-27_Jules Supervielle

Jules Supervielle

 

JULES SUPERVIELLE is a French poet and a modern French poet. He belongs to this century and died only a few years ago. Although he wrote in French, he came of a Spanish colonist family settled in South America (Montevideo). He came to France early in life and was educated there. He lived in France but maintained his relation with his mother-country.

His poetry is very characteristic and adds almost a new vein to the spirit and manner of French poetry. He has bypassed the rational and emotional tradition of his adopted country, brought in a mystic way of vision characteristic of the East. This mysticism is not however the normal spiritual way but a kind of oblique sight into what is hidden behind the appearance. By the oblique way I mean the sideway to enter into the secret of things, a passage opening through the side. The mystic vision has different ways of approach– one may look at the thing straight, face to face, being level with it with a penetrating gaze, piercing a direct entry into the secrets behind. This frontal gaze is also the normal human way of knowing and understanding, the scientific way. It becomes mystic when it penetrates sufficiently behind and strikes a secret source of another light and sight, that is, the inner sight of the soul. The normal vision which I said is the scientist's vision, stops short at a certain distance and so does not possess the key to the secret knowledge. But an aspiring vision can stretch itself, drill into the surface obstacle confronting it, and make its contact with the hidden ray behind. There is also another mystic way, not a gaze inward but a gaze upward. The human intelligence and the higher brain consciousness seeks a greater and intenser light, a vaster knowledge and. leaps upward as it were. There develops a penetrating gaze towards heights up 

and above, to such a vision the mystery of the spirit slowly reveals itself. That is Vedantic mysticism. There is a look downward also below the life-formation and one enters into contact with forces and beings and creatures of another type, a portion of which is named Hell or Hades in Europe, and in India Patal and rasatal. But here we are speaking of another way, not a frontal or straight movement, but as I said, splitting the side and entering into it, something like opening the shell of a mother of pearl and finding the pearl inside. There is a descriptive mystic: the suprasensuous experience is presented in images and feeling forms. That is the romantic way. There is an explanatory mysticism: the suprasensuous is set in intellectual or mental terms, making it somewhat clear to the normal understanding. That is I suppose classical mysticism. All these are more or less direct ways, straight approaches to the mystic reality. But the oblique is different – it is a seeking of the mind and an apprehension of the senses that are allusive, indirect, that move through contraries and negations, that point to a different direction in order just to suggest the objective aimed at. The Vedantic (and the Scientific too) is the straight, direct, rectilinear gaze – the Vedantin says, May I look at the Sun with a transfixed gaze'–; whether he looks upward or inward or downward. But the modem mystic is of a different mould. He has not that clear absolute vision, he has the apprehension of an aspiring consciousness. His is not religious poetry for that matter, but it is an aspiration and a yearning to perceive and seize truth and reality that eludes the senses, but seems to be still there. We shall understand better by taking a poem of his as example. Thus:

 

ALTER EGO

 

Une souris s'échappe

(Ce n'en était pas une)

Une femme s'éveille

(Comment le savez-vous?)

Et la porte qui grince

(On l'huila ce matin)

Prés du mur de clôture

(Le mur n'existe plus) 

Ah! Je ne puis rien direct

(Eh bien, vous vous tairez!)

Je ne puis pas bouger

(Vous marchez sur la route)

Où allons nous ainsi?

(C'est moi qui le demande)

Je suis seul sur la Terre

(Je suis là près de vous)

Peut-on être si seul

(Je le suis plus que vous)

Je vois votre visage,

(Nul ne m'a jamais vu) 

 

ALTER EGO 

A mouse runs out

(I t was not there)

A woman wakes

(How do you know?)

And the squeaking door

(It was oiled this morning)

Near the cloister wall

(There is now no wall)

Oh! I can't say a thing

(Well, now you'll be quiet!)

I cannot move

(You are walking along the road)

Does all this get us anywhere?

(I'm asking you)

I'm alone on Earth

(I'm here beside you)

Can one be so alone?

(I'm more alone than you,

I can see your face,

No one has ever seen mine.)

 

It is a colloquy between "I" and the "other-I". The apparent self sees things that appear so concrete and real but in the "other", they vanish and become airy nothings. Still, if things have any reality it is there in that other self. 

Or again, take this : 

 

LUI SEUL

 

Si vous touchez sa main c'est bien sans le savoir,

Vous vous le rappelez mais sous un autre nom,

Au milieu de la nuit au plus fort du sommeil,

Vous dites son vrai nom et le faites asseoir,

Un jour on frappe et je devine que c'est lui

Qui s'en vient près de nous à n'importe quelle heure

Et vous le regardez avec un tel oubli

Qu'il s'en retourne au loin mais en laissant derrière

Une porte vivante et pale comme lui.

 

 

HE ALONE

 

If you touch his hand it is quite without knowing,

You remember him, but he had another name.

In the middle of the night, in the depth of sleep,

You speak his real name and ask him to be seated.

