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The poetics of Baldur Ragnarsson is something we have to study through the
very concrete thought-threads that appear in his texts; in him, Esperanto
thinking becomes an entirely concrete enterprise, in which poetry stops
counting as an optional feature and becomes central. I hope to demonstrate at
least part of this assertion with some examples, and of course I acknowledge
that this approach to his poetics will have to be cross-fertilized with the
readings of others. It helps to begin with the following poem from Esploroj:
Aksiomo
Sufiĉo
jen kvanto
mezioma
kaj ja ne ia
ĝiskioma
elefanto
aŭ sandviĉo
An axiom
Enough
Here’s a quantity
Half-way
And not an
All-the-way
Elephant
Or sandwich
A short format poem
especially directly puts you in touch not only with the poet of that concision
but also with the poetics of that conciseness. How does the thinking in Aksiomo proceed? To call the sufficiency
‘a middle bit’ not only creates a verbal surprise but launches the
thought-thread within the language exploration – ‘upto-however-much’ will later
echo the wordish labour of ‘a middle bit’ [with which it rhymes in Esperanto].
The middle-bit choice on the one hand means giving up on the wish to climb up
to however much, a wish that can be grasped in the form of an elephant, who
rhymes in Esperanto with quantity (one notes that in Ragnarsson rhymes and
other poetic devices directly feature in threading the thoughts, something that
in his poetics dissolves the bipolarity of the prosish-ratiocinatory and
figurative rationalities). On the other hand, to aspire for a middle-bit
solution is a trying that won’t be satisfied if the role of the solution is
usurped by an unmediated recombination of the elements of the problem – a
recombination effectively formulated as a ‘sandwich’, rhyming with the ‘sufiĉo’
‘sufficiency’ at the start of the thread and closing the thought. Such
effectiveness of expressions makes possible a dialogue with the reader, and
enables resonances. Creating such options hits just that distinguishably
intermediate key which marks the work of Baldur Ragnarsson, a poet of the
process.
To gain more clearly
formulable access to that labour, let us consider a sequence from Esploroj, beginning at Speguloj, in which “The mirrors of the
waters/ incessantly flow through my mind”. After the break-up into fragments,
the recombination of the fragments gives rise to new images. These contain
“their own worlds, each on its own, / of realities, memories and dreams” and
are so delicate that “the smallest thought / ruffles their surfaces .../
smashes their worlds/ into ruins”. This periodic catastrophe is healed during
sleep, so that “the mirrors get/ their quiet back / the pictures shine again /
the world gets back in shape”. And yet this healing is undone at the next
phase; the world that was back in shape “awaits a new perishing / at the break
of dawn”.
What follows that poem
is the sequence Difinoj, Ĉe la rando and Glacio. At the end of this little series of ours, at Glacio, we will face the serious, frozen
sleep of water itself, and we will recognize that the catastrophe is precisely
those quite specific, quite definite contours that freezing itself has etched:
“But what summer could not give / can be provided by winter / one morning the
image disappeared / for the cave had frozen. / And that is when those / who
held out during summer and longing / understand that what has its very own face
/ is only / the ice”. If we begin at Speguloj
and end at Glacio, we see especially
clearly the role of processes in the poetic logic of Ragnarsson.
The poem Difinoj, with ten numbered parts, is
about a probing that resists the idea of having to search under the surfaces.
In Difinoj 1, „so many years/ without
breakthrough“ at first sight look frustrating, but there is at once the
clearing-up „touches/ surface explorations/ sign-focused searches/ until“ – and
the word „until“ jumps to reappear to the right, indicating a category shift:
laŭsignaj serĉoj
ĝis
ĝis
trans kaj tra
signifas superfluon
kresko
kresko validas
sign-focused searches
until
until
across and through
mean an overflow
growth
growth holds good
One possible reading construes the first occurrence of „until“ as a conjunction
and the second one as a preposition, giving the sentence the form „searches,
until Until, Across and Through mean an overflow“. On that reading the poem
reports a process of repeated touchings that become consciously sign-focused
searches, move beyond the initial frustration of non-breakthrough and reach
that phase of explorativity in which the notions of attainment-until, of
leaping-across, and of breaking-through begin to bear the meaning of overflow,
of something exceeding the sufficiency that is in fact worth aiming for, the
sufficiency that the earlier poem was about. Reaching that phase inaugurates a
realization of growth and now gives the subject a picture of a process, which
presents itself, at process-end, as growth.
