Michel Camus The Paradigm of Transpoetry
Michel Camus The Paradigm of Transpoetry
Michel Camus The Paradigm of Transpoetry
We do not know what poetry is. The univocal concepts which one
used to call "the world", "reality", "nature", "culture", "poetry" have
become more naïvely reductionist since seekers have become
increasingly aware of the plurality of worlds and cultures, of the
complexity of levels of reality and of levels of perception, levels
uncaptured by Aristotelian logic and dialectics. Rather, an infinite
number of levels of truth and of complexity in poetry exist, a
verticality of levels of poetic perception, a plurality of directions of
the quest, a multiplicity of forms of poetic art.
Many trends in contemporary Western poetry have become estranged
from its origins in the initiatory "high-poetry" of the East. Evidence
which the adepts of the Greater Vehicle had clearly seen when they
discovered the verses of the Rig Veda. René Daumal and his friends
had opened a poetic, mystic and gnostic way, through the
contradictory cultures of East and West, as they did through the
sciences turned exclusively toward the pole of the Subject and those
turned exclusively toward the pole of the Object. In France, as
elsewhere, there are still poets open to the invisible dimension of
"sacred bonding" to be distinguished, as does Roger Caillois, from
"sacred unbonding". There are trans-religious poets inhabited by a
feeling for the Absolute: the Arab poet Adonis for example. Atheist
mystical poets like Bernard Noël. Poets of enigma "burning" at
different degrees of intensity in their element of fire. Seekers after
truth, in whose view initiatory poetry, oriented toward a unified
consciousness, tends to create a link between the essence of humanity
and the essence of the universe. Poetry of source and sorcery. Poetry
of awakening. Only the awakened poet knows that the quick and the
dead are of the same essence. But the poetry of greatest awakening
today lives on only in the catacombs of an epoch which is prey to the
disintegration of all values, the degeneration of all religions, the
collapse of the last myths of Marxism and the utopian eschatology of
science. In a world in which all points of reference have been lost,
here and there one still finds seers, heretic bearers of the sacred fire
and the alchemists of silence. The media fear silence. Insensitive to
"high-poetry", the people who live on the surface of life are incapable
of sensing the secret silence, which lives on hidden in the silence of
death.
North, South, East, West are part of the same Rose of Winds and are
generated by the same enigmatic center. Every true poetic search, in
whatever language or kind of culture, is oriented toward this center
and tries to approach it in the sense meant by the poet Antonin Artaud
when he cried out: - but who has drunk at the well-spring of life ?
Among the converging pathways of the quest, each has its own way of
crossing over toward the inaccessible fountain of life; one might call
trans-poetic the way of the "poet-so(u)rcerer " oriented toward the
unity of knowing. Goal which goes through and beyond poetry.
Filled with the sense of the Absolute, the poet-so(u)rcereris today a
citizen of the world. She is trans-national in the sense that she feels
linked relatively to many levels of reality at a time, but linked
absolutely to what goes through and beyond them. That is to say that
she feels herself to be first a citizen of the cosmos, then citizen of the
Earth (the "planet-village" of Jacques Delors), then European, then
French, then Corsican for example. Alas, as Kierkegaard said in
substance, man has an annoying tendency of relativizing the Absolute
while absolutizing the Relative. What is necessary, on the contrary, is
to lose our absolutist identifications to accede to what René Berger
has called a trans-identity : this is a concept which is infinitely open,
analogous to that of an infinite identity of every consciousness awake
to its own transcendence and to the transcendence of the universe, thus
to a double transcendence to be perceived as one. One can therefore be
both national, through membership in a territorial culture and trans-
national in the spirit of trans-culture.
The essential part of being trans-cultural is not to let oneself be
alienated by forms and beliefs, by systems of thought and formal
teachings. It is to open oneself to the transcendence of meaning of the
meaning before language, openness which the Mexican shaman Don
Juan Matus called the "silent knowledge" which is inseparable from
our luminous ignorance. The poet-so(u)rcererworks at reconciling the
warring sisters of poetry and philosophy. The trans-cultural vision of
poetry is inevitably trans-religious; it is planetary before being
European, French or anything else; it flowers at the center of the Rose
of Winds; it is open to all differences. Our occidental identity is
illusory to the extent that it does not integrate the Other - the oriental -
that we are also, in eternity. From this point of view, both Rûmi and
Meister Eckhart are equally our "masters" of living. Our
understanding of any culture different from our own can only be the
result of our own understanding being open to the identity of
opposites. We, Occidentals, are in our essence the alter egoof the
Orientals. We are a part, as are they, of the same transcendental We, to
make reference to the vision, in the work of Edmund Husserl, of the
absolute inter-subjectivity of the beings and the things which
determine the essence of life.
