THE CRYPTIC MESSAGE AT THOMAS KINSELLA
AND ION BARBU
by Marcela Iuga
There will always be a gap between generations be those generations biological, be literary, there will always be a fight. But this is just one aspect of the problem we are going to have in mind in order to draw a parallel between two poets. We shall draw a line between two poets, two spaces, and two periods. Kristeva and Derrida would call it an intertextual line or genotext; Brian McHale calls it an intertexual zone: “an intertextual zone […] is constituted whenever we recognize the relations among two or more texts or between specific texts or larger categories such as genre, school, period”[1] But intertextuality can be defined simply as a disseminated idea from a text to another, the two gaining a kind of a twin relation.
The two poets are Thomas Kinsella, an Irish poet and Ion Barbu, a Romanian poet. Kinsella and Barbu are separated by spaces: West (for Kinsella) and East (the Orient is pictured very well in one of Barbu’s poetic cycle
Isarlîc). We seem to be caught in a kind of rushdian dilemma “East or West”. The good news is that both ménage to trespass spaces. Although Kinsella edited
The Tàin and is familiarized with Irish mythology his poetry goes over Irish connotations, myths and legends, aiming to more general symbols. Barbu never expressed deep interest for traditional poetry. He extended his wings to the surrounding spaces (Turkey for example
Isarlîc being in fact Troy so Barbu returns to legendary times also). Nevertheless his poetry belongs to a hermetic trend because the reader has to look for meaning deeper.
If we are to make a reference to the period of writing we have to choose Modernism. But first, we have to make clear one thing: no literary current is pure. It will always be preceded by one current that shall stand as an enemy for the new, fresh current. Modernism goes into this pattern also. It is preceded by Symbolism does not deny it but it denies Classicism so all that is old and ancient and comes from that tradition: “The greatest triumph of the greatest poets is today” (W.Whitman) Modernism opens its way to Postmodernism, the most controversial of them all. Being characterized by crises, modernism has as a favourite literary genre
the novel. That is because it can largely disseminate the idea of God’s death starting from Nietzsche. The narrator’s perspective changes from the third person to the first, the narrator is not omniscient anymore and the stream of consciousness technique is more and more acknowledged.
Even though marginalized, poetry has the same ideas:
imagism (poetry requires no ornament but a musical phrase);
vorticism (many images in one image) and the best characteristic is
personism (the poem is a dialogue between you and me): “A poem is best read in the light of every other poems that have been written” (Frank O’Henry).
Modernism is popular at the beginning and middle of the twentieth century, and that is when Kinsella starts writing, the fifties. So his early poetry is marked by the influence of W.H. Auden and Patrick Kavanagh dealing with Irish landscape, traditional poetry. Of course he reached the heights in the seventies when he adopts American modernism from Ezra Pound, William Carlos Williams and Robert Lowell. His most popular volumes are:
Poems, Another September, Downstream, Nightwalker. In the seventies he started his own publishing house: Peppercanister. So, the Peppercanister poems are indeed modernist and contain poems like:
Notes from the Land of the Dead (1973
Hen Woman is a part of this cycle),
Her Vertical Smile, The Pen Shop, and
Men of War from 2007 when Kinsella received the key to the city of Dublin.[2]
Barbu’s case is a little different. He writes earlier in the century, in the thirties, and starts writing poetry following a bet. Ion Barbu is the penname of Dan Barbilian whose education is actually Mathematics, more specific Geometry. But he had for a friend Tudor Vianu, a literary critic, who said that no mathematician could write poetry. Barbu is the proof he was wrong. Nevertheless Barbu abandons fast the poetry, he returns to geometry inventing what are known today as Barbilian spaces. That’s why he did not evolve as Kinsella. But from a Felix Aderca interview we can discern four poetical cycles: Parnassian, Balcanic, Expressionist and Hermetic. The last is the most important because it stands for the volume
Secondary Game (
Joc secund) and
Uvedenrode. The explication for the title comes from Plato who has started the world’s theory. There is the primarily world of ideas, which is pure. From this world comes our world that is a copy, an imitation. The third world imperfect as it is art’s world, the copy of the copy. The idea is that art has not a pure existence so at least its expression should be “a purer secondary game” (un joc secund mai pur)[3]. In this cycle, that has in centre the idea of wedding the metaphor is combined with mathematics. What results is the miracle of cosmogony itself.
This miracle coexists in the two chosen poems:
Hen Woman and
The Dogmatic Egg (Oul Dogmatic).