If you, the subject,
have grown, and thus grown up, attained self-possession, and thus have a self,
then you have also become a preserver and caretaker of a memory that you will
have to archivally organize on an annual basis. This is the key that Difinoj 2 hits, and we leave as an
exercise for the reader the task of listening and checking that key; we note
only that the pasts preserved have the form of „memories/ visitable in sleep“,
and yet are not passive objects, but are themselves subjectual, experiential,
and thus ocular: „eyes/ that can be looked into/ involving multiple centres of
consciousness“. Again, in that word „diskonscie“ (‚involving multiple centres
of consciousness‘), the language-making specificity of this poet works with his
concrete poetics to keep careful faith with the processes that the poem
explores via being.
What begins to appear
in Difinoj 3 are the results of the
tendency to sift your reexaminations of the pasts: some bits of memory shine
noticeably and „express themselves in a fairy tongue“, which creates a new
relation between the now and memory arround the active monitorable
visualization: „light centres below / for the constant actuality“. But the idea
that light provides unique access and that touch makes more concrete this sense
of having is in fact a factor limiting you: in Difinoj 4 you see that the whitewashed wall whose surface you touch
does not as a whole enter your holding – your understanding stops, resisted by
the special concreteness of the wall‘s interior, reached neither by light nor
by your touch: „whitewash whitelasts/ while I touch coordinately/ an
indifferent wall-nakesness/ covers are coordinable/ the beneaths resist/
internal unwhites/ touchproof“ – a poem that reaches a masterly summary at that
final verse „touchproof“. How do you respond to those limits of light?
In Difinoj 5 you „notice/ the hands/ no flight
inwards“, and thus you imagine courage as the capacity to accept the world of
surfaces as something understandable and sufficient. In other words you survey
what is available to you: „something of silk/ concrete softness/ white leisure on
the parapet of a bridge/ underneath/ iron-blue water/ is a touchable substance/
a world observed“ – that you are able, are you, to stop at this satisfaction
with an observable world and to regard the inside as an avoidable goal only of
wishful escapes from reality? Unfortunately you aren‘t: „surface explorations/
gradually create tedium“ (Difinoj 6),
and this tedium stimulates your attention‘s probing faculty known to you as
your love – and the insistence of your love shows up in your touches: „timid
strokes/ in this case equal/ amorous impatiences/ obedient ovals/ zigzag
non-surrenders“. In love, your feelings meet your reason and find themselves
unsatisfied with these results: „on the surfaces/ i feel/ null-valid“ – in this
recognition of the inability of your search so far to find a valid conclusion
you commit yourself to further searching.
You now get back to
the start of your „sign-focused searches“ (Difinoj
1), but you greatly decelerate the rhythm, you hesitate a lot, even in the
middle of a word: „sign-/ focused searches/ or/ or/ dubious tracks/ almost/
guide me“ (Difinoj 7), and the end of
your poem „o Mona Lisa/ as if“ versify into the beginning of Difinoj 8 – „up to/ the police point“.
You have only a pile of „surface experiences“, which don‘t substantiate, don‘t
substantivate: „moments/ particle-pasts adverbialize/
before mirages/ miracles“ – you wish to retrieve the magic of the fairy tongue,
but your resources rigorously declare that leap to be impossible: „across and
through/ mean an overflow/ excess/ transition“ (Difinoj 9), says your echo from Difinoj
1, and the idea of transition carries you to a fertile metaphor, that of
rain – you begin to believe in the syllogismless reasoning of raining: „rain
fills/ a world unattachedly/ fears not/ demands not/ is not interested/ moves
from one world to another/ unnoticed/ ambiguously/ ambivalidly“. There! You
think you‘ve found a key outside touch-dependent, result-expressing reasoning,
in a process that presents itself as watery-earthy, and thus managing to leave
the earth without any specific gesture of transition.
Your rain begins,
though, by not providing a solution – it will dissolve all into chaos: it (Difinoj 10) „will drown cities/ oceans/
will in death prove by touching/ essence/ crossing/ osmotically in life depths/
will be reached by/ growing“. Only such an odyssey without a driver will give
you back a sense of the magical tongue: „then/ pearls will release secrets/
will offer facings/ pupils/ a fairy tongue will incarnate/ growth / growth
holds good“ – and there you are again in the initial movement of the
definitions.
