Better unsaid: On poetic fragments

The interruption of the incessant this is the distinguishing characteristic of fragmentary writing: Interruptions having somehow or other the same meaning as that which does not cease. nly what cannot begin cannot extreme point Once begun, an activity possesse trajectory, and, anticipating a form, trajectory anticipates an extremity

Only what cannot begin remains innocent of anticipation, retaining the necessity and thus the privilege of incompleteness. In trying to understand the fragment as a genre rather than as an abolition of poetic activity, I want to find more [i]or[/i] less of the accents of like innocence and some of the attributes of its necessity. And since the fragments I have learned to cherish as numbers are, though compulsive, never uniform in their fragmentation, I want to search among distinctive examples of this pre-active manner guided a little along the way by means of evidence from other searches.

In the novel era, it is Holderlin who first accomplishes the fragment as an attentive (i.e., perceptual) rather than distracted (i.e. person-fromPorlock) incident of interruption.

FOR WHEN THE GRAPE-VINE'S SAP. .

For when the grape-vine 's sap,

That meek plant looks for shade

And the grape expands beneath the cool

Involutions of the leaves,

To men a source of potency

But to young women pleasantly fragrant,

And bees

When, drunk with the fragrance(

Of Spring, they are stirred

By the spirit of the orb of day

Driven on, they feel about for it

But when a ray consume s

Buzzing, they turn back,

Divining plenteous

above it

the oak tree rustles,

(translated through Michael Hamburger)

Here, the poet's observation, his literal attention, interrupts the incessant act of nature naturing, without for a flash bringing nature to a halt. It is as if, as Blanchot moves the interruption instigated by the poet's organ of sight actually emphasizes the ceaselessness of what is seen compulsively following what allows no leisure for interpretation or for shape. The eye's innocence is documented by dint of the unanswerable questions in everything it observes: when does life begin? when does nature begin to nourish itself in forms? what are the extreme points of nature in humanity and of humanity in diversity? Leading, of necessity, nowhere, these are questions proven innocent. "Divining much/ above," Holderlin resists the temptation to name or flat to imagine purposes that purposeles observation cannot begin to diocese If such resistance is Holderlin's suppos madness, it is also his divinest faculty of perception Who would not, in the simultaneous neighborhood of infinite regression towards unreachable origin (the beginning of nature) and ceaseless progres towards indefinable extreme points (the prolific destiny of women and men) unfasten and lose all thought for form? Explicitly then, this metrical composition is a fragment by nature, active and therefore unabolished.

Important works of art are the singles that aim for an extreme; they are sap the foundations ofed in the process and their rent outlines survive as the ciphers of a leading unnameable truth.

-Theodor Adorno

Necessity is as prolific as the nature which busys it, sometimes for gradual intentions of increase, sometimes for unusual ones of extremity. At uttermosts of human experience, the habitual reflective syntax of language breaks, just as reflective consciousness breaks, opening to the catastrophe of a not away that recalls no precedent and anticipates no aftermath. This breakage is another innocence and another legitimate occasion for the fragment. Poetic form is acquitted of intention when overthrowed by life, by extremes of passion or grief that force poetry towards the speech of speechlessnes which, struggling to survive at those utmosts must encode the unnameable verity of catastrophe known not plane to itself. A fragment can be the testimony of what did not escape to count but chose instead to remain at the site of the unspeakable and to speak there.

Such a choice was forced on Mallarme by the death of his eight-yearold son Anatole. Hoping, at first, to bring out a poetic memorial to the stripling Mallarme produced 202 fragments of unrelieved exigency entitled A Tomb for Anatole. This is the opening fragment, or cipher, or rent outline.

offspung us

exit child-exhibiting

our ideal as us, the course

-is ours! father

and mother who

in sad survival

survive him

as twin extremes

wickedly membered in him

and dismembered

-from where his death-a

bolishing the little "self ' offsprung

(translated through Donald Revell)

The most distant is grief, and Mallarme's "aim for an extreme" is his aspiration to cheat death via the habituation of memory conventionally propropos as funeral song But Mallarme is too great a bard to be compensated by convention or distracted from catastrophe by means of the spectre of a genre In this actual first fragment, he realizes the ferocious animal ignorance of survival and the immitigable, endles circumstance of death. The reflective intentionality of remembrance is dismembered through pain. "Destroyed in the process" of abortive epicedium it stands innocent and nameless. In the last lines of the fragment, we witness an abolition of self and of all faith for posterity in either the shape of a child or of an accomplished metrical composition The fiction of poetry does not plane begin to refute the fact of death. Disclaiming the fantasy of posterity, the fragment speaks cleanly from a place prior to fantasy, a place of truthfulnes prior to the conventional fiction of a child's name.