Ponge On The Seine

I remember standing on the Pont des Arts in Paris about ten years ago, in early January, and gazing at the Seine, fascinated by the churning and swirling and roiling and boiling of its muddy waters. I’d never seen the Seine like this. This Seine was insane. This version was more like the Seine of 1910 that flooded Paris, rising eight meters above its normal level swallowing the entire city, including the sacristy and presbytery of Notre Dame, the basements of the Louvre and the Palais de Justice. The Seine I saw in 2015 wasn’t rising to flood level, but was a far cry different than the placid, easygoing Seine I was used to seeing. Water, in all its forms, is fascinating. But rivers, in particular, hold a profound fascination for me.

When I was ten, my father built a house high on a bank of the Mississippi River in Fridley, a suburb of Minneapolis. I spent many hours watching the river. I looked for tree branches and other detritus floating on its surface, listened to the crack and thunder of ice floes breaking up in early spring, squatted to gaze at the carp sunning themselves in the shallows near the shore in the languid days of summer. Rivers are always changing. The swirls and twirls and spirals and eddies on its surface are liquid enigmas, subtle indications of what lies beneath. Mark Twain said it's like reading a book. And it is. The turbulence at the surface is an intimation of anomalies in the current due to the shifting formations of sand and clay on the bottom. It isn't prose. It's poetry. These subtle revelations of the mischief below is an ongoing saga, a language of oblique impressions and agitated scripture.

Francis Ponge, the 20^th century French poet famous for his unique collection of prose poems, most of which centered solely on objects, swallows and flowers and seasons and dinner plates, wrote a prose poem embodying the Seine. It begins with a perplexing riddle: “A thousand times since I tried to give free rein to my mind about the Seine, a thousand times, you have noticed, dear reader, I have encountered obstacles on my way, hastily erected by my own mind to block its path.” One of Ponge’s characteristic methods is to shape his language in such a way that it adopts the attributes and properties of the object he is describing. In this case, he expresses the most salient characteristic of a river: it flows. Flowing is also a characteristic of writing, at least when inspiration is driving the words forward, and the current of this wonderful absorption continues unabated, occasionally overlapping the banks and attracting footnotes.

Writing flows. At least, it flows until it encounters an obstacle, like a dam, or a drought, or a rerouting. A sudden bend in meaning. Thunder. Rain. The landlord knocking at the door. The focus breaks. The flow goes elsewhere. Trapped by a distracting video on YouTube. Or just plain fatigue. The heat is intense. The thrust trickles to a thread. The mind exhausts its ideas, or - as Ponge suggests - the obstacles are hastily erected by my mind itself. The mind - in its fervor to explore every possible eventuality - encounters obstacles that it imposes on itself. Why? Why does the mind do that? I don’t know. I’m watching Lucinda Williams sing Magnolia.

This technique of pairing one thing – a phenomenon or object with the of human consciousness – functions as a generative device, a strategy for exploring the potentialities and capabilities of language while simultaneously providing a focused and unique perspective on the phenomena of planet Earth.

"A thousand times,” he continues, “it seemed to me that my mind itself was running along the edge to outpace its own tide, to oppose it with folds of land, dikes, or dams... frightened perhaps to see it rushing to what it believed to be its doom." Note how skillfully he manipulates his words and ideas to mimic the many whims of a great expanse of moving water, and at the same time allude to the many oddities and entanglements of human consciousness. Reading into the current of the river the same impetus that drives his mind to explore external phenomena an equal fear of revealing the darker truths of mortal existence, he doesn’t anthropomorphize the river so much as invest it with his own tendencies, to draw from the river a parallel that has little to do with applied physics and far more to do with metaphysics. He isn’t blocked by fixating on a rational description; he’s stymied by the abrupt appearance of unintended consequences. Everyone, I’m sure, is familiar with the rather destabilizing tendency of experiencing invasive thoughts, thoughts that in no way relate in any rational way with whatever it may have been you were thinking. Rather than suppress this tendency, Ponge does what he can to profit from it, go with it, see where it takes you. With Ponge, there is always something a little subversive seasoning his rhetoric, a mischievous desire to undermine his own framing with the craziest analogy he can find. “Objects, landscapes, events, people around give me a great deal of pleasure on the other hand,” Ponge writes in his diaristic My Creative Method, an ars poetica written in Algeria from December 12, 1947, to February 9, 1948, “they convince me. By the very fact they don’t need to. Their presence, their obvious solidity, their thickness, their three dimensions, their palpability, indubitability, their existence of which I am far more certain than of my own, their: ‘that’s not something you invent (but discover)’ side, their: ‘it’s beautiful because I couldn’t have invented it, I would have been quite incapable of inventing it’ side, all that is my sole reason to exist, my pretext, so to speak; and the variety of things is in reality what makes me what I am. That’s what I want to say: their variety makes me, gives me permission to exist in silence even. As the place around which they exist. But in relation to a single one of them, in relation to each one of them in particular, if I consider only one of them, I disappear: it annihilates me. And, if it is only my pretext, my raison d’être, if it is therefore necessary that I exist from it, that it will only be - it can only be - by a certain creation of my own with it as subject.”