 

One day there comes a knock and I guess it is he

Who comes to be beside us at any time

And you give him such an empty stare

That he turns and goes far away, but leaving behind

A living door, as pale as he himsel£

 

The Reality is so real that it is always there, and it is not always altogether intangible, invisible. You touch it often enough but you do not know that it was the reality. You give it another name: perhaps imagination, illusion, hallucination.Yes, at the dead of night when you have forgotten yourself, forgotten the world, nothing exists, you call out his true name and set him in front - O my soul, 0 my God!

In the next poem that I quote, the mystery is explained, that is to say, described a little more at length.

 

SAISIR

 

Saisir, saisir le soir, la pomme et la statue,

Saisir, l'ombre et le mur et le bout de la rue, 

Saisir le pied, le cou de la femme couchée

Et puis ouvrir les mains. Combien d'oiseaux lâchés,

Combien d'oiseaux perdus qui deviennent la rue,

L'ombre, le mur, le soir, la pomme et la statue.

 

Mains, vous vous usurez

A ce grave jeu-là,

Il faudra vous couper

Un jour, vous couper ras.

 

Grands yeux dans ce visage,

Qui vous a placés là?

De quel vaisseau sans mâts

Êtes-vous l'équipage?

 

Depuis quel abordage

Attendez-vous ainsi

Ouverts toute la nuit?

 

Feux noirs d'un bastingage

Etonnés mais soumis

A la loi des orages.

 

Prissonniers de mirages

Quand sonnera minuit

Baissez un peu les cils

Pour reprendre courage.

 

* *

 

Saisir quand tout me quitte,

Et avec quelles mains

Saisir cette pensée,

Êt avec quelles mains

Saisir enfin le jour

Par la peau de son cou,

Le tenir remuant

Comme un lièvre vivant?

Viens, sommeil, aide-moi

Tu saisiras pour moi, 

Ce que je n'ai pu pendre,

Sommeil aux mains plus grands.

 

TO SEIZE

 

Seize, seize the apple and the statue and the night

Seize the shadow and the wall and the end of the street

 

Seize the foot, the neck of the lady in bed

Then open your hands. How many birds released

How many lost birds that turn into the street,

The shadow, the wall, the apple, the statue, and the night?

Hands, you will wear yourselves out

At this dangerous game.

You will have to be cut

Off, one day, off at the wrist.

 

* * *

 

Great eyes within this face, who

Placed you there?

Of what vessel with masts of air

Are you the crew?

 

Who boarded your decks,

That you must ride

The darkness, open wide?

 

Black flares on the bulwarks,

Astonished, you complied

With the law of storms and wrecks.

 

Prisoners of a mirage,

When the strokes of midnight settle,

Lower your lids a little

To give yourself courage.

 

* * *

 

Seize when all else fails me,

And with what hands 

May I seize that thought,

And with what hands

Seize, at last, the daylight

By the scruff of the neck,

And hold it wriggling

Like a live hare?

Come, sleep, and help me,

You shall seize for me

What I could not hold,

Sleep, in your larger hands.

 

These hands do not grasp that thing, these eyes do not see that. Try to capture through the senses that tenuous substance, you find it nowhere. You cannot throttle that reality with your solid fist. Chop off your hands, pluck out your eyes, then perhaps something will stir in that darkness, something that exists not but wields a sovereign power. The eyes that see are not these winkless wide eyes, blank, vacant and dry, before which blackness is the only reality. One must have something of the bedewed gentle hesitating human eyes; it is there that the other light condescends to cast its reflection. The poet says, man with his outward regalia seems to have lost all trace of the Divine in him, what is still left of God in him is just the 'humidity' of his soul¹ —; the 'tears of things' as a great poet says.

The sense that seizes and captures and makes an object its own is not any robust material sense, but something winged and vast and impalpable like your sleep - the other consciousness.

The poet speaks obliquely but the language he speaks by itself is straight, clear, simple, limpid. No rhetoric is there, no exaggeration, no effort at effect; the voice is not raised above the normal speech level. That is indeed the new modern poetic style. For according to the new consciousness prose and poetry are not two different orders, the old order created poetry in heaven, the new poetry wants it upon earth; level with earth, the common human speech, the spoken tongues give the supreme intrinsic beauty of poetic cadence. The best poetry embodies the quintessence of prose-rhythm, its pure spontaneous

 

¹God says to man: "L'humidité de votre âme, c'est ce qui vous reste de moi." 

and easy and felicitous movement. In English the hiatus between the poetic speech and prose is considerable, in French it is not so great, still the two were kept separate. In England Eliot came to demolish the barrier, in France a whole company has come up and very significant among them is this foreigner from Spain who is so obliquely simple and whose Muse has a natural yet haunting magic of divine things:

 

Elle lève les yeux et la brise s' arrête

Elle baisse les yeux, la campagne s'étend.

 

She lifts her eyes and the breeze is stilled,

She lowers her eyes and the landscape rolls on.

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