Greek Lucidity

We can say, I think, that writing is sometimes as difficult as it is because it strains our vision, as if with our inner eye—our insight—we are trying to see the meaning, the significance of something we come up against, an object, an event, an imaginative world of our own making. But the just-right word or phrase or sentence we may eventually find depends just upon that vision-power, and good writers who command it may show us what it can produce.

The Nobel Laureate Odysseus Elytis is considered one of the three major modern Greek poets of the last century. He said of himself that he was a poet only, not a writer of prose, but the collection of what essays he did write, entitled Open Papers, shows what visionary powers he possessed to lay bare the significance of small fragments of life around him. In an essay there entitled “First Things First,” he speaks about his poetic work, and says ironically and outright that “my powers of observation are largely absent, and every attempt at description bores me to death.” If we can’t call it observation, imagine, then, how lucid a perception this passage of his a few pages later illustrates:

The way a bird leans to one side, or the yogurt vendor calls a little louder on the downhill at dusk, or the way an odor of burnt grass billows through the open window (from where?), the subtlest, most invisible marks assume their entire meaning, as though their only mission was to convince me that at any moment the beloved arrives.

This is a poet speaking for a time in prose. Prose wants to describe the husk, but poetry wants the seed. We could spend a good while trying to understand the sophisticated grammar and composition of that one sentence, but too much of that would deny Elytis what he wants to give us, his vision:

Here is the smallest canvas where my life’s ideogram can be embroidered; if you think it worth examining, it would be enough to yield a space whose meaning lies not in the natural elements that compose it but in their extensions and correlations inside us to our farthest limits, so that, in order to become easily read and understood, the entire significance of the vision is finally concentrated in the psychic clarity it presupposes and needs.

Vision in a psychic clarity. English has two difficult adjectives which together sum up, I believe, what Elytis is saying here. Something is perspicuous which is clear and lucid because of its precise constrction; and someone or something (like a poem) which is so discerning and keen that it sees through such a perspicuous structure is perspicacious. Poet and reader, artist and spectator must be these qualities to each other, in order to, as Elytis says again, “recompose the world, literally and metaphorically, so that the more its desires are actualized the more they contribute to the materialization of a Good acceptable to all humans.” Can we think of anything to be prized more at the moment than a philological way to materialize the Good?

Elytis won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1979. His acceptance speech, as well as the Nobel Foundation’s award speech, are very much worth the while to read. Both are available online.

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