Still waters run deep, so they say, and this is deep. But still it is not. It’s rife with paradox, swarming with heterogeneity. Without interrelation, nothing exists. The world of things finds their essence in willow, the willowy suppleness of a mind in a thrall of excitement to the churning of a hungry consciousness. The hunger, say, of the Seine to reach the ocean.

“Each time,” he elaborates further in La Seine, “after having recognized the obstacle, I almost immediately found the slope that allowed me to get around it. And no doubt I was not so fixed on my plan nor on the point of the coast that I would cut through to throw myself into the Ocean, that certain obstacles could not have deviated my course, but what does it matter, since I definitely found my passage, and knew how to dig a bed that now hardly has any hesitations or variations.”

I hesitate to provide my own interpretation of this, as I’m sure there are many. But anyone who has plunged ahead with a difficult artistic project has certainly felt the combined feelings of frustration and euphoria that accompany these endeavors. That vague but teasing scintillation in the mind of an understanding or perception that eludes articulation, but which – maybe in the middle of the night as one’s mind wanders – flows – like a river – that surmise or abstraction that so teasingly eluded definition, is arrayed all at once in the jewelry of words and metaphors. I’m frequently amazed at the things that bubble up from the unconscious. Strange thoughts, bizarre ideas, sudden insights, hilarious conceptions that shift from one thing to another depending on the silt and season and depth and effluence of that river in my head.

Ponge, not surprisingly, feels the same way. "What does it matter,” Ponge exults, “since given the obstacles that were put in my way, I still found the shortest path.”

“What does it matter if the sun and the air prevail upon me for tribute, since my resource is infinite…and that I have had the satisfaction of attracting to me, and of draining throughout my course a thousand adhesions, a thousand tributaries and desires and adventitious intentions...

…what does it matter, since they have given up trying to contain me, since they only think about stepping over me...

…I see clearly now since I chose this book and that despite its author I took my course there, I see clearly that I cannot dry up...

…what does it matter, since far from throwing myself into another desire, into another river, I throw myself directly into the Ocean...

…what does it matter, since I now interpret my entire region, and that not only will one no longer do without me on the maps, but only one line will be inscribed there, it will be me.”

…but here begins another book, where the meaning and pretension of this one are lost.”

Odd, isn’t it, to see the external become internal? One can never be quite sure where one thing leaves off and another begins. Everything overlaps. The external overlaps the internal as the internal overlaps the external. The world doesn’t stop at your skin. It registers on the eyes and ears. It flows in the veins. It mints its coins in the forgeries of the mind. It collides with opposing forces as ideas collide with the quantum legerdemain of the universe.

So what’s up with his next book effacing the existence of this book, this present contemplation of the Seine? He uses the word ‘pretension.’ This confession of inadequacy is there to serve a higher impulse than a perceived inefficacy. When the Seine enters the ocean, it ceases being the Seine. It diffuses and fuses with the water of the ocean. The Seine ceases being the Seine and is lost to the vagaries and idiosyncrasies of this new medium. The ocean. Which was there all along. When it was clouds. When it was reeds. When it was flowing. When it was dividing into green and gray at the Square du Vert-Galant, which is the western tip of the Ile de la Cité. When it reached Le Havre, and ran its water, its currents and idiosyncrasies, its anomalies and candy and verbiage and larynx into the calm cold rhetoric of the English Channel, it wasn’t lost, it was transformed. That’s the name of the game. Flux. As Heraclitus put it, no one steps in the same river twice. And that’s what flux is all about. Impulse. Impetus. Implication.

“And I know very well that I am neither the Amazon, nor the Nile, nor Love,” writes Ponge. “But I also know very well that I speak in the name of all liquid, and therefore whoever conceived me can conceive everything.”