by Pierre-Albert Jourdan, translated from the French by John Taylor

from The Bitter Oleander, Spring 2010

In the preceding issue of The Bitter Oleander, I accompanied translated excerpts of Pierre-Albert Jourdan's sequence, L'Entrée dans le jardin (The Entryway into the Garden), with some biographical information about this French poet and, especially, prose poet who remains much too little-known. For readers of French, the two books to hunt down are Les Sandales de paille (The Straw Sandals, 1987) and Le Bonjour et l'adieu (The Good Morning and the Farewell, 1991). These thick volumes constitute Jourdan's incomplete Oeuvres complètes at Mercure de France: a final volume, which should have comprised an unpublished novel evoking the French underground during the Second World War, never appeared. Yet the latter manuscript is uncharacteristic of Jourdan's style, most favored literary genres, typical subject matter, let alone his vantage point on Nature and metaphysics. Jourdan tends to be neo-transcendentalist in outlook, indeed somewhat Thoreau-like, and was increasingly influenced by his readings in Eastern philosophy. Rather naturally for a French writer of his sensibility, which can be likened to that of his friends Philippe Jaccottet (b. 1925) and Yves Bonnefoy (b. 1923), he is likewise engaged by the "Cartesian" antipode of this perspective: a skeptical grappling with the self and subjectivity. In his many memorable "fragments"—a favorite term—maxims, diary entries, notebook jottings, and short prose pieces, Jourdan describes landscapes with stunning vividness and depth (he was also a skilled painter), admires and draws out the significance of humble plants in and around his garden at his country home in the Vaucluse village of Caromb, and keeps questioning both the miracle of aliveness and the specter of death, especially during the last year of his life, when he was dying from lung cancer. He also penned scathing vignettes of social satire.

Jourdan's focus on death necessarily sharpens in his last book, L'Approche (The Approach), a notebook-diary that was first issued posthumously in 1984. (He died in 1981 at the age of fifty-seven.) This journal records thoughts, books read, daily routines, and hospital experiences during the poet's five-month long wrestling with terminal illness. In an essay that I wrote about Jourdan in 1995, I speculated rather abstractly about what he envisioned with this term "approach," notably the possibility of merging at last with a Nature from which he had been "separated." I likewise pointed out, rightly (I still think) but also abstractly, that in comparison to "many other twentieth-century authors fascinated with death ... he reacts to our grim predicament by groping for a path leading away from the terminuses of nihilism and a resigned, hopeless materialism."

The Approach can certainly be interpreted at this philosophical level, but now that I have spent two years translating a major selection of all Jourdan's prose writings, I would like to emphasize how intensely human and down-to-earth this book and all his other writings are. The Approach is the journal of a writer who, confronted with fear, fatigue, redoubtable examinations (like fiberscopies), debilitating coughing spells and increasing chest pain, struggles to maintain his literary and spiritual aspirations at the highest level. He manages to observe himself with detachment, even with humor. "Can one say 'breathing on tiptoe'?" he wonders when he has elsewhere evoked gasping and suffocating; he adds in parentheses: "(As when one wants to get out of a nasty situation.)" As to writing under such circumstances, he depicts his daily efforts in various complementary ways:

Writing shaped like tiny wads of bread: so that you can swallow the fish bones stuck in your throat.

Authenticity scrubs words so clean that they become aggressive. They turn against you, and you were counting on them. They wound you. It is as this moment that you must continue to face up to them.

The Approach constitutes a courageous testimonial and response to two ominous questions: Why write? And why read? More generally, Jourdan's oeuvre comprehends writing as an examination par excellence of the predicament: "how to live."
                                                          —John Taylor

*       *       *       *       *

The trouble is that others observe us. Our loved ones, also those who make decisions (more or less abruptly) for us. All the same, you cannot wear your decrepitude as if it were a victory. In any case, this exceeds my spiritual forces a wee bit.

Yet this question should also perhaps be raised: where can our true face be found?

You cannot get out of yourself in order to grasp meaning; halfway out of your depth most of the time, you can only test the current with your fingertips; which is not at all the same thing.

