However our universe - this structure which we live within - came to be, in our minds or outside, the one thing we constantly encounter is its persistent formal brilliance: its proliferation of figures, relations, shapes, interlockings, dynamics, patterns, interplays. I'm coming more and more to feel that it doesn't matter in the slightest if these forms are "ordered", or "intended", or "arranged", or "fated". It doesn't matter because they are
there. Their ontology is an almost infinitely powerful indicator; their mere existence is - yes, the most abused word -
miraculous. What is important too about formality is that even the most simple base design can yield up the most staggering complexity of figured interactions. We require a mere dimensional outlay on several planes for the result to grow exponentially, in mirrored branchings, into a fractalled network of stunning multiplicities.
This reflection on figures and figurativeness is so pressing to me right now because of three centers of thought in my current life: poetry, rhetoric, and chess. I am learning chess. I used to play, when I was younger, and then gave it up for many years. But over the last few months I've begun again, with an almost immediate and weirdly strong obsessiveness.
The moment when this occurred was very unusual, and almost revelatory. I was walking past a cafe and happened to glance to my left. In the corner of the cafe's lounge area, half lit, half in shadow, was an armchair with a small round table before it, and on this table, a chessboard. The pieces were arranged, ready for play. The white faced the black, and stared across their four awaiting rows of in-between blank. The forms lay in waiting, in potential power:
en puissance.
I was almost, and the word is not too strong, transfixed by this object. I stopped to look at it! My immediate thought, which struck me at that very moment by its strangeness, was: "that is a poem." It seemed obvious. That is, the chessboard, the object itself, was a poem. Not in a metaphorical sense, but in a purely everyday,
descriptive sense: that this was nothing different to the poetic object, rendered concrete. But not only was it one poem, it contained almost infinite possibilities for an infinity of other poems! Is this like every poem? Is every poem one arrangement of the pieces leading
ensuite to an infinity more? Are the poems we write mere freeze-frames of a particularly beautiful pawn structure? A deft and unseen knight check and pin? And then the pieces will move again? And then the music will begin again?
Such potential, such beauty, and yet how simple was the base design! Six differing pieces, to make a base syntax. Tactics would be its evolving and variable grammar. The pawn structure would be one syntactical base, and the two bishops, after activation, functioning in formation, would be another interposing structure, like images, or narration. The rooks, after castling, may form into a unified battery, say, on the F file, to unite like an advancing thematic. Chess too, has its literature, and we draw on its openings and end-games like our traditions, and modify them, and play less or more "by the book".
But I think the most important feeling to me from this image of the cafe corner was this: all of this simultaneous freedom and categorization, which in poetry, language and the world we take so often to be conflictive, is here unified, crucially, in the context of
the game. This idea itself of
the game is sufficiently powerful to resolve the binary. Order and individuality form here an almost entirely organic relationship. What tortures us, say, in Rhetoric then - the division of language into a discrete nomenclature, which fights against our freedom as individual language users (
"langage" et
"parole") - is here seen just as another play of interplays. Nothing else. Nothing to be sad over. Nothing to be wrought up about.
The binary resolves itself by the pure power of figuration. The figures are the answer. They are the question infinitely "re-posed".
***
It is crucial then that poetry, like chess, is simultaneously a game, and also exceedingly important. And no mutual exclusivity between these, whatsoever, just as there is none in chess between order and freedom. "Important", because as game it represents all the other structures we live by and within. "Unimportant" because, in spite of the representation, it remains what it always has been: a play. Both "play" and "a play", with their incumbent theatrical overtones ("
jouer un role"!) As the French poet Philippe Jaccottet says, to quote from memory inexactly, poetry is "en même temps un jeu et un témoignage du secret".
"En même temps!" Not, then, at different times, important and unimportant, depending on the poem or language or instance, but all of the time, always, both: game and non-game simultaneously and inextricably inter- and over- laced.
What else though, I wondered when I got home later the same afternoon, was in this moment of the chessboard in its corner, half-lit in light? More. There was more. I decided it was this: I felt that this has always been more or less my recurring idea about death: that whether we continue to exist or not once we are outside of the game - just as when we move outside of the poem - what occurred within the game itself - there, in the past of our left lives, which we have now finished living - remains both important, but also left behind, in the universe of the game that we have now left.
This seems obvious, but there is something there which is important for me. Often, when we are afraid of dying, I wonder if it isn't maybe because we imagine that we will still be
within the game after we are supposed to have left it. It is that image in Eliot for instance, in the Quartets I think, of the curtain falling and of us still standing there, waiting behind, in the surrounding darkness. But when the game finishes, you look at it - how you lost or how you won or how you drew - you knock over your king, you rise from the table.
You walk away.
You leave the game there, in its corner of the cafe, half-lit, in the sunlight. It remains with you, as a memory, or it dissipates. It is at once deeply, immensely important, and also an amusing trifle of momentary feeling and thought. After its existence, it doesn't matter if you step out into a street of sunlight or into a space of newness or unconsciousness. You enter a new game, even if it is the game of no forms.
And, simply, those forms and figures were but something, intensely, that you lived within.
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