Maria
Thanks very much for that quote from Kristeva. For some reason it puts me in mind of a
quote from Faiz Ahmed Faiz I've found in the intro's to translations of Faiz's poems (by
Naomi Lazard and Agha Shahid Ali):
"The true subject of poetry is the loss of the beloved."
(For Shahid -- and, I think, for Faiz -- the "beloved" is often the homeland.)
I am thinking at times of indeterminacy in poetry as the loss of a "beloved" security --
though sung of as indeterminacy, its wonder.
Rather far-fetched, unless one will be passionate about such a matter as that...
Nicholas
> In my struggles with kristeva - particularly in "The Black Sun" - I came
> across the following passage describing the melancholy/depressive position
> in respect to her experience of writing and the poet:
>
> "If the melancholy person ceaselessly exerts an ascendency, as loving as it
> is hateful over that Thing, (thing being, I think, the object - the 'secret
> and unreachable horizon of our loves and desires')...the poet finds an
> enigmatic way of being both subordinate to it and...elsewhere. Disinherited,
> deprived of that lost paradise, he is wretched; writing, however, is the
> strange way that allows him to overcome such wretchedness by setting up an
> "I" that controls both aspects of deprivation - the darkness of
> disconsolation and the "kiss of the queen". The "I" then asserts itself on
> the field of artifice - there is a place for "I" only in play, in theatre,
> behind the mask of possible identities, which are as extravagant,
> prestigious, mythical, epic, historical and esoteric as they are incredible.
> Triumphant, but also uncertain. This "I" that pins down and secures the
> first line, "I am saturnine - bereft - disconsolate" points, with a
> knowledge as certain as it is illuminated with a hallucinatory nescience, to
> the necessary condition for the poetic act."
>
> For me, it recalls the saturnine, prophetic "I am" tradition evident in
> Clare and in some cases, the celtic tradition - regardless, it's still hard
> to not feel the overwhelming "I" of Kristeva in her writing!!
>
> maria
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