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PARTISAN REVIEW
banned from it under the impact of looking for purity of lyricism;
epic poetry, for instance, has been largely abandoned . In my new
book I wanted to say as much as possible by mixing verse and prose ,
and by mixing quotations from poems and poems of other poets
which I consider to be connected with the tone and thinking of the
book. At the same time, as I mentioned before, I feel less and less in–
clined to write essays .
It
seems to me that there are too many words
in articles and essays.
RB:
What about novels?
eM:
Novels are an anathema to me.
RB:
From your own poems and the "inscripts" that you have in–
cluded in your book, I gather that you think that the way to deal
with sin is to have a prospective conscience rather than a retrospec–
tive conscience.
eM:
Yes. There was a time in my life when I went through a very
difficult period of constant retrospective thinking about my short–
comings, my sins and misdeeds in the past. A friend of mine , a
follower of existentialist philosophy , told me that I practiced what in
the middle ages was called
delectatio morosa,
a term used to describe
the way in which monks used to think about their past misdeeds and
sins, meditating on them for days instead of doing what was neces–
sary at the present. She said that our past is not static and that it con–
stantly changes according to our deeds at the present. The things
that we do at the present throw a light backwards upon our previous
shortcomings and deeds ; every act of ours presently performed
transforms the past.
If
we make use of them as a motoric force , for
instance, that pushes us to do good things , we redeem our past and
give a new meaning and a new sense to our past actions .
RB:
Would you say then that the criterion of being good is striving to
be better?
eM:
I don't know whether we should think in these categories .
Usually we are besieged by our past. We constantly think in terms of
the past and the future . We visualize how we were and how we will
be . We do not think very much in terms of the present.
RB:
In your book you say: "Nature soon bores me . . . " and later
you say: "After all, Nature was not the object of my contemplation.
It was human society in the great cities of the modern era , 'the
pleasures of the depraved animal ,' as Baudelaire says." Is it human
capacity to deal with sin that interests you?
eM:
No, I said that the human world interests me more than the
