a metaphor from Shklovsky

 

In the book of interviews that Serena Vitale  conducted with Viktor Shklovksy, he says a wonderful thing about poetry, quoting Mandelstam: “…poetry is the “deep joy of recognition.” That’s it. The poet searches, gropes in the dark, and my dear contemporaries, so prolific in words, the structuralists, who filled the world with terminology . . . You see, they don’t know this thing, this affliction of the presentiment of art and the joy of recognition. Only the great poets do. They know they’re going to write. They don’t know what will come out, whether it will be a boy or a girl, they only know that it will be poetry. Only the poet knows this tortuous search for the word, the physical joy of “recognition,” and sometimes, also the anguish of defeat. Again, take Mandelstam: “I have forgotten the word I wanted to say. A blind swallow returns to the palace of shadows . . .” I knew Mandelstam, I remember him rushing down the stairs of the House of Arts declaiming these verses. You see, a poem is born from struggle. A rhythm, a word, like an echo, then a word with a different meaning, in the dark you only see individual, separate things, but then, little by little, your eyes adjust to the change in the light, they can see, and it’s poetry.”
 
I like the registers of this remark, from birth to physical joy. It has a long history, this male mimicry of birth – art’s competition with the mother. A competition that is won each time by the mother, of course – try as the poet may, the words that come out are of a different substance and nature to the naked human being. The words are promised the chance at “immortality” – to be passed on for an insignificant geological time in books or by word of mouth. The child, meanwhile, is at the center of a crisis of recognition  – hence the supplement of the name. Poetry is never changed in the cradle with the child, and out of the breakdown of that metaphor – which re-presents itself, neurotically – we find other metaphors, murkier ones – for instance of poetry as a struggle for recognition  in the Manichean dark. A dark that, one finds, is actually simply a change of light, not its annulation. Who struggles, here?
 
 
Later in the interview, Shklovsky says: You should be afraid of the books you agree with, not the ones you disagree with.
 
I figure it is the same thing with metaphors.