Roberta Bertozzi interno 38

At the mercy of language
notes from a reading of Josif Brodskij
in CLANDESTINO
Quarterly review of literature and poetry
year XVII n. 2/2004

abstract

[...] The chronological disruption, the projection of language beyond the poet’s private experience, the intensity that grows by itself and incites the poet from the place he previously left, a place where at the beginning there was but one word or even just one audible sound which would reveal things he had no knowledge of; they all remind us of Plato’s interpretation of the Ion according to which the poet "is incapable of writing poetry unless he is inspired by a god and his enraptured mind finds itself imbued with absolute insanity. As long as he owns his wits, no man can ever write poetry nor can he foretell". Clairvoyance, i.e. the clearing of one’s vision as it is produced by rapture does not entail anything mystical: the close contact with the language acts as a vector that naturally transports man towards a state of awareness, because "the practice of poetry is an extraordinary accelerator of conscience, of thought, of the universe’s full understanding”. The dimension where language can entirely manifest its irreducibility is one of exile: one has to come to the exiled condition, to its marginality and to the expropriation of the ancestors’ space, which represent the illuminating situation of the indissoluble tie between a man and his language.
The experience of being cast away from one’s own country provokes the unexpected irruption of such an innate bind, which strikes man with all its factual extension: "exile suddenly takes you to places where it would normally take a lifetime to get to".
Throughout his life, Josif Brodskij experienced being an exile and found himself on the edge: yet the writer, who would be expelled from Russia in 1972, was once a son of Saint Petersburg. This was a place at the frontier with the mainland, also seen as the "window to Europe" desired and built by Tsar Peter I; it was a strange and alienating city that did not resemble to any other place in continental Russia.
Following his departure from his Russian homeland because of the ruling hostile regime, Brodskij plunged deeply into the very heart of his mother tongue thanks to the encounter with a foreign language, i.e. English: "in the eyes of any writer the condition we call exile is, first of all, a linguistic event: an exiled writer is hurled, or seeks refuge, inside his mother tongue. One could say that what was once a man’s sword has now become his shield and shell. What was once a private and intimate liaison with language has now become his destiny as an exiled being, rather than turning itself into a form of duty or an obsession.”
During the exile the Muse reveals her face and takes off the mask of any working or vocational practice, in order to confess its ontologically radical and fatal nature, its choice to act as a propeller that instills unconditioned verticality to our recognition: "for another truth, about the condition we call exile, is that it impresses a huge acceleration to the flight – or drift – which already takes us towards being isolated as professionals of the writing practice, taking us towards an absolute perspective: towards the condition where all that a man has left is his own self and his language, with no one around or in the way". Once it is acknowledged that the act of standing in front of our language sets out our destiny, all the references to given situation or context, as well as those addressing any time and space contingency, disappear. Such awareness projects us into a state of absolute intimacy with our truth as human beings.
Our language has the same consistency of a mixture and walks through us even in silence, similar to the uninterrupted, everchanging water flow. Language is the concrete space where we move, where we engender ourselves as human beings: it is the priority of meaning that marks the quality of our identities. By becoming aware of our inner quality, we are able to reject all sort of false choice: if we state that language is destiny, we assign to it the key feature of our being inside and for the world. As not only language is a container of narration, thought and evidence, but it also stands for our genetic specificity; thus poetry, being the climax of language, is our ultimate goal: "if what distinguishes man from other species is word, then poetry, which is the supreme achievement among all language practices, becomes our anthropological end, as a matter of fact, it is a genetic one. Whoever considers poetry no more than a way of killing time, a mere "reading” activity, commits nothing but an anthropological crime, against himself in the first place". [...]