Benjamin Peret’s “Le Deshonneur des poetes”

Part II

To think about goals in such a poetic way was to Aristotle’s mind impossible, if man was left without the imagination, itself a metaphor for a foreseeable future. Distinctly it was for poetry to establish the linkage between logical language and the imagination relating man to his goals, in order to make possible a fantastic discourse about the consequences of engagement. Thus poetry teaches us also much about the anticipation of consequences that our actions shall create, if we go about it in a certain, that is defined way. Homer reflected upon this by revisiting former battle fields, in order to ask what would and could have happened, if mankind had avoided that well defined road and taken instead another path, one more peaceful. To Homer the latter would have to go with a strong sense of life, in order to give people the conviction that they can live peacefully together.

Hence throughout the ages poems reveal how the imagination seeks and finds orientation by re-examining constantly the goals that are given. As a dialogue with the imagination, this would allow for further going reflections in terms of the goals mankind wishes to be fulfilled and, therefore, what discrepancies there exist to the given ones. Little wonder then that it would be a terrible loss, if poetry could no longer give to mankind that very needed orientation especially when about to enter new fields of the unknown.

To someone like Brendan Kennelly, all this is very alarming. As an esteemed poet in Ireland he is read by many, including a single father trying to bring up his three sons. It is all about human values being passed on. Brendan Kennelly does know how to communicate, that is to give orientation. His voice is being listened to. When asking a taxi driver of Dublin if he would know him, not only did he affirm it, but emphatically described how he uses Brendan Kennelly’s poems, for instance, as a guide on how he should educate and raise his three sons alone because their mother had died early. All the more is the loss of compassion in modern developments most disturbing to someone like Brendan Kennelly who senses the needs of people. He is being listened to, but feels that he is facing these difficulties more or less alone. Above all compassion to Brendan Kennelly means to try and overcome desires for revenge by basing human responses on true knowledge about the ‘self’ in relation to others. He is convinced that there is no use to run through the streets with a knife in the heart. In an almost Christian way he waited years for a suitable moment, in order to be able to say just quietly ‘hello’ to the man who had raped his daughter when sixteen at the time it happened and who had an aborted baby as a result of that. That quiet hello was a more powerful gesture than attacking the man. It stands out as a lone alternative to what is usually suggested by the multi-media production of modern images about life, namely that in the absence of dialogue and compassion, there is but one way to respond: with more violence and revenge.

Brendan Kennelly is disturbed by the fact that academics are generally not very helpful at all, especially when it comes to develop such knowledge that society needs most. His position indicates that to have the compassion to reflect and to question the kind of language in use, it is important to go beyond the manipulative use and grasp of daily languages. In advertisement, but also in the realms of ‘news-speak’, this functional use of language helps merely to cover up loss of ‘human experiences’. As a result language can be transformed all too easily into propaganda. Distortion of truth is one of the terrible consequences that the twentieth century had to go through. If accepted by everyone as state ideology, it makes everyone seem to be but a willing part of a general campaign against humanity. Consequently everything will turn against poetry and the human spirit to speak out truth in freedom. That negative development starts by prejudicing opinions against others who wish to contradict this tendency in an open, equally democratic way.

In a world of alienation, it means that the ‘practical wisdom to judge’ is replaced by sharp, equally blunt categories transforming opinions into ‘prejudices’. One of its worst consequences is ‘racial assertiveness’. Blind to the needs of others, such ‘assertiveness’ can become most violent, if based on racial, religious and ethnical lines. A counter movement and possible solutions are only perceivable in such cultures that do not try to be superior to others. The danger of such assertiveness is that they bring about such tendencies which can dehumanize entire communities because they drive out the need to live together. They start with perversions of meanings and end by replacing ‘human identity and commonness of people’ with demands of ethnic exclusiveness. All of this cannot be explained without realizing that there is working in the background an intellectual motor denying any peaceful solution. There remain then only such solutions that are sanctioned by ‘violence’.

If left as it is, things shall be distorted beyond human recognition. This is especially the case, if an ‘aggressive’ language is used to claim that there is but one ‘moral’ position. If that is the case, then ‘blind hatred’ is evoked and the work with empathy made impossible. There is the example of Northern Ireland but also Kosovo in former Yugoslavia.

