Bronwyn Louw
Le Mystère de l’oralité
—pour Claude Ber
La parole évanouissante est une catastrophe. J’ai l’opportunité maintenant de me nourrir d’une récolte résiduelle, très mince, d’explorer un élan évanouissant avant que ne soit l’évanouie. La tendance est troublante, l’impasse et ses retours-retournements donnent le vertige. C’est prenant, trop pour l’étudier. La complaisance d’une posture d’étude me paraît presque inconcevable. Il faut perdre en sérieux, se défaire d’une gravité, d’un attachement, pour considérer un peu la chose et chercher à comprendre ses ressorts. Je vous relate quelques notes à ce propos, indicatives seulement. Des parcelles verbales. Sans savoir pourquoi, je veux les enregistrer, mais surtout les consigner sur la surface souple de vos mémoires, comme s’il s’agissait d’esquisses
d’une cathédrale dont la logique
est en germe.
Il y a un résidu de sommeil
sommeil à répétition
se suspend
ne s’endort ni ne se réveille
l’état se poursuit longuement
Une fille d’une opulence rouge dorée
ne s’endort pas, sourit, elle dit
en goûtant ses mots astringents
Je ne m’obstinerai pas à faire tout
le travail et quelque chose rit de
sa nouvelle absence
Les mots ne sont astringents que parce que
certains souvenirs sont traversés de
rivières révélatrices, de la même famille
que les prémonitions et les épiphanies d’après-coup
les prophéties décalées et les présages paralysés
le savoir qui ne coïncide pas
avec le moment a quelque chose d’âpre
qui sursaute dans la bouche
paroles en feu
la blondeur de la fille
rougit, rougeoie, elle ne s’endort ni ne se réveille
elle délivre une ouverture
le souffle se tord en elle comme un tourbillon –
très doux – elle le recrache pour le sentir
rencontrer la fraîcheur d’air
et entendre naître un mot
né de son feu expulsé
et de l’air lentement se renouvelant
le mot est Vit non Vient non Vent non Vert non Verbe non Verger
Oui, Vergier. Verger…
Le mot ne cesse de s’élargir et de s’amoindrir
il est d’une espèce de mouvement
dont les membres ne se meuvent
qu’en apparaissant et disparaissant dans
et depuis
une sorte de transparence
Ma fille de flamme
s’endort dans les cendres ; c’est une ouvrière
du seuil, à elle de travailler rarement
trop, et jamais seule.
À qui de boire ce café épais d’ailleurs apportés ? De humer ces aliments qui altèrent ? À qui de fumer longuement dans des nuages blancs à la recherche d’une mémoire marginale ? C’est la jeune fille des histoires, l’ouvrière oisive fort aimée par le monde et maintenant sa chair qui transperce la fumée est pleine, parlante, et elle raconte des histoires plus qu’elle ne laboure les mêmes histoires elle les lisse en les glissant dans les mêmes oreilles jusque dans sa vieillesse elle raconte ces mêmes histoires et parce qu’il s’agit d’histoires de seuil (la fois où elle est presque morte ; les naissances dangereuses ; ce départ dont elle n’est jamais revenue) je me dis qu’elle raconte non pas pour digérer, mais pour y goûter, et cette connaissance inaboutie, passagère, vit dans la parole qu’elle me profère dans l’oubli parfait de m’avoir déjà raconté, raconté.
Quelle radoteuse celle-là (Dit une petite fille parlant de sa grand-mère défunte à sa mère endeuillée. Je ne suis pas mécontente qu’elle ne soit plus avec nous.) Radoteuse, oui, mais pourvu qu’elles restent et restent
parmi nous
les radoteuses.
C’est un métier. C’est ce qu’elle fait. Consciente ou pas d’être à l’œuvre, elle fabrique quelque chose de ses mots. C’est de ce quelque chose qu’il s’agit. L’entretenir. S’entretenir. Entre-tenir-le.
Orality as a Mystery
—for Claude Ber
The vanishing word is a catastrophe. Now, I can nourish myself on the most residual of harvests, to explore a fading vitality before it fades. This tending towards is troubling, the impasse and its returns-reversals are dizzying. It’s engrossing, too much to study. The complacency of a studious posture seems almost inconceivable to me. You have to shed seriousness, a certain gravity, of attachment, to consider a thing and understand what spurs it. I am sharing some notes on the matter, purely indicative. Several verbal plots. Without knowing why, I want to make a record of them, but more than anything to impress them on the supple surface of your memory, as if they were sketches
of a cathedral whose logic
is burgeoning.