One of the axioms of the poet-so(u)rcereris the absolute principle of
the relativity of all reality and of all language. She knows that all is
metaphor. She knows that the paradox of poetic language is to allude
to what escapes language. One often forgets that language is a Great
Wall of China. The poet-so(u)rcerergoes through and beyond
language by being open to the "silence-alive". It is in this way that the
poet escapes from the prison of the tongue. "There is no poetry
without silence", said Roberto Juarroz. This presenceinfinitely near
infinitely far of the "silence-alive" one can call indifferently
presenceof the sacred or consciousnessof immanent transcendence in
the sense that transcendence is immanent to consciousness itself. It is
this "Order of the Secret" which initiatory poetry attempts, an
impossible wager, to enable people to share in. It is a secret, so to
speak, that is trans-poetic, because it goes through and beyond speech
and silence, because it is before speech and silence. It is the middle
secretly includedin the binary opposition of speech and silence. No
poet has ever said nor will ever say what this included middle is.
Meister Eckhart alluded to it in evoking the essence of a "third
speech" which is neither spoken nor thought and which is never
expressed. Poetic silence can accede, in its experience, to the highest
luminous level of silence. Only this silence can free us from the
opacity and weight of language. It is not an empty silence, it is a
silence full and even overflowing with silent meaning. It matters little
what name is given to designate the abyss or the hollow hidden in a
tongue, in other words the non-referent that escapes all language. The
poet-so(u)rcereruses words freely as arrows shot toward the
Unpronouncable, toward the inaccessible but inexhaustible Source.
Within his human limitations, he can only approach it without ever
being able to reach it. To say "the Source" is again a metaphor; that of
the enigma of "Who ?" and the enigma of "What ?" which are one and
the same enigma. The poet has the freedom of making allusion to
them by evoking the Name-less, the Form-less and the Bottom-less.
Paradoxically, it is the Bottom-less that provides the foundation of the
unity of poetic knowledge.
We live in a world in which techno-science generates a techno-culture
which has nothing whatever in common with an agriculture of the
soul. To these outrageous forces of uncontrolled globalization, what
counter-forces can poet-so(u)rcerers oppose ? Resistance to the
obscurantism of the media. Self-transformation toward self-
knowledge. Our vision of the world cannot change unless we change
from inside, unless our states of consciousness evolve, in Goethe's
words, toward more light, mehr Licht! In the titanic struggle which
opposes light and darkness, each of us, according to her nature, serves
either entropy or negentropy, either the evolution of consciousness or
its involution. Each is the conscious or unconscious instrument of
forces which are beyond all understanding. Poet-so(u)rcerersknow on
what side they fight. The paradigm of trans-cultural poetry is
above all the necessity of the awakening of man to what makes
him a man, to what goes through him and what goes beyond him.
The Manifesto of Transdisciplinarityof Basarab Nicolescu, quantum
physicist but also author of a thousand Poetic Theorems, opens the
way to encounters between poets and scientists, between researchers
in social sciences and those in the exact sciences. This is a radically
new departure. It is the seed of a new alliance between researchers and
creators in all disciplines against the predators in power. Growing
numbers of astrophysicists and quantum physicists are turning out to
be metaphysical poets. The alliance of seekers after truth, those
questioning the pole of the Subject and the others the pole of the
Object, and their transdisciplinary interactions, can constitute an
indestructible nucleus of light against the predators' attempts to plunge
the world in shadow. The destiny of humankind is not decided in
advance, it is created at every moment. Launched on the spaceship
Earth in a fabulous cosmic adventure, the human phenomenon
possesses in its heart an inexhaustible potential to awake to the
luminous transcendence of its own interior sources. It is the vocation
of the poet-so(u)rcererto make allusions to this by creating new points
of reference and new sign-posts on the path-less path of interior
infinity.
Michel CAMUS
Translated from French by Joseph E. Brenner