In France an old colonel, who had some interest in reading and writing and whose life was spent in making soldier march on the commands of ’left’ and ’right’, decided from the force of habit, to make a parade of writers and after his retirement brought out a literary journal to teach them how to write French. He had great complaints against the new writers, who, in his opinion, did not know French at all, lack simplicity, comprehensibility and flow and made their expression in such a way that uselessly complicate their meaning. The colonel therefore took upon himself the task of correcting their poems every month until he reached Paul Valery’s poem ’A Cemetery by the Sea’, whose one line was as follows;

’Le vent se leve! il fant tenter de verve’
(The wind began to blow! Life should be tried to be lived)

Mr. Colonel converted this line into pure and real French in this way;

’Le vent se leve! il fant vivre mavie’
(The wind began to blow! I should live)

Whether after the colonel’s editing the language has become idiomatic or not, I don’t know-as I don’t know French that much. It is however clear that poetry has disappeared from it. First see how greatly the idea has changed. The colonel says that ’I should live’- An English translator has rendered it as ’you should live’. Valery, on the contrary, has changed his desire into a general principle. It is true that he has said that sentence for himself; however the way is such that it seems to be addressed to all the other people. Thus he has converted an inner urge into an attitude towards life. The existentialists say that when a person selects something for himself he in fact selects it for the whole of humanity. Valery chose such words that both the steps of selection became one and the difference between the common and the particular ceased. Perhaps Mr. Colonel thought words as the dress or ornament of idea. But here even the idea has not been understood by him. Now come to poetry. Sartre says that the painter Tintoretto paints a yellow sky of his sadness. Valery has made an internal urge a song. This is not only an expression or announcement of the desire to live. The line, in its very self, is an attempt to live. It consists of two sentences. The first is about the nature and the second, about man. It is a pity that the French sounds can not be expressed through Urdu alphabets. (In any case, to write essay with out considering verses is a folly, though this folly has always been committed in Urdu).


Well, ’Le vent se leve’ is not only a phonic portrayal of wind. The sounds in it contain both the man’s envy of nature and a permanent theory about it. How easy it is for nature to live, contrary to man, for whom it is a constant effort and struggle. He has to fight both with the external things and with himself. All this conflict has gathered into this sentence;

’Il fant tenter de virve’

In this line, all the meanings lie in the words. Change the words and the whole experience is gone. However the difference between Valery and the colonel is not only that Valery has a greater sense of the music of words. It is a particular attitude towards life and art that produces that sense. Until and unless a man makes all his senses seep into the external things and let external things be absorbed in all his senses, poetry like Valery can not be produced.

What sort of an attitude is this? or in what relation does an artist stand with external things, himself and his art? are things, which I have no right to say any thing about. It will be a self-deception, even a grave ignorance, if I should, after writing Phislan (a short story by the writer), think that the mental factors of Shakespeare are now within my grasp. But as an ordinary student of literature, such questions are also necessary to arise in mind. I have no personal experience of creating any great literary work. So I can but only make haphazard attempts to understand the inner process of creation through what the great poets have said about their own works. This would be similar to an attempt of drafting a map of the North Pole after reading a travelogue by some writer. However even for the sake of amusement-’Life should be tried to be lived’.


For the purpose I have selected two things. One is a poem by Stephane Mallarmé, the other is German Philosopher, Heideger’s essay, in which he has distilled five fundamental points about poetry from the work of Hölderlin. Mallarmé’s poem should have been reproduced in French, as what the other two people have said in a philosophical manner; he has communicated through his technique. But in Urdu, an English translation could be given at the most. Mira Jee had made too bold an attempt, as I believe that Mallarmé can not be translated into Urdu. Even in English the translation of Roger Fry is not more than a presumptuous endeavor, as the person who translates Mallarmé’s poems with out rhyming is sincere but does not understand his poetry. In these translations the meaning of the poem has definitely got expressed though the poetry, Mr. Fry has left with Mallarmé. However as it is not possible here to do without the English translation, it is being presented. The name of the poem is ’Salutation’, and it was written on the occasion of a writers’ congregation.