There’s a residue of slumber
slumber in repetition
suspending itself
not sleeping but not waking
the condition continues at length
A girl of red-golden opulence
does not sleep, smiles, says
in tasting her astringent words
I won’t insist on finishing all this
work and something laughs at
her new absence
Words are only astringent because
certain memories are traversed by
telling rivers, of the same family
as belated premonitions and epiphanies
staggered prophecies and paralyzed omens
knowledge that doesn’t coincide
with the moment has something bitter
that startles in the mouth
words on fire
the blondeness of the girl
blushes, glows, not sleeping but not waking
she offers up an opening
the breath turns in her like a tourbillon –
softly – she spits it out to feel it
meet the freshness of air
and to hear the birth of a word
born of its expulsed fire
and of the air slowly renewing
the word is Go no Grow no Greening no Garden no Grove.
Yes, Grave. Grove…
The word doesn’t stop widening and narrowing
it’s a kind of movement
in which the limbs stir
only by appearing and disappearing in
and from
a type of transparence
My flame girl
Sleeps in the ashes; she’s a laborer
of the threshold, up to her to work rarely
too much, and never alone.
Who will drink this coffee thick with imported places? Who will smell these life-changing leaves? Who will sit endlessly in white clouds of smoke in pursuit of a marginal memory? The girl of stories, the idle worker so loved by the world and now her flesh which pierces the smoke is full of speech, and she tells stories more than she plows the same ones she smooths them over by whispering them into the same ears into her old age she tells these same stories because they are the tales of threshold (the time when she almost died; the dangerous births; this departure from which she never returned) I tell myself that she doesn’t tell these stories to digest them, but to taste them, and this unfinished, fleeting knowledge lives in the words she utters, forgetting all about the times she has already told me.
What a talker she was (Says a young girl speaking of her departed grandmother to her mourning mother. I am not unhappy she’s gone.) A talker, yes, but provided they stay and stay
among us
the talkers.
It’s a profession. It’s what she does. Aware or not of being at work, she is making something with her words. It’s this something that it’s about. To conserve it. To converse with it. To with-stand it.
(Translated from the French to English by Carrie Chappell)
_____
Statement of Homage
Le mystère de l’oralité. Orality as a mystery. It is a phrase I happened upon in a book called Nourritures. Philosophie du corps politique, where the philosopher Corrinne Peluchon inquires into how all living is vivre de, living off (rather than lifting off…), a kind of radical interdependency in which one life is food for another. I say I happened upon the phrase mystère de l’oralité, but it is more like it happened to me. I was reading, following the demonstration of Pelluchon, who, though audacious in thought, is quite methodical in style. The kind of reading where you double back, sometimes, to check the progression of logical connectors, and make sure you didn’t take a wrong turn in the reasoning, because there are right and wrong paths through the well-built sentences doing a solid job of making sense. When I read mystère de l’oralité, I tripped on the words and fell headfirst into another form of thought. Something of a transe, or a revery – receptive, and yet infinitely more active – in which reading had to become writing, and writing took the form of the poem above. Mystère de l’oralité. Its original title was Dit du mystère de l’oralité, in reference to a medieval form of poetry, but somewhere along the line the “Dit” (“saying”) fell away. I don’t want to put it back, but I don’t want to forget it was there, either. There it is, the grounding of literary tradition, haunting the space before the first words like a missing limb.
The writing of Mystère de l’oralité, and the poem itself, remind me consistently of a conversation I had with Claude Ber, back in the Spring of 2020, a few words of which have lived on in me, and are, as of this Spring 2024, making their way into a chapter – called Le Mystère de l’oralité - of my doctoral dissertation. In this conversation four springs back, I was telling her about my thesis project – an agripoetic approach to contemporary orchards and orchard writing – and asking if she would advise its creative component. She told me about how the verb savourer, to taste, shares a root with the verb savoir, which means to know. Saveur is taste ; savoir is knowledge. And the latin root they have in common, sapēre, means “to have a flavor” (“avoir de la saveur”). I also remember her talking about the Tree of Knowledge and the Tree of Life, the impact Hebraic myths of Eden and its symbolic trees had on centuries of orchard poetry, as well as on the imaginal association of tasting and knowing, of fruit and world changing (shattering) knowledge.
