IX
The crux of the matter is that their actual appearances are irrelevant and were not supposed to be registered. What was supposed to be registered is the spiritual accomplishment which is the ultimate proof of the poet's existence. A picture is a bonus only to him, perhaps to her; to a reader it is practically a minus, for it subtracts from the imagination. For a poem is a mental affair: for its reader as much as for its author. "Her" portrait is the poet's state conveyed through his tune and choice of words; a reader would be a fool to settle for less. \Vhat matters about "her" is not her particularity but her universality. Don't try to find her snapshot and position yourself next to it: it won't work. Plain and simply, a love lyric is one's soul set in motion. If it's good, it may do the same to you.
It is otherness, therefore, that provides the metaphysical opportunity. A love lyric may be good or bad but it offers its writer an extension of himself—or, if a lyric is exceptionally good, or an affair is long, self-negation. What is the Muse up to while this is going on? Not much, since a love lyric is dictated by existential necessity and necessity doesn't care much about the quality of articulation. As a rule, love lyrics are done fast and don't undergo much revision. But once a metaphysical dimension is attained, or at least once self-negation is attained, one indeed can tell the dancer from the dance: a love lyric from love and, thus, from a poem about, or informed by, love.
X
Now, a poem about love doesn't insist on the author's own reality and seldom employs the word "I." It is about what a poet is not, about what he perceives as different from himself. If it is a mirror, it is a small one, and placed too far away. To recognize oneself in it requires, apart from humility, a lens whose power of resolution doesn't distinguish between observing and being mesmerized. A poem about love can have for its subject practically anything: the girl's features, ribbons in her hair, the landscape behind her house, the passage of clouds, starry skies, some inanimate object. It may have nothing to do with the girl; it can describe an exchange between two or more mythic characters, a wilted bouquet, snow on the railroad platform. The readers, though, will know that they are reading a poem informed by love thanks to the intensity of attention paid to this or that detail of the universe. For love is an attitude toward reality—usually of someone finite toward something infinite. Hence, the intensity caused by the sense of the provisional nature of one's possessions. Hence, that intensity's need for articulation. Hence, its quest for a voice less provisional than one's own. And in walks the Muse, that older woman, meticulous about possessions.
XI
Pasternak's famous exclamation "Great god oflove, great god of details!" is poignant precisely because of the utter insignificance of the sum of these details. A ratio could no doubt be established between the smallness of the detail and the intensity of attention paid to it, as well as between the latter and one's spiritual accomplishment, because a poem—any poem, regardless of its subject—is in itself an act of love, not so much of an author for his subject as of language for a piece of reality. If it is often tinged with an elegiac air, with the timbre of pity, this is so because it is the love of the greater for the lesser, of the permanent for the transitory. This surely doesn't affect a poet's romantic conduct, since he, a physical entity, identifies himself more readily with the provisional than with the eternal. All he may know is that when it comes to love, art is a more adequate form of expression than any other; that on paper one can reach a higher degree of lyricism than on bedroom linen.
Were it otherwise, we would have far less art on our hands. The way martyrdom or sainthood prove not so much the substance of a creed as the human potential for belief, so love poetry speaks for art's ability to overshoot reality— or to escape it entirely. Perhaps the true measure of this kind of poetry is precisely its inapplicability to reality, the impossibility of translating its sentiment into action for want of physical equivalence to abstract insight. The physical world must take offense at this kind of criterion. But, then, it has photography—not quite an art yet, but capable of arresting the abstract in flight, or at least in progress.
92 I J О s E PH B R О D s K Y
XII
And a while ago, in a small garrison town in the north of Italy, I chanced on an attempt to do precisely this: to depict poetry's reality by means of the camera. It was a small exhibition consisting of photographs of thirty or so great twentieth- century poets' beloveds—wives, mistresses, concubines, boys, men. It started in fact with Baudelaire and ended with Pessoa and Montale; next to each beloved, a famous lyric was attached, in its original language and in translation. A fortunate idea, I thought, shuffling past the glass-covered stands that contained the black-and-white full faces, profiles, and three-quarter profiles of bards and ofwhat amounted to their own or their languages' destinies. There they were— a flock of rare birds caught in the net of that gallery, and one could indeed regard them as art's points of departure from reality, or better still, as reality's means of transportation toward that higher degree of lyricism, toward a poem. (After all, for one's fading and generally moribund features, art is another kind of future.)
Not that the women (and some men) depicted there lacked the psychological, visual, or erotic qualities required to forge a poet's happiness: on the contrary, they appeared sufficiently if variously endowed. Some were wives, others mistresses and lovers, still others lingered in a poet's mind while their appearance in his quarters may have been rather fleeting. Of course, given the mind-boggling variety of what nature can paint into a human oval, one's choice ofa beloved appears arbitrary. The usual factors—genetic, historical, social, aesthetic—narrow the range, for the poet as for everyone else. Yet perhaps the particular prerequisite for a poet's choice is the presence in that oval of a certain nonfunctional air, an air of ambivalence and open-endedness, echoing, as it were, in flesh and blood the essence of his endeavor.
That's what such epithets as "enigmatic," "dreamy," or "otherworldly" normally struggle to denote, and what accounts for the preponderance in that gallery of visually alea- toric blondes over the excessive precision of brunettes. By and large, at any rate, this characteristic, vague as it is, did apply to the birds of passage caught in that particular net. Conscious of the camera or taken unawares, those faces appeared to carry in one way or another a common expression of being elsewhere, or having their mental focus somewhat blurred. The next moment, of course, they would be energetic, alert, supine, lascivious, bearing a child or eloping with a friend, bloody-minded or suffering a bard's infidelity—in short, more definite. For an instant of exposure, though, they were their tentative, indefinite selves, which, like-a poem in progress, didn't yet have a next line or, very often, a subject. Also like poems, they were never finished: they were only abandoned. In short, they were drafts.