BEYOND THE TWILIGHT OF REASON
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Hilton Kramer:
Thank you. Mr. Milosz.
Czeslaw Milosz: I
listened attentively Mr. Donoghue's excellent remarks,
and I would like not to express disagreement but to embroider, to say
something about my experience as a poet in this century. The fact is that
those who mind their own business rather than the world's, as Mr.
Donoghue says, and who try to live in the country of the blue, beyond
the reach of accredited knowledge, have great difficulty in this century.
They are under constant social and ethical pressures. They are asked to
justify their existence by dealing with serious problems and not practicing
their art. The Enlightenment was a secular translation of the theology of
redemption to the worldly realm.
In
this respect, I believe the work of
artists who are forced to serve criminal utopias reflects the same ethical
and social pressures faced by those who oppose such criminal ideas. I can
say this as the author of anti-Nazi poems. I believe that as a poet I acted
under the same pressures of the ethical and the social as those who were
serving criminal states.
I must invoke here a poet, the late Joseph Brodsky, who was my
friend. He was not concerned with the social and the ethical. Paradoxi–
cally, he developed his art under the ultimate social and ethical pressure,
that of the Soviet state, but he was free, and he moved in his own realm.
Why? Because he served the elemental force of the Russian language.
It
is
not so simple for an artist to remain in his own realm because if he be–
haves like that, he is sentenced to write linguistics, not poetry. Brodsky
was an exception to the case. Poetry and literature in general are con–
nected with reality but in extremely complex ways.
I should add here something which hasn't been mentioned: memory.
We have no other means of knowing about phases of our civilization, of
our time, of the nineteenth century, for instance, than through literature.
Literature fixes those certain phases. The function of poetry and of fic–
tion's memory is very important. Unfortunately, if we look at this
century, an extremely small part of human experience has been fixed in
language and literature. We may wonder how small a percentage of what
mankind has lived remains in the language. The reasons are not only in
the reluctance or indifference of writers and poets, but in the very fact of
form. Form cannot be first if you want to reach high artistic levels, since
you are then bound by form, and that form is very often a betrayal of re–
ality.
It
cannot grasp reality.
Joseph Brodsky wrote in one of his essays one of the most penetrating
passages on the creative process in general, about Anna Akhmatova's
poem, "Requiem." She wrote it when her son was imprisoned. She
