From the Poet to Poetry, from Poetry to Poet

Author(s): William Kluback

Source: Cardozo Studies in Law and Literature , Spring - Summer, 1994, Vol. 6, No. 1
(Spring - Summer, 1994), pp. 87-101
Published by: Taylor & Francis, Ltd. on behalf of Cardozo School of Law

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 From the Poet to Poetry,
From Poetry to Poet
William Kluback

Wherever we turn in Fondane's work, whether we speak of Gaston

Bachelard or Lev Shestov, of history or the unhappy conscience, of aesthetics
or the cinema, we remember that in all these discussions and commentaries
there is the poet and poetry. Prose and verse merge. Every insight found in
an essay emerges anew in a poem. There it will take on a new life and form.
There it will join a multitude of other poems, of collections, and the part
of a poet's legacy. This is the legacy that has concerned us for several years,
and has made this work possible. The poetry of Fondane is distinct in the
sense of reality. There is no fluff of beautiful words creating beautiful
imagery. Man is not driving away from the world. He is a being of despair
and bewilderment. He faces the absurdity of death.
This despair and anguish came from his Jewishness, from the reality
of exile, which he lived not only in Romania, but also in France. The
reminders of anti-Semitism were everywhere. Fondane could not escape a
destiny which he knew hung over every son and daughter of Israel. It hung
over the people. It hung over God. Fondane was the eternal questioner, his
voyages were unending, his dissatisfactions profound and disturbing. He
knew that powerful confrontation between death and knowledge. The beauty
of reason never moved without the shadow of death. Man seemed eager to
bear this punishment. The enticements of knowledge had no equal. He also
knew that death was beyond reason, was a stumbling block for it. It remained
a mystery which every religion sought to encounter and conquer. But no
religion conquered death. No God conquered the Serpent. In the midst of
these two powers, of death and knowledge, Fondane sought life. But this life
remained part of his Jewish destiny. Here knowledge found its greatest
challenge: a world indifferent to a people who remained believers in a strange
God of Law, whose presence is hidden and whose justice never belonged to
creation. Law brought God's word into a world bearing the punishment of
death, i.e., a world in which death was unknown, where man became
conscious of its reality, where life was easily crushed. Man knew the
difference between the knowledge of life and the absurdity of death.
We read Fondane's poems gathered in two collections. One is called
Ulysse. This collection was edited in 1929 on the return of Fondane from

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Argentina. It was published in 1933 in Brussels in the "Cahiers du Journal
des Pontes." It has been added on to and there are variants. Titanic was
written during and after a second trip to Argentina. It was published in
Brussels in 1937 in the same journal. Fondane made minor corrections to
the texts of this collection.!
With his poems, Fondane writes conversations with the world and
man. The poet writes from the world to the world. There is no escapism, no
Garden of Epicurus, no presence of the Kingdom. There is the confusion,
the suffering, the unexpected devastation. There is also love of life, the beauty
of colors, the pleasures of youth, the goodness of human contacts. Every
poem has an ambiance in which we hear new voices, melodies and the cries
of anguish. Should we generalize and create bridges from poem to poem,
find linking concepts and key words? Perhaps we should. It would please
our understanding. Perhaps we should not. It would please our imagination,
our sense of imagery, and our delight in the parable and paradox. It would
be prudent to turn to the poems we have selected and think about them.
Let the pen create its own reality. Let it fascinate and startle us.
Among a group of poems that were collected and published in Non
Lieu in 1978 under the heading "Scattered Poems," there is one with which
we would like to begin our discussion. These poems were written from
1940-1944.

The earth ends somewhere, life ends somewhere,

what difference does it make! the clouds
float into the sea, they float fleeing, ungraspable,
and I am among this herd of sheep
life before, a child,
when I wrote, with a stick, in the sand. (299)

A melancholy lies over these verses permeating the imagery of

sadness and hopelessness. The poet belongs to the herd that has no resting
place. There are no more safe harbors. The forces of destruction have become
painfully sophisticated. They have created what the novelist Norman Manea
calls "the profession of self-abasement," the "disgust syndrome." The word
is no longer man's finest achievement. It is the source of his elimination.
In the word, he is crushed. In the word he becomes the tool of malfeasance.
We read the poem again and again. We seek an image which identifies the
poet, which allows us to put out our hand to him. We can do it and yet we
can't. We watch the clouds float into the sea, we are part of a herd, death
is close. It is not an illusion for us but the experience of the poet's
circumstance in which we all live. We are comforted by our secure and
pleasant surroundings. Fondane belonged to a past that will not return. But
why do we delude ourselves? We know that our comfort is not real, that our

