up my idiosyncrasies – Marcel Proust‏

by richibi

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    “Holy Man“ (1989)
 
       Eric Fischl
 
          ______
 
 
Marcel Proust is not an easy read, 
of literature it is surely its Everest,
not an easy climb, but from its peak
the world takes on an entirely other
order
 
an English-speaking friend has 
suggested he might try to read it 
again, but not in French this time,
I countered that that way he’d miss
the many crevices and crags, the
slippery slopes and lethal ledges, 
that give shape to the mountain, 
which the French grammar would
apply in all its intricate 
manifestations
 
part of the pleasure in reading 
Proust is the poetry, where style 
and substance coexist to create 
magic, and inspiration  
 
the sentences are long, they wind 
on for often pages, you need to be 
able to tell the subject from the verb
despite sometimes extended
intervening distances
 
but the grammar is sound throughout, 
except for in a couple of isolated
instances, grammar that would test
even a Frenchman
 
indeed Proust is where, I profess, I 
truly learned to speak French
 
there’s another mountain
 
 
the conceit is that someone rings 
the bell at their Combray cottage,
and after 3300 pages someone 
rings at the same door again
 
in between the years have passed,
they are the fruit of Proust’s 
“recherche”, search, investigation,
quest, a term that can’t be fully 
expressed as such in English, 
which doesn’t express the 
confluence of cold science and 
candle-lit spirituality expressed 
in the French word
 
in dissecting the very entrails of a 
flower, a tea cup, a crumpet, an eye, 
a brow, a lip, a gesture, a frown, a 
smile, a gait, Proust describes his 
own world, concocts it, minutely, 
meticulously, until you realize this 
can be only his perception, that 
therefore all of our interpretations 
are but our individual perceptions, 
our myriad unique worlds
 
from which one can begin to 
shape one’s own
 
later with Wittgenstein, the 
philosopher, this became known 
as phenomenology, the idea that 
we are confined for knowledge to 
our private views of the world,
wherein language plays, manifestly, 
a crucial part
 
in the beginning, if you’ll remember, 
was the word
 
curiously, in French, it is the verb, in
the beginning, implicitly suggesting 
a word of action 
 
 
Proust had been prescient as Freud, 
uncovering an inner world we’d always 
believed was outside us
 
at the top of his priorities Proust
chose art, personal expression,
it’s all that we can return to the 
world
 
and what else could be our purpose
 
 
Richard
 
psst: bonne lecture, Kurt