Poetry or ‘the word as resistance’

A word can characterize a feeling, a sound, an aroma and so on. A word can embrace the hope, the eternity, or that which is beyond our concept of the ‘reality’.

A word can be the refuge for those that do not have words, those that have been excluded, without flag, without hope, to a side of the road.

When that ‘word’ becomes in shield and arm, then, it arises from the ashes, the hope, the fight, the emancipation and the resistance. This resistance is the ‘being of the word’, the word that becomes subject, the word that fights to survive and re-build the ‘other reality’. This word is already poetry, because it has touched the subtle of the being and thus begins to transcend the limits of our own history.

Poets can die, but their words born and reborn in each historical process with the force of a volcano, and there, it is when we understand that those words, that poem, that poet, remains as the last truth, and therefore as the ultimate hope: ‘the absolute resistance’.

When several words become transformed themselves in a powerful poem, then, the poem will be able to challenge the Nietzchenian Will of Power, this power which may be that ‘will’ which remains in the human beings as a subtle essence of the existence. This resistance, which becomes a poem is, ‘the captured’ by the feelings, better said, the sensation which may face herself as much as strong that the will of power. And it is there, where the ‘I’ penetrate the sensation together with the reality (the world), for what the poem has become a profound sensation that gives form to the subject.

“The given is (not) given to a subject; it is the subject that is constituted in the given” [1]

Then, the sensation, the word, the poem, the subject, has become one. This sensation has got transformation into a thought. It impels, and compels thought. Thus, It may be said with Deleuze that “All aesthetics is aesthetics of force”. This force remains immanent because it has been constructed by the same human-mud, the mud where those who resist (and have resisted) have submerged all their humanity and have been found by the sensation became in a piece of poetry. They have found a piece of truth, pain or hope, the consciousness have become one with the word and the sensation have thrown the subject into the world, into the existence and thus as Heidegger said, “man alone has dasein, and he cannot escape it” [2].

As Roque Dalton [3] wrote in his poem: “Like you” (1975).

“…and my blood boils up
and I laugh through eyes
that have known the buds of tears.
I believe the world is beautiful
and that poetry, like bread, is for everyone…”

These eyes, are those which Pessoa used to say “to think is to have a pain in the eye”. This ‘bread’ has not owner, it represents ‘the share’, it brings an inner power which is at the same time, food, thought and poetry. And Dalton continues:

“…and that my veins don’t end in me
but in the unanimous blood
of those who struggle for life,
love,
little things,
landscape and bread,
the poetry of everyone”

Here the ‘unanimous blood’, is the consciousness, of all the world. This blood is conscious bind by the Husserlian concept of consciousness as “consciousness of something…” and not as an abstract state of mind. Roque Dalton brings us to the absolute compromise with the whole existence, with the ‘resistance’ as the last hope.

In a similar fashion, the Simin Behbahani’s [5] poem called: ‘It’s time to mow the flowers’. It reaches the maximum power through the word, when the word itself gets involved in a deep metaphor that is resistance itself:

“It’s time to mow the flowers,
don´t procrastinate…”

These flowers may be the hope, a hope that fights to survive, to resist. There, the word would seem to be more than the sensation, because the metaphor is a pure-thought that has not fear.

“The meadows are in bloom:
Who has ever seen such insolence?
Bring your scalpels to the meadow
To cut out the eyes of flowers…”

Each line, challenges that ‘will of power’. With a fantastic coherence, the author opens her heart and illuminates each word with the whole meaning.

“My poems and the wild mint
bear messages and perfumes,
don’t let them create a riot with their wild singing.
My heart is greener than green,
Flowers sprout from the mud and water of my being.
Don’t let me stand, if you are the enemies of spring”

It has a profound beauty, a beauty that can be that which was described by Kant as “to find something beautiful, we must respond to it as it presents itself, without reasoning and analysis”.

Poetry is much more than the arbitrariness of the language predicated by linguistics such as Sausurre, because poetry as well as resistance are inherent to mankind and thus the signifier and the signified represent just the formalization of the sensation, and human beings are much more than symbols. It means that the whole itself is more than sum of the parts and thus words represent just the mean to structure the sensations, but poetry is by virtue an inherent element of the human ontology and resistance itself.

[1] Deleuze (1991)
[2] The “Dasein” is literally “To be there”. Dasein has no essence beyond what it can make itself be.
[3] Roque Dalton (1935-1975) was a revolutionary Salvadoran poet. “Like you” was written in 1975.
[4] Ferdinand de Saussure was a linguistic who developed a system based in the principle of arbitrariness of language.
[5] Simin Behbahani (1927) is an Iranian poet born in Tehran.