ON Z.H.
On Zbigniew Herbert
Zbigniew Herbert lived most of his life (1924-98) under regimes that were inimical to what we can loosely call freedom of expression. His writing bears evidence of his historical situation as a man trying to live out a poetic and intellectual vocation in a hostile environment. The traces can sometimes be overt — for example, in his satiric counterattacks on the regime — but are more usually concealed by ironic masks or Aesopian language.
Herbert was not a poet-martyr as, say, Osip Mandelstam
was. Nevertheless, the record shows a lifetime of principled
opposition first to the Nazis, then to the Communists. Until well into his
thirties he led a fringe existence, with none of the rewards that someone of
his education and talents might have expected. After the 1956 thaw, his growing
reputation opened up opportunities for travel outside Poland and eventually led
to residencies, fellowships and visiting professorships in the West. But unlike
his contemporary Czeslaw Milosz he chose against exile.
The unspectacular, unheroic species of integrity and stub-
bornness that characterizes Herbert's life weaves its thread
through his poetry too. For the sake of brevity (a Herbertian
virtue) I will call this theme "the faithful life", picking up the
word faithful from the last line of 'The Envoy of Mr Cogito', a poem to which I
will return (the line reads simply 'Be faithful Go').1
The faithful life is not the same as the life of faith: the
difference between the two (namely that you do not need to have faith to be
faithful) might be called central to Herbert's ethic, were it not for the fact
that privileging the faithful life over the life of faith and erecting it into
a credo, an article of faith, would at once qualify it for sceptical
interrogation of the Herbertian variety.
In Herbert's "oeuvre" there is a steady stream of
poems that turn on an opposition between purity (purity of theory, purity of doctrine),
which he aligns with the divine or angelic, and the impure, the messy, the
human. The best known of these is 'Apollo and Marsyas' (1961). Apollo, who is a
god and therefore inhuman and therefore without human feelings, flays alive the
satyr Marsyas, reacting to Marsyas' prolonged howl of agony
with nothing but a fastidious shudder. Apollo has won the
musical contest (Marsyas is undergoing the fate of the
loser), but Marsyas' howl, rudimentary though it may be as music, expresses
every atom of his exposed (skinned) human (ungodlike) being with
a petrifying intensity that the god cannot equal.
This is only one of a number of poems that put the case for the
human in its unequal contest with the divine. The world that God has created,
and that carries the imprint of divine reason, may be perfect in theory but is
hard to bear in reality (In the Studio'). Even the next world turns out to be
pretty unendurable by human standards. As new arrivals discover at the heavenly
gates, not the tiniest memento of their old life will be allowed to accompany
them; even babes are to be removed from their mothers' arms 'since as it turns
out / we shall be saved each
me alone'. God's Heaven turns out to have an uncanny resemblance
to Auschwitz (At the Gate of the Valley').
What is wrong with systems, to Herbert, is that they are systems.
What is wrong with laws is that they are laws. Beware of angels and other
executives of perfection. The only angel even tentatively to be counted on the
side of humanity is the seventh one, Shemkel, who is kept in the squad only out
of respect for the sacred number seven. 'Black nervous / in his old threadbare nimbus',
Shemkel has been fined many times for illegal importation of sinners (`The
Seventh Angel').
Marxism, one need barely points out, is deeply coloured by Christian
eschatology. The world of achieved communism in which each will receive
according to his need and the state (earthly power) will have withered away,
is, literally, heaven on earth.
Herbert's satirical reports on heaven are inevitably also
reports on life in the workers' state. In heaven, because the materials to hand
are human and therefore imperfect, certain compromises have to be made. Forgone
are the luminous circles, the choirs of angels, etc.; what we end up with is an
afterlife not too different from life in People's Poland (Report from
Paradise').
The most interesting of Herbert's afterlife poems comes from
the 1983 collection Report from a Besieged City, arguably the strongest of the
nine collections he published. In a poem called 'Mr Cogito's Eschatological
Premonitions', his persona Mr Cogito reflects on life after death and on what
kind of resistance he will be capable of mounting when he has at last to
confront the heartless, bloodless angels and their demand that he give up his
humanity. Smell, taste, even hearing — these he will be
prepared to relinquish. But to hold on to the senses of sight and touch he will
be prepared to suffer torture:
to the end he will defend
the splendid sensation of pain
and a couple of faded images
in the pit of a burned-out eye.
Who knows, thinks Mr Cogito to himself, maybe the angelic interrogators
will at last give up, declare him 'unfit / for heavenly / service', and let him
return
along an overgrown path
on the shore of a white sea
to the cave of the beginning.