The situation is further aggravated when ‘violence’ is justified on the grounds of ‘humanitarian’ motives based on historical analogies. In order to justify the bombardments of former Yugoslavia and in particular of Kosova, many references were made to experiences in the Second World War. In reality such ‘humanitarian acts’ mean in the hands of a state or an association of states the justification to take unilateral action, that is to end mediation and even diplomacy based on recognizing the sovereignty of the other. The consequence is one-sided approach with the intention to dominate over the other as was the case when the NATO intervention in Kosovo by-passed the United Nations.

Therefore, the situation of ‘poetry today’ could be reflected on hand of what and how poets took sides in the case of the Kosovo conflict, while their responses to atrocities elsewhere have been very slow, e.g. East Timor. All this leads to the question, whether poetry and poets themselves have become dishonoured not by what they have done, but rather what they failed to do and say through poetry in terms of ‘objects’ reviewed.

* * * * * *

Benjamin Peret attests that poetry becomes dishonoured when the political parole dictates the pen while not expressing really the nature of the poet’s own conscience. That says it all, but is difficult to comprehend, never mind explain and there are many other things attached to such a thought. So let us concentrate at first on what is meant by poetry depending upon the poet’s conscience.

Admittedly conscience is a complex concept. It has to reach far into society, if it is to make any sense. Without it, the loss of the true language is incurred and not only that. Everything seems to go then wrong, the moment distortion of truth becomes the norm. This would be the case if out of the desire for something only that is said what the other would like to hear. Ernst Bloch calls it the ‘slave language’, that is when everyone would mask their true motives, out of fear to reveal truthful thoughts to the other. If anything, the resulting confusion between reactions and overreactions in the absence of just honest responses to what the other says and does, that makes the situation become worse, not better.

Added to that dimension of possible losses of the poetic language, there has to be the phenomenon of ‘corruption of the mind’. There are two sides to it: the political and the social one. While corrupt situations are marked by powers of negotiation between theory and practice as to what can and should be implemented, the overall tendency to give up originally agreed upon measures and ideas will undermine any honest work. Furthermore, ‘good practices’ will become impossible if people are left out of the process. By not being informed, they shall be unable to know if and how they could support ongoing developments and new projects. That means their linkage to the ‘cultural heritage’ shall grow weak and as a result of the overall corruption, the morality to do anything out of honesty will falter since without ‘memories’ and ‘meaning of place’.

The city of Palermo went through such an experience once everything came under the grip of the Mafia. The historic centre was not merely neglected, but became a recruiting place for new members. That started already at an early age with children being solicited in petty thefts and similar crimes. Everywhere else such bondage to negative actions means the people become silent. They do not dare to protest against such piracy of entire communities for they know the threats and violent sanctions only too well. It is better to look the other way or else to pretend not to know what is going on. Being uninformed is, therefore, a classical way of survival in a society that betrays the ethical spirits of humanity and does not care really about the lives of others. Only once mayor Orlando started to initiate cultural strategies that brought many people back into the historical centre while banning speculative building constructions on the outskirts of the city, and after having confiscated the money of the Mafia clan, the city began to breathe a new sign of life. It still required daring actions to jolt common people out of their silence once a petty theft occurred but the sense of direction was there: to restore the ancient buildings and to revive the memories of the place. The biggest symbolic action in that context was the reopening of the Opera as was later on the staging of a world conference against corruption and measures for security in the city. Killings had declined by then as much as in New York, but then the reasons why and what will be the future of those cities, this is too early to tell at the end of 1999.

Nevertheless to state it once more at general level, it is important to be consequential and remain at times uncompromising, even if not easy at the political level. Poetry has to be written in the language of the people. They must stand up to themselves, that is able to look one another into each eyes and by all humour, criticism, irony, twisted logics etc., still come to terms with one another, if all people are to survive on this one and only globe.

Poets must realize that only their self understanding in all honesty can stand up to alienation and to the various forms of corruption. The latter begins already by people not informing one another exactly what takes place. Of course, there are constraints when it comes to realize such a poetic demand. After all common people may want at times to be able to understand things only immediately, and not over time. The latter case does require the ‘work of memory’, so as not to forget what was before and how things look now. But then that is not so easy, since looking back or ahead may lead easily to wrong compromises. This may be a result of such mediation tactics between needed patience and strong demands, in order to be convinced one can make at all any stand against current trends.

