ROMANTIC POESIE

Do you ask how I was at this time?
As one who has lost everything so as to gain everything.
—Friedrich Hölderlin

I miss the sun-dial, the moving moon, the actress:
The secret of accessing the ineffable.
Here I invoke her— but who, I wonder, have I named?
Diotima, Sophia?— or that irreducible kernel
These thinkers tried to access (Hölderlin, Novalis, Schlegel)—
The difference of the world to itself, felt within oneself,
Running the whole gamut of human emotions and reflections?
Whereas many remain assured of the provisional labels
They’ve saved for the sacred and profane worlds,
These thinkers felt an urgency that could not.
The time comes to save our voice of heartfelt intuitions
From lapsing into oblivion—
It is the urgency of this time-coming from out of it 
That links their time with ours and the hereafter.
As they are: signals from the dead,
Redresses from the bed-rock of accepted nomenclatures
To give us a new breath again, to begin thinking.

Romanticism firstly rejects that the I is merely transcendental.
They sought to situate “it” in a more holistic view of nature,
A nature liberated from its caricatures as a causal mechanism
Divorced from the world we live in; or as an object
Upon which the human is written. They sought a nature
That is active and autonomous only as we are taken in by the poetic spirit.
This began a new orientation towards embodiment
(Yet which drew from a wealth of tradition),
One that extends the “I” to the “non-I” without surrendering
The function of each— an organic whole where each part functions
For the maintaining of the “harmoniously opposed.”
Thus, Fichte’s structure that relates the subjective “I”
To the objective “this one here,” mediated by
An immanently “transcendental function”— yet here seen as the bridge between,
The symbol of a gap in being more than any thing.
They realized just the same that even this formulation
Is situated in language, where the grassy “fields” get their signification
In the field of embodied language which is far vaster, which opens
“As if on a Holiday…”

And yet, with language, they sought a truth inside truth’s fictions
To serve a witnessing function outside the merely linguistic,
Where words unravel, expose themselves in their nakedness
As would have formerly the mystic’s. Against this movement
We ordinarily find nothing but resistance,
For all our truths (and gods) are embedded in it.
Of all the romantics, Hölderlin was the clearest
To recognize the deep implications of this predicament:
The gods— and significations— have fled.
They find themselves as we do: in the middle times
Before the gods come, if ever, again. We
Are to flesh out what is to be said (and left unsaid)
In this interim period. But by this recognition
We have already entered a liminal state
Where time sheds its differences by realizing them
In the spacing out of presences:
The dislocating absence of us and our essence,
Poetically spread across a borderless countryland
To be shared in finding finally a resting place
In the movement of a beckoning process without stasis.
There remains much to be written and read still,
Where longevity can only mean the resurrection
Of the body from the chains of the world
And of the word from the chains of usage,
Where both find their home
In an urgent, deeply felt, yet-to-come relevance.

But how are we to approach this “truth”—
That no truth is not half-said, relative in a sense
To the finitude of its expression— without
A feeling of homelessness, alienation, and dread?
Where does radical critique leave us
When we understand it, not as a position among positions,
But as the irreducible tension between and within systems,
An admittedly inescapable “predicament”?
Theirs— and ours— is the response of exile
To the world of “one’s own religion,” which finds its community
Throughout all epochs, across all traditions,
In what has been written and what, from outside the textual, is read into it:
A community relevant only if it voices itself again
To trace its disappearance as it manifests and fades.

As Schlegel argues, the classical work is only classic
If it retains the necessity of this reading in.
Precisely, the necessity of incomprehension
Towards the “purposeless purpose” of showing—
Not communicating, not explaining, not as expression—
hat which always remains to be said: the incommunicable.
This attention to language, its ironies, its backwardness and its trends
Seems prerequisite for a “romantic religion.”
This is dialog, intimate with the risk of death,
Where we struggle with chimeras until
To an authentic cognition we are slowly led,
All along with a sense of direction
Of being “naturally” pulled along by trees and texts.
This marks a versatility fully aware of the chaos at stake
“Outside its system of expression,” i.e. at the heart of it,
Where the path is filled with mile-steps and stops for needed breaths.
The goal of the system becomes a methodical “anti-system”
Of composing liberated fragments— outlining the shared content
Of our increasingly dislocated and spacious “human” head (now “godly”?),
Opening a window onto the process of thought
By revealing it in all its surprising spiraling steps, rather than idolizing its products.
Here, poetry is only “useful” insofar as it effaces all use-value,
Insofar as it remains for generations to come
Unappropriated by anyone— except
To inspire the idiomatic process to arise once again
From the ashes of stagnant signification,
To engage our language in the flux of its instant.
Sovereignty, trying for the impossible: the saying of Saying itself—
To voice again what in excess exists
As a remainder, which slides out from under the written text
To push us through a topography nonetheless.
Schlegel sees this activity from Dante to Shakespeare
And at the foundation of all human happiness: to care
For what’s been said before, so we’ll know how to say again.