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malfeasance is not moderated. We know that it has increased. We walk alone
with a knowledge that has brought death in more and more subtle
dimensions.
We begin to read the poems of the collection called Ulysse. We read
the first poem which begins with these words: "I was a great poet born to
sing joy, but I sob in my cabin." We read the last lines: "Alone! I was alone
in the world with myself, a dead leaf, like a dead leaf." The beginning points
to the journey that Ulysses, recognized by the poet as a Jew, takes in a world,
known and unknown, real and illusory. The end is the image of the dead
leaf. We are all like dead leaves. We are all children of death gathered in the
Fall into heaps of leaves. No one and no thing escapes this fate. But what
we are fills the lines between the beginning and the end. This is a journey
we take with Fondane. We follow him from poem to poem, knowing that
he has a story to tell. It is the story of an exile, of the wandering Jew, who
like Kafka's Hunter Gracchus, has no harbor. In Kafka's tale, the words of
the Hunter shatter our tranquility:

Nobody will read what I say here, no one will come to

help me; even if all the people were commanded to help
me, every door and window would remain shut, every-
body would take to the bed and draw the bed clothes
over his head, the whole earth would become an inn for
the night. And there is sense in that, for nobody knows
of me and if anyone knew, he would not know where I
could be found, and if he knew where I could be found,
he would not know how to deal with me, he would not
know how to help me. The thought of helping me is a
sickness that has to be cured by taking to one's bed.2

The story of the Hunter Gracchus was a long one, to be told only
by the Hunter, but now the historians know the story. It is the story of the
Jew, of the eternal exile. The story is told at sea, in a harbor, on a journey.
It is told everywhere that men tell stories and others want to hear them. It
is told everywhere men have not forgotten the powers of the imagination,
where poetry is still alive and image excites the sense of wonder. It is the
story of a wandering truth which refuses to be caged. It is the story of a
wandering Job. If Kafka spoke of the wandering of the Hunter Gracchus,
Fondane also spoke of a wandering that began many centuries ago, too far
back to have any clear vision. In a poem called "Preface," he spoke of this
event:

It was a long time ago that

the specter of history began
the beginnings were already forgotten

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 the fabulous origins were no more
when I was born into the world
in the midst of Intrigue
like an event that was forever foreseen
and, nevertheless, like a surprise
a disturbing personage
who could leave everything in place,
who could change everything,
the meaning of action, the course of motion
who established from the beginning
prodigious domination over the text, strange to the living
the right to stammer our the best replies
by improvising a world alongside the Author
and suddenly, in spite of the Plan,
to introduce itself into the being of a person
crying, overwhelmed, to the public in the
loges, "for my thirst there is not enough reality!" (26)

The poet came into the world like a cinder in the eye of reason. He
was that subversive and indignant voice which shook the confidence of those
for whom harmony and balance were the supreme virtues, whose souls
fashioned the order in which everything else could be explained. These were
our moral and political dictators. The philosopher Shestov told us that for
God anything is possible and our reason found that difficult to absorb.
God could not violate the laws he had given to man. In his relationship to
man - and we must assume that such a relationship existed - He bound
Himself as well as man. How gentle and pleasurable that are the needs of
balance and harmony, how satisfying it is for our self-confidence. Abraham
taught us that not only are all things possible for God, but that all things
are possible for man. Abraham walked with Isaac, preparing to sacrifice, and
this mocks and terrifies our moral sense. No matter how we question
Abraham, how we fling about the term absurd, we cannot avoid the fact
that for man also, all things are possible. This shocks and startles the
imagination. Man could, as the poet said, leave everything in place. He could
change everything. Nothing that we can say about him determines that
drama of his life. The absurd is possible, the rational is, at times, impossible.
Man leaps over it and does the impossible and the unexpected. This frightens
those who want to embrace man in reason, who send for the cage of
rationalism to imprison this bird of flight, who knows not where he goes
nor how long he can fly.
"I1 n'y a pas assez de r&el pour ma soif!" More often we imagine
that there is too much reality for our thirst. The world, its events, its