Above all it is the poet who should sense that risk of over exposures to failures once trying to stand up for the truth. Poems ought to reflect what it means to be left alone. This cannot be a programmatic definition of poetry writing, for political reality requires as much freshness of thought as something unexpected that can be added to enrich those seeking a solution.

If people judge other persons negatively, i.e. they too will compromise and break with the ‘rule of measures’, then despair will grow out of proportion. That intensifies the danger of quick judgements becoming the rule. It is apparently required in a world where survival is hard and relationships not easy. All that leads to pressing people into consumable forms as if buying simply a car, e.g. the guy has it or not. If not, then too bad for him. There is nothing organized to counter that destruction of a meaningful relationship. Everything appears to be a futile case: there is no time to wait around any longer, that is at least until he has made up his mind.
In the absence of any compassion or long term perspective, this makes true love hardly possible. People begin to feel already humiliated if they have to lower themselves, while all what they feel for the other is materialized through the world of consumption. Here dominates the logic of the status quo expressed through symbols of power and money. Showing off like the youngster on his fast motor bike is but the beginning of over exaggerated display of the ‘self’ when in fact it is a covering up of deep voids and loss of meanings.

There must be created, therefore, a linkage between the poet and the general, that is a social conscience, if ‘words are to touch upon all those silent tears and wounds not seen for the scream has been wounded too seriously’ (taken from my poem ‘Wounded Scream’). There has to be added another reason for the loss of authenticity of poetry, namely of not having good enough companions who could bring about that extra value by their criticism. Robert Frost had to travel to Europe to find that proper schooling, whereas William Carlos Williams remained at his location. This is to say, it can go either way or at least Americans would like to assert that you do not have to go to Europe, in order to have culture. Still, it depends upon friends and movements to bring about such expressions that can articulate the true stand of things.

If ‘bridge’ can be used as a metaphor, the obligation for clarification of the self through poetry is crystal clear. Unclear remains, however, to what extend this is still possible through the ‘other’. The discovery of the ‘lyrical I’ (Adorno) and then retaining it once found is in all cases neither self-understood nor supported by the prevailing culture of consumption and image making adaptations to the given. If not that, then corruption stands in the way, leading on to the ‘narrow mind’. It will not allow poetry to show a way out precisely because of a common denial that there still exist other possibilities to work together and in full knowledge of the contradictions, when it comes to living together. The poetic point about it is how to realize that in a human, not exclusive or assertive way. The latter would make even the simplest gesture of human co-operation meaningless.

However, to extend the song of Simon and Garfunkel, there can be no clarity in murky waters and troubled are the future bridge builders since it appears not much could be attained in the twentieth century by way of empathy, understanding and love for life. If Eliot was right about Europe being a wasteland, then he forgot only to add that too many people find themselves to be of no value to the others in the New World insofar as they believe to exist only to be wasted. That touches upon Martin Jay’s interpretation of Bataille’s thesis on how prices are established: not through scarcity, but through wastage. This is contrary to common economical and hence ideological beliefs. As a matter of fact, the more life is sacrificed for something, the more precious it becomes.

It is worthwhile to repeat, therefore, some of the steps Benjamin Peret took to outline his views on what poetry should never do, namely to be a servant for some political cause. He starts searching for the ‘original significance of poetry’. This was a difficult perspective for him to take back then due to the much stronger feeling prevailing at that time with regards to the split between the Old and New World. Being in exile, such yearnings constitute a search for continuity. Naturally, in the sense Adorno understands it, the cultural perspectives and the role of poetry within that had to change especially after everything had become equally so vital and so senseless to survive the Second World War.

‘A brush of death, a brush of life’ (Mari Pizanis) takes back the sense of anything having still an original significance after a basic feeling was there, but not expressed in and through all poetry whether now written in the Old or the New World. The failure to convince and to decide combines in poetry the realization that there have been repeated but too many failures to meet the challenge. Too often the need for a response to the call of life went unnoticed. That makes current poetry into but a very weak admission that there was a lack of courage to face the consequences. Part of the explanation is that a newly developed fear governs now use of the poetic language. This is because a different order started to prevail after the Second World War. It is underlined by the fact that ancient poets are reputed by the modern ones. The latter, disappointed by war and broken relationships, would no longer wish to advocate ‘measures for tasks ahead’ nor do they still trust love. The Greek poet Kazantzakis predicts fearfully, ‘you with your love will destroy justice’.