What a strange adventure to be invited to this gigantic party at which you catch, through the hubbub, mere snatches of mostly meaningless conversation as everyone chews away frenetically around a buffet table whose victuals are, moreover, unequally laid out.
      A few guests get it in their minds to crawl away under the tables and thereby occasionally manage to find a way out, after some desperate groping. Ending up far from the crowd, they are still as destitute yet now in a landscape whose neutrality makes some kind of transformation seem possible. At this point, some of them are seized with fear, while others plunge on even further; whenever their signals manage to reach us, they are heartbreakingly tender. You thus come to suspect, with fright and gratitude, what it means to have the honor to be invited.

I have been sailing my way through a constant fever. Heat flashes, shivering. My pen does not take them into account. What else can I do but obey it? I am not going to turn my blood ink-black by constant worrying. I am going to give my pen the better part. The blue part, preferably.

As I study a photograph of a passionflower blossom, I think of Mélie who, last summer, would have almost dug up her garden just to make me happy; and of Paul who, at the same time, could hardly keep back his delight at all the cuttings that he had gathered. This tiny little eighty-year-old woman offers the kind of sealed friendship (to use René Char's expression) that nothing can break. It is as if we naturally formed a big family whose members did not need, however, to rub shoulders with each other constantly. A notion of neighborhood in which distances vanish and in which you discover, with the greatest surprise, that human relationships can make life gentler.

Last night, the north wind cooled off the heat and cleared the horizon. At present, it is playing the game that we know well: sculpting clouds with the help of Mount Ventoux. There they are, as if trapped, unable to get over the ridge and coming apart like immense, ever softening, spinning tops. I do not want to push the analogies any further!

I cannot truly distinguish my own suffering, at least at this bearable stage—but I hope with all my heart that, if it worsens, the same mood will subsist deep inside me—from that of, for example, these trees assailed by the violence of a wind gone mad, from their own struggle; or from that of animals who are tortured, poisoned, stalked, and hunted down and yet who are, each of them, our mainstays. I refuse to pay the slightest bit of attention to those who, their ego bleating at the slightest alert, are surprised to discover that they have not remained at the center of the world. Suffering is so widespread, and extends so far beyond our understanding, that we should relinquish (perhaps in the form of a sacrifice, even a blind one) a part, even if infinitesimal, of our own ills. And this, as long as our mental lucidity is not covered over by the irremediable. This is a prayer that I humbly formulate for myself.

Don't tell me that I am forgetting slums, cold, hunger, deep poverty, tortures, and massacres of the innocent. These constitute a totally different kind of problem. A problem at our level. For which a study of the causes might provide logical responses, solutions. I am referring instead to an insolvable problem—boundless evil—that goes beyond politico-economic realities. A problem that derives from nothing other than the despair of a fragmented self. Let us speak among ourselves, if you like, but let us also suffer with the All of a world in which we are, to all appearances, mere, easily swayed, pawns.
      But also tell me if you really hope to resolve our problems with all those subhuman informers, cheaters, and arsenic poisoners? Remember, not so long ago, all those nice protesters, with their heads held high, who were purifying France. We were happy, weren't we? Let me change sides. I'll let you keep your exclusively humanist nobility.

We are adrift on the stormy sea of the earth, though usually with enough tranquillizers to give us a sensation of terra firma. Little matter therefore if we lack skiffs and especially ferrymen. Their guild has died out. In this way, drowning is immediate.

After the surge of the mistral which, perhaps because of my weariness, made my head split, now a mere whisper can be heard this morning, that of departures being imagined from the windowsills of towering pine trees. Birds know all about this. They have flown back to us with all their feverish joy, with that little hopping about of the soul that we add in the hopes of being included in the celebration.

Watching plants grow never ages you.

Hands impregnated with rosemary.

Between this harmonious landscape of the Haut Comtat Venaissin and us, an over-motorized cohort of heads stuffed with endless schemes, I have the impression that a sort of landslide is taking place; or a crack in the earth widening so much that it becomes more and more difficult for us to cross and meet up with ourselves. Detect how an understanding between the two parties could benefit mutual equilibrium. Perhaps one should ask: how to listen? This would already be a major step forward.

