Prologue: "A Sun within a Sun"
from Claire Chi-ah Lyu's
A Sun within a Sun:
The Power and Elegance of Poetry
And burned by the love of the beautiful...
my consumed eyes see only [m]emories of suns.
Charles Baudelaire, "Les plaintes d'un Icare"
According to the story, Daedalus and his young son, Icarus, were trapped in the Labyrinth on the island of Crete. To escape, Daedalus, a skilled artist, sculptor, architect, and engineer, designed and built wings for himself and his son and attached them to their shoulders with wax. Together they flew out of the Labyrinth, but as they took flight, Daedalus warned Icarus not to fly too high or too low: if he flew too high, the sun might melt the wax; if too low, the water might weigh down the feathers. Daedalus went ahead, keeping the middle course, but Icarus, ignoring his father's words, flew high into the sky toward the sun. The wax melted, and with his wings detached, Icarus plunged into the ocean that now bears his name.
Icarus is considered by some an imprudent fool – Pierre Grimal's Dictionary of Classical Mythology calls him "a foolish youth" who "did not listen to his father's advice" – by others a brave soul who had the courage to take risks for a higher ideal.1
In a sonnet, Philippe Desportes, a French poet of the sixteenth century, praises Icarus: he "died pursuing a great adventure," burned by "the most beautiful of stars" (Il mourut poursuivant une haute aventure; Il eut pour le brûler des astres le plus beau). "The sky was his desire, the Sea his sepulcher / Is there a more beautiful purpose, or richer tomb?" (Le ciel fut son désir, la Mer sa sépulture: / Est-il plus beau dessein, ou plus riche tombeau?).2 Charles Baudelaire, in the nineteenth century, gives Icarus a voice in "Les plaintes d'un Icare" ("The Laments of an Icarus"):
The lovers of prostitutes
Are happy, rested, and sated;
As for me, my arms are broken
For having embraced clouds.
It is thanks to the matchless stars,
That blaze in the depths of sky,
That my consumed eyes see only
Memories of suns.
In vain I wanted of space
To find the end and the middle;
Under some fiery eye I know not
I feel my wing breaking;
And burned by the love of the beautiful,
I shall not have the sublime honor
Of giving my name to the abyss
That will serve as my tomb.
(Les amants des prostituées
Sont heureux, dispos et repus;
Quant à moi, mes bras sont rompus
Pour avoir étreint des nuées.
C'est grâce aux astres nonpareils,
Qui tout au fond du ciel flamboient,
Que mes yeux consumés ne voient
Que des souvenirs de soleils
En vain j'ai voulu de l'espace
Trouver la fin et le milieu;
Sous je ne sais quel œil de feu
Je sens man aile qui se casse;
Et brûlé par l'amour du beau,
Je n'aurai pas l'honneur sublime
De donner man nom à l’abîme
Qui me servira de tombeau.)
[I: 143] 3Neither a complete fool who fails pitifully nor a pure hero who succeeds gloriously, Baudelaire's Icarus speaks of opening up simultaneously to the brilliance and beauty of "the matchless stars" and to the darkness and terror of the abyssal "tomb." He does not claim the "sublime honor / Of giving [his] name to the abyss" but tells of his "arms... broken / For having embraced clouds," of his "consumed eyes see[ing] only / Memories of suns," and of his entire being "burned by the love of the beautiful." He accepts the wound the world inflicts on and inscribes in him in a movement of complete opening of the self to the world and its risks for the sake of the "love of the beautiful." He takes the risk of wings knowing that he might be consumed by the sun, lamenting that those who take no risks of flight, "The lovers of prostitutes / Are happy, rested, and sated; / As for me, my arms are broken / For having embraced clouds." Repus (sated) and rompus (broken) rhyme in French, emphasizing a relationship, but one of opposition, between holding tight onto easy pleasure, possession, and certainty, on the one hand, and poetry's move that lets go of certainties, breaks open and free, on the other.
"The poem is the answer's absence," Maurice Blanchot writes. "The poet is one who, through his sacrifice, keeps the question open in his work."4 Icarus is the figure of the poet who risks sacrificing himself to "the love of the beautiful," willing to be "broken" by and open himself to love and Beauty, and thereby opens – and leaves open – the question of love, Beauty, and risk. For poetry is clear perception, or realization, that only "broken" arms can hold the whole universe and, as Rabbi Nahman of Bratzlav said, that "no heart is as whole as a broken heart."5 In breaking out of the secure closure of the answer and migrating into the uncertain openness of the question, poetry is pure, lucid, and rigorous in its surrendering to all of life's possibilities. Poetry is language that explores "how much risk one can take in allowing one's words to be modified by the world," to borrow Bruno Latour's statement regarding scientific discourse.."6 Risk is the willingness "to be modified." Poetry takes, and depends on, essential risks of not holding back from deep intimacy with the open, the self, and the other.
Every species forces the natural historian
to take as much risk to account for its evolution
through an innovative form of narration
as it took the species to survive.
