Pierre-Albert Jourdan - paradox and its close kin aphorism are ways to approach the ineffable, the infinite, the immanent, and above all the state of unity between self and world that he devotedly, passionately sought

 

Pierre-Albert Jourdan, The Straw Sandals:

Selected Prose and Poetry, Trans. by John Taylor.

Chelsea Editions, 2011

Pierre-Albert Jourdan wrote down observations, notes, aphorisms and diary entries with such dedication to clarity as to remove the distinction between prose and poetry. This is a book of original reflection, marvel at the beauties of nature and keen awareness of the fleeting moments of life. "For Jourdan, writing was a tool for exploring what it means to have come into being, for determining how to live in the world every single day and thus how to die, and for intuiting possible spiritual truths in our midst. This task was always more important than seeing his work in print and establishing a name for himself. This radical genuineness now radiates from all the pages that, thankfully, are in print"—John Taylor, from his introduction.

How is it that writing so fresh, so spontaneous and with such deep friendship for the best of what mankind and world can offer writing that always strikes the right note is not harkened to more attentively? --Philippe Jaccottet

What Jourdan experiences in his morning garden, and records as an experience of the absolute, is […] the surprise of one who has returned to a beloved countryside after long months of absence, his marvel following upon the fatigue of highways and a sleepless night… --Yves Bonnefoy

For Jourdan, writing was a tool for exploring what it means to have come into being, for determining how to live in the world every single day and thus how to die, and for intuiting possible spiritual truths in our midst. This task was always more important than seeing his work in print and establishing a name for himself. This radical genuineness now radiates from all the pages that, thankfully, are in print. --John Taylor, Introduction

Very few books have the capacity to change a reader's life, but this splendidly moving anthology of writings by Pierre-Albert Jourdan is one of them. Introduced with perceptive brilliance by the well-known critic John Taylor, it includes selections from eight of the author's works, spanning the twenty years of his maturity--an arc cut short by lung cancer in 1981. Born in Provence in 1924, Jourdan was a masterly stylist in the French tradition of short prose, which can encompass aphorisms, brief meditations, prose poems, journal entries, or simply jottings--apercus of reality caught on the wing. But Jourdan's notes constitute much more than a literary oeuvre of remarkable deftness: they trace his evolution toward a state of secular grace. This is the testament of a self-effacing saint with no need of a church, who consistently keeps his foibles on display with humble, resolute honesty. Whether he is observing the behavior of animals, communing with the plants in his beloved garden, or pursuing his workaday existence in a transport company, he never fails to probe the essence of things, profoundly and unobtrusively. The Approach, composed in his last few months, as he traversed the painful wasteland of medical treatments, grants us a luminous vision of the astounding power of joy, a joy that does not shrink from the minutae of suffering, decline, and death. Despite his obvious links to Eastern doctrines of detachment, even in extremis he retains a sensuous delight in light-washed landscapes, the humming of bees, the small firework of a flower, and every "unexpected magnitude" revealed by the everyday world. It is easy to see why such celebrated poets as Yves Bonnefoy and Philippe Jaccottet have long admired Jourdan's rapt and courageous prose, which teaches us to die because it teaches us to live. We cannot thank John Taylor enough for bringing this unjustly neglected author to the attention of the English-speaking public in his sensitive translation: at every turn, he renders Jourdan's extraordinary range of tone and diction with flawless skill. --Hoyt Rogers, Review of Contemporary Fiction, Spring 2012

"For Jourdan, paradox and its close kin aphorism were ways to approach the ineffable, the immanent, and above all the state of unity between self and world that he devotedly, passionately sought. [. . .] Between moments of disgust with the human (and human-made) world, moments of rapture for the natural world, and, at the end, moments of fear at losing that very self's ability to sense, he writes in hope that the paradoxes he has provided will help to free us as well as himself: 'Writing throws out a bridge that it destroys with every page.'" - Kate Schapira, The Arts Fuse

"Each sentence sends the imagination spiraling off into a different spectrum of images and memories. Each phrase may be savored and contemplated as a separate poem:

The fragrance of cypress beneath the eyelids.

[. . .] We are deeply indebted to Chelsea Editions for making this important body of work available, and to John Taylor for supplying not just a literal translation into English sentences, but a luminous transmutation into English poetry." - Martin Abramson, Book/Mark

"Reading Jourdan's observations from Caromb is to move through the gamut of scale; to enter the flower-head with the bee and observe the rippling of the wind in the shrub or its effect on the peregrinations of the butterfly before looking up to the ever-changing cloudscapes of the mountain and the vast extent of the intervening country; to follow Jourdan as he walks, observing the fissile bank of the road or the cloud raked on a ridge. It is as if Jourdan's tiny stitches, his microcosmic observations, cumulatively sewed together a vast panorama of his native Vaucluse, in its definite-indefiniteness having few parallels outside such Shakespearian landscape music as Tippett's Triple Concerto or Britten's Midsummer Night's Dream." ~ Chris Miller, The Warwick Review, volume 5, No. 4, December 2011.

