Rhythm under oath: Python, the sage and the poet

 

I’ve always liked Alain, the French philosopher who published a chronicle of mini-essays, the Propos, ipn a Normandy journal. Apparently, as the publication of his diary showed, he was an anti-semite – which is surprising in as much as this was never part of his public record. Anti-semitism is the pornographic mag stash of the old French daddy intellectuals, alas. You discover it in their letters and journals, where they wank away at the subject.

 Still, his chronicles are full of apercu that I rather like. For instance, the distinctions he makes between the Pythie, or prophet, the sage, and the poet.

 The Pythie is a liminal figure, a beast-human, who says everything in the order of the instant – everything that comes through its head”

“… she forms a perfect receptor, expressing every instant, and far beyond our thing wisdom which always distinguishes and chooses. By a view of the same kind that we see in animals, and principally in birds, evidently carried here and there by the winds and the seasons. Instinct is always divine and divinatory. »

 The Sage is, on the opposite end, the emblem of choice and distinction.

 “The sage is completely other : he has sworn to be only what he wants to be. He chooses, which means he refuses. He refuses to be all, and to say all things at once. From whence such marvels as the pure succession of numbers, where the attentive person lets no event penetrate.”

 And finally, there is the middleman – the poet. If the Pythie howls and soughs and cheeps and says everything, while the sage says, I prefer not to, the poet attaches himself to an event – that of the body.

« Thus, here are the two extrêmes : and the poet is between them. He wants to be a universal receptor, but without losing his reason. This is why he rules himself, like the sage, and gives himself a law. But, inverting the savant, he rules himself in his own body. He gives himself a rhythm, of walking, of breathing, of the heart, in accord with the total moment: but it is a rhythm under oath.”

 

This, to me, is a rather beautiful way of putting figures on the chessboard. It is a passage comparable to Pessoa. Rhythm under oath! But of course, to take that oath – any oath, whether you are a pirate or an accountant - you must swear by some power outside of yourself.