* * * * *

It seemed that at the beginning of the twentieth century Yeats could still bring about such a strong poetry, that Ireland was able to free itself from the yoke of British enslavement. Yet that did not mean the dimensions of violence were resolved, hence no difference was made between what constitutes a threat as opposed to a challenge to one’s own culture. By confusing the two, the need for self-imposed constraints was resented and overtly revolted against because taken for limitation’s (laws not formulated by the people but imposed from the outside and from above) by the dominant culture. All that could be taken as a negative result of colonialism, including the colonialization of the minds in the Old World resenting the New World.

Naturally, all protest remains empty if without a love for life and people. Such ‘lyrical protest’ that tends to cover up places of silence before people can speak up (M. Foucault) has a heavy political connotation, especially if it relates dishonestly to historical periods by which collective identifications become possible. As Guenter Grass remarked, he became weary of the fact that so many writers created after the war anti-fascistic heroes when he knew that only few existed really during that time 1933-45 in Germany. Poetry has to be realistic, not a fiction or myth.

Important in this struggle for freedom in poetic expressions are indeed honesty and integrity. They are self-imposed constraints and add to the overall axiom that not everything is possible. Poems may even divert from that, provided they are self aware of that fact and show what tension exists between the poetic measure of truth and reality. For instance, if things do not happen in a natural way, then flesh and mind are too weak to act together; they are bend, but not in any but in a responsible way indicated by the poem stretching itself to reach clarity despite everything being but ‘broken pieces’ of identity left at the way side of the street.

James Joyce had to escape immediacy to take a closer look at life at home, and as Brendan Kennelly said it, he did so by looking at Dublin from above, from the clouds. Brendan Kennelly would add that this did not resolve, however, the much bigger problem of ‘poetry and violence’. Bad things follow always an aberration of truth. It is never good, if things meant for life are denied out rightly in the name of some illusive cause, and may that be merely the admittance of the impossibility to live as wanted with others in such a way, that compassion for truth would be possible. Usually that spells troubles and bad political times begging for the revolt and even stronger for the revolution. It gives too much power to the illusions of fears as being reality.

* * * * *

In following Benjamin Peret’s analysis, it has to be said that it would be a mistake to relate these and other experiences merely to outcomes of Second World War. All too often the developments leading to First World War and events thereafter are left out. Thus if a review of the twentieth century is to be complete, the kind of ‘brain washing’ going on since the beginning has to be put into perspective. Most interesting are remarks and comments by Andre Breton, the key person of the Surrealistic Movement. The latter emerged really out of the years of confusion following First World War.

Andre Breton testifies to explain first steps to overcome silence in but an awkward way:
“Bear in mind that, during the spring and summer of 1919 when the first six issues of Litterature came out, we had very little freedom of movement: I wasn’t discharged until September, and Aragon several months after that. The powers that were took great care to ease the transition between the kind of existence to which the war had introduced us, and the kind that the return to civilian life held in store. This precaution was hardly superfluous. The inevitable contact between soldiers returning from the front soon ended up retrospectively heightened the reasons for anger: their feelings about the pointless sacrifice of so many lives; their desire to ‘square accounts’ with the rear guard, whose famous hard-line policies had for so long gone hand in hand with ruthless racketeering; the innumerable broken homes, and the extreme mediocrity of any future prospects. The headiness of military victory had died down…..
We had gotten away from the war, that much was certain. But what we couldn’t get away from was the ‘brain washing’ that for four years had been turning men – who asked only to live and (with rare exceptions) get alone with their neighbours – into frenzied and fanatical creatures who not only did their masters’ bidding, but could also be ruthlessly decimated. Naturally, some of these poor fellows were now looking rather angrily at the ones who had given them such good reasons to go fight. One couldn’t keep these former soldiers from comparing notes or sharing their individual experiences, which the censorship office had made sure were never broadcast. No more than one could keep them from discovering the extent of the war’s ravages, the limitless passivity it had generated and, when this passivity had tried to rouse itself, the terrible harshness of the repression that followed. As you might imagine, they were not in the best of moods.

(Interviewer: ‘Still, the general atmosphere was not one of revolt, but rather of apathy – or so it seems at this remove.’)

