Frederick Turner
The Ars Poetica of Attila József
[...]
For József the universe as it is is ordered, coherent, interdependent,
and maintained through the dialectical tension of its elements. It has
a necessity which is both beautiful and fateful. The image he uses is a
homely one from a craft he must obviously have had to practice often: chopping
and stacking wood. A well-stacked cord of firewood holds together and holds
up, paradoxically, by the tendency of all of its components to fall apart
and down:
Just like split firewood stacked together,
the universe embraces all,
so that each object holds the other
confined by pressures mutual,
all things ordained, reciprocal.
(Consciousness)
These lines also appear in "(Self-devouring...)," his moving
apology to Mihály Babits, the elder poet he had previously lampooned
in his cruel poem "On a Poet." There they serve as a demonstration
to his distinguished former enemy of the seriousness of his philosophical
views, and as an exposition of the way in which two poets of opposed tendencies,
the flautist (Babits) and the piper (himself) might cooperate in a universal
harmony. Like Pindar, József associates the harmony of music with
the skill of joinery, which so arranges the joints of posts and beams in
a roof, that storms make the bond tighter. The lines were obviously important
to him, for he repeats them verbatim in "Consciousness," one
of his most important philosophical poems, and elaborates them into an
ontology.
If one were to characterize József's ontology in formal philosophical
terms, one might call him a realist. But his differs from all the traditional
brands of realism. He is not a common-sense realist, who accepts the world
as it seems. He finds a higher and deeper reality in things than the illusions
of habit, custom, appetite, opinion, and fashion:
Those other poets--why should I worry
how they defile their paunch and crop?
with gin and trumped-up imagery
let them feign drunkenness, throw up.
I leap the time's saloon, its liquor,
strive for intelligence, and beyond!
My brain is free, I'll not play sucker
and serve their fatuous demi-monde.
Let nature be your test and measure!
Let yourself eat, drink, sleep, embrace!
No pain shall make me serve the pleasure
of powers so crippling, vile, and base.
(Ars Poetica)
He is not a transcendental Platonic or Christian realist either, for
he sees that deeper reality as immanent, indwelling in the physical immediacy
of the world rather than suspended above it in a limbo of perfection, and
as dynamic and evolving rather than fixed forever in an eternal present.
For József reality is a river, like the Danube with its cargo
of melon-rinds and pepper-parings like moons, and apples like planets.
Its ideal forms are not static and eternal geometries outside it, but more
like the pillars of fire and smoke in the book of Exodus that go on before
us within the real world, leading us into the future, transforming themselves
according to the conditions of the time.
[...]
József schools his extraordinary sensorium into an experience
that is both phenomenologically immediate and scientifically true. For
instance, his understanding of genetics and cytology in the following passage
is quite uncanny:
My mother was a Kun, my father Magyar
in part, perhaps Rumanian in full.
My mother's mouth gave me the sweetest nectar,
my father's mouth, the truth as beautiful.
If I but stir, they do embrace each other.
It grieves me sometimes when I think of how
time flies, decays. Such matter is my mother.
"You see when we are not! ..." they tell me now.
They speak to me, my being's patrimony,
in this my weakness, thus I may be well,
recalling that I'm greater than the many,
each of my ancestors in every cell--
I am the Ancestor, in my division
I multiply, blithely turn dam and sire,
and they achieve their double parturition,
many times many making one self fire!
(By the Danube)
Nature is our own heredity; the past is alive in us, in our genes, our
cells, our muscles: the moment when our parental sperm and egg came together
is recapitulated in every present moment as our cells divide in the process
of multiplication. József's clear understanding of the physical
reality of the world, even our own bodies, can be unsettling until we accept
its beauty. He has no illusions about what is going on in his beloved's
body; she is a physical world in herself, populated by her own society
of living organisms:
Your capillaries, like a bloodred rose,
ceaselessly stir and dance.
There that eternal current seethes and flows
and flowers as love upon your countenance,
to bless with fruit your womb's dark excellence.
A myriad rootlets broider round
and round your stomach's tender ground,
whose subtle threadings, woven and unwound,
unknit the very knot whereby they're bound,
that thus thy lymphy cellbrood might abound,
and the great, leaved boughs of thy lungs resound
their whispered glory round!
The eterna materia goes marching on
happily through your gut's dark cavern-cells,
and to the dead waste rich life is given
within the ardent kidneys' boiling wells!
Billowing, your hills arise, arise,
constellations tremble in your skies,
lakes, factories work on by day and night,
a million creatures bustle with delight,
millipede,
seaweed,
a heartless mercy, gentle cruelty,
your hot sun shines, your darkling north light broods,
in you there stir the unscanned moods
of a blind incalculable eternity.
(Ode)
There is, however, nothing reductionist or materialist in József's
realism either. After all, he was thrown out of the Communist Party partly
perhaps for his reactionary love of traditional poetic forms and meters,
as well as for the heterodoxy of his views. The spiritual and the imaginative
are for him just as substantial a part of the world as are matter and energy--indeed,
more so, because they are more immediately active and represent a further
refinement of nature's evolutionary process.
But nature also is the past, and since its reality as past cannot be
undone, it stands before us as law rather than choice. It is awesome, beautiful;
it is our teacher; it is our heredity and patrimony. But it also gives
us our drives and needs and desires, our hunger for food, sex, shelter,
progeny, rest, comfort. It expresses itself in the laws of historical necessity,
of technological momentum, economic inertia, the social system we are born
into. The existent universe, as expressed in the constraints of history,
is a prison:
And now I stand, and through the sky-dome
the stars, the Dippers, shine and burn,
like bars, the sign of jail and thraldom,
above a silent cell of stone
(Consciousness)
[...]