Salutation

Nothing! This foam and virgin verse
To designate naught but the cup
Such, far away there plunges a troop
Of many sirens upside down

We are navigating. My diverse
Friends! I already on the poop
You the splendid prow which cuts
The main of thunder and of winters:

A fine clarity calls me
Without fear of its rolling
To carry, upright, this toast

Solitude, reef, star
To whatever it was that was worth
Our sail’s white solicitude.

In this gathering Mallarmé is standing to toast the health of the young writers. This is no time for philosophical discourses. This is a formal occasion and he is to say light things. Proper to the situation, he has said in the very first line of his poem that all this is nothing, just foam in the goblet and so are his verses.

This means that this whole poem is a game. But like this poem, artistic creation also starts with this ’nothing at all’ sort of game. There are some critics today who frown on hearing the use of word in connection with art and instantly start deliberating upon its psychological meaning and biological importance for men. But an artist does not sit to write with the thought that at the moment he has to do a great service to humanity. However important the effects of his creative activity upon the mankind may be, they are no concern of his at the moment of creation. Before making love a man does not think that the growth of human race is his duty. An artist is also grasped in the claws of a creative lust and he, for the sake of the pleasure of the game, surrenders himself to the impulse. He, in this aspect, is somewhat similar in status to woman. Years of pain dissolve in the pleasure of the creating moment. In the joy of the game, the artist even fails to remember what agony he is burdening upon himself. Whatever may be the degree of biological importance of game in the eyes of Mr. Herbert Reed, for an artist the creation, in addition to being other things, is also a game-and in the same sense as children understand the word.

The first thing, Hölderlin has said about writing poetry is also that it is an innocent hobby. This is because, according to Heidegger, poetry writing does not directly affect reality. This is not a process. Here we don’t have to take decision, which creates crime or sin. This proposition is not completely correct. However the artistic creation appears to be a game-particularly to the artist at least at the time of creation. In reality creation is such a horrible thing that the artist would dare not frequent its neighborhood if it did not seem to be a harmless game. It is therefore also a necessary component of poetry, without which it can not come into being. Heidegger has declared play as a harmless margin to poetry-which means that as a mountain is attached by a valley so is non-serious playfulness an element of the artist’s personality; Ezra Pound has even said that every great poet is a buffoon to some degree. Well what I know about creation! However what the great personality of Thomas Mann has told me is that the thing in the artists that most frightens the non-artists, is their sportiveness. Leave others for even a man like Nietzsche was estranged from Wagner for the reason. In any case for an artist, the creation starts the way Mallarmé’s poem begins-’O leave it, this all is nothing but foam’.

When the foam started to rise up, Mallarmé first of all saw mermaids, plunging into it. This is to be the second element of creation-Dream. Do not start defining the psychological and biological meanings of the word. At present we are speaking the human tongue and want to disgrace the artists. Even if later on we should have to accept that in comparison to the realities in art, all the other realities are a mere shadow. But as art is something detached from what we, in our every day life, call reality, it at the first glance seems worthless and unreal. Art does not know to hamper any of the mental processes and moves on all the plains at the same time. Coleridge, when he became critic, blackened pages after pages in describing the difference between fancy and imagination. The artist however deliberately detaches himself from the every day reality. He purposely sits to have dreams and does not feel abashed from doing that like ordinary people. By the very fancying his artistic imagination gets movement. Mallarmé had changed it into a proper exercise. This process of dreaming is also a part of the artist’s game, without which even the realistic story of Zola can not be written, poetry being a remoter thing. Zola was writing the lifelike story of Rougon-Macquart Family; he was however unable to decide its conclusion. In the meanwhile Germany defeated France in the war of 1870. Zola said, ’Yes! Got it’. What else is it, if not the mermaids that appear from foam! This unreal atmosphere is as necessary for a poet as cloud for mountains. For plunging into reality, the artist has to detach himself from the every day reality. In connection with Mallarmé’s mermaids, you read the phrase ’upside down’. Its corresponding French is ’A l’envers’, whose rhyming, Mallarmé has maintained as ’vers’, which means verse. Really there is a very deep connection between the two. To write verse the poet has to assume a position with his head down and legs up. The real face of reality can only be seen this way. The artist, in the engrossment of his play, does even that. After leaping beyond the boundaries of reality, what is encountered?