It’s true that most of these soldiers soon chose their camps. Little by little, they formed associations whose leaders quickly managed to channel their dissatisfaction. Moreover, even when their interests began to diverge sharply, as ‘war veterans’ they maintained a certain measure of purely sentimental solidarity (which in retrospect is rather amusing). The powers I spoke of – who had braved extreme unpopularity during the war years – had no trouble staying in office, simply by promoting darkly destitute ceremonies to absorb the unrest that threatened to spread like a stain. These ceremonies foreshadowed the constant inauguration of monuments to the dead that live on today as testaments to an age of vandelism, such as the shrine of the ‘unknown soldier’ in Paris’s Place de l’Etoile….”

* * * * *

When Benjamin Peret wrote his ‘le deshonneur des poetes’ in 1943, he felt that it was impossible to establish a poetic agenda at world level. He anticipated developments after 1945. In his explanation he refers to a ‘confusion of the mind’ dictating much more than many poets would admit on how things were to be perceived. It took on for him a form of necessity to which poetry had to respond, if it was to keep its dignity and validity. For what to do when the turmoil’s in society no longer allowed the ‘life of the human spirit’. The latter commenced once it was possible to take poetry as an expression of the conscience of man seriously.

Obviously already prior to the war – the Surrealist manifest is an attest to that – this life was condensed by such factors as loss in creativity despite some outstanding achievements especially in the sciences. This negativity perpetuated itself and life lost in colour. The reservations made it impossible to reach for new roads of tomorrow. Road means here not only linkages to and between other places of nature as being closer to the expression of the conscience – something which could describe the longings of the modern tourist who experiences everywhere then nature when it is a contrast to his own experienced place back home. Nowadays the term ‘road’ contains metaphorically also the significance of what it means to do things differently today compared to that of how things were done yesterday. For what we do today, decides over what we do tomorrow.

That aspect of reflections in times of changes has to be put into context of Beret’s concept of conscience, since he arrives at this perplexity by asking about those variables in human life which are constant in comparison to those which are changing. The influence of model-like thinking can be felt here, but should not be given too much importance since more crucial is that Beret wanted to call upon ‘here’ as standing for “love, freedom and perhaps science”. Exactly this latter hesitation meant in his terms uncertainty prevailed as to what exact thinking of the sciences poets should embrace. Many more questions arise out of this need of poetry to come to terms with not merely science, but the subsequent developments based on new technology and consequent exploitation of natural and human resources.

The life of human beings is reflected in millions of faces, according to Benjamin Peret. That thought provokes many more stories then what can made out of a ‘glance’ when finding oneself in the streets of modern cities. Martin Jay notes this to be one of the main characteristics of the twentieth century, for this period in time is marked by a continual ‘disenchantment of the eye’. At the same time, Bart Verschaffel, philosopher at the University of Gent in Belgium, would elaborate on the difference between the hidden and the superficial glance. According to him a man’s glance falls upon a woman’s face only after she had looked at it herself more than ten times in the mirror. That reminds of Flaubert’s description on how women at court trained their facial muscles in order to conceal the real emotions and to respond only at their wish, that is show but a mask of facial expression at all times. It was Watteau who tried to show how a breaking out of the rigid rules of such expressions would imply leaving the court of nobility behind and return to the peasants for they show in their faces that there exist still traces of authenticity, that is a liveliness otherwise thought to have vanished out of people’s faces.

Naturally the ‘condition humaine’ has changed since then and the cry for diversity attests nowadays even more to the loss of unique characters. In a sea of uniformity it is ever more possible that individual expressions are easily lost and thus there is no telling what difference there exists still between a mask and a true face. Superficiality has ruined any possibility of going deeper into the personal history and into the living history.

