Flow, rest, inertial motion

Wilner, Di Piero, Bonnefoy

pp. 141-162

in: Emily Rolfe Grosholz, Great circles, Berlin, Springer, 2018

Abstract

Poetry, like music, is an art that is inherently temporal. Just as we must hear a melody in time, so we must read a poem in time. I hum the melody to myself as I recall it, and say the poem over to myself, half out loud. Like a melody, a poem is never all there at once: we must run through it. Yet in many respects time is inimical to discourse: its irresistible, irrevocable flow, the river of time, carries us all away. A poem cannot be merely temporal; to be art and to be remembered—to be memorable art—a poem must resist temporality or make something of it. How do we do that? Our experience, so thoroughly temporal, would be a mere flood too (and so we wouldn't have any experience at all) unless we could remember events and classify things, and organize the world by telling stories and offering explanations. In the flood of time, we remember backwards in reflection and project forwards in action, using discourse; and we build things that are stable, houses and chairs and books. So our experience is really a side-eddy in the river of time, close to the mossy or stony bank, where past, present and future are held together by awareness. Time circles, impossibly, in that side eddy.