The Tombs of Ravenna

PN Review 42:2 November - December 2015

From Yves Bonnefoy's essay "The Tombs of Ravenna," translated by John Naughton:

If nothing is less real than the concept, nothing is more real than this alliance between form and stone, between the exemplary and a body: nothing is more real than the Idea that is risked. 
Ornamentation belongs to that category of beings that joins together in its profound purity the universal and the particular. It is the Idea made presence, and in the joy it awakens in us, I tasted the savor of a true eternity. 
* 
The universal is not a law that is everywhere the same and so never worth anything anywhere. The universal has its locale. In every place, the universal exists in the way it is looked at, in the way it is used.  
* 
Poetry and journey are of the same substance, the same blood - I am repeating what Baudelaire has said - and of all the actions that are available to man, these are perhaps the only useful ones, the only ones that have a goal. 
* 
I will say by allegory: it is this piece of the somber tree, this torn leaf of ivy. The entire leaf, constructing its immutable essence with all its veins, would already be the concept. But this torn leaf, green and black, dirty, this leaf that shows in its wound all the depth of what is, this infinite leaf is pure presence, and hence my salvation. Who could tear from me the fact that it was mine, and in a contact, beyond destinies and sites, that binds me to the absolute? Moreover, who could destroy it, since it has already been destroyed? I hold it in my hand, I hold it tight as I would have loved to hold Ravenna, I hear its tireless voice. - What is presence? It seduces like a work of art; it is rudimentary like the wind or the earth. It is black like the abyss and yet it reassures. It seems a fragment of space among others, but it calls to us and contains us. And it is a moment that will be lost a thousand times, but it has the glory of a god. It resembles death... 
* 
Whoever seeks to make his way through sensory space reconnects with a sacred water that runs through each thing. At the slightest contact with it, one feels immortal. 

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Reading Thumboo's "Ulysses by the Merlion"

I've just revised a poem written years ago, a poem that delineates the different responses of four readers, of different generations, to the seminal nationalistic poem by Edwin Thumboo . Thumboo is reckoned to be the first major Singaporean poet writing in English. First, Thumboo's poem, then followed by mine. ULYSSES BY THE MERLION (for Maurice Baker) I have sailed many waters, Skirted islands of fire, Contended with Circe Who loved the squeal of pigs; Passed Scylla and Charybdis To seven years with Calypso, Heaved in battle against the gods. Beneath it all I kept faith with Ithaca, travelled, Travelled and travelled, Suffering much, enjoying a little; Met strange people singing New myths; made myths myself. But this lion of the sea Salt-maned, scaly, wondrous of tail, Touched with power, insistent On this brief promontory... Puzzles. Nothing, nothing in my days Foreshadowed this Half-beast, half-fish, This powerful creature of land and sea. Peoples settled here, Brought to th
Read more

Steven Cantor's "What Remains: the Life and Work of Sally Mann"

Image
Sally Mann, The Perfect Tomato , 199 0 Since it is moving pictures, a film necessarily captures--produces--a process. It turns photographs into the making of photographs. It joins moments ("spots of time") into a Life. This I expected watching Cantor's documentary on Sally Mann's creation of the exhibit "What Remains." So photographs of a long-dead beloved greyhound "lead" to photographs of the Civil War battlefield of Antietam, to photographs of Mann's Virginian farm bloodied by the police killing of a runaway convict, to photographs of decomposing bodies in a forensic study site, as if each group of pictures forms an independent yet preparatory stage in the creative process. What I did not expect to see is the influence of the film-making on the photography itself. Mann begins to think of her exhibit as a "narrative," and wants the narrative of death to end on a more uplifting note. With such an idea in mind, she takes close-up pic
Read more

Goh Chok Tong's Visit to FCBC

Image
I am surprised by how much this incident is affecting me. I thought I have moved past my former religious life, left it behind in Singapore, but like tin cans tied to a dog it has followed me and is rattling me. I am posting the incident, and my response to it, here on this blog, because I want to remember that the past is not yet past. When Emeritus Senior Minister of Singapore Goh Chok Tong visited Faith Community Baptist Church on 13 January during a Sunday service, Senior Pastor Lawrence Khong took the opportunity to deliver a hateful anti-gay message . Among other things, he said: We affirm that the family unit comprises a man as Father, a woman as Mother, and Children. This is the basic building block of society, a value foundational for a secure future, a premise fundamental to nation-building. and warned ominously that We see a looming threat to this basic building block by homosexual activists seeking to repeal Section 377A of the Penal Code.   Examples from ar
Read more