Mallarmé has said in the beginning of the second stanza; ‘We are navigating’. So long the poet was detached from his dream-it was a game but as soon as he entered into it, it changed into an adventure-perilous and difficult like a voyage. What adventure is this? (Is it) an investigation into the inner world? A quest for the mysteries of human nature (or) the search of the ultimate reality? Name it what you may! In this journey the man looks for every thing. However there is another basic meaning of this adventure. Hölderlin says that the man has God’s most dangerous gift-language, which is given so that he may tell who he is. It is not known what the stone would say if it started forming a philosophy of life. Anyhow if we see from our point of view, the difference that appears to exist between the stone and the man is that, contrary to the stone, life is an inner experience for the man. Man becomes whatever he is at the time when he admits his existence. Without this acceptance man does not come into existence and to come into existence is the first and basic responsibility of the man. All the other responsibilities come later. What is it that the man accepts as his existence? It is his relationship with other things.

The principle that separates things and joins them with each other has been named by Hölderlin as ’Proximity’. For coming into being the man accepts that he is a part of that proximity. It means that the man comes into existence with the help of other things. His confession and admission is his existence. For man the means of this admission is language. Here I have used the word ’means’ for the sake of facility, for language is even more inevitable a thing. Word is not only the name or description of things. The things after going through a metamorphosis become words. This means that language is included in that ’proximity’, in which the man is included. The human existence and language are mutually indispensable. Then why is language a dangerous thing? Because language make us stand in front of all the things and the existence of other things seem to us threatening for our own existence. The man wants to become uniquely single, unmatched and utterly absolute and the other things seem prone to deprive him of this right of his. In man the greatest inner conflict (Reich has proved that it is a biological struggle) is that he can not come into existence with out the consciousness of other things, though he also fears that consciousness. This is the ’pleasure’s weight’, about which Faraq Gorakpuri has said, ’Bala-ain Ya Bhee Muhabbat Kay Sur Gaee Hon Hi’.

This ecstasy is such that sometimes man prefers death over it.

Tum He To Eh-lay Hawas Imtahan Say Bhag Chalay
Yay Kia Zaroor Tha Hoti to Moot He Hoti?


(Translation: You, who fled from trial, O man of lust; Was it sure that had it happened, must be death?)

But the artist puts himself into the trail deliberately-and under the pretext of playing and in playing with words, encounters death.

Hölderlin has said that the poet can be the victim of thunderbolt at any time. But it is the vocation of the poet that he should plunge into the mouth of death in the act of playing. This is the voyage of Mallarmé. In the last line of the second stanza the sea is mentioned. This is the ’proximity’, with out drowning into which, the man can not acquire his existence. Then in winter this sea sometimes freezes and sometimes lightening thunders over it. When man, in the fear of the consciousness of things, shrinks within himself, his existence gets frozen. Then when consciousness comes and leaves things utterly shaking. In short both beloved’s deserting and beloved’s unification are perdition for man. The sportive artist, however, accepts both of them. When he, while watching the spectacle of the mermaids of his dreams, suddenly startles then it is known that he is navigating on a horrible sea, where there are two great dangers-Either the ship can get stuck in ice or become a prey of lightening. But if he forfeits his voyage, he can not maintain his existence as an artist.