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personalities, its ideologies, its conflicts, seem to overwhelm us, and we
escape, finding refuge in some safe harbor of moral certitude, understanding
the world from some preordained logic or revelation. But there are those
for whom this escape is not possible, for whom there is no safe harbor, and
no preordained revelation. There is only wandering and ceaseless question-
ing. But why this questioning? Why is there no satisfaction with what is?
Why does reality remain an enigma? Fondane was an unfortunate poet.
Fortune made him an exile. Fortune made him a son of Israel. He belonged
to a people who had no place in the scheme of reason. They were a fossil
people, a defiant and unredeemed people who, others believed, plotted the
destruction of the world to which they were forbidden to enter. They
remained a small people huddled about their God, preserving His Holiness
while the others mocked them. Fondane knew that no comprehension of
reality would explain this to him. He knew, like Shestov, that for God,
everything was possible. He knew that for man everything was also a
possibility. But what did that mean? For man, it was a paradox. With death,
man bought knowledge, he bought the knowledge of good and evil, he
bought wandering and search. For him, there would be no rest, even though
it was ordained that the Seventh Day he must rest. This was the rest of the
restless soul whose restlessness could never fulfill God's command. God's
command was an illusion. Fondane was pursued by the cage of reason which
would have given him rest, but he was like Ulysses. He would wander. He
was to know and embrace Sisyphus:

Sisyphus, old Sisyphus that you are thus used!

Will you surrender? Would I consent to the sole
right of force?
It was nothing, a trap.
We must not surrender. There is no escape, no
escape! (24)

If there are no safe harbors, no explanations, if there is only

ambiguity and ceaseless journeys, then we go on fascinated by the unknown
and the mysterious, listening always to the poet's voice, the one that is heard
by the Jew and has been heard for generations: "Pas d'issue, pas d'issue."
Fondane, when a young man, knew there could be no bridge between Athens
and Jerusalem, no bridge between Anaximander and Biblical creation. For
the former, everything proceeded from the One into the world of contin-
gency and accident. There are the words of the philosophers: "For everything
is either a principle or derived from a principle. But the infinite has no
principle - for then it would have a limit. Again, it is ungenerated and
indestructible and so is a principle. For what comes into being must have
an end, and there is an end to every destruction. Hence, I say, it has no

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principle, but itself is thought to be a principle for everything else and to
govern everything." This is Aristotle's summary of Anaximander's idea.3
The reasoning is clear. It satisfies our need for a rational presenta-
tion. We are pleased. The Bible begins differently: "In the beginning God
created the heavens and the earth." Every act follows from the Divine Will
and we always wonder if He could have done it differently. The poet knows
this Divine Will whose powers mock his understanding but exile his
imagination. For this reason, it is the absurd. He, like Abraham, will walk
in either faith or doubt, but he will walk, and he will say to his companion,
what he says to himself: "There is no escape, no escape." With these words,
Fondane faced the world, an accident in the scheme of things.
Fondane dedicated a poem to his friend and teacher Lev Shestov.
We listen:

How meager is the view which sees and does not scourge
the vision,
which sees but cannot gnaw into the world.
How meager is the spirit which thirsts only for itself
which swings to the pitching of the boats, which is
cast upon the land by the lurching of the sea,
which cannot incline the ocean's axis
nor discover a world fearing to change the sense of scriptures
delicate spirit tied to life
trying to drag along its life in the midst of death
like the Volga boatmen hauling along the steep bank,
the huge barges in the backwaters of the river. (88)

We imagine the Volga boatmen dragging these huge barges along

the river. We are reminded of Sisyphus. We don't have to imagine him
happy. We drag life with us, aware of little that will befall us, that will draw
death closer to our existence, and make it a more intimate part of our
experience. Shestov brought Fondane to a world of thought rejected by their
idealist contemporaries who lived from the enlightened traditions of
rationalism, from the visions of Anaximander, Descartes, Spinoza, Leibniz
and above all, Hegel. It was Shestov who sharpened his vision, who forced
him to love the Bible and made him never to forget that the Serpent
promised the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge that would make men like gods,
and men ate the fruit and they found it good. This was a promise men never
forgot. What they forgot was the death which their knowledge revealed.
With death absurdity came into the world as an instrument of human
imagination. We have learned to be masters of the absurd. We have learned
to be men. The Serpent gave us his most lethal weapon. We have learned to