Simply said, the ‘loss of face’, so much dreaded in Japan, has become in the Western World a general outcome of turmoil’s, overturns and pains of expression given up in the wake of betrayal. Especially those others who mean a personal truth to oneself have been left behind. The American romantic version is usually the ‘true love’ that has been left behind for the sake of a career in the big city. That makes the ‘self’ Kant already was seeking too weak in terms of articulation possibilities as to make any difference in what is then left to decide upon. After all, the readiness to give up important human relationships signals already a lack of compassion for truth and an absence of love of life. As it has become nearly impossible to realize any love free from some very deep pain, for nothing is here self understanding and bridges of understanding have to be rebuild constantly, many prefer not to pursue such a life in agony about the other. Especially the fear of having to go through human pain explains then the tendency towards neutral faces: the outcome of denying anything which could come close, affect one, and indeed threaten potentially to throw one of the path set out already by society, in order to find the socially recognized and sanctioned successes. Such weakness to give in to something external, although of no importance to the self, that has become so much the aim of education and social pressure, until it is by now a common practice. Unfortunately the giving up of the ‘true love’, that is of the search for ‘a true self in the other’, that started already with the protest movement wanting to be simply different from the others instead of being authentic in the relation to the other (U. Sonnemann).

Socially speaking, it is impossible to realize a plurality of liveable truths, that is a differentiated understanding of common feelings based on experiences, viewpoints, opinions, news, if everything said and done is but in the sign of tutelage’s. That means both servility and suffrage under specific forms of toils burden language, people and eventually all human relationships. It makes the search for the ‘self’ ever more so complicated as unnecessary to go on travelling along the road in search of that self, if the others cannot wait but instead give up their ‘self’s’ in vain and out of resignation. That means everyone lives in the darkest fear never to be truly recognized for what one is to oneself and what could become possible, if true human relationships would foster those ‘leaps of creativity’. The situation is best expressed by such poems and faces that describe more pain – the pain out of longing for poetic truth - than mere despair. At least that tension over a simple difference indicates already something, or at least that human resistance does still exist, however weak it may be in ways of poetic and other forms of articulation.

B. Peret uses here the French extension of ‘vivre’ to relate to ‘demeure’, that is what has started to live here and there, at this spot of earth and in this city. It can be extended to include streets and houses, as well as the neighbourhood which politicians like to stress so much as source of the community spirit. What they tend to overlook is, however, important to the poet: why there is the own rejection of a place called home when transformed if not into a castle, then into something meaningless? A possible home of humanity can never be a temple of worship about what has been possible and what shall be believed in all the times, for if in such a place everything is merely consumed, then the temple as reminder of the destroyed cultural heritage means really loss of memory. Instead the souvenirs, icons, relicts and other pieces meant to facilitate memory, they do take a hold of the identity building process, but what philosophers have described as 'kitsch', that leaves aside any further going aesthetical reflections and poetic awareness of the need to still answer calls of life in a most truthful manner possible.

All what is shown by the faces of those who live amidst those relicts is that ‘omnipotence’ has taken a hold of their lives and features. Omnipotence is the full consciousness to be without power and, therefore, a refusal to enter any further human experience. Borders are marked by the fear to be a failure not merely in social, but deep down in personal terms. Thus poetry of the coming century shall be marked by an impossible need to confront daily the inability to do something conceptually. The latter would be important, if there was to be developed the ability to determine one’s life out of a self-propelling motive of love. Oblomov got off the couch only once that feeling gripped him, but merely temporarily since soon that love faded as it became evident on how impossible it was for him to reach out to that woman. This is indeed omnipotence to the fullest extent in a life lived more or less, but not consciously as a personal experience worthwhile to remember.

B. Peret anticipates the alienation’s to come. Out of today’s perspective, we begin to sense that this pertains not only to specific individuals or groups, but to the kind of life people are forced to live altogether. There have been said many things about such impossibilities to live truly since the end of Second World War. Adorno touched upon it, insofar he said in ‘minima moralia’ that “no true life is possible in a wrong life”. Even if over exaggerated, it reveals some of the consequences to be faced once denial of truth becomes the key imprint upon the face. The consequences go deeper then that, for the self denial precludes any option of having a fruitful dialect between the imagination and honest language in search of truthful poetry.

There are moments of life like gifts – often too small a base for reflections – while even phone calls can become precarious dealings with life without knowing if that is true: an abnegation of alternatives. Her reply: “I don’t want to be phoned by you anymore”, can be a fore ever truthful pain that shall not cease to exist even if she will never pick up a phone again to answer his call. At least the call is there and not nothing.