"Jourdan didn't write so much as attempt to purify the desire to write and scrub its purpose. His oeuvre is made of compressed prose texts, aphoristic notations, and pithy descriptions. Although he wrote with the disclosing regularity of a diarist, he insisted, 'One must learn to speak above oneself in the same way you can help someone climb over a wall.' [. . .] With The Straw Sandals, we finally have finely attuned English translations (with the originals en face) of Jourdan's entire first book, selections of his mid-life writings, and the whole of L'Approche or The Approach, his final work. . ." - Ron Slate, On the Seawall

". . .to our great good fortune, the publisher Chelsea Editions now offers us two beautifully designed, bilingual books editions of two major twentieth-century Francophone poets, translated magnificently by John Taylor. And, Nonetheless by Jaccottet and The Straw Sandals by Jourdan were published in 2011 and include selected prose and poetry, with introductions by the translator. [...] Both Jaccottet’s and Jourdan’s poetry is grounded in nature, yet it is far from being “nature poetry.” It is not “inspired” by nature the way some melancholy, idle observer watching a garden from behind a lace-curtained window might be. It is a poetry born out of the desire to cross the line between nature and the invisible beyond it; it is a poetry both thought and felt. For Jaccottet, as for Jourdan, looking at nature is never simply an act of letting your eye/I touch the surface of things; rather, it is an act through which your eye/I relearns how to see." ~ Daniela Hurezanu, The Quarterly Conversation, Issue 28, Summer 2012

Some poets try to make the leap through metaphor. Some, notably the Surrealists, try to make it through juxtaposition and “bad” combinations. Some, like the L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poets, don’t appear to want to make it at all. The leap is between what is written and what is read; it is an appeal to surprise, an attempt to startle language and its participants into some other state; it is how to express in words what can’t be expressed in words. The second part of that sentence is a paradox, and it is another way that poets who want to make the leap—including Pierre-Albert Jourdan (1924–1981), whose poems and other writings are selected in The Straw Sandals and edited, translated, and introduced by John Taylor—attempt it.

Rather than provoking the mind to figure out how it could be true, the hope of paradox is that it will catapult the mind into experiencing it as true. For Jourdan, paradox and its close kin aphorism were ways to approach the ineffable, the infinite, the immanent, and above all the state of unity between self and world that he devotedly, passionately sought: another kind of leap, a leap out of the self and into unity. He craves

All contrasts erased. A shared sky.

A language in which there is no partitioning off, no emptiness.

As you stand there, aren’t you overwhelmed, reduced to nothing, jubilant?

Looking at that sky, he wants us (or himself) “to sign your name to this canvas” and “to vanish into it.” Of the grass, he writes, “I lend my voice to it; more truthfully, I give my voice over to it completely,” and later adds, “Leave me to my wandering, my face in the grass. Forget me so that I, too, may forget myself.” He wants to be entirely immersed in the natural world, its plants and weathers, the rises and falls of its ground; the three lines separated out above were provoked by, respectively, “the flight of a magpie,” “the welcoming light of fennel along the path,” and this particularly observed scene:

The bees get busy. They make the rosemary bush come alive. The meaning of all these blue flowers—their blossoming out—lies in a sort of squandering, be it studious. The soft buzzing makes all space quiver: you walk a little further, you sense this, but is it really so?

In his reverent introduction, Taylor’s notes on the leap of self (as distinct from the leap of language outlined above) refer to it in Jourdan’s work as “a quest to surpass—or efface—the self,” and add, “Yet this ‘leap’ may well be impossible, and in a certain respect undesirable . . .” Jourdan seems to feel that it is particularly impossible for a poet. If you startle yourself into some other state, who will write down what you see there? If you completely enter it, will you be able to get back? If writing is your lifeline, is it also your yoke? Again and again in his earlier collections and notebooks, Jourdan writes, sometimes with warmth and gentleness, sometimes with violence and disgust, of the impediment that words become:

What needs to be restored speaks an impoverished language.

Words persisting in their silence, having nothing to add to the errors of the day.

To give a name to this joy would be to mislay it.

I have so many things to tell you. May you stick them, one after another, back into my throat, reducing them to this plaster cast, this bandage.

“It is always in you that everything is degraded,” Jourdan writes, apparently addressing himself, seeing his self and even his writing as blocks on his path to merging with the world. In his view, writing is helpful or harmful only as it gets the writer—or possibly the reader—closer to or further away from unity. He notes multiple times that he is not patient, that he’s impatient, that patience would get him where he wants to go, that he should’ve been more patient: “The landscape watchman must hand over his identity before opening his eyes.”

But does becoming part of the unified world require an effort—and if so, who makes the effort?—or does it require the abandonment of effort? “Open up the path (chemin) for it, open yourself up like a path (t’ouvrir comme chemin),” he writes. He wants to go where he cannot, “With, for a companion, the curve of a hill in the evening haze. Make yourself vanish as you face it. Make an effort to return this completely natural courtesy, without an effort.”