Bruno Latour, foreword to
Power and Invention, by Isabelle StengersThe historian of science Isabelle Stengers proposes to scientists that we "take, accept, and learn to measure the risks," warning against the "sterility" of the "least risky approach," which she calls "easy critique."7 In his foreword to Stengers' book, Latour agrees that science must acknowledge "risky construction" that "takes risk as its cornerstone," indeed, that even the discourse and narration of science – "the words" – must take risks.8 He might as well have been speaking about poetry: "There are constructions where neither the world nor the word, neither the cosmos nor the scientists take any risk. These are badly constructed propositions and should be weeded out of science and society.... On the other hand, there exist propositions where the world and the scientists are both at risk. Those are well constructed, that is, reality constructing, reality making, and they should be included in science and society."9
He rejects "most critical thinking" that reproduces "exactly at the outcome what was expected from the beginning... because the writer incurred no risk in being kicked out of his or her standpoint in writing them.... The equation is simple, although very hard to carry out: no risk, no good construction, no invention, thus no good science."10
"No risk, no good construction, no invention, thus no good poetry," one could also say. Or, no science or poetry at all, because both good science and good poetry would be tautologies. Poetry, like science, seeks to produce what Stengers terms "astringent effects" that stop "thought from just turning in self-satisfying circles."11 It insists that we abandon and awaken from the deceptive comforts of habit and addiction. Risk is the willingness to open up the limited and limiting circle of the familiar and the easy so as "to be modified." To receive the power of poetry, reader, critic, and teacher of poetry alike must "be modified," for the poet takes the risk of language that is "modified by the world," that eschews preconception. Poetry is a venture, an exploration, not a resort to doctrine or established hierarchy. It is a way of seeing that leaves nothing out and yet selects and concentrates what it has seen to the essential, which Stengers calls "the singularity of an object or situation."12 It condenses language as embodiment of thought and feeling to its core of active and creative principle. It activates the potential play of meaning with a heightened energy that strikes those who read it with a kinetic force. It stuns the reader with the intensity of "a sun within a sun," to use Baudelaire's words from "Le poème du hachisch": "What can be this drunkenness of love, already so powerful in its natural state, when it is enclosed in the other drunkenness, like a sun within a sun?" (Que peut être cette ivresse de l'amour, déjà si puissante à son état naturel, quand elle est enfermée dans l'autre ivresse, comme un soleil dans un soleil?) [I: 433].
Baudelaire writes that people who have never taken hashish often imagine naively that hashish intoxication enhances love's pleasure as if to the second power – "like a sun within a sun." The poet's answer is clear. Intoxication and addiction, in destroying freedom, lead only to lethargy and dissipation. Hashish's "sun" is a false lure. Only poetry, as the incomparable force of concentration and intensification, opens to authentic experiences of love and freedom, and hence to the true intensity of "a sun within a sun." I follow Baudelaire's move of celebrating poetry by reading "a sun within a sun" as pertaining, ultimately, to poetry's power.
A Sun within a Sun explores poetry's "risky construction": its experiment and experience that open language to its infinite possibility and hence to the creative potential of Beauty. If understanding the meaning of Reality is the ideal and the consequence of science, Beauty is the ideal and the consequence of poetry, each an enigma in that each requires an opening toward and an acceptance of the unknown and unknowable other. Wisdom is the fruit of both.
Poets answer Beauty's call to risk and freedom – the risk of freedom – through language, but not language as routine and familiar. Paul Valéry calls verse a "strange/foreign [étrange] discourse," a "language within a language."13 Poetry risks creating a "foreign language" within the familiar discourse, transforming language by compelling it to speak of what is outside its bounds. Poetry takes the risk of wounding us as we approach the sun in order to heighten our awareness of life's beauty and terror, joy and sorrow, fragility and perishability. It demands also that we live as we read, intensely and openly – in risk – for the sake of deeper meaning, willing to encounter peril and to transform it into Beauty. Beauty and poetry – the beauty of poetry – invite us to move closer to our selves, to live in intimate proximity to our own deep original strangeness/foreignness. Poetry is an "invitation to depths" (invitation des profondeurs), to borrow Blanchot's words.14
For to read poetry is only the beginning. Poetry insists that we refuse to live in denial. Baudelaire warns the reader against hypocrisy in his poem "Au lecteur" ("To the Reader") and insists, in "Le voyage," that the reader "plunge into the depths of the abyss, Hell or Heaven, what does it matter? / To the depths of the Unknown to find something new!"(Plonger au fond du gouffre, Enfer ou Ciel, qu'importe? / Au fond de l'Inconnu pour trouver du nouveau!) [I: 134, original emphasis.]15 Poetry demands of those who read the constant practice of clear-sightedness, critical intelligence, and responsibility. Only such a commitment will bring the power and freedom to create for ourselves and to live in a poetic relationship to the world and to ourselves. Writing, reading, writing (about), and teaching poetry require that we acknowledge and accept the shock of poetry and respond to its imperative to explore the unknown, not to hoard and guard the known, to create and open possibilities, not to narrow our options to probabilities or certainties. Certainties can be a hindrance to life, just as dogma is to science.
