For those caught on the edge of the world, who entwine me between their words and reality - who are the world to me. For those away. 12/07/2025.
Caught between words, on the edge of myself, at the edge of the world.
Spending days drifting closer to the clear of the window and the blue of the sky, winding fingers between lines of poetry and strands of hair. Dust falling outside like rain onto freshly-shorn grass. Afraid of dying alone with only my thoughts scattered between these lines for company. And words falling out of the page like a summer storm -
Poetry is the expression, in human language taken back to its essential rhythm, of the mysterious aspects of existence: it graces our stay on this earth with authenticity and constitutes our only spiritual vocation.1
There is nothing more isolating than a room full of books whose words will not speak to you, will not line themselves up neatly and spell themselves out for you, who withdraw into themselves, the depth of the page, and out of comprehensibility. Pages eating themselves up and evaporating into the ineffable sands of letters. If it is true that poetry remains ‘our only spiritual vocation,’ if it is the ‘essential rhythm’ of language, then it seems that our souls have escaped from our grasp like a water-boatman drifting over the surface of a pond. How can this essence of humanity, this spiritual duty, so easily pass through our fingers?
Anxiety-ridden and filled with anguish, cars pass outside on the street as lines vibrate on the page.
This evening I do not come to conquer your body, you beast
In which the sins of an entire people are found, nor do I come to dig
In your sullied hair a sad storm
Under the incurable ennui that my kiss releases2
A poetic speaker, approaching a sleeping prostitute, refuses the prescribed relationship expected between them. He sees the world before him as it has been shaped in language, this woman’s body transformed into that of a ‘beast,’ her sinful hair ‘sullied’ by the morality associated with what she does with it. No, he doesn’t want to sleep with her, no, he wants something else from her, ‘the heavy and dreamless slumber’ she enjoys even after her ‘blackened lies.’
But while your breast of stone is inhabited
By a heart that the tooth of no crime has wounded,
I flee, pale, defeated, haunted by my death shroud,
Afraid of dying while I sleep alone.3
These words are like two closed doors to me. As this woman’s heart is a closed door onto the world, Mallarmé wishing to look through the peephole and experience the world as she might. Impossible. An existence within herself and for herself, as Hérodiade is in a later poem still within his Poésies. ‘Hérodiade,’ however, is not really a poem, but a dialogue, a likely opening to a play in verse, and one in which the titular character allows no access. As if she is poetry itself -
Step back.
The blond current of my immaculate hair
When it bathes my lonesome body, freezes it
With horror, and my hair which the light encircles,
Is immortal. Woman, a kiss would kill me,
Were beauty not death.4
Surely someone - anyone with any idea of what Stéphane Mallarmé was doing - would be able to cast more light on these lines than I, wading through these poems like a heron treading carefully on scalding land. Like the sleeping woman in ‘Angoisse,’ Hérodiade is - or seeks to be - impenetrable, not to be some comfort to mankind in her beauty, but to be impervious, untouchable, unreachable in her beauty, something her mirror promises and threatens at once, when looking into it, and
Searching for my memory which is
Like leaves under your glass at the bottom of a deep well,
I appeared in you like a far-away shadow,
But, horror! Some evenings, in your harsh fountain,
I have known - in my scattered dream - nudity!5
For whom, ‘devoured by anguish,’ the nurse asks, is Hérodiade guarding ‘the vain mystery of your being?’
‘For me,’ she responds. ‘Yes, it’s for me, for me, that I bloom, all alone!’
I close the book in front of me, tune into the ambient humming of the café around me. Words cannot describe this reality sitting just outside the window, a simple description in prosaic - commercialised - speech, cannot. Drawn back to its essential nature, caught in the chance of rhyme and current of rhythm, these lines are as hard to grasp as the word they will never quite get to.
Wandering through Camberwell roads, I think about all the leaves. Attempting to count the countless leaves on the countless trees lining these winding roads might achieve this shock of your removal from the real: bouleversé - a word I’ve been thinking about. Knocked off your kilter by the basic comprehension you fail to reach of the world around you.
Is place an illusion? Don’t we go back and forth in a world invisible though as real as the table on which I’m having breakfast? And what about the no-place which precedes our birth and the one, very likely as illusory, into which death will take us?6
Mallarmé’s letter to Léo d’Orfer (1884): ‘La Poésie est l’expression, par le langage humain ramené à son rythme essential, du sens mystérieux des aspects de l’existence : elle doue ainsi d’authenticité notre séjour et constitue la seule tâche spirituelle.’
From ‘Angoisse’ in Poésies: Je ne viens pas ce soir vaincre ton corps, ô bête
En qui vont les péchés d’un peuple, ni creuser
Dans tes cheveux impurs une triste tempête
Sous l’incurable ennui que verse mon baiser.
Also from ‘Angoisse’: Mais tandis que ton sein de pierre est habité
Par un cœur que la dent d’aucun crime ne blesse,
Je fuis, pâle, défait, hanté par mon linceul,
Ayant peur de mourir lorsque je couche seul.
From ‘Hérodiade’ in Poésies: Reculez.
Le blond torrent de mes cheveux immaculés
Quand il baigne mon corps solitaire le glace
D’horreur, et me cheveux que la lumière enlace
Sont immortels. Ô femme, un baiser me tûrait
Si la beauté n’était la mort..
Also from ‘Hérodiade’: cherchant mes souvenirs qui sont
Comme des feuilles sous ta glace au trou profond,
Je m’apparus en toi comme une ombre lointaine,
Mais, horreur ! des soirs, dans ta sévère fontaine,
J’ai de mon rêve épars connu la nudité !
Etel Adnan, There: In the Light of the Darkness of the Self and of the Other, with thanks to Bilal for having supplied me with such a beautiful set of words.