It is said that the loss of distance in the mind brings with itself a loss of mediation possibilities and subsequently life is experienced in the reduced form as an uncompromising, hard reality. Immediate demands turn into something like brutality. It can become even violence so that the loss of a true love would leave only fear being forever outraged over such timidity, that is loss of options to free oneself according to own standards of dignity and intellectual capacity. Adorno described it as the ‘Muellhausen trick’: the ability to pull oneself out of the swamp by pulling at one’s own hair. Once subdued by the impossible, and this means really the ethical setting of the given as an intellectual honesty of the self to the self, then any subsequent mentality is no longer an expression of freedom in relation to the conscience, but a sort of dogmatism hindering any comprehension, that is meaningful understanding of other people’s lives.

A key for such interpretations, B. Peret finds in ‘love letters’. The eclat of love is fully expressed in such letters as those of Kafka to Felice or Hoelderlin to his beloved. These testimonies of impossibilities have been linked to the romantic movement, itself a historical period as if this despair over the impossible does not carry itself over into modern times.

However, B. Peret reminds that these ‘letters of life’ started to be written when the executions overturned the revolution and the shooting of workers who had participated in the barricade fights took new forms of eliminating possible challenges to power. Yet what B. Peret misses often in retrospections of those revolutionary times is the failure to distinguish between political and social revolutions. The latter he links with the ‘spirit of liberty’ based on discovering knowledge: a different way of coming to terms with reality, including the will of the other. While this may be true, he still has to show the consequences of compromises, even to the point of self betrayals in order to keep face within the official order being established thereafter.

The reason why in B. Peret’s assessment, there erupts a difference to the usual analysis of alienation as evoked by Marx and subsequently Marxism, is then the ‘loss of memory’. This is because he sees that loss of knowledge about what memory can only attain over time as being compensated by a ‘stupendous production of souvenirs’ by which to remember. Over the last fifty-five years the increase in tourism has made this cultural heritage production even more vital for compensating the general loss of memory. Another odd difference to those former times is that memory is no longer linked to the complexity of life itself, but to some special places of meaning. They have to do with specific categories of activities but which is being covered up or alienated by huge advertisements especially for all kinds of intertwines: lovely beaches, or fast foods drive ins with cars becoming the places to eat, as if the need to eat, to quell the hunger was no longer a part of a self understanding element of the people requiring other forms of communication and even poetic interludes, if they are to know what to do the day after tomorrow while still sure they are enjoying life.

As Michael D. Higgins states, the meaning of a place where one lives is attached directly to the ‘integrity of memory’ such a place can uphold. Over and again remarks can be heard that back then people talked with one another, because there existed still then cherished neighbourhood linkages. Memories of such places seem to recall the existence of close-by community values as carried forth by a special kind of social dynamism. By contrast the aloofness of the villas outside the city itself, especially if hidden behind walls and high trees, represents only those who are afraid of any immediate contact with ordinary people. That contact can be made anytime by going down the same elevator with other tenants of an eight-teen floor apartment or else by taking a crowded bus to work. As the term suggests, ‘close by districts’ are regarded as still friendly neighbourhoods when compared to those areas one is afraid to go through alone. In-between there exist those streets emptied of people. There is only the wind blowing pieces of paper against fences secured by NATO barbed wire. These and many other kinds of security measures suggest that the world has become very dangerous, and that it does not pay to have a ‘friendly attitude’ towards the outside world. This is said in the face of what kind of reality can be confronted in New York and elsewhere as typical phenomena of places having lost any aesthetical touch. The question comes to one’s mind, but where does this leave the people at the end of the twentieth century?

Fifty-five years later Carlos Fuentos returns to the subject of poetry as linked to ‘revolution’. Similar, and yet very differently Fuentos regards ‘revolution’ not as being something looking solely forward, for he detects in this ‘break’ a search for the past. This happens out of longing for the original. The revolution is done to restore the authentic something thought to have prevailed in the past.

Still, if one looks at the revolution Chomeiny caused in Iran, then the restoration of the original – here that of the Koran – becomes a new form of dogmatic practice based on a new Fundamentalism outlawing not merely the old form of religious beliefs but all secular tendencies wishing to re-interpret the old text in the light of new needs. Such new Fundamentalism and other kinds of conservative religious beliefs make it impossible that cities and their inhabitants give space for poetry as a non-understandable, still to be understood way of common people to express in their wish to uphold life something authentic, something true – something to remember still many years later.

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Benjamin Peret’s “Le Deshonneur des poetes”