Hen Woman is a poetry that can be divided into four parts, each one of them being marked by a star. The first part describes the initial atmosphere. There is a combination of visual images and odorous ones. The time of day is “noon” so end of the day always requiring for a new beginning. The image is that of a still nature and in order to create this the lyrical voice uses a stylistic device and that is the oxymoron “smelled of stillness”[4] This silence is known always to be the calm preceding the storm, in fact the “thunder” which definitely brings to mind violence. The silence gets personified and gives out the expression of his own voice and that is “Hush…”[5] There are two following images that should get our attention: one is of the “black hole/ in a whitewash wall so bright” because it first starts the idea of contradiction, of two opposing powers, Good and Evil, black and white. The second image is that of the clock: “a clock murmured ‘Gong…”[6] that inspires temporality, time running away and implicitly death. And beside there are two adverbials of time/ mood” Too late. Too late”
The poem introduces four instances that stand between presence and absence:
the hen (it might be an ironical but at the same time philosophical problem: which appeared first, the hen or the egg?)
the woman (feminine image that will always bring the maternal figure into mind)
the lyrical voice ( there are deictic marks all over:” I” “me” “my”) and…
the egg “a white egg”. It is insisted upon the image of stillness: “and time stood still/ Nothing moved bird or woman.”[7] Time standing still appears also in Goethe’s
Faust where Faust asks time to stop for a moment of happiness. But that is disturbance of an internal order (past- present- future) and is not possible.
In the second part we can appeal to another visual: that of the “beetle like a bronze leaf” This carries “a ball of dung bigger than its body”. More observations: the little creature that carries something bigger than itself brings to mind the myth of Atlas carrying the Earth on his shoulders but also of Sisyphus and the big rock. Anyway these are both acts of penitence, and Christ’s image while carrying his cross is of the same order(Atlas, Sisyphus and Jesus are all heroes who sacrificed themselves in order mankind to receive its redemption ). We are also interested in the idea of the little world, the microcosm that lives in the macrocosm. Similar images are used by Medbh McGuckian and Tudor Arghezi (“Soul of mine, transform yourself into a child” – “Fa-te suflete copil”)
The lyrical voice is an observer of the whole process of the birth of the egg, he and the hen woman”she”: “I saw the egg has moved a fraction”[8] It’s for the fist time something moves in the picture, and time is “not quite stopped”[9]. The new egg is defined as being” a clean new world” this bringing back the idea of microcosm, and the egg is a whole different entity. The birth being not yet finished we have a whole moving image” It slowly turned and fell/ […] and began its drop to the shore”[10] The process of birth is considered, by the lyrical voice, to be a miracle: “As I watched the mystery completed” and because of that fall into the dream world “dreamlike” This is a Baroque motif “life as a dream” what I have lived could have not been real.
The story has been apparently simple till now: in a still evening, on a clock signal a woman is late for egg laying. In the end, the lyrical voice and the woman assist the hen in the miracle. The third part is more difficult because we have reached the philosophical ground. The discourse becomes deeply subjective”I”. The lyrical voice rememorizes the moment of birth- romantic device:” I feed upon it still as you see”[11] The mystery of birth is endless for not even imagination can cover that territory: “there is no end to that which is/ not understood, may yet be noted/ and hoarded in the imagination/ in the yolk of being so to speak”[12] And that is a profound, internalised perspective.
The potential mystery is an idea that also appears in Blaga’s poetry, in the Romanian space: “I do not crush the crown of mysteries of the world” (“Eu nu strivesc corola de minuni a lumii”) or, in the same tradition Nichita Stanescu says “I build the mystery” (eu construiesc misterul). The image of the egg internalizes too, because now we can see the dividing egg”dividing blindly”. Most significantly is that this egg is “twitched, packed with will” It becomes, in this manner, a cosmogony. Because in Indian, Vedish, tradition the universe had no will before starting to come together. But then, because of will, it started its formation. And the image of cosmogony continues with the transformation of the egg from non-being into being: “Something that had- clenched/ in its cave-not been/now was; an egg of being”[13] From this moment on the whole picture is moving, and it gains even a rhythmic, continuous pattern: “a whole year it fell/-as it still falls, for me […] as it will continue to fall, probably until I die”[14] From the non colorful image we pass to an explosion of colors: red, gold, silver, white, yellow. As we can see noble, pure colors: “the red gold beating/ in its silvery womb, /alive as the yolk and white of my eye”[15] Spatiality is abstract” the vast indifferent spaces/ whit which I am empty”, oxymoronic expression, because you cannot be empty with something.