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use it well. We are destroyed when the absurd is taken from us. We lose our
humanity.
But this is the world of the absurd. We wonder how we live in such
a world in which we ask again and again: "A quoi bon tout cela?" and we
have no answer to our despair, but we repeat the question because there is
nothing else for us to do. Death follows us everywhere and it burns
constantly at the fringes of life. We elaborate Fondane's question with
another from Norman Manea in his piece, "The History of an Interview"
in On Clowns, the Dictator and the Artist: "How could one 'resist' in this
world of the absurd? Isn't every attempt to be authentic, to rehabilitate the
truth, inevitably prey to manipulation and defacement?" (174)4
Our reason backs away. It stutters and mumbles and then with
audacious self-confidence declares: This is not a legitimate question. The
burden has fallen away, but neither Fondane nor Manea is free. Reason can't
erase the question. For them, the question is real. It is real because it touches
and then penetrates what men have never understood: the meaning or the
non-meaning of creation. The descriptions which Anaximander and Aris-
totle found so easily presentable, which could be expressed with confidence
and ease, are not possible for us. We witness a truth which philosophy cannot
put aside, a truth with which the philosopher Franz Rosenzweig began his
great text, The Star ofRedemption : "Philosophy takes it upon itself to throw
off the fear of things earthly, to rob death of its poisonous sting, and of
Hades its pestilential breath." All that lives belongs to death. In the latter
it finds life.
Fondane reminded us not only of our folly, but of our cruelty. He
reminded us of how sophisticated we have become in the ways of malicious-
ness, that we have set aside the traditional devils which make our literature
exciting and revealing. The old devils have resigned. New ones have learned
new ways. These we have watched with horror, but they have much yet to
teach us. Their ways are still to be revealed. We are moved with fear and
anguish at the new possibilities. Fondane gives us hints of what he has
experienced and we listen as the poem to Shestov continues:

How meager are the rivers

for those whose life belongs to the land,
tranquility seated on the warm terraces.
I have seen the waters mount to their edges
it soaked their heart, it dampened their souls.
I saw and I cried "help"
I had already cried the first days of the world
Am I to cry till the end of days?
I saw so many of the living suddenly become the dead

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 and so many of the dead throw their line to the
muddy waters of life.
So many sources to which my lips were sealed
without thirst, and so many thirsts remained un-
quenched,
so many shades, so many undefined regions,
that I often banged on the table and cried
"What is the good of all this?"

Fondane had many stories to tell. He was a man in exile. He

belonged to a people whose place in the world was known only to God, and,
perhaps, it was now even forgotten by Him. The story is a tale which the
poet will utter till the end of days. The story is not about himself. That
would be a selfish story. It is the story of a man who must move from place
to place, who must speak many languages, who sees the suspicion of his
fellowmen, who one day is forced to wear the star and tell the other that he
is a Jew, a wanderer. He remembers an ancient language, and uses a few of
its words to remind him of his origins, cursed or blessed, he doesn't know.
Death and life moved quickly from one to the other, but this movement
was different from those of other people. Jews lived differently. They died
differently. They lived, others thought, as worshippers of an evil God, a
demiurge. The others were taught this by the man Marcion. Many believed
him. Their God was angry and incomprehensible. No man knew His ways
and no man drew close to Him without the feeling of destruction. He loved
only those who were fiercely devoted to Him and lived by His command.
He was a God of Commandment. He demanded obedience. Fondane never
forgot this God. He questioned Him and often longed to forget Him.
Moments of peace made it possible not to think of Him. He had
commanded rest, and Fondane enjoyed this rest from Him, but this was
only illusion. There was no rest from Him. He commanded the impossible.
Fondane knew that in this life his story could only be told by a fool or
perhaps by an idiot as Shakespeare put it in Macbeth: "It is a tale told by
an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing."
The poem concluded with these lines:

Did we know if the morning was real

the great morning of men
and their sun was shared among them in blood
was it true, was it false?
what was the good of so many navigators, so many
world voyages, new continents, lost paradises,
panoplies, consciences,
where the princes of exile drag their boredom

