I learned to love in a house where legends and faces floated. When the stairs creaked, people said: “It’s nothing, it’s the ghost Francois.” He was our friend, we weren’t afraid.
On the tram on Thursday evening, a man started talking out loud, a can of beer in his hand. We returned home with the fatigue of the day. We listened in silence to his logorrhea in a puff of yeast. He said he was Algerian, that he knew the Torah, verses from the Gospel of Matthew, that young people today were wicked, genuinely wicked, that only God, up there, could save us, that we were screwed. At one point he asked the question which could be the one I too address in the present: “What have we lost? »
In The Walk under the Trees, Philippe Jaccottet paints the poet as “a walker hunched over by his doubts”. And he adds: “But it happens that blessed breaths carry me away” (Le Bruit du temps, preface by Jean-Marc Sourdillon, 2022). He tells how in the landscapes, around Grignan, the day sometimes leads his gaze and his hand in the middle of the trees and the mountains, this marvel “which accompanies us every day and seems to wish to be understood”. He recalls the viaticum bequeathed by Novalis to continue to inhabit the world as a poet despite all the evidence of the devastation: “Paradise is scattered all over the earth, which is why we no longer recognize it. It is necessary to unite its scattered features. »
Many poets, when it was necessary to reconstitute the spiritual forces in the midst of the ruins, after the great catastrophe of the 20th century, gave nature and its wonders as a horizon for poetry. Their heirs can be found today by the dozens – and that’s a good thing.
But the fragments of paradise, it is in the RER B crowded at seven o’clock in the morning, among the trash cans ripped open at dawn, in the middle of the divers closed in on their itinerant garden, that it is urgent to collect them so that our hope do not fall back – and forever – into the dark well. It is there where the bird and clarity are lacking that poetry must dare to repatriate to give back to the castaways that we have become the thirsty water we need to regain a human face.
It is no longer a question of fleeing, of fleeing over there: real life is here, under the punch of desolation, in the empty gaze of offices, in the insolent horns of shop windows, under the crazy slogans of counterfeit merchants. happiness. What would be a poetry that would be content to look at the world from the attics of childhood, to breathe the fresh air of the tides, without planting itself there, at the crossroads of our disasters, without pricking itself on the gray roses of the city, without breathing their sickening smell? A poetry that would turn a blind eye to our food shortages?
When we call indifference wisdom, the heart that stops beating to ideals, the death that we arrange to silence the voice of revolt within ourselves, the comfortable exile that we create for ourselves so as not to howl at the stars, it is easy to swim in the wound of the world.
Poetry has never been and never will be wisdom. It is even the last madness that will remain with us when we have given the totality of our lives to mechanical rationality, the last drop of the blood of promise that we carry to our souls. Poetry is that old coin, without use, that we find in the bottom of the pocket of the faded coat that no ragpicker wants anymore. Poetry is the name of the candle that the hirsute infrequentable holds in his hand, when he comes out of his pierced barrel, when he seeks men in the blind streets of impeccably imperfect cities.
Poetry never has the face of yesterday: it is now that it occurs, where we thought we were inconsolable, under the flashing neon lights of bad life. Like a hope that would be restored to us under the whip of ugliness, in the overwhelm of the “brutal cities” (Verlaine, “Charleroi”, Romances without words).
Do not be wise, above all, oh my pain, do not keep quiet. The verse is called the verse because it shows you the way to a country that does not yet exist and that you must build. A country that is waiting for you to open its doors. The poem is the love attested without proof of this country which calls us. The splendor that remains to us when the devastation has done its work, the you had not dreamed that the first wonder leaves us in mind like a compass or a fire for life.
And as Introuvable is the name of the country, we hasten to learn the poem by heart, as we carry away a little of the miraculous earth when, by chance, a landscape or a human brother gives us a glimpse of it.
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