Relating earthly foods and word-based nourishment is something at work in Claude Ber’s very understanding of poetry. The author of many collections of poems (most recently Moltings, in 2020, and Death is never like, the fifth edition of which came out the same year), she has also written articles about the writing of poetry. This theoretical work is derived from practice, anchored in her own particular art of negotiating between the movement of the spoken word and the fixedness of the written one. This is the work not of writing poetry (écrire de la poésie), but of writing in poetry (écrire en poésie), poetry being to Claude Ber a language onto itself, or rather an alteration of language, making of the poem a way of thinking, a form of knowledge. And this is where the mystery of orality crops back up. Because, for Claude Ber, “poetry is fundamentally related to orality because of its closeness to physicality”. Forever cautious to generalize, obstinately grounding her observations in her own practice of writing, she suggests : “Perhaps […] the rhythm of a poem is the living memory of the body in language, a link to the body, its vital movements and participation in cosmic cycles […]”. She goes on to say that our first relationship to language, as infants – through the ear, the mouth – is with a voice. Adding “And what is a voice, if not a body, a rib cage, lungs, a throat, vocal cords, a mouth, a tongue, lips…?”.
Speaking is thus a physical act, and that physicality is still at work in poetic language, not only through the rhythm and sonorous qualities of a poem, but also in a network of images linking poetry to elements of orality such as eating, and breathing. Quoting chamanic rituals in which words are transmitted from mouth to mouth, tongue to tongue, as something to eat and swallow, Claude Ber insists that this “physical, nearly gustatory, perception of words” is still at work today. Claude Ber’s intuition that words and eating can be taken together, and that this association is not only an old image, but a contemporary reality, is an important source for my writing and research. It resonates with what Corinne Peluchon means by mystère de l’oralité : everything that goes through the mouth, that goes on in the mouth (words, spit, song, food, cries ; eating, speaking, tasting, kissing, crying…). Why does the even-keeled philosopher call this miss-match reality of which she has made a category a “mystery”? She seems to suggest that orality, understood in its vocal, alimentary and respiratory dimensions, is a sphere we have only begun to understand, and the site of another kind of knowledge than a vision-based one.
A knowledge that is not power, distance and division, but participation, closeness and mixing. Claude Ber characterizes her approach to writing poetry as a direécrire, a practice which oscillates between spoken and written words, sight and voice, body and spirit, the closeness of emotion and the distance of critique. She lists these binaries only to say that her writing is fueled by the tension between them. Her poems carry, she writes, the trace of a lost language, a spoken living one, but they also consent to mourning its loss. This idiom is both language before writing, but also speech before words (Antonin Arthaud), the babble or stutter of sound in search of words. I remember well an afternoon in Paris where Claude Ber told me about glossolalia, an antique and medieval form in which a cacophony of sounds and words both recognizable and invented was the premise of sacred knowledge, something to be deciphered…Maybe that’s what I most want to honor, to pay tribute to, in Claude Ber’s poetics : the effort to create a working theory of how words are alive, and to explore the limits of that life, taking up this mystery of orality and formulating part of its promise, through a particular way of writing of poetry and a partial reading of literary history.
NB : Quotes are from a 2009 conference for Le Printemps des Poètes, intitled “Poésie et oralité”. The translations are mine.
Claude Ber
Claude Ber has published over twenty books, mainly poetry, but also plays and essays. Translated into several languages and featured in numerous reviews, anthologies, and collective publications, she gives readings and lectures in France and abroad. After completing a double degree in literature and philosophy, she taught in secondary and higher education, notably at Sciences Po, and held academic and national posts. The studies and reviews devoted to her writing underline the singularity of her approach, which late French poet Marie-Claude Bancquart described as "considerable for its unity of inspiration as well as for the lucid richness of its means", and of which Thierry Roger notes, "One must see and hear this superb claudication, signature of a living, unstable equilibrium, a creative dissymmetry (...)". Claude Ber has been awarded the Ivan Goll International Poetry Prize and the Légion d'honneur for her life's work and her commitment to gender equality and human rights.
Latest books: Main tenant Ed. Les lieux dits, Mues, Ed. PUHR 2020, La Mort n'est jamais comme Ed. Bruno Doucey 2019 (5th ed.), Il y a des choses que non, Ed. Bruno Doucey 2017.
Source: https://www.claude-ber.org/
_____