It is more and more difficult for me to be in a crowd among those grinning, crisscrossing ectoplasms who are oblivious to each other, their arms loaded down with packages of asphyxia. A pain in my chest. Flee as fast as possible. Commit yourself to the slope of the heart.

Motionless contemplation impregnated with the plant world and bordered by light. Non-action cleansed of those overflowing glosses in which you drown— experienced, even so, with a highly ironic smile so as not to mask the lack of rigor and total simplicity—and this causes what is gained, instead of bearing its fruit in silence and blossoming in the fibers of Being, to end up as a note written down, an excessive use of ink. This is an irresistible need: you cannot uproot everything. No satisfaction is involved: this is my only excuse. Yet the act of writing down notes does not remove any of the calmness that I feel, as if there were a sort of complicity enabling me to partake of an ant, a bee, a butterfly, a rosemary bush, an olive tree, or a cloud. Enabling me to get closer to the dream of a body extending to the dimensions of the Cosmos. If it is indeed a dream and not, as I believe, truth coiled in the depths of Being.

This notion of belonging must be acquired inside yourself. Like digesting food. Chewing a mountain would, for example, be necessary for rising. Another kind of chewing, perhaps.

Does this go beyond the framework of our preoccupations? I willingly agree. But our illnesses are forged by our preoccupations, whose very framework is so narrow that sometimes our heads get stuck inside and cannot be withdrawn without our becoming half crazy.
      There must then be a more flexible path or at least a compromise allowing us to loosen the strangler's noose a little.

Morning-of-the-Birds.

The suddenness of these attacks of the chills. Like a click that sets the machine in motion. Exhausting, uncontrollable shivering; raspy gasping. Buried under woolens and covers. Then the opposite occurs: the fever rises, my hands get warmer and my head turns burning hot. Whereupon a long sweating session. What language does my body speak? What is it telling me? To think that I can't catch the slightest scrap. Poverty, extreme poverty. May my body forgive me.

Through a few gaps in the vegetation, I can spot the horizon opening out in the distance. Unable to walk around in the garden, I come down the landings and get absorbed in the spectacle. Memory takes over, climbing up wild slopes: Le Beucet, Venasque, Murs, La Roque-sur-Pernes, Saumanes ...
      I remember how with a franc in my pocket I was miraculously able to get my Solex repaired in Villes-sur-Auzon (Seyssaud's landscapes) and then return to Caromb, my eyes riveted on my worn tires, praying that they would keep up their efforts just a little longer. I was given a harsh lesson that day about extravagant, carefree—inebriated would be more exact—cavalcades. All this reminds me of Jacques Réda, and I dedicate my old Solex to him. It is sleeping behind the house, alongside a cart wheel.

As if it would be better not to get too close so as not to be terror-stricken.

The silvery gray of the olive tree, the unique light reflected by its vibrant foliage, turn it into—how to put it?—a spokesman. It so glistens with life that it refreshes and elevates how we look at the world. If you looked at the olive tree as would an old Taoist, it would become the tree of the alliance between heaven and earth: what is tortuous rises into a flame tip. And we would be so impregnated with the peace enveloping it that we would be sailing, giving ourselves over completely, on a sea of oil.

Leaving this countryside is—already—like undergoing a first surgical act before "the other one." And here the operation takes place without anesthesia, while you are dispossessed of everything.

For every gaze that turns away, something dies. We never know the sum of these infinitesimal, unnoticed, deaths because they take on the face of our own death.

The enormous ventilating fan. Such force has something throbbing and implacable about it. Another pain.

A surprise this morning when I looked in the mailbox: two lizards, a male and a female, sleeping in this abode that they must have deemed comfortable for a night's rest.
      We are surrounded by lodgers of all kinds. It is one of the particularities of our house: a meeting place.