The image of Mr Cogito under torture at the hands of the
angels repeats the image of Marsyas tortured by Apollo. The gods believe they
are omniscient as well as omnipotent; but in fact, suffering as animal beings
suffer, unable to escape the body in pain, is beyond their ken. Being powerless
is beyond the powers of the gods.
(It will not escape the reader's attention that in the
greater
pantheon there is a god who responds to the charge of being
above and beyond suffering by committing himself to
suffering in a human way, without relief, unto death. This god, the Christian
Jesus, has no presence in Herbert's poetic universe.)
In 'Mr Cogito's Eschatological Premonitions', the ironic
treatment of heaven — and by implication of all doctrines of salvation or
perfectibility — has not been left behind, and the knife-turn of paradox is
still central to its argument on behalf of the human right to feel pain. But in
this late poem Herbert goes beyond the neat irony and lapidary perfection of
such earlier pieces as 'Report
from Paradise': in its last lines it opens out to a world
(the path, the sea, the cave) as strange and beautiful and mysterious as the world
we mortals live in, a world we cannot forget and cannot bear to leave (but must
leave and must forget, for ever).
There are several dozen Mr Cogito poems. As a personage
Mr Cogito makes his first appearance in the collection Mr
Cogito (1974), and he remains a strong presence in Report from a Besieged City.
He starts his life as a self-deprecating mask (persona) for the poet, not too
different in spirit and style from the wry but hapless little-man cartoon
characters who flourished in Polish and Czech cinema of the Cold War years. A
poem like 'Mr
Cogito's Abyss', about the abyss ('not the abyss of Pascal /
. . .
not the abyss of Dostoevsky /. . . an abyss / to Mr Cogito's
size')
that follows Mr Cogito around like a pet dog, might be a
fitting
script for one of these cartoons.
The risk a poet runs in investing too heavily in a persona
of
the stature of Mr Cogito was, I suspect, clear to Herbert
from
the beginning. 'From Mythology', a prose poem in the early
collection Study of the Object (1961), spells out the
danger. It pre-
sents itself as a potted history of religion, ironical in
its dismissive
brevity. Stage one: savages dancing around idols. Stage two:
the
Olympians (thunderbolts, creaking beds). Stage three: the
age of
irony; people carry around in their pockets votive statues
of the
god of irony, made of salt. 'Then came the barbarians. They
too
valued highly the little god of irony. They would crush it
under
their heels and add it to their dishes.'
The god of irony, believed by his devotees to be
all-powerful,
able to wither his foes with his knowing smile, turns out to
be
powerless against the barbarians. Worse than that: they
relish
him, or at least use him as relish. To translate the
allegory baldly:
from Paradise': in its last lines it opens out to a world
(the path,
the sea, the cave) as strange and beautiful and mysterious
as the
world we mortals live in, a world we cannot forget and
cannot
bear to leave (but must leave and must forget, for ever).
There are several dozen Mr Cogito poems. As a personage
Mr Cogito makes his first appearance in the collection Mr
Cogito
(1974), and he remains a strong presence in Report from a
Besieged
City. He starts his life as a self-deprecating mask
(persona) for
the poet, not too different in spirit and style from the wry
but
hapless little-man cartoon characters who flourished in
Polish
and Czech cinema of the Cold War years. A poem like 'Mr
Cogito's Abyss', about the abyss ('not the abyss of Pascal /
. . .
not the abyss of Dostoevsky /. . . an abyss / to Mr Cogito's
size')
that follows Mr Cogito around like a pet dog, might be a
fitting
script for one of these cartoons.
The risk a poet runs in investing too heavily in a persona
of
the stature of Mr Cogito was, I suspect, clear to Herbert
from
the beginning. 'From Mythology', a prose poem in the early
collection Study of the Object (1961), spells out the
danger. It pre-
sents itself as a potted history of religion, ironical in
its dismissive
brevity. Stage one: savages dancing around idols. Stage two:
the
Olympians (thunderbolts, creaking beds). Stage three: the
age of
irony; people carry around in their pockets votive statues
of the
god of irony, made of salt. 'Then came the barbarians. They
too
valued highly the little god of irony. They would crush it
under
their heels and add it to their dishes.'
The god of irony, believed by his devotees to be
all-powerful,
able to wither his foes with his knowing smile, turns out to
be
powerless against the barbarians. Worse than that: they
relish
him, or at least use him as relish. To translate the
allegory baldly:
the ironist can find himself participating in a morally
degrading
game with the powers that be in which, as long as he
pretends
not to be confronting them, they will pretend to take no
notice
of him. So much for irony, not only as a political strategy
but as
an ethical refuge, a way of life.