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 among the remembrances of trumpet and slaughters?
Enough, Enough of my insomnia!
Their world is perhaps there but am I in it?
I walk past and nothing is in the mirror,
not even a hole.
In vain I play with words that are no longer used
like the hammer with which we redo the used and
twisted nails and hide them again
No longer is a song given to man
I cannot close my eyes
I must cry to the end of time
"We will not sleep to the end of the world"
I am only a witness. (88)

We listen carefully to the words: We will not sleep to the end of the
world. We are reminded of Pascal's words, those which Shestov loved so
dearly: il ne Taut pas dormir pendant ce temps-i (we must not sleep during
that time). Pascal referred to Jesus' search for companionship. The disciples
slept. Peter did not have one hour for Him. Fondane grasped this loneliness.
He was forsaken and alone. Civilization offered no protection. Reason
became folly, and folly sounded like reason. We must not sleep until the
end of the world. Jesus, like his fellow Jews, is eternally betrayed. The Jew is
eternally discarded. Fondane and Pascal join hands. Shestov is among them.
They know this eternal insomnia which no medicine could remedy. It came
down through the generations. It was foreseen. It was foretold. No man or
woman can sleep in a world where God is abandoned to those who seek for
themselves His majesty and truth, for those who have converted Him into
a model of rationalism. No one can sleep in a world where death is not the
essential problem, where it has been removed from our deepest concern. We
listen to the great Neo-Kantian philosopher Hermann Cohen, and we hear
these words: "For death is a metaphysical evil, and mystics may brood about
its cause or possible abolition. This is no theme for moralists, and therefore
also not for true religiosity."5
How comforting are these words of the great Neo-Kantian. Reason
and rational faith have removed man's greatest stumbling block to his
comprehension of his existence. God's punishment is not a punishment. It
is only an illusion. Knowledge will give man his divinity. The transition
from nature to civilization is within the domain of reason. For Shestov, as
well as for Fondane, this transition comes not with the illusion of death,
but in its reality, one that mocks our attempt to find meaning and purpose,
one which shocks our reason and leaves it helpless. We stammer with our
words. We cry with Fondane: "What is the good of all this?" It is not reason

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that challenges us. It is contingency that is painful and disturbing. This is
the reality which Hegel vowed to crush, to erase from philosophy. Death
teaches us about contingency and accident. This is the story of Fondane,
the son of Israel.
We read another poem with no title or dedication:

My father, what have you done with my childhood?

What have you done with the little sailor in blue?
I was happy, happy among those who were unhappy,
the red pepper it was so fresh!
Later i saw Charlot and I understood the emigrants,
later, even later myself...
Emigrants, diamonds of the earth, savage salt,
I am of your race,
I bring like you my life in my suitcase,
I eat like you the bread of my anguish,
I no longer ask what is the meaning of the world,
I put my firm fist on the table of the world,
I belong to those who have nothing, who want
everything
I will never know how to resign myself to that. (45)

From land to land, he wandered in body and soul. The France which
he loved deeply, whose language and literature he adopted and shared with
his Romanian heritage, betrayed him. He had a small circle of friends,
Cioran, Paulhan, de Gaultier, but he was a foreigner in the land of Gaston
Bachelard. He was born to be an emigrant, to a people who were always
emigrants, whose land was a Promised Land in which other peoples dwelled
and found attachment. He was an emigrant from a Holy Language which
he no longer knew, whose alphabet he remembered and whose eternal cry
he repeated: "Hear O Israel the Lord Our God is One." He knew these
words. He carried them with him. They were the words of the emigrant,
carrying an emigrant God. He had nothing. He wanted everything. But the
world had neither place nor purpose for him and his people. They would
live with others. They would fight for their ancient lands for which others
would also fight. He carried his life in a bag, one which he shared with all
the other emigrants who roamed the earth. This was a fate given to him by
his father, by Abraham whom God commanded to leave the land of his
father. He carried only a divine promise. It would not be through history
that the promise would be fulfilled. But there is always faith. His God would
no longer wander with His people and His Name would be One amongst
men. Fondane put his "poing dur sur la table du monde." With these words,
with a fist of defiance, he gathered his companions. He found Job and