The first part announces a violent movement that comes into act only in the forth part, birth not being so violent. The egg falls on the ground and is destroyed: “It smashed against the grating/ and slipped down quickly out of sight”[16] The extended moment of birth is compensated by a quick end: “It was over in a comical flash”[17] The hen woman gets angry at first but then gives out a comment of deep wisdom: “It’s all the one. / There is plenty more where that came from”[18] meaning that the sacrifice of one little life does not matter in the bigger picture, because the egg can recreate itself in the womb again, so life is always possible.
The last distich is the lyrical voice’s part: “Hen to pan! / It is a simple world”[19] The basic idea is that the universe has internal simple laws that made it last so much time. The macrocosm assists each microcosm in development, mourns for each lost but continues its movement. Each act of existence presupposes sacrifice and suffering. That is how we come into being. The same lyrical voice states in
The Messenger that “I am all egg” so this is my birth and maybe the poem is my ars poetica. (A metatexual message)
Why does Thomas Kinsella belong to William Carlos Williams’ tradition? There is at least one poem that can be compared to
Hen Woman:
The Red Wheelbarrow. “So much depends/ upon/ a red wheel/ barrow/ gazed with rain/ water/ beside the white/ chickens”[20] Everything is familiar from the setting, stillness of the place to the colours. In fact the image seems to be an Expressionist painting. Still nature, the feeling of trap, lack of freedom:”depends”, interdependence, addiction. The colours are red and white. The geometrical element is “wheel” circle, round, perfection but also repeatability. Kinsella uses the mathematical number “zero” and Barbu a mathematical measurement” the plus pole” as opposed to the minus pole and the wheel too”roata”. Contradiction comes as a handy process. The wheelbarrow is associated with “rain water” and that is a natural element that stands at the basis of life: we, humans, are seventy percent water. It can also bring the idea of mirroring and that is recognition, is reason but is also doubling. The same image can be found in E. A. Poe in
The Fall of the House Of Usher: “I reined my horse to the precipitous and lurid tarn that lay in unruffled luster by to the dwelling, and gazed down- but with a shudder even more thrilling than before- upon the remodeled and inverted images of the gray sedge, and the ghastly tee-“[21]
Romanian literature tried always to recover the losses it had in time. With Ion Barbu this is one step ahead. The poem,
The Dogmatic Egg (Oul Dogmatic), can be found in the volume Uvedenrode. The poem starts with a motto trying to define the dogma itself: “The dogma: And the Holy Ghost walked on waters” (“Dogma: Si Duhul Sfânt se purta deasupra apelor”[22]). It develops in ten, blank verse, stanzas. The first stanza gets in translation the personal pronoun
He: “He gave to this sad gathering (“A dat acestui trist norod”[23]). This is very important because what is omitted in Romanian is Jesus Christ’s figure itself. The quote states” He gave his apostles bread and vine and sad…” This is what the priest says when he blesses the holy gifts. So it’s a Christian expression. The gift of Jesus is creation itself. But there are two kinds of eggs: life giving “the living egg” (“oul viu”) and sterile” the sterile egg” (“oul sterp”). The egg that is to procreate is “made to be watched in the sun” (“făcut e sa-l privim la soare”[24]). The sun is not only a star that guarantees life, eggs that are to be chickens are kept in the heat, but also death, and Icarus stands as a proof.
The new innocent egg: “blameless, new egg” (“Nevinovatul, noul ou”[25]) has to undergo the basic three phases of life: birth, wedding and death “Wedding palace and vault” (“palat de nunta si cavou”[26]). The vault is very similar to the Kinsella”s “cave”, being both closed, protective spaces. The third stanza pictures exactly the image of the womb: the yolk and white are surrounded by the hard material, crusty. It is like a rammerserzälung. The Baroque motif “life as a dream” has in this stanza two traces: “sleeps” (“doarme”) and “dream” (“vis”). Once the setting is ready the egg can start its developing process: the little chicken comes to life thanks to a kiss of the white. The lyrical voice addresses for the first time the human being. He does that because humanity seems to forget that every miracle is worth seeing and appreciated: “om uitător, ireversibil, /Vezi Duhul Sfânt făcut sensibil? / Precum atunci, si azi - întocma/ Mărunte lumi păstrează dogma”[27] Man is a forgetting and
irreversible creature. The cosmogony is out of reach since Adam’s fall because he cannot perceive such a miracle. The macrocosm is obvious but the microcosm “the little worlds” can be easily forgotten. So as a reconciliation gesture the lyrical voice offers man, the reader, a
symbol- egg/ ou-simbol; symbol of continuous rebirth, of germination, of life.