If Mr Cogito is not
to be crushed under the heel of the bar-
barian and used as a condiment, if the Mr Cogito poems are
not
to suffer the fate of being bought by high-ups in the regime
as
birthday presents for their wives, or even of finding
themselves
on the school syllabus, then Mr Cogito cannot just be Mr
Zbig-
niew Herbert, homme
moyen sensuel, rhymester and Polish citizen,
viewed in the
shrinking and distorting glass of irony. He must
be more.
In an important respect, Mr Cogito is like Don Quixote
(with whom he is explicitly associated in the very first
of the
Cogito poems, 'On Mr
Cogito's Two Legs'): he is a creature
whose creator only
gradually comes to realize how large a poetic
weight he can bear.
The Quixote of the first chapters of
Book
One of his adventures
is a foolish old buffer. The Quixote of
Book Two is larger than the pygmies who surround him,
larger
even than the knights
of old who are his constant companions.
'Mr Cogito
Bemoans the Pettiness of Dreams', near the begin-
ning of the Cogito series, is a poem based on a common and
rather petty trick:
using the absence of material (the loss of
inspiration) as the material of a poem. 'The Envoy of Mr
Cog-
ito', with which the series concludes, is one of the great
poems
of the twentieth century.
The not entirely transparent title of 'The Envoy'
invites one
to read it as an envoi addressed (Go) both to the collection
of
poems Mr Cogito and to the self who appears in it, at last
unmasked. It can be
read by itself, and even by itself its force is
undeniable; but for its proper effect it needs to be read as
the last
of the Mr Cogito
collection, looking back on its
avatars and
unmasking them in the cause of telling the truth. Reading it
in
this way, as a demand — indeed a command — to the self to persist
in the faithful life even in the absence any credible faith,
one
must be struck by its rhetorical grandeur and moral
ferocity, not
qualities one usually associates with Herbert, but
potentialities
that the reader may well have sensed from the beginning,
behind
the ironic masks.
There is one
strain notably absent from Herbert's
poetic
oeuvre: the erotic. Of course poets are not obliged to write
love
poems. But all the
evidence of Herbert's essays on art and travel
suggest a sensibility open to experience and acutely
responsive to
beauty. 'Prayer of the Traveller Mr Cogito', from the 1983
col-
lection, though not a
great poem in itself, is a
heartfelt and
palpably sincere prayer of thanks for the gift of life: 'I
thank you
0 Lord for creating
the world beautiful and various and if this is
Your seduction I am
seduced for good and past all
forgiveness'.
But after the 1950s
the erotic fades out of Herbert's work, save
in one late poem, 'Oath' (1992), which looks back with
regret to
beautiful women
glimpsed and then lost, in particular a woman
in a newsagent's in the Antilles:
for a moment I thought that — if I went with you —
we would change
the world
I will never
forget you —
a startled
flutter of lids
matchless tilt
of a head
the bird's
nest of a palm.
Regret at a life not
fully lived, and doubt that his achieved
has compensated for
that, become a gnawing theme in He
late poetry. Of
course one might say that the Soviet e
made it hard for any of its subjects to live a full life —
in
words, that history
was more to blame than the man hi
But to so nagging and
lucid a self-doubter as Herbert, si
the blame is not an
acceptable strategy. The hero of his
'Why the Classics'
(1969) is Thucydides, who makes no e:
for his failure as a general during the Peloponnesian W
faces his judges, reports the facts, and accepts his punish
Herbert's verdict on himself comes in a pair of poems, `Mr
ito and the Imagination'
and 'To Ryszard Krynicki — A:
(both 1983) in which,
crucially, he identifies his greatest
as a moral being —
namely, his steady, undeceived vision
world — as his principal limitation as a poet:
he adored tautologies
explanations
idem per idem
a
bird is a bird
slavery slavery
a
knife a knife
death is death
'Mr Cogito's imagination / moves like a pendulum /
with great precision / from suffering to suffering'. For ti
Cogito 'will be
counted / among the species minores'.
'So little joy —
sister of the gods — in our poems Ryszai
writes to his friend
Krynicki, 'too few glimmering tw
borrowed money, or
even more markedly when Poland
made its
entry into the world
of globalized consumerism in 1989,
Mr
Cogito's power to do
justice to a new reality failed him. (This is
hardly a damning
charge: who among the world's poets has
measured up to the
challenge of late capitalism?)
Mr
Cogito's monster
lacks
all dimensions
it's
hard to describe
it
eludes definitions
it's
like a vast depression
hanging over the country
it
can't be pierced
by a
pen
an
argument
a
spear. ['Mr Cogito's Monster]
There is one further quality of his hard-to-describe monster
that
Mr Cogito might have
mentioned: that it has somehow
man-
aged to transcend, or at least get beyond, good and evil,
and is
thus out of reach of the dry moralist's yes/no. To the
monster all
things are good in
the sense that all things are
consumable,
including the ironist's little salt artefacts.
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