Therefore, to approach a work carries a dual task:
To touch upon what is there but only by its lack
And to touch thereby upon a lack that’s part and parcel with oneself—
In freedom, a movement freeing of all psychological
Or “subjective” content, for the object of this knowledge
Self-relates automatically as an object to be dropped.
It proved, after all, to be you, hearing yourself in your absence.
Truth remains only as knowledge’s vanishing accent:
It has no cause; it does not enter the realm of “lasting,”
Except to leave a trace to inspire those who come after it.
It sees its very formulations with ironic laughter,
Aimed at language and the folly of its dualisms.
It is intimate with the word as specter and apparition,
Intimate with the threat that our language too may become a dead.
Thus Schlegel writes that all our great truths are trivial
Appearances in an age of tendencies; his tended to irony and fragment,
The two most “serious” ways the romantics were able
To find a humility proper to humanity’s finitude.
Both of these strategies aim to disseminate new possibilities,
Opening what Heidegger would call “the clearing,”
Where recognition of a knowledge “beyond language” is the sole criterion,
Though, to be clear, this beyond means being close to language’s corpse,
That is, to our own core: saying its most essential;
To recognize this is already to begin responding
With silent incisions into the topography of language.
The fragment presents the status of a thought in progress
By presenting its irresolvable aporias (not as obstacles
But as evidence of a dynamic capacity for human thought)
Arising as they do in specific cultural milieus, by allowing
Forgetting to intercede playfully,
By renouncing an absolute model or system and substituting
An evolving method of falsification and verification whose ultimate
Criterion is the spiritual status of the I’s that read them
Outstripping communication’s yes-no bifurcation:
For no amount of words will render true the untrue heart,
But if the heart is ripe, the word springs forth.

This fragmentary exigency— marked by the splintering
Of names and of strictly “logical” thinking— is the nature of all dialog,
The goad and impossible goal of Blanchot’s infinite conversation,
And suggests a renewed meaning of what it would mean
To be “contemporaneous”: a challenging of accepted
Cultural values, based on a deeply felt temperance
Able to define boundaries within a rigorous tenderness.
For Hölderlin, this is the primordial foundation
By which we feel ourselves equal to those across all time:
The sense of a universal formative drive
Which finds its direction by constantly cultivating
Our “natural” drive to form the unformed—
Which gets dulled into tameness if we define “nature”
As pre-formed or given, as bogged down by
The weight of that “almost boundless prior world”
Too reliant on antiquity’s productions, succumbed to humanity’s “positive forms.”
The romantics reject this idea of nature-as-given
Or as the background of human activity.
They found— as we must— its acting forth within
Which brings us to our ownmost “particular being,”
Our appropriate Bildung
Which can never be mandated— and is therefore the sole essential.
To be contemporaneous here, as a part of this fragmenting-apart
Of the world and its ways from out from under it,
Means “with violent effort, to oppose as a living force
Everything learnt, given, positive:
The perfect conditions for imagination and freedom,
To find our direction in a harmony of pure and impure directions,
To find our equal ground on the shaking heart of history.

Kierkegaard was such a model for the break from pre-given forms,
Where the object of faith must bring us to a halt,
Where we are either offended and turned away
Or reenter the process of “transparently resting with faith,”
So that belief may “naturally” grow,
Where the “natural” resistance in us is prerequisite for this rending-forth,
For this marks a responsibility that takes us outside of what’s given,
Outside theory, a relation beyond ethics,
Where the mark of the spirit’s freedom is only incidentally
Marked by lawfulness and theoretical neatness.
That is why the paradox of the God-man is faith’s sole object
And perhaps why many of the avant-garde romantics remained Christian;
But even if “Christianity” is rejected,
We must see how this rejection can meaningfully be “Christian.”
It puts us into relation with death: utter nonmeaning.
Dada, years after both the romantics and Soren,
Would unleash even further this “offensive” attack
By rejecting the tenability of any word to enact its referent,
A further decomposing of what was long signaled,
Even if in its theses Dada appears drastically different;
“Deconstruction” seems clearly laid out here from the beginning,
Long before Derrida followed it to its articulation;
And Surrealism, following Freud, would simply apply techniques
To access unconscious material much in the way Schelling described—
And the interrelation of all of it is astounding when you think about it:
The marvelous path-making displayed in this topography that decays and grows.
But they are only winks and nudges: an incitement to the process,
For it presents itself— with all its poetic truth and untruth—
As the silence of the dark side of an illusion, the abyss that is language
And the revenant word, so clear to us now
As we look up from the page to find no one there
Or even here in this room—

And yet the odd question:
Romantic religion for who? directed to what Other?
There can be no answer but the response to a lack found there,
A secret, a question, whose insistence is to remain
In its signifying-functioning our deepest passion. We see
The lack that afflicts the gods afflicts us all:
The power of the name to evoke presence has fled
In the same breath and with them, dissociated over
A slow process of reading and the read, the “I”
And what it says when saying “Saying itself.”
Presence is usurped by a reversal in the functioning of letters,
The insertion of a meaning in absentia.
There is no assurance, there is no “relative ending.”
This is what Kant signals and the romantics extend
When denying the possibility of any closure on the ontic,
Paradoxically signaling a new mode of philosophy altogether:
A space of writing devoted to thinking through its own ending.
Nietzsche writes: “The wasteland extends,
Destitution grows larger,” but isn’t he remarking
On the desert of signification
Already disclosed in Hölderlin’s revealing openness,
That poet who warned us of this break long ago?

