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The poetics of life versus the poetics of death by Katerina Anghelaki Rooke (1994)


Aegina, May 7, 1994

Mythology is the poetics of life, while religion is the poetics of death. Poetry is the link and at the same time the method by which existence and, therefore, the existential question is turned either into a metaphor for life or a metaphor for death; poetry here as a mechanism, not necessarily as a poetic result.

The question we ask ourselves is always the same: What is this? Where does “this” come from? “This”, that is life. Yes, the question is always the same, but the answer – the proposed answer – is not. The symbiosis of the one-dimensional question with the infinite variety of answers is possibly one of the ingredients of the unbelievable variety of the human experience on this earth.

I imagine that when man was a newcomer to this world, the fear of death and the instinct for survival were much more powerfully united than they are now. Awe in front of fire created the idea of a god of fire, that is the invention of a story that would familiarize one with the object of terror and help one to live with and beyond the fear of fire. Likewise, myths dealt with what we do with our lives, how we live or how we imagine our unlived lives. Gods intervene, yes, but they do so only when they decide – God know why! – to become human, to taste the bidden fruit of mortality. Daphnis and Chloe loved so much that they became part of the beauties of nature, mortal and immortal at the same time; immortal because seeds never die, mortal because decay is part of the seed. How a story or the absence of a story becomes a myth depends on the strength of the collective poetic sense, on how reality through poetry is able to find a metaphor for itself, a metaphor that can defy time. In other words, the quest for the meaning of life leads to the conceptualization of life, that is to a myth.

If one were to take a lot of liberties, one could argue that the plurality of gods in the old religions accounted for the fact that the focus of man’s attention was life. Maybe because life was not always taken for granted, maybe because death was not considered the opposite of life, but its completion. I cannot but quote here Paul Valery when he says: “Death, among the civilized, is something outside nature; as a result, it creates a false idea about life and destroys our understanding of the value of natural signs.”

More and more, death, both as the quintessence of experience – because it will never be one – and as an idea, has been severed from life. We notice then that “Gods” become “God” and the existential question ceases to offer an imaginative proposition for life; it is an agonized question demanding a soothing answer, a mythology of death, i.e. religion. Human imagination, or poetic instinct, instead of being used to create models of life, is called upon to create consolations for death. Maybe also a certain kind of narrow-minded faith – very common nowadays – springs from the process I have just described. Now, we have to believe in a God that guarantees us that death is not the one that will have the last word, that is “will have no dominion” and that life is really eternal. But, if one looks at it in a different way, life itself is the guarantee of eternity. Life as a product and as a producer of nature. Nature as an eternal mechanism of reoccurring spring. You need not need faith for what is because you are surrounded by IT (you need the other kind of faith that is called confidence, but that would take us very far indeed.) This IT, of course, has many secrets: some of them are going to be revealed to you in due time, some never, some are going to be revealed to others, not to you, but is this a reason to hold this mystery against nature or creation or existence? But here it is; rage * and despair led us not to expect but to demand an explanation. And, it goes without saying, that in order to accept an explanation, as even plausible, you have to believe in its source, in the one who utters it. So reality is not any longer the answer but the proof that the answer, the explanation, is correct: God exists since the world exists. God does not die, so you won’t die. Everything that happens from now on has really happened. It is history versus myth. Provided you believe. If you believe, then Christ made Lazaros interrupt his death, get up and walk.

I have a feeling that in ancient times you did not have to believe Demeter lived six months of the year in the bowels of the earth in order for you to grasp the full meaning of spring, no more than you have to believe that Childe Harold existed in order to appreciate the beauty of “Childe Harold.”

Some will argue that what we call mythology today was religion then. Maybe so. On the other hand, human experience has shown that the younger one is the more the cycles of life make sense, while the older one gets and the closer death approaches, the more one is likely to feel that life has treated one unjustly and one needs to believe that there is something superior to life itself. What is true for one human being could not apply to the human race as a whole? When the human race was young, it created myths of life, when older it produced religion, or “intimations of immortality.”

But regardless of this rather simplistic theory of mine, I believe that poetry is more related to the mechanism of myth-making, that it is to that of religion. Hoelderlin expressed this antithesis between the mythical hero and the religious martyr. Torn as he was between his delirious attachment to the ancient Greek gods and his love for Jesus Christ, while at first he imagines Christ to be the brother of Hercules, even of Dionysos, he ends up by saying that he feels intimidated to have these people (i.e. Hercules, Dionysos) who are so bound to this world, ** coming face to face with Christ.

As I conclude these few thoughts, I realize that I have not been able to explain why I think that a poet is nearer to Pandora and the little hope that is left at the bottom of her box, than to Ecclesiastes who says that man will never know in his heart what Good is and what God is. I believe that the poet will always be closer to the myth, because the myth is about what is and about what cannot be said.

The message that the poet receives from reality is both precise and unnamable. Reality explains itself by itself, for itself and at the same time it sends you back to your own existence for an explanation. A poet can see the universe breathing exactly as he himself does, but also knows that it does it in a totally different way. The explanation is inbred in the question. Repetition is one of the laws of nature but at the same time it does not exist since nothing is identical to anything, not even to itself.

My self-preservation depends on something that ignores me completely.

Maurice Blanchot says: “Writing must testify to the fact that something cannot be said.” And Valery again: “The person is only one of the effects of being. The Self attaches itself every moment, from a flux of a very different nature.”

Not only to conceive but to experience daily the life of opposites, without trying to unify them under one divine principle, is to my mind what a poet is all about…To tell a story when nothing has or will ever be solved. Just as a myth does. A poet will say just this:

“I hear the little noise of my existence and my stupidity is in front of me.” (Valery)

 

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