In his introduction to Danilo Kis’ A Tomb for Boris Davidovich – a collection of short stories about the mental and moral degradation of human beings under totalitarianism – Joseph Brodsky writes:
“By virtue of his place and time alone, Danilo Kis is able to avoid the faults of urgency which considerably marred the works of his listed and unlisted predecessors. Unlike them, he can afford to treat tragedy as a genre, and his art is more devastating than statistics… with his emphasis on imagery and detail, combined with ironic detachment, Danilo Kis’s obviously poetic prose puts his horrid subject matter into the most adequate perspective by alerting the reader to the prose’s own intelligence. Thus, the reader’s ethical evaluation of the phenomena described ceases to be merely a matter of his distraught sentiment and comes out as a judgment made by his profoundly offended supreme human faculties. It is not that the thought is felt but, rather, that the feeling is thought.”
While I am not entirely convinced about this seeming privileging of an aesthetic response to totalitarianism over a political response, the sentiment is portrayed with a particular impact in a poem that I came across today, Zbigniew Herbert’s The Power of Taste:
—
It didn’t require great character at all
our refusal disagreement and resistance
we had a shred of necessary courage
but fundamentally it was a matter of taste
Yes taste
in which there are fibers of soul the cartilage of conscience
Who knows if we had been better and more attractively tempted
sent rose-skinned women thin as a wafer
or fantastic creatures from the paintings of Hieronymus Bosch
but what kind of hell was there at this time
a wet pit the murderers’ alley the barrack
called a palace of justice
a home-brewed Mephisto in a Lenin jacket
sent Aurora’s grandchildren out into the field
boys with potato faces
very ugly girls with red hands
Verily their rhetoric was made of cheap sacking
(Marcus Tullius kept turning in his grave)
chains of tautologies a couple of concepts like flails
the dialectics of slaughterers no distinctions in reasoning
syntax deprived of beauty of the subjunctive
So aesthetics can be helpful in life
one should not neglect the study of beauty
Before we declare our consent we must carefully examine
the shape of the architecture the rhythm of the drums and pipes
official colors the despicable ritual of funerals
Our eyes and ears refused obedience
the princes of our senses proudly chose exile
It did not require great character at all
we had a shred of necessary courage
but fundamentally it was a matter of taste
Yes taste
that commands us to get out to make a wry face draw out a sneer
even if for this the precious capital of the body the head
must fall
—
I particularly like “chains of tautologies a couple of concepts like flails/ the dialectics of slaughterers no distinctions in reasoning/ syntax deprived of beauty of the subjunctive…”, for the physical sensation of the language, and for its sense of how the constriction of language is inevitably a precursor to the constriction of imaginative worlds and of empathy (the word “chains” is particularly well-placed).
I am reminded of two other poems. The slightly defamiliarising “necessary courage” recalls the fare more defamliarising “necessary murder” used by Auden in Spain, almost as a counterpoint: “The conscious acceptance of guilt in the necessary murder...” Auden later disavowed this too-quick endorsement of revolutionary violence, and renounced the poem entirely. And “cartilege of conscience” brings to mind the “vertebraed with veracities” of Jorge Fernandez Granados’ Reconciliation, a poem about doubt and the end-of-the-rainbow quest for certainty. Both poems use an image of the body to capture that sensation that occupies that nameless space somewhere between firmness and rigidity.
anenduringromantic 