And yet “lightning flashes” with our becoming:
The word arrives as opening-forth to found a world,
Idiomatic each time, where the wound is voiced in singular tones:
What it means to be in common without relying
On the transcendence of any determined community or common-being,
For as Bataille would later write, all determination is exhaustion.
It is our intimacy with the distress of this break
That assures our place as social beings, aware that
Our only “calling” is to respond as singulars to this inherent lack,
One that— of necessity— lets us drop freely our objects (of knowledge).
Nancy will later write, “Consciousness of self is outside the self of consciousness,”
Pithily describing what is at work in romantic thinking and beyond,
The “rejection of closure,” as Lyn Heijinian would put it,
The recognized remainder left after any absolutization or ab-solution.
This ends any notion of metaphysics as a “project,” or of a humanity tacked on to it.
The only tenability of a romantic religion is to understand it as “linking-together”:
The “bible” as a system of books eternally revealing and revising,
All forming one book— the absent one, but firstly our passion for it—
Without which there is no coherence for us.
Religion as sacrifice of all of the finite (Kierkegaard’s “infinite resignation”):
To understand the subject as a “subject-work”:
Not as a “work-project,” but as a function of all that is other:
The “becoming-artist,” an always-in-process,
Founded on the (un)completed repetition of the in-finite in each instant;
In short, “The work of art creating itself,” “Absolute auto-production”—
Death— in the sense of being-towards-i”
As the possibility of our impossibility as such, and coming up to it.
We are sucked up into an infinite process
To share everything we uncover, and must therefore miss.

Self-effacement, irony, rebuttal— series, parody, opposition:
All speech as the possibility of linking together beings
Despite disparate times and queries: this is romantic religion.
They extend Fichte, for whom the moral act was the divine movement
That let God be God by letting the finite be finite
In the positing of an infinite “ought,” re-contextualizing
Finitude from without, through the subject-function, beyond the human-relative.
Thus, for Schelling, the artist consciously, in freedom, assents
To the “absolute” and unknown, which thereby sets its object free
To become its proper socio-historical necessity as the living-work—
Not as if it were a subject-project, but as an unconscious product,
Participating in an evolution far beyond the merely artistic-conscious,
Fulfilling his or her singular role in the writing of the in-finite:
A dedication to a vision and an insight to come after.
For Schleiermacher, religion was based in personal intuition,
A “non-base,” dynamic outside dogmas, with experience as its criterion,
Again emphasizing that religion meant personal transformation
Of the subject into a function of the Infinite, as voided: the universe
As a self-disclosing possibility to which we must merely open up.
Works of “art and lit” are to hold a special place in our heart,
Especially those that bring to us our singular response to these recognitions;
But more importantly, we are to respond to the lack
They present, the lack that the thinkers themselves thought
To “master” by putting to paper as best as they could,
Even if this mastery meant total finite annihilation and absurdity,
Willing themselves therefore to servility and paving a sovereign way beyond it,
Entering the process of becoming that implies a “barred” subject—
A response of autonomous sacrifice and annihilation that heralds
The secret of the word as an ever-becoming, phenomenal sensation,
Finding for us a place outside— yet in— a context we ourselves thusly begin
In the triple play of repetition, essence, and in-sistence.
In Novalis, we find this freely initiated process
With imagination at the center: interpretation and composition
Hand-in-hand in movement, at work in the “I,” concretizing it,
Not merely in the realm of the aesthetic or religious, but in the flux of instantaneous living.
The “I” recognizes itself in its other and begins to hover (es schwebt)
Between the two poles without blurring them.
By participating in this way, the “I” overcomes self-inclinations
And any objectified view of the world
By setting itself free from its objects, letting them “be naturally”
Outside any pre-formed utilization or conceptio, of them or their world.
Therefore, nature as active
Only in the space where we have released our attachments,
An activity that fills this space of its own accord,
Towards the “fruits” of which we must remain, in the end,
Passive— and yet, intimate with our weeping and our laughter,
his is our active passion, without past,
That which passes on and is passed.

To hover, nothing other than the “work” of the poem:
Self-uncovering at its peak encounter: Dissolution.

As Nietzsche wrote after the romantics, even against them,
“It is of time and becoming that the best parables should speak:
Let them be a praise and justification of all impermanence.”
There is the lesson of the caesura:
How to breath again is a blessing we must never forget
If we are to actually live in its negative expressions
Which it sends us, against the world, to upset it,
To bring it up from the shallowness of self-assertiveness and calculation.
We are to see how it has already been accomplished,
Across and beyond an impossible death—
To see the way we are to play our integral part
In the rending of necessities in freedom,
For all the human hearts that breathe together: Poesie.

Written December, 2009