed with lime, a certain false spirit of the Mediterranean inherent in other localities that resides on the other side of the looking glass of this sought-after topos—usually slightly to the north, or to the east, several sun-scorched wastelots with an abandoned house, lizards, a dusty road.
In the essay “On a Certain Poem by Andrea Zanzotto,” Sh. A. displays a dizzying ability to simultaneously speak about the stated subject and to chart a course through his own stylistic raptures. His essays are prosaically viscous, worthy of the indifference of the finest poetic lines, archaically subservient. The poem “Departure to Vo,” discussed in Sh. A.’s aforementioned text, is from D-to’s early period, the beginning of the 1950s; the protagonist is preparing to depart from somewhere out of the blissful non-existence of the oikumenic periphery, approaching emigration or, if you will, exile—for the sake of that very archaic subservience, let us choose the latter. His slowness, inability to evade the collapse of the landscape’s familiarity, reluctance to leave behind the knowledge likely shaped by these very places, lead Sh. A., the interpreting one, to, let’s call it, a manifesto of relations with space; in it, one is left only to get bogged down, it is always flickered—with glimmers of the radiantly absent Plotinus’s “simplest simplicity” of a nearby refuge.
The protagonist of “Departure to Vo,” while in his homeland, nevertheless yearns for a reminiscent motherland that is firmly absent from his biographical map. Is Sh. A. not writing about his future self—(about all of our future selves?)—recalling that F., that motherland, which, even during his lifetime, ceased to exist on the map of the real?
As for Zanzotto, his hometown preserves his memory with certain streets, narrow, of course, sloping, with visitant emptiness and the ancestral home, looking over a low fence—just as it should be not to block overthrow an eye on the pale-pink building—occupied by someone else now; one can imagine that it is settled by one of the admirers (but whose? perhaps not a teenager clutching to his chest a disheveled bird dummy with withered feathers?). The short fence is built of stones that are easily amenable to division. One of them, with a barely settled yellow-faced Xanthoria parietina, a lichen, on it, for some reason shaped like the letter O—and now this lichen has to move out from a more spacious, uniform fence to a fragment forever limited by its modest proportions—so, this one—rough, abrasive—ended up in my palm, then—in my pocket, and was ultimately relocated to a city of different formations.
In Sh. A.’s poem “On the Side of the Stones,” a certain he presents a collection. His exhibits are also rough—like my specimen from P. di S.—but impeccably clean, breathing, of course, devoid of lichen. The stones appear scattered before us, while we long to see the one whose surface is the same color as skin. And if you were to pick it up without fear, then between your hand and this dark-pale, dark-translucent pebble, the distinction would slowly fade away, much like the transition from the “local” to the “other” is erased. Similarly erased is the transition from what is written in the actual poem to what remains unsaid around it. And the more imperceptible this transition is—like skin fused with stone—the more vociferously that other, born of the poem, asserts its claim to the words of the local. Sh. A. understood this poetic transaction, its result—the path to that metaphysical oikoumene, Plotinus’s superb simplicity, rather than contenting oneself with a glimpse of it in the background, and where else could it be but on the side of the stones—but we, of course, are never there, we are here, where they still use them to build cities, rather than write poems.