By Steve Light.
[Pic: Naoko Haruta: Life 140 Pasternak My Sister Life]
Pasternak is in Marburg to study philosophy. He rents an upstairs room in the home of a widow and her daughter. How serene is the view! Trees, tranquility; light the entire day! Yet, with barely one semester completed, Pasternak returns to his room one day, bundles his philosophy books with a string and, tossing them under the bed, adieu! heads for the train station, for Moscow, for poetry. “While my heart is spilling/ on the platform/ hurling carriage doors into the steppe” (“My Sister–Life“).
Pasternak, or more correctly, Safe Conduct, did not enable me to abandon philosophy, but it did bring me back to poetry. And it is only one more reason why I have never abandoned the notion that something truly significant lies in this image, for me always vivid and always as alive as when I first formed it: ‘bundles his philosophy books with a string and, tossing them under the bed….’ I am not now certain if my description of Pasternak’s room corresponds to the description he actually gave it. Perhaps I’ve given the room more light, more serenity than it had. But the sheer, the indescribable happiness which the image of that room conjures up for me stands in paradoxical contrast to the delight I take, indeed, to the impulse elicited by my image of the act in question, viz. the impulse to abandon philosophy for poetry.
“Philosophers, the natural enemies of poets,” says Quasimodo’s “Discourse on Poetry.” But philosophy? Pasternak, however, in contradistinction to Rilke, for example, understood very clearly: poetry is a lifetime but not life. A philosopher of life, surely, but not the poeticization of life. And besides, one can, after all, live without poetry, although–and as Jankelevitch once said with reference to philosophy–not so well.
The philosophical and the poetic impulses are not automatically opposed, notwithstanding that they do remain at essential antipodes. But, the central difficulty is clear: how does a spirit reconcile its singularly singular multiplicity? Because philosophy and poetry call from the same centre.
Yet, poetry is the total despair of words, of the word. And it is immediately evident why a poet cannot be a philosopher. Pain has no patience. And patience wounds too deeply. Poetry is the homeopathic solution. Seek to heal the wound by wounding it, by concentrating it. Paradoxically, this gives respite. One rushes straight to the core. And, yet, the impulse to the concentration of the word (“The singing/ of the taut bowstring”) [“In Everything I Seek to Reach”]) is not irreconcilable with the philosophical need, however much it would seem to provide resistance against the siren call of philosophy. But, this is precisely the point: because it is just here that we are plunged into that existential-notional region in which philosophy and poetry battle to establish their own essentialities, into that region in which spirit is above all torn. “The strongest mortar/ is the white night, gazing upon darkness” (“For Anna Akhmatova“).
Does the emergence in the later Pasternak, both in practice and in aesthetic speculation, of the claims of prose represent the inability of lyricism (“turning events into throbbing reality” [“For Anna Akhmatova“]) to ever fully concentrate the philosophical impulse or is it that the richest lyric must–by virtue of and at the very moment in which it deploys its supreme power of concentration–find itself impelled outside itself, just as the richest and most fully expressed idea must suddenly find itself propelled by a tropism of the most epigrammatic kind? But the question ranges too far afield, transcending, thereby, its own point of departure. Because to a spirit torn the transparencies of an essentialist dialectic cannot be easily translated into essential practices. Not, then (or not so much): poetry or philosophy? But, rather: poet or philosopher? But, there-in lies the dilemma. Because how are we to state this difference, viz. this difference which obtains between these two precise sets of alternatives? Because what does philosophy cost the poet? And surely an answer cannot be as simple as saying: a lifetime!
Did the youthful Pasternak, hastening to the station to catch his eastward- bound train, already know the difference to which we have just alluded, and did he know that the struggle between philosophy and poetry only escapes the formal interest of its conceptualization when it is found at the very center of a spirit’s aspiration (and, thereby and therefore, being scarcely something that can be resolved. Because what should one do when the sirens call simultaneously and from opposite shores?)? But would it not be possible in this case to listen, truly listen, held fast as we would be, held fast at the very center and precisely by virtue of this double-call, this twice-called (and must we not immediately recall that double and, thereby, contradictory delight to which we alluded at the outset?)? Doubtless, philosophy can cost a poet a lifetime. But is it not also true that it is only in a struggle with philosophy (with the philosopher in him) that poetry (that the poet) can hope to achieve greatness, significance, true poetic substantiality? Is it not, then, precisely by virtue of this quintessential transmutation, indeed, is not this transmutation itself alone that which we could call–and surely it is a riposte to the privilege Hegel gives philosophy over art–substance become subject? And the journey from Marburg to Moscow is difficult not so much because of the distance, but because of the depth. “Under the window shade the sun is smoldering/ And the steppe collapses up to the stars” (“My Sister–Life“).
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Steve Light, a basketball point-guard following upon Nate Archibald, Pete Maravich, and Willie Somerset–and akin as well to Steve Nash, Chris Paul, Stephen Curry, and Earl Boykins–is also a philosopher and poet.
