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“Poetry as a Spiritual Exercise,“ by Jean-Wahl (1942)
translation by Timothy Lavenz (2013)

A spiritual exercise, first, in the etymological sense of the word: exercise of the breath, of rhythm – and this rhythm will be both passive and active, a passivity sent up into activity –, poetry is also a spiritual exercise in a more profound sense. It is an exercise for becoming conscious (sometimes an infinitesimal consciousness) of the unconscious. Even Valéry, who talks about the first lines of verse being given to him, of the rhythms he discovers by surprise at the origin of his poems, and of the intermediary states between consciousness and the unconscious, would not deny it; even Mallarmé, who sees ideas surge up from the blank page, and a clarity that emerges from the night of Idumea. And, inversely, the surrealists must well know what part consciousness plays for them.

An exercise which also consists in manipulating in a mysterious way time and space. Condensing and elongating time, the poet creates a time that is no longer the time of the everyday. He isolates a moment to which he gives its own duration, incommensurable with ordinary time, at once longer and shorter; longer because of its infinite resonances, shorter because of its ecstatic and instantly rapt character.

This isolated instant, that of the poet, is an instant no longer isolated, in which a duality, a plurality, a multitude of instants shine and are condensed. An instant that no longer exists as an instant.

And the poet creates a space in it, infinitely near, infinitely remote, this living space which is that of the work of art, and which Rilke, inspired by the lessons of sculpture, knew how to make us feel. A space that no longer exists as space.

In this time and this space, which are at the same time so near and so far away from us, everything becomes, at the same time, near and far away.

The mysterious is here quite near; and the here-quite-near is mysterious. These two affirmations, one Coleridge’s and the other Wordsworth’s, rejoin each other; they both knew it, and Novalis, perhaps better than they, became conscious of these two movements that appear contradictory.

Every work is an operation, an experience that takes place, is made [se fait].

Thus the question recently posed to me by a young poet, if is poetry an evasion or an exploration, loses meaning. All great poetry is an evasion only in appearance. It is an evasion only because it goes deeper.

And, like this the poet is created, he is the poet of himself, delivering himself from his demons, excusing himself, dedicating himself.

And finally silence comes. Perhaps poetry is only our way of coloring and making vibrate the silence that succeeds us, or which is contemporary with us.

Often, it is not the meaning of a verse that grabs and holds us, but something else, the interior accompaniment and care it brings up within us.

When it comes to speaking to others, the poet hesitates, he doesn’t read well his poem. Or he reads it as if it were another’s. He reads it without comprehending it. Thus Claudel when he puts on his glasses and acts just like a notary when he reads his great works. Deplorable, in reality admirable way of reading Claudel. Some other makes of his poems, by his hesitations, something shredding. Must we distrust poets who read their works too well? No; I know of some who can restore about their work the atmosphere from which it was born.

Some poets have told us the method of their exercises; Shelley, how he cultivates his astonishment, or more simply lets it develop on its own; Hölderlin, Poe, Rimbaud, who disrupt every meaning; Mallarmé.

We shouldn’t speak of poetry as a spiritual exercise anyway, but of each mode of poetry as a particular spiritual exercise. What could be farther apart than the strict arches underneath which a Dante makes us pass, and this open space where Whitman makes us breath among immense waves and winds? And yet there’s no less infinity in the first than in the second.

Will we then be led to say that all poetry is the creation of a world? We note well the character of creation and totality there in poetry. But, owing to certain realist tendencies I feel in me, or to a certain incapacity, I would hesitate to define poetry as a “creation of the world.” Of course the idea of the world is the effect of an illusion, at once retrospective and totalizing. Poetry is rather the creation of a language or a music, of a language which is a music.

Perhaps we should add, after having envisaged poetry as a spiritual exercise, that the poet must not be too conscious of poetry as an exercise, and that poetry is not only an exercise. “Exercise” puts the accent on the activity. “Experience” (if one takes the word in the sense James takes it when he speaks of religious experience) puts the accent on passivity. Exercise, experience, creation, poetry is also an adventure.

Fontaine, 1942

Translation of “La Poésie comme Exercise Spirituel,” from Poésie, Pensée, and Perception, by Jean-Wahl,  1948.