The limpidity of accords: the bumblebee at the heart of the hollyhock, the white butterfly on the valerian. Furtive accords that are like extras, that go beyond the functions attached to them. A sort of stupefying over-abundance from which we are carefully kept remote. A separation that is perhaps (I was going to say, simply) the mystery of Creation. Even a prestigious palette is not sufficient, not even the dizzying rounds ofHieronymous Bosch (who nonetheless tries to approach it from another angle). Our endeavors always come up short, in an irrevocable formulation that has no correspondent. Yet to be here in the midst of all this should solicit from us a reflection urging us to adopt a certain kind of behavior: one making us worthy to brush up against, without shame, the profusion of this world from which we prefer to turn away, for it is simpler (or more profitable) to return to our beloved mirrors. A civilization in which beauty products are mere masks.

Because we cannot fix prices here, we prefer the terra firma (?) of poker and transactions. We die like idiots, facing a dazzling smile that we are unable to recognize and that plunges us, as it becomes even more dazzling, into absolute darkness.

Celebrate, celebrate, nothing else matters.

Calmness seems an integral part of this house, even in difficult moments. Is this perhaps a secret of the old stones with which it is built? A calmness of age-old countryside. A slowness full oflessons. May God let me end my days here.

With tears in my eyes, I watch Snoupi passing. It's the confidence that animals have that kills you. Their affection. Snoupi's need to be petted, which he expressed constantly. His need for a friendly hand. Literally starving for that more essential nourishment. He was only a dog, wasn't he?

You cannot become attached to human beings, things, or landscapes without suffering immediately taking up a position at your side. This is probably a trite remark. Yet a much stranger fate brings you face to face with uprootedness. It is better, then, to accept the suffering at your side. And illuminate it with love.

This morning, Mount Ventoux is like a bluish puff of steam barely sketched against a sky with which it seems blended with delight, forgetting its battered old bones and deep wrinkles. It thus becomes that spiritual mountain, that resonance inside ourselves that we discover we need.

Leaving, yesterday, as always over the marvelous road that skirts around the Dentelles de Montmirail and passes through Suze-la-Rousse (Grignan is approaching), before it branches off towards the big highways, where I always feel knocked senseless. A feeling there ofloss, of a Nature that has almost turned away from us. You need to be able to make a big effort, but what would it consist of? Getting to work inside yourself, I suppose. Gathering resources. At the moment, mine are mostly of the Dali's "soft watch" variety. Hence, be patient?

A note in René Allendy's Journal strongly reminds me of René Daumal, at least in regard to the meaning of their common first name and the necessity of being re-born: "Are respiratory diseases not perhaps the fate of those whose birth was ill-received? My own birth was certainly a missed opportunity. I think that it is not by chance that I was given the name René. It signifies that it would have been better if my birth had taken place a second time, under better circumstances, or that it was necessary to go through the process again, on another level. When I plunge into myself today, isn't this a kind of rebirth?" And isn't this, as it were, the very battle that Daumal wears himself out waging on the slopes of Mont Analogue?

My nose at the window, like those old men who keep time away by gazing dully outside.

Only fleeting, barely formulated, silent prayers—so much weakness! The "artichoke" is nearly peeled. It's cold. A problem of thickness. How to solve it?

How everything falls back down here into this grim gray weather! I admit that I notice this without bewilderment, yet I am aware of the loss. The invaluable sensation of being sustained, in my physical collapse as well, is transformed into something strongly resembling a cloud of icy indifference. Of course, this is one of the norms of the City. It is up to me, the abnormal one, to believe in the attentive complicity of a rosemary bush, an olive tree. It is up to me to battle with distances, demolish them. In order to live a little.

With my own ruins, I would like to build a chapel exposed to the wind.

In this difficult period for you physically, what has the sympathy surrounding you been built with? A good share of it with the landscapes around Caromb, which have touched various people, as if they had received a friendly pat on the shoulder...
  

About John Taylor
John Taylor's collection of essays, Into the Heart of European Poetry (Transaction, 2008), has appeared in a new paperback edition. He is also the author of the two-volume Paths to Contemporary French Literature (Transaction, 2004, 2007). He writes the "Poetry Today" column in the Antioch Review and is a regular contributor to the Times Literary Supplement. His most recent personal book is The Apocalypse Tapestries (Xenos Books, 2004), a sequence of poems and short prose.

The Bitter Oleander
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