To risk is to take chances. Chance, according to The Oxford English Dictionary, is a "possibility... of anything happening: as distinct from a certainty." To act when there is certainty of failure would be foolish; to act when there is certainty of success would be logical. Neither case involves risk, for risk, as chance, is the possibility of "anything happening." To take risks is to act and engage when nothing guarantees success; it is to accept as truthfully and as courageously as possible anything and everything that life brings our way. We habitually avoid risks in our daily life, hoping to reduce the chances of failure and loss, forgetting that doing so limits, too, the opportunities for growth and joy. Henry Miller writes that "the test of a man's humanity lies in his acceptance of life, all aspects of life, not just those which correspond with his own limited viewpoint."16 To live with a larger perspective that opens up the world and life to their fullest and richest potential – risk means maximum living that awakens us to our deeper "humanity"; it is the openness, the truth, and the fact of life.
In taking risks poetry takes responsibilities, which, in Miller's words, is "to bear the consequences which a pure act always involves."17 Poetry is a "pure act" of language and hence must "always" "bear [its own] consequences." Poetry's purity is the aesthetic and ascetic practice of language, awakening us from anesthesia, whose power of concentration does not block out risks but puts the world and words at risk in order to create maximum possibilities of life and hence give life its chance. Chance, as "the way in which things fall out," comes from the Latin cadere, "to fall." Cadentia, the "action or mode of falling, sinking down," gives rise to cadence – the flow, rhythm, and measure – in music, verse, and poetry. Cadere, cadence, chance, risk – falling is poetry's way; and risk is poetry's very measure, construction, and cornerstone. Poetry, like science, means to "take, accept, and learn to measure the risks."18 Icarus, the falling body, is the figure – the corpus – indeed, if doomed, of poetry.
Forgetting the law of the father in his own ecstatic flight, Icarus says "Yes" to the fatally beautiful and all-consuming sun. His "Yes" celebrates Beauty as pure living and dying. It is a hymn honoring the intensive and extensive luminescence of poetic language that opens a world gleaming with possibilities authentic and new. To say "Yes" to the profound gravity of infinite risk with joy, innocence, and lightness – that is the demand of poetry: to bear and to bare the pure weight of the soul, falling freely into "a sun within a sun."
Notes
1 "Icarus," The Dictionary of Classical Mythology, Pierre Grimal, trans. A. R. Maxwell-Hyslop (New York: Blackwell, 1986) 227.
2 Anthologie de la poésie française, ed. Georges Pompidou (Paris: Hachette [Livre de poche], 1961) 100-1001.
3 All references to Baudelaire's works are to the (Euvres complètes, ed. Clauqe Pichois, 2 vols. (Paris: Gallimard [Pléiade], 1975-76); and Correspondance, ed. Claude Pichois and Jean Ziegler, 2 vols. (Paris: Gallimard [Pléiade], 1973), and appear in the text with volume and page numbers. Correspondance is abbreviated as Corr. Unless otherwise indicated, the translations are my own.
4 Maurice Blanchot, The Space of Literature, trans. Ann Smock (Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 1982) 247.
5 Elie Wiesel, The Fifth Sun, qtd. by Jean-Luc Nancy, A Finite Thinking, ed. Simon Sparks (Stanford: Stanford UP, 2003) 255.
6 "The question is not so much how you can mimic a science... but how much risk one can take in allowing one's words to be modified by the world." Bruno Latour, foreword, Power and Invention: Situating Science, by Isabelle Stengers, trans. Paul Bains (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1997) xvii.
7 Stengers 19, 5.
8 Latour xiii.
9 Latour xiv.
10 Latour xviii-xix.
11 Stengers 5, original emphasis.
12 Stengers 6.
13 Paul Valéry, "Poésie et pensée abstraite." (Euvres, ed. Jean Hytier, 2 vols. (Paris: Gallimard [Pléiade], 1957) I: 1324, original emphasis. Valéry speaks of "les vers" as "étranges discours" in plural; I use it in the singular.
14 Maurice Blanchot, Le livre à venire (Paris: Gallimard [Folio], 1959) 10.
15 Charles Baudelaire: Selected Poems, trans. Carol Clark (New York: Penguin, 1995) 145. I render in verse form Clark's prose translation.
16 Henry Miller, Henry Miller on Writing, ed. Thomas Moore (New York: New Directions, 1964) 208.
17 Henry Miller, The Rosy Crucifixion. Book One. Sexus (New York: Grove, 1965) 26.
18 Stengers 19.
A Sun within a Sun:
The Power and Elegance of Poetry
University Of Pittsburgh Press
Copyright © 2006
All rights reserved.
Reproduced by Poetry Daily by permission
of the University of Pittsburgh Press.
Poetry Daily / Amazon.com
Selected books available by Claire Chi-ah Lyu:
A Sun within a Sun: The Power and Elegance of Poetry — Hardcover
