elaborate variants, to compose a new
De Rerum Natura.
I believe that he may be the Lucretius of our time, reconstructing the physical nature of the world by means of the impalpable, powder-fine dust of words.
It seems to me that Ponge's achievement is on the same level as Mallarme's, though in a divergent and complementary direction. In Mallarme the word attains the acme of exactitude by reaching the last degree of abstraction and by showing nothingness to be the ultimate substance of the world. In Ponge the world takes the form of the most humble, secondary, and asymmetrical things, and the word is what serves to make us aware of the infinite variety of these irregular, minutely complicated forms.
There are those who hold that the word is the way of attaining the substance of the world, the final, unique, and absolute substance. Rather than representing this substance, the word identifies itself with it (so that it is wrong to call the word merely a means to an end): there is the word that knows only itself, andno other knowledge of the world is possible. There are others who regard the use of the word as an unceasing pursuit of things, an approach not to their substance but to their infinite variety, touching on their inexhaustibly multiform surface. As Hoff-mannsthal said: “Depth is hidden. Where? On the surface.” And Wittgenstein went even further than this: “For what is hidden … is of no interest to us.”
I would not be so drastic. I think we are always searching for something hidden or merely potential or hypothetical, following its traces whenever they appear on the surface. I think our basic mental processes have come down to us through every period of history, ever since the times of our Paleolithic forefathers, who were hunters and gatherers. The word connects the visible trace with the invisible thing, the absent thing, the thing that is desired or feared, like a frail emergency bridge flung over an abyss.
For this reason, the proper use of language, for me personally, is one that enables us to approach things (present or absent) with discretion, attention, and caution, with respect for what things (present or absent) communicate without words.
Leonardo da Vinci offers a significant example of the battle with language to capture something that evaded his powers of expression. Leonardo's codices comprise an extraordinary documentation of struggle with language, a gnarled, spiky language, from which he seeks richer, more subtle, and more precise expression. The various phases in the treatment of an idea—like those of Francis Ponge, who ends by publishing them in sequence because the real work consists not in its definitive form, but in the series of approximations made to attain it—are, for Leonardo as writer, the proof of the eflFort he invested in writing as an instrument of knowledge; and also of the fact that, in the case of all the bookshe thought of writing, he was more interested in the process of inquiry than in the completion of a text for publication. From time to time, even the subjects are similar to Ponge's as in the series of short fables that Leonardo wrote about objects or animals.
Let us take the fable about fire, for example. Leonardo gives us a rapid summary: the fire, offended because the water in the pan is above him, although he is the “higher” element, shoots his flames up and up until the water boils, overflows, and puts him out. Leonardo then elaborates this in three successive drafts, all of them incomplete, written in three parallel columns. Each time he adds some details, describing how, from a little piece of charcoal, a flame bursts through the gaps in the wood, crackling and swelling. But he soon breaks off, as if becoming aware that there is no limit to the minuteness of detail with which one can tell even the simplest story. Even a tale of wood catching fire in the kitchen fireplace can grow from within until it becomes infinite.
Leonardo, “omo sanza
De Rerum Natura.
I believe that he may be the Lucretius of our time, reconstructing the physical nature of the world by means of the impalpable, powder-fine dust of words.
It seems to me that Ponge's achievement is on the same level as Mallarme's, though in a divergent and complementary direction. In Mallarme the word attains the acme of exactitude by reaching the last degree of abstraction and by showing nothingness to be the ultimate substance of the world. In Ponge the world takes the form of the most humble, secondary, and asymmetrical things, and the word is what serves to make us aware of the infinite variety of these irregular, minutely complicated forms.
There are those who hold that the word is the way of attaining the substance of the world, the final, unique, and absolute substance. Rather than representing this substance, the word identifies itself with it (so that it is wrong to call the word merely a means to an end): there is the word that knows only itself, andno other knowledge of the world is possible. There are others who regard the use of the word as an unceasing pursuit of things, an approach not to their substance but to their infinite variety, touching on their inexhaustibly multiform surface. As Hoff-mannsthal said: “Depth is hidden. Where? On the surface.” And Wittgenstein went even further than this: “For what is hidden … is of no interest to us.”
I would not be so drastic. I think we are always searching for something hidden or merely potential or hypothetical, following its traces whenever they appear on the surface. I think our basic mental processes have come down to us through every period of history, ever since the times of our Paleolithic forefathers, who were hunters and gatherers. The word connects the visible trace with the invisible thing, the absent thing, the thing that is desired or feared, like a frail emergency bridge flung over an abyss.
For this reason, the proper use of language, for me personally, is one that enables us to approach things (present or absent) with discretion, attention, and caution, with respect for what things (present or absent) communicate without words.
Leonardo da Vinci offers a significant example of the battle with language to capture something that evaded his powers of expression. Leonardo's codices comprise an extraordinary documentation of struggle with language, a gnarled, spiky language, from which he seeks richer, more subtle, and more precise expression. The various phases in the treatment of an idea—like those of Francis Ponge, who ends by publishing them in sequence because the real work consists not in its definitive form, but in the series of approximations made to attain it—are, for Leonardo as writer, the proof of the eflFort he invested in writing as an instrument of knowledge; and also of the fact that, in the case of all the bookshe thought of writing, he was more interested in the process of inquiry than in the completion of a text for publication. From time to time, even the subjects are similar to Ponge's as in the series of short fables that Leonardo wrote about objects or animals.
Let us take the fable about fire, for example. Leonardo gives us a rapid summary: the fire, offended because the water in the pan is above him, although he is the “higher” element, shoots his flames up and up until the water boils, overflows, and puts him out. Leonardo then elaborates this in three successive drafts, all of them incomplete, written in three parallel columns. Each time he adds some details, describing how, from a little piece of charcoal, a flame bursts through the gaps in the wood, crackling and swelling. But he soon breaks off, as if becoming aware that there is no limit to the minuteness of detail with which one can tell even the simplest story. Even a tale of wood catching fire in the kitchen fireplace can grow from within until it becomes infinite.
Leonardo, “omo sanza
Similar Books