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Jeremiah. He found that legion of fighters, known and unknown, who
refused to surrender their illusions, who would not forget their God. They
were always with Him in exile, one which He had given them. Fondane was
the poet of the emigrants. He gave them voice. He reminded them that: "Je
mange comme vous le pain de mon angoisse." Never could he be free of
this anxiety. It was his life. Only death could take it from him, but it would
take also his life. He lived from exile, from the reality of the emigrant, from
their memories. The poet called the emigrants the diamonds of the earth,
the savage salt, "diamants de la terre, sel sauvage." He wrote from their
uniqueness, from their message, from their struggles. They were the great
subversives, the rebels, the revolutionaries, the teachers of faith and hope.
They were the believers in a world that had bowed down to atheism, cynicism,
and indifference.
Each poem brings us a new vision, new images, new struggles. We
read and we listen. We need no discourses. We need only a deeper imaginative
sensitivity. We need patience and tranquility to think and wonder:
These are not the visions of insomnia.
I wish! The isles are moving.
I wish! Here is the ancient blood returned,
the villages, the banners.
I wish! Here is the daily bread which comes forth
on my commandment
in the antique laws and the fallowed lands.
I make the wheat sprout in the dead stones
Roses come forth in the old bibles
Oh! noble man above all that, the powerful
man who both decides and does all
- a man, not a dream
- a man, not a rough voice!
- a man without knees, who sings
and which nothing can sweep from the earth
while he sings
like a dead leaf in the season of the wolves. (85)

The poet speaks of a man without knees, " un homme sans genoux,"
the man who is not a dream, who sings the ancient tales of his people, who
knows the story and it dwells in his soul. He knows that the story is his life.
This is the story of exile which the poet allows to bloom. This is the story
that is his life, the story which the world must hear. It is the story of life.
Without this story, there is only death, the wind-swept leaves which are
gathered for destruction. The poet has always sung his tales. Ion sang the
verses of Homer. The latter on the island Chios sang the verses of his great

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epic. Virgil sang and Dante sang, Milton and Blake also sang. Fondane heard
this singing. He heard also the songs of the ancient Psalms. He heard David
and the melodies of the lyre. We listen to Fondane's songs and we hear the
ancient voices. We hear their songs. We read the poem dedicated to his wife
Genevieve:
I would not know how to tell you about the water
I feel preceded, I feel followed by it,
it scourges my heart
it crushes my eyes and slanders distances
it is dirty and spits out the fate of a flea
it fashions time
it demands the headstrong.

I come from a little white village where the cows piss,

the sun shines upon the brassieres of hay,
a scent of the morning is washed in water
ants march in long lines on my calm hands,
a goat sipped the milk,
fresh lettuce, you are quiet,
the flesh was so calm
a village of little Jews hanging in the air
the sidewalks were strewn with dirty ribbons,
I was stifled with happiness, with disgust,
that smelled of fresh bread and salted herring,
love smelled the warm dung.

The poet came from a small white village, a village of Jews, where
life was rustic and calm. Here man knew the simple and sensual pleasures,
the momentary sadnesses and the momentary joys. Life and death were
partners in the course of human existence. Men recognized the realities of
work, of weather, of food and conversation. The larger world of cities, of
ideologies, of politics and international conflicts were far, far away from
daily life. Men didn't worry about idealism or materialism. Life brought
forth its own attitudes and debates. It had its own sense of honesty and
deceit, charity and maliciousness. It was a microcosm of human relationships
and needs which hadn't found its way into textbooks and lectures. But
Fondane remembered. His poetry never left the everyday life of satisfactions
and needs. Life revolted against the idea. It refused the imposition of ideas.
It knew, instinctively, that this imposition suffocated and crushed the
unpredictable quality of daily work. But life in the village was not ideal.
Men strived for their families. They sought education and change. They fell
prey to those who created scapegoats for their miseries, who turned their

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lives into slavery. The Jew was always there to fill this role, to provide the
actors in the conspiracies which brought suffering to their lives. The poem
goes on:

I sang all that but I wanted to leave

I wanted the universe deserted
I wanted the enormous cities where the sun is black
tearing the shirts of men
crying to them my madness and my thirst
I wanted the barren, salty and supple Ocean.
Ocean! I gather you on my breast!
You are much too great, but your hairs are fine,
in my little village, I believed in you so firmly,
your power overwhelmed my body
would I one day find you so pale?
At the cry of the fishmonger I felt you naked
do you suffer like men?
Your eyes brought me pity, your burning eyes.
If you could at least stop yourself for a moment,
your course is endless!
How terrible is the solitude, speak?
If I could I would love you like a sister.
I would help you cross the inhuman zones
hand in hand. (31-32)