The fear and conservatism engendered by a life limited to natural drives
is what puts the common man and woman at the mercy of the rich and power-
ful, who can play upon their weakness and thus gain their support against
progress. If there is nothing beyond the realm of existent being, we are
trapped within its laws. But for József there is indeed something
beyond being: nothingness itself.
"Frost's glittering axe-head"
Who would this poem's reader be,
must know its poet, must love me,
sailing upon the vacuum,
knowing, as seers do, what's to come...
("Who would this poem...")
The poet comes to the edge or shore of the world. Beyond it there is
nothing, a clean and glittering void, as untrodden as the very snow that
will fall tomorrow, but not at 180 degrees to the line of the past, as
the quotidian future is, but rather, so to speak, at 90 degrees. Sometimes
he will set sail in that mysterious void. He comes to that place in ecstasy,
extreme despair, exhaustion, at the end of his tether, in a contemplative
trance, in the violent exhilaration of sexual joy. Often there is a strange
flash of light and a soft whicker, like the sound and glitter of a blade,
or a bolt of lightning before the thunder; the experience of instantaneity
combined with a preternatural stillness.
I am as one who comes to rest
by that sad, sandy, sodden shore
and looks around, and undistressed
nods his wise head, and hopes no more.
Just so I try to turn my gaze
with no deceptions, carelessly.
A silver axe-swish lightly plays
on the white leaf of the poplar tree.
Upon a branch of nothingness
my heart sits trembling voicelessly,
and watching, watching, numberless,
the mild stars gather round to see.
This place of emptiness and void is also the place that calls existent
reality into being. Nothingness condenses into a world: József here
anticipates the insights of quantum cosmology, which regards vacuum as
an inherently unstable state which must generate fluctuations at some critical
level of microcosmic
indeterminacy, fluctuations that can balloon up into a physical universe.
Aristotle's dictum, ex nihilo nihil fit, out of nothing nothing can be
made, is as wrong for the quantum cosmologists and for József as
it is for the book of Genesis. Here is one of József's uncanny anticipations
of the quantum vacuum and the evolution of the initial singularity into
a cosmos:
Nothingness so flits within it
as a something's dust, a minute
past its prime. . .
Nothingness so flits and dances
as if it a something were;
universe expands, condenses
to the future, floating there;
space, the sea, the branched tree-branches,
dogs whose howling avalanches,
sing its sphere...
I, my chair, each fry and phylum,
and the Earth beneath the Sun,
solar system, this asylum,
with the galaxies strive on--
("On Our Poet and His Time")
The experience of this place on the edge of everything touches off in
him a wild beauty of poetic metaphor:
As fairy-glittering as thought, as bright,
twinkles the winter night.
Darkness' silver silence locks
the moon onto the Earth's still parallax.
A black crow flies across the frostcold sky;
silence cools in my mouth. Bone, do you hear it?
Molecules tinkle, crystals ramify.
In what glass case or cabinet
glitter such winter nights?
(Winter Night)
A few lines later in this poem he uses the metaphor we have looked at
in "Consciousness," of the well-stacked cord of wood, to describe
the chora or self-constituted container of the universe, glimpsed by metaphor
in the cloud of sparks thrown up by a locomotive:
Across the plain,
like its own small winter night,
a freight train sets its plume of smoke alight
chora to contain
in a cord's bourne, infinite,
the turning, burning, dying stars' domain.
(Winter Night)
Nothingness, then, is the dynamic incompleteness that draws the universe
on into new creation. But in his more despairing mode he recognizes that
nothingness as his very own self; he is a hole in being, his poem only
the bright corolla of radiation that is emitted as the matter of his experience
plunges past the event-horizon of his engulfing emptiness.
Think: I have nothing left to give away,
no one to have and hold. What I called "me"
is nothing too. I gnaw its crumbs today,
and when this poem is done it will not be...
As space is by a searchlight, I am pierced through
by naked sight
("My Eyes Jump In and Out...")
And in this place József encounters a gigantic and terrifying
ghost: God Himself, the Ancient of Days, the absent father whose corpse
still feels full of the power to punish.
As Nietzsche knew, even the absence or death of God leaves in the language
and the world an enormous and unnavigable God-shaped hole. Like Melville's
Captain Ahab, József attempts to strike through the mask, to challenge
this authority that has forever preempted the poet's power to create, the
people's own self-evolution:
I'd choke my very breath, to die,
your rod and staff thus disobeying,
and look you boldly in the eye,
you empty, human-faced unbeing!
(Tumble out of the Flood)
That palpable absence demands of us an inhuman perfection, a renunciation
of physicality that can tempt us toward suicide, and that can freeze up
the loving sensuality of life:
O bony chastity of heaven--
starved hoarfrost of a feast ungiven!
Unwinking, imperturbable!
Trusting that I'll do what is noble!
I live on diamond-chilly herring,
etheric furniture my dwelling,
my nails grow sharp and curve and harden,
their roses whiten in their garden.
(Rime)
Yet at other times József recognizes the sweetness and the lovingness
of the divine as it makes its presence felt in human history, calling us
prophetically toward a world of human fulfilment. Perhaps his most charming
and delightful poem celebrates with the swarthy Magi the birth of Christ:
In excelsis, Lord of Hosts, Lord of Hosts!
We are not some dry old priests.
What we heard was at your borning,
kingdom of the poor was dawning.
We looked in for just a glimmer,
heavenly king and our redeemer!
Caspar's what my name would be,
sort of earthly king, you see.
(The Kings of Bethlehem)
József's ambivalence about the fellow-occupant of that creative
void is fundamental:
Terrify me, my hidden God,
I need your wrath, your scourge, your thunder;
quick, come tumble out of the flood,
lest nothingness sweep us asunder.
(Tumble out of the Flood)
|