The chromatic factor is present here also: red “not the red egg” (‘nu oul roşu”[28]), white, “the developing white of the egg” (“spornicul albus”[29]), yellow “grows in the yolk” (“în gălbenuş/dă roade”. The image of the clock is dual: the clock is “ceasornic fără minutar”[30] / “clock lacking the minute line” but also a “yellow, necessary clock”/ “ceasul galben, necesar[31]” The first image of the clock reflects a timeless minute clock, time is present but is relative, subjective. It is because of that, that we have to fear time. Christian perathology speaks about the limitation of the human being, about time that erases the existence”tempus edax rerum” Time decides when it is the moment to leave”Ce singur scrie când să moară? Şi ou şi lume[32]” That is why man has to live the moment “ carpe diem” and to fear time. So what is man but a reckless creature” om uitător, ireversibil”, “ om şters, uituc”, “ om fără sat, om nerod”. Because of that man will never discover the miracle of life:”Durata-înscrie-în noi o roată/ Întocma dogma[33]”. The dogma is the mystery of life and death.
There is a last part that stands for a revision: “Încă o dată”/” once again”. Both eggs are to be let enjoy the first moment of existence: “Îl lăsa-n pacea-ntâie a lui”[34]. The sterile egg could be eaten and the life giving egg could se given to the brood-hen. But neither of them would fulfill its beginning: “Ca vinovat e tot făcutul, / Şi sfânt, doar nunta, începutul”[35] The thesis is astonishing: from the first moment that we enter the doors of life we are subjected to permissibility”guilty is the coming into life”. The beginning is saint because the world’s evils haven’t touched us yet.
“I think the reason he buys everything he can buy is that in the back of his mind he has the crazy hope that of his purchases will be life everlasting! – Which it never can be”.[36] „Because human beings dream of life everlasting […] But most of them want it on earth and not in heaven”.[37] Both fragments belong to Tennessee Williams and they illustrate exactly the central issue discussed by both Kinsella and Barbu: we cannot live forever.
Notes:
[1] Brian McHale Postmodern Fiction, p.57.
[2] From Wikipedia, Thomas Kinsella
[3] Ion Barbu, Poezii, p. 67.
[4] Patrick Crotty, Modern Irish Poetry: An Anthology, p. 160. ( Thomas Kinsella)
[5] Op.cit,p.161
[6] Idem, p. 161
[7] Idem, p. 161
[8] Op .cit, p.162
[9] Id:ib
[10] Idem, p. 162
[11] Idem, p. 162
[12] Id:ib
[13] Idem, p. 162
[14] Op .cit, p.162
[15] Id:ib
[16] Idem, p. 163
[17] Id:ib
[18] Idem, p. 163
[19] Id:ib
[20] George McMichael, Anthology of American Literature
[21] Edgar Allan Poe, Tales of Mystery and Imagination,p.117
[22] Barbu, Ion, Poezii, p.99
[23] Op .cit, p.99
[24] Idem, p. 99
[25] Idem, p. 99
[26] Id:ib
[27] Op .cit, p.100
[28] Idem,p.100
[29] Id:ib
[30] Idem,p.100
[31] Id:ib
[32] Id:ib
[33] Idem,p.101
[34] Idem,p.101
[35] Id:ib
[36] Cred că motivul pentru care cumpără tot ce poate este că în subconştient are speranţa nebunească că unul dintre lucrurile cumpărate va fi indistructibil – ceea ce e imposibil, Tennessee Williams, op. cit., p. 59, [t.n.].
[37] Pentru că oamenii visează la nemurire […] însă majoritatea şi-o doresc pe pământ şi nu în ceruri, T. Williams, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, p. 49, [t.n.].
Bibliography:
- Barbu, Ion, Poezii, Editura Minerva, 1976.
- Crotty, Patrick, Modern Irish Poetry: An Anthology, Belfast, The Blackstaff Press, 1995.
- McHale, Brian, Postmodern Fiction, RoutledgeLondon, New York, [s.a.]
- McMichael, George, Anthology of America Literature,
- Poe, Edgar, Allan, Tales of Mystery and Imagination, Prietenii cărţii, Bucureşti, 1995
- Williams, Tennessee, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, Best American Plays, forth series 1951-1957,edited by John Gassner, Crown Publishers, [s.l], 1958.
- Wikipedia, Thomas Kinsella