Walter Benjamin once wrote, “the knowledge of which we can give the clearest account will be the most profound.” For Benjamin, this meant a theory of knowledge and a concept of experience as little grounded in subjectivity and “cognizing consciousness” as possible. Such knowledge will have been liberated from the subject-object dichotomy, which has dominated understanding in the modern era. That is, it would no longer follow the paradigm of adequatio intellectus et rei, where the subject’s knowledge was justified insofar as its representations corresponded “adequately” to the objects it represented. Why, exactly, should we reject this paradigm? Because not only does it tend to deny any world apart from the subject’s own representations (its “world-view”), but also because it tends to deny experience itself – for in experience the split between subject and object presupposed here can never in truth be achieved, and the represented world never really matches the one experienced. In other words, by asking the subject to represent the world of experience as an object, even as its own object, it cannot not help but get trapped in the solipsism of its own constructions, and to deny – by repression or outright hostility – whatever does not fit into the world of its “view.” It is this totalizing aspect of cognizing consciousness that Heidegger also diagnoses in his important essay, “The Age of the World Picture.”

To obtain a clearer account of knowledge and experience would mean, first, to liberate ourselves and our account from the trap of objectivizing consciousness, and to forgo any grounding operation in the subject, in its representations and “self-certainties.” Indeed, the difference between self-certainty and experience would have to be kept constantly in mind. Every “knowledge claim” (if claims we make) would have to be articulated in the space of this difference, in the gap between self-certainty and its failure. Eschewing knowledge directly defined by the subject and its “impositions,” our account would seek not to ground itself per se, but to expose itself; and it would strive to reveal experience itself as the ex-position of the “subject.”

Exposition has the meaning of “setting forth the meaning or purpose,” but also of displacement, shifting, reorienting, and re-moval. A theory of knowledge based in exposition would therefore strive be displaced on the spot, without however surrendering the rigor of “knowing.” The question becomes: How to encode this incessant shifting? How to articulate this zone of nonknowledge where the subject as such “blacks out”? How to bear witness to desubjectification? How to think, exposed at every point, radically “open”? How, in a word, to know oneself at a distance from oneself – to know experience as ungraspable, yet whole?

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… A sensitive (riven) man writes, but only to reach where he knows he cannot reach, to attain the unattainable. He imagines that the instant of writing creates these future encounters, but he knows his imagination fails him. God – the possibility of connecting – fails him, leaves him high and dry. And the idea that failure (non-success at the “game” of being) would usher in some kind of secret achievement also lent him no consolation. For he wanted, here in the writing, but more importantly everywhere, to be level-headed; and yet he could not seem to avoid being a clown – and, what’s worse, obviously being one. He couldn’t find that proper perspective that would dignify or justify his bellows and his blurbs. Imagine a photographer before a breathtaking expanse, his camera ever poised, but whose hands were so buried in the earth that he never got a chance to take his shot. That is, he saw no way to present in a total way the beauty of what his hands worked, of what they felt – his thought, his life, his experience – being buried. However, distantly it’s true, he intuited from time to time that he had encoded it somewhere, all of it in fact, however dispersed – though in a way he could not exactly manage or access, its sense always elsewhere than in the present of his capturing; and yet inevitably it was somewhere – somewhere else, invariably – where what he’d said could not help but become clearer, calmer, and more accurate, having somehow resisted the erosion that time had exercised over him and his own speech. But this intuition never took him very far; he had to be practical. And so he started the whole thing over each time, forced to rely again on the clown’s spontaneous conjurations, escaping sui generis, surrendered to the surprise effects of grammar and tight squints, the fortuity of never-fixed forms and downright boring ideations. No, this game gave him little hope to go on. And yet he wrote. Besides, he knew he would live on until there was no more – which, after all, was something.

To write, to really compose – to really philosophize, these days, if you like– requires something immeasurably precious, then, always extending, always extenuated: respect for “oneself,” one’s aleatory and precarious presence, always othered-without-return, always thrown to chance – the world – alone but never alone, confused and basically blown to bits – but always touching something or someone – always riven, always written as such. A writing whose effects could not be planned, but could only let themselves be affected by another (always another) right now, interrupted and opened to everything in that other “one.” You had to learn how to sustain this crazy respect for the other within – for the other one you’d never know. Such respect, however, could only be sustained in that, each time, some new relationship was drawn: a line extended between you and another, you and me perhaps, but always between one respected “plus” another respected “one.” To write, then: to achieve an impossible connection, to situate oneself in the taking-place of place itself – of relationship – “invisible” but with nothing behind it, instantly broken off and right at the surface, where the truth of what we shared was twice revealed and lost. To connect, then, here: to inspire and drive further the “cause” of such reckless abandon; to conjure the spirit or truth of abandon and to summon ourselves to it. To bring to light exposure as such – to sing and put the lighter to oneself.

—No. To write is just this: to befriend, to meet, without contact.

–To befriend, finally: to respect ourselves; to respect the all we have to shout and sing.