Subject Activity

Paul Chamberland The Courage of Poetry Translated by Ray Chamberlain.

The "I" here comes straight from strictest intimacy, from the most vigilant intimacy. On the other hand, one who pronounces the word goes superbly beyond the individual as he is forced to see himself in his reality, his opaqueness, his insufficiency. But he nonetheless enables me to reach him in the rarefied air at the summit where love, free love, overcomes the impossible in casting off all reservation and offers itself up to the miracle-working pyre. One must imagine this "I", this "subject", not as a person exactly but as a resonating center uniting all those who gather around it.

Straight from the strictest intimacy to the potency of poetry.

Only poetry, and all that surrounds it, allows me to live at the limit, standing fast in front of the voracious whirlpool, the black hole. I'm not anywhere other than where I am and I don't see any other way of being judiciously contemporary.

Limits give way...

[...] the suppression — not yet achieved — of the barrier dividing the it/I into the subject-and-object, inside and outside... It arrives there through the courage of emptying the representation — which is ever being reborn — that it offers itself. In its uplifting — seen as innate — it knows itself as an act of the world, not as a position of a (separated) subject.

A pyre. A whirlpool. A representation reborn.

Just what does it mean to say "I"?

And so for day 1080
27.11.2009