From the village, to the city, to the ocean, the poet journeyed in
search of the unknown. This journey was endless, but not purposeless. The
poet sought the companionship of the ocean. Its vastness filled his
imagination. He spoke to it of suffering and solitude, of movement and
indescribable mystery. The ocean was the universe which the poet longed
for. It was the infinite distance which moved from the human to the
non-human. Fondane spoke to Genevieve of this unknowable longing in
him to travel the lands and the seas. No cage could hide him. Only death
would reduce him to a motionless quietude. Death was the supreme foe. It
would bring him from the imagination and thought, to an abominable
stillness. It alone reminded him of his limitation, of the being he called self.
Death defied his reason, stunned his imagination. It was the punishment
for his knowledge. The more he increased and explored the latter, the more
death became reality.
In the midst of exile, of loneliness, of never-ending voyages, there
was an affirmation of life, a miraculous yes to a world of no's, an audacious
faith in God whose presence was painfully hidden:

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 Yes, I loved the world.
How often, Sun, I saluted you
for having burned away my clarity,
I covered myself with my voice,
I moved in the silence which grated upon me,
I loved strength, hard barks,
the oxen, whose noses touched the emptiness,
the truthful things, quiet, soothing,
the peasants with their hoarse voices, their
tanned skin,
the tranquil cover of calmness.
This is the world. (55)

But the world is more than a pastoral image. Abel pleased God, but
murder brought about civilization. It followed upon the violation of the
prohibition. Man's movement from nature to civilization comes with death
and murder. Both bring reason and knowledge, will and imagination. Man
discovered that Abel belonged to a pre-civilized humanity. It is a world of
death. Its pastoral existence crushes a world built on knowledge, action and
death. The poet remarked at the end of his poem:

Greater my thirst than the world,

greater my hunger than the world,
no song, no cup bearer,
no one from whom to seek help,
no sobbing or fierce God,
to pray, to confront,
no soothing voice, refreshing, no face. (55-56)
Fondane loved the world, the one created with violation and
murder, the one we call civilization. He loved the world created by Adam
and Cain. The great lawgivers sought only to modify and recreate it, but it
remained the world. Men sought to be like gods. Reason was deified and
remained the source of good and evil, seeking to know what was forbidden.
Reason learned to justify the history of Cain. It learned how to formulate
a divine plan, a teleological view of history. It taught man its most precious
wisdom: "What is reasonable is real, what is real is reasonable." Contingency
and accident are man's errors and falsities. These were the illusions of
existence. These could be overcome. Man's soul could be remade. It could
be educated by the reason of the State. We only need to learn, with
sophistication, to manipulate man and make a "profession of self-abase-
ment." Fondane loved the world, and like Job, he refused to allow it to
satisfy his thirst. The world was only the beginning of a new and vaster

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journey. The world was an infinite possibility. Fondane believed that
everything was possible for man, a being who must die because he ate the
fruit of eternal longing, the fruit of civilization, whose reality is death.
Fondane showed us how to speak to our visions, the ones we carry
from the past to the present, the ones we share with the world, the ones that
make our lives purposeful and meaningful. Fondane said to his vision:
"What is the Exodus? What is Babylonia? What is Jerusalem? " We listen to
these questions and we hear the calm voice of eternity. We hear what flows
below the world of death. We hear a melody of peace. But never, never will
that voice appear among us. It has no place in our world. Perhaps it will be
heard in the world to come.

1. See the editor's notes on page 318 of Le Mal des fant6mes (Paris: Plasma, 1980) in which
all of Fondane's poetry is collected. All numbered references after poems are from Le Mal
des fant6mes, and all translations are my own.

2. See "The Hunter Gracchus," The Complete Stories, Nahum Glatzer, ed. (New York:
Schocken Books, 1972), p. 230.

3. Early Greek Philosophy, Jonathan Barnes, ed. (New York: Penguin Books, 1987), p. 75.

4. Norman Manea, On Clowns, the Dictator and the Artist (New York: Grove Weidenfeld,
1992).

5. Hermann Cohen, Religion ofReason Out of the Sources offudaism (1918), Simon Kaplan,
trans. (New York: Frederick Ungar Publishing Co., 1972), p. 134.

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