Here his sportiveness comes to his aid and he says with a great calm, ’Nous naviguons’-’We are navigating’. But in this journey the artist is not completely alone. Not only his contemporaries but all the artists who have gone before and who are going to come are involved in it. In other words not only the artist individually but through him the whole tradition of that art navigates. Here the simile of chain and loops would not be appropriate as though the poet as an individual is separate from his tradition; the tradition works from within him and he from within the tradition. This is another type of ’proximity’, which the poet has to admit. The translation has not captured this proximity, the way Mallarmé has expressed it. In English there is only ’Diverse Friends’ but in Mallarmé the first line of the second stanza ends on ’Divers’ and the next line starts with ’Amis’. In French the two words will be read together, which means that they are both one and separate (at the same time). This is the relationship of one artist with the other artists. But in this journey, in addition to artists, the whole humanity is also participating as the poet is using language, which is a common heritage. The language in itself is a relation and an association. The very meaning of language is that a man is speaking and the other is listening. Mallarmé, in another of his poem, has said that a poet gives purer meaning to the words of the tribe. But as in reality the language is a dialogue, therefore the poet, by accepting the language and by making it a means of his journey, sets the whole mankind in motion. When a language starts its journey through a poet, then all the people, who speak that language, come drifting along; all bound with the poet and the poet bound with them.


Now take Mallarmé’s fourth stanza. We see that as the poet’s play changes into a voyage, he becomes aware of its dangers. He is navigating among things and he knows that his existence is under their threat. But these things are also the creator of his existence. Now it is a question whether he should surrender himself to these things or not. But by this time the ecstasy of the sense of ’proximity’ has dominated him. Now he doesn’t decide himself any more, this ecstasy makes decision. Things are calling out to him and he has drowned in the flux of that calling’s pleasure. Now he is no more frightened of tumbling and falling down. But where has his sportiveness led him to? What is the conclusion of that journey? First see the theory of Hölderlin and Heidegger. The man does not come into being until he admits the ’proximity’ of the existing. This acceptance is made through language and in a way that things become words. So the language, while on the one hand, gives existence to man also bestows permanence to things. If there were no language, there would be no world for the man. The language is in fact dialogue. This means that the very human existence is a dialogue. As man admits his existence through language, so the human life and the verse are two names for the same thing. Therefore the aim of the poet’s efforts is that man and human life may come into existence.

As Mallarmé, in this poem, is thinking from the point of view of a creative artist, he is not at all concerned about the result of his journey. If the artist starts enumerating the benefits of his work and his ecstasy dwindles then he can’t create. For him the creative ecstasy is every thing. Mallarmé however has non-seriously enumerated the three great aspects of his struggle-Solitude, Reef and Star-It is possible that the vessel of these voyagers would disappear in the infinities of the sea; it may also hit some rock and turn into pieces. So there is a possibility of its reaching the stars. The artist though aware of these possibilities is indifferent to them, nevertheless. His only interest is that the journey may proceed.

Our sail’s white solicitude.

The English translator has got rid of the difficulty by saying ’white’. In French ’Blanc’ means both ’white’ and ’blank’. In Mallarmé the concept of ’blank’ is of central importance. This is both the symbol of nothingness and the completion of being. Then being also takes birth from nothingness. So the quest in which the poet’s sails are engaged is not only pure and clean but also ’blank’. This means that the poet has not decided before hand what he is to look for. This activity may lead him anywhere-may take him to the stars, may put him to death. He is in search of creation-in search of the acceptance of his and other people’s beings. Just this is the task of the artist. The real artist does not set out to find stars, he just sets out and from the closet of his ego goes in the direction of the other things, whatever may the consequence of his interest be. Mallarmé has said every thing through his rhyming. The first and the third lines of the last stanza end on ’Etoile’ (star) and ’Toile’ (sail). For the poet his very sail is the star. His very journey is his destination. Ask the rest of the things from German philosophers (1955).