The Bow and the Lyre - random quotes!

The problem with reading for purpose is you tend to start a book half knowing what you are looking for and  miss interesting points that the writer makes because they don't fit  your aims. I suppose it is a major downside to reading for research  So, as I was reading The Bow and the Lyre I constantly was assailed by ideas that I did not really have time to fully absorb. Rather than let them simply slip by, I kept a note of them by sticking a 'post-it' on the page. I thought it might be interesting  just to pull together a few of my favourites.

*It is not the poet's task," says Gardia Bacca, "to tell things as they happened, but as we would liked them to happen." The realm of poetry is the "I wish." The poet is "a man of desires." Indeed, poetry is desire. But that desire is not articulated in the possible, or in the likely. The image is not the "likely impossible," desire for impossibles: poetry is hunger for reality. Desire always aspires to suppress distances,  as seen in the desire par excellence the amorous impulse. The image is the bridge that desire places between man and reality (p. 54)

The Poetic Revelation

..absence and presence, silence and the word, emptiness and plenitude are poetic states as well as religious and amorous ones. (p 125)

After creation, the poet is alone: now it is others, the readers, who are going to create themselves in re-creating the poem. The experience is repeated but in reverse: the image opens up to reader and shows him its translucent abyss. The reader leans forward and plunges. And yet as he falls--or as he ascends, as he penetrates the chambers of the image and abandons himself to the flow of the poem he breaks away from himself to enter "another himself" previously unknown and ignored. The reader like the poet, becomes an image: something that is projected and separates from itself and goes on the the encounter of the unnameable. In both cases the poetic is not something that is outside, in the poem,  or inside, in us, but something that we make and that makes us. (p. 151)  

Now, how can poetising not be a judgement our original fault or defect, if it has been agreed precisely that poetry is a revelation of our fundamental condition? This condition is essentially defective, for it consists in contingency and finitude. We are astonished at the world because it presents itself to us as the strange, "the inhospitable"; the world's indifference to us stems from the fact that in its totality it has no meaning other than that which our possibility of being gives it; and this possibility is death, because, "as soon as a man enters life he is already old enough to die." From birth on, our living is a permanent being in the strange and inhospitable, a radical malaise....lack is our original condition because originally we are lack of being. (p.132)

Moreover, no one "is in history," as if history were one "thing" and we, before it, another: we are all history and we all make it together.

The history of modern poetry is that of the continuous dichotomy of the poet, torn between the modern conception of the world and the sometimes intolerable presence of inspiration.

Man is plurality and dialogue.

And in truth inspiration is not any-where, it simply is not, nor is it a thing: it is an aspiration, a moving, a forward thrust: towards that which we ourselves are. Thus, poetic creation is the exercise f our freedom, of our decision to be.   (pp. 147 - 149)

And in truth inspiration is not anywhere, it simply is not, nor is it a thing: it is an aspiration, a moving, a forward thrust: towards that which we ourselves are. Thus, poetic creation is the exercise of our freedom, of our decision to be.

The distinctive essence of man does not consist so much of being an entity of words as in this possibility of being "another." And because he is another he is an entity of words. They are one of the means he has to make himself anther. (p.162)

The Consecration of the Instant

The poem traces a line that separates the privileged instant from the temporal current: in that here, and in that now, something begins: a love, a heroic act, a vision of the godhead, a momentary wonder at a tree, or the face of Diana, smooth as a wall of polished stone. That instant is anointed with a special light: it has been consecrated by poetry.......it is an instant packed with all its irreducible particularity, and it is perpetually susceptible to repeating itself in another instant, to re engender itself and illuminating new instants, new experiences with its light. (p.169)

Signs in Rotation.

Technology can foresee these or those changes and, up to a point, construct future realities. In this sense technology can produce the future. None of these marvels will answer the only question man asks himself as a historical being and, I must add, as man: the why and wherefore of changes. [..} Indeed, in proportion to as the future it builds is less and less imaginable and devoid of meaning,

....so it is that everything that once seemed loaded with meaning now appears before our eyes as a series of efforts and conditions that are non-sense (..._ the now is no longer projected into the future: it is an instantaneous always. We are lost among things.  (pp.143-4)

Man does not see the world, he thinks it. (p.258)

We live a present which is fixed and interminable and yet is constantly moving. A floating present. (p.261)

Otto Paz's achievement is to re-imagine consciousness - thought really - as a pervasive inventiveness - and celebrate poetry as its song. His insights into the relationship between religion poetry and the sacred are profound and thought provoking as is his analysis of the position of the poet now, in a secular and increasingly technological world. The Bow and the Lyre is a truly inspirational book.