The rest is history, common knowledge, at least for those who know the poem, which isn’t drilled into the minds of schoolchildren or regularly chosen for recitation in poetry competitions; but anyone who wants to read it will be able to find one of the many editions. This is where Varamo’s adventure comes to an end. He sat down, and he wrote the poem. It is true that the verb “to write” covers a wide range of practices. In this case the author simply copied out all the papers he had put in his pocket since leaving the Ministry that afternoon. He did this in a purely cumulative fashion, without punctuation or divisions, without rearrangement, in lines of irregular length (the idea of prose, a late refinement in old civilizations, was utterly foreign to him). The order was determined by chance. The code book provided a basic structure, and he alternated the keys with literal transcriptions of the other notes. He had the advantage of having received contradictory instructions, which he followed with the providential diligence of a beginner: Caricias had told him to change the keys to make them unrecognizable, and the publishers had advised him to leave the raw materials as they were.
The result was Varamo’s famous poem, except that it was less a result in itself than a way of transforming what had preceded it into a result. It produced a kind of automatism or mutual fatality, by which cause and effect changed places and became the same story. Far from diminishing the poem’s initial vigor, this circle intensifies it. Which is, in fact, what always happens. If a work is dazzlingly innovative and opens up unexplored paths, the merit is not to be found in the work itself, but in its transformative effect on the historical moment that engendered it. Novelty makes its causes new, giving birth to them retrospectively. If historical time makes us live in the new, a story that attempts to account for the origin of a work of art, that is, a work of innovation, ceases to be a story: it’s a new reality, and yet a part of reality as it has always been for everyone. Those who don’t believe me can go and see for themselves.
December 15, 1999