My intention is not to “create
tedium” in you to the point of letting your impatience overwhelm your love,
dear fellow reader. It is important to engage you in this interpretative
labour, this growing, so that it hits some validity. Please do your own journey
through Ĉe la rando up to Glacio to corroborate or disconfirm my
suggested reading. If “a fairy tongue/ will incarnate” (Difinoj 10) has taken up, very tentatively and allusively, a
Christian thread, and if Ĉe la rando 1,
referring to a crusade and thus more obviously touching the same thread, moves
into the hypothesis that “to the best of my knowledge/ no one yet has taken up/
arms”, and into the undramaticness of the truth – “never does/ an oratorical
exterior/ dress/ the truth” (Ĉe la rando 2),
and into a rejection of [what the Esperanto world’s international anthem calls]
the bloodthirsty sword: “but what matters most/ if someone announces discovery
of/ the truth/ is whether he likewise/ announces himself ready/ to crusade” (Ĉe la rando 3) – how then does the
verse-borne, stroke-dependent, exploring process reach the proposal that the
ice of Nordic nature counterpoints the rain water with which Baldur
Ragnarsson’s poetry builds a rhythmic relation and in a mesocosm bridge-builds
between the world’s macrocosm and the person’s wavy microcosm? Forgive my long
sentence and probe away on your own, with your own cadences, but don’t forget
that our poet has steeped himself in the waters – and ices of his predecessors,
and that that the cross metaphor in Mihalski (Life is Golgotha. Two crosses:
you and me) was followed by Auld’s rigorous equating of Christianity with
missionary Leninism and violence. Be careful to locate our poet in the literary
sequence which he self-consciously, as a thoughtful critic, inherits.
And when there has been some
growth in your own comprehension of the relation between Ragnarsson, processes
and precisions/ imprecisions, you will manage to return to the processual steps
of development armed with the proposal that it is important to highlight the
anonymity, the namelessness, of those steps. I am alluding of course to those Ŝtupoj
sen nomo, Steps without Name, which his first book of poems characterized
with an explicit care that drew on a different format for its explicitness. His
effort in that book focused on flawless brush-strokes painting cosmic,
Pascalishly wonder-creating vastnesses and depths which echo in the experiences
of the human who experiences and remakes. After that take-off, the question in
the second book, Esploroj, has to do with the personal, understanding, relation
with that echoing through which we catch again and retrieve the cosmos in
ourselves, as a process every time of cosmos-emergence from repeated descents
into chaos. This is one reading of
Ragnarsson’s poetics.
Is this thread “enough”, though
– if I may, with some self-parody, echo my excessively cheap highlighting of
one or two poems – to help understand his abundant work in prose, his
cherishing of translation, his decision to base his work in Iceland in
particular and in the sovereignty of small ethnicities in general, in the space
of Esperanto comprehension?
If Kabe [Kazimierz Bein] and [Kálmán] Kalocsay
overemphasized translations and if Auld, by way of counterpoint, greatly
stressed Esperanto original writing, what Ragnarsson gives us is an
understanding of the literary and selfly process
which drives into obsolescence that old and never settled debate. His
contribution to our understanding of process – which we may situate on a world
map next to the élan-focused Bergson or the processological Whitehead who have
already, in their full-blown philosophical visions, accorded a central place to
the generality of processes – emerges most clearly perhaps in the notional
polarity of processes and precision. It may make sense to end our argument by
offering a few remarks on this matter.
In Ragnarsson, process simultaneously urges us to look
for precision and also, in advance, declares dead those patterns that will be
the most visible result of our enterprise. If in Auld “the goal does not elude
us/ however it consumes us”, in Ragnarsson precision as a goal of the probing
attracts us, mirage-like, and moves us ahead, and our growth takes the form of
learning how to smile as we get to know better the miraglike nature of our
hunt. His probings do not give eternity or permanence to that specific mirage –
Ragnarsson’s high regard for the heterogeneity of processes prevents him from
forcing on them any Hegelian philosophical hat wearable at all times and
places. By no means does he suggest that aiming for precision might be a
general feature of absolute all human comprehension processes. And yet he seems
drawn to those process that are indeed driven by the impulse to discover the
truth and to then do something, and he is specifically concerned with truth in
the form of precision – and of the understanding that those observable truths
do not satisfy us. Our refusal to go to war for our tentative truths and our
understanding of the tentativeness of our realizations are adjacent, in the
middle, sufficient earth of Ragnarsson, to our inclination to love; and here he
becomes a theorist of the fairy tongue of Tolkien, who became available in
Esperanto when Auld, of all people, translated him. Auld the neighbour is an
important key when we are reading Ragnarsson – and in exactly his
neighbourhood, what new trump cards Ragnarsson turns up! Auld was at the same
time so precision-loving and so passionate; what new concrete means of poetry
Ragnarsson brings to bear on his versely thoughts on precision, on love, and on
the passionate quietness of the probing that makes you you!
Copyright by Probal Dasgupta, 2008