Pierre-Albert Jourdan -- writing should be obsessed with the search for unity. Photo: Gilles Jourdan

For Jourdan, are the two kinds of leap the same leap? The leap of the mind over paradox, the leap of the self into not a void but into the landscape, from which only humans are excluded—from which he excludes himself every time he makes an effort, through language, to reach it? It makes sense, at least, that the form of language he favored is one that seems to undo itself. Even to write of silence has a paradoxical quality, and he returns to it throughout:

We think we are present, believing we had detected silence when actually it is only a narrow margin through which the silence flees.

The pauses or blank spaces between fragments, maxims or notes whose words form, to recall French poet Yves Bonnefoy’s phrase, ‘the ridgeline of a silence’: you could say that these silent blank spaces expand your lungs (as when you breath [sic] in again) and are thus necessary. Without them, that is without the emptiness, you could not read and understand the words.

Yet this book contains over three hundred pages of purposeful writing—Taylor notes that Jourdan wrote much of The Straw Sandals/Les Sandales Pailles systematically, methodically, before going to his job at the Societé Mutual de Transports Publiques—and much of what’s here is excerpted from larger groupings, books or journals.

Clearly, words are real and necessary for him: he’ll dwell on a word as if it, just as much as a rosemary bush or cliff face, could provide a gateway out of the self and into the world: “‘frémissement’—trembling, an admirable word dressed in leaves and flesh, in wind and love,” or “The plant world has given me a new boost…I have just thought of the word ‘roulier,’ ‘cart driver.’ A cart full of grass? In order to make you sneeze as he drives it past, to shake you up a little.” Later, he addresses the paradox of words and silence more painfully:

Simplicity would mean getting along without words. They are such fragile barriers. We use them only because it seems impossible to stop speaking: we have to justify ourselves. But Good God, justify ourselves for what? Simplicity would mean enduring what we undergo in silence—a barrier-shattering silence. But such silence, which emerges from the darkest depths, cannot be assimilated without reacting, without crying out. Though it is useless to do so. Remaining speechless erects still another barrier. It is up to you to bring it down, O Impatient Death.

When Jourdan wrote the above words, he knew he was dying. Before he knew it, he had written of the sense of processes going on without him, asked questions about what endures. At the beginning of L’Approche, his last book, presented here in its entirety, he adds,

Somewhere in me indeed dwells gratitude. Like a sunlit plant wavering, the curve of a hill, a pine tree swaying.

A feeling that remains remote from vicissitudes, will always be there, and can be verified. Even without me. Especially without “me.”

A support, like a baton handed on in a relay race.

It almost seems that death is going to offer him what he wanted: a chance to abandon, relinquish, his self. But he fears, too, that dying will not unify him with the world but will separate him from it. Perhaps because of this fear, in this last book words begin to serve him differently, to be more than stumbling blocks or fetters:

From now on, I will content myself with setting down on paper a few notes, like markers staking out ground already engulfed by the sea.

Writing shaped like tiny wads of bread, so that you swallow the fish bones stuck in your throat.

Most revealing, perhaps, is “This writing is meant to carry us” when compared to his first group of poems, in which he asserted that “Light that has no arms to carry us.” And later still, it is the land that carries him: “I remain faithful.”

Jourdan strove in his poems, in spite of his poems, to surmount the separation between his human self and the beauty of the non-human world. “Producing literature is not at stake,” he wrote firmly, impatient with poetry, with the modern human-made world, with the “masturbatory speculations” of contemporary poets (although he makes loving reference to poetic contemporaries, as well as to poets of other times and places). What is at stake is his beloved landscape, the gateway to the abandonment of the self, or the healing of the “distance” between the self and the world: “…it would be possible for us to bandage certain wounds and reestablish an equilibrium. This would presuppose a fair amount of disinterestedness and a wagering on beauty that we dare not even imagine.”

There is tension throughout with regard to who Jourdan asks to make this wager: himself or us. Taylor writes about his choices in translating the nonspecific French third-person pronoun “on”, sometimes translated as “one,” instead as “‘we, a non-specific ‘you’ or a passive verbal construction.” The translator goes on to note that Jourdan “increasingly appeals to the colloquial use” of the pronoun “on”, rather than the words for “I” or “you,” speculating that this is another one of Jourdan’s attempts to take himself out of the equation.

Pronouns have a lot of power in French, and they seem particularly fraught in writing that attempts to dismantle the self or call it into question. When Jourdan writes tu (the more intimate and direct “you”), he may be addressing himself. But if his desire for unification goes beyond himself, then it may be that he’s also talking to us, insisting that we make (or abandon?) the effort, attempt to heal the wound, break down the barrier, cross the distances he refers to as “deadly (meurtrières) and relinquish the self that, after all, is neither as beautiful nor as harmonious as what we can see all around us if we look:

The almond tree this morning is a-buzz with bees. This is calmness, the deepest expression of calmness. It sinks in deep, through the walls. There are no more separations. As barriers become so marvelously fragile, it seems to us that wounds vanish. It is what we could call the honey of a gentle death. Producing literature is not at stake, but rather drawing in and on this gentleness. And it changes nothing that gentleness is not granted to us. We feel it. How cannot one dream of having such an ally?

Between moments of disgust with the human (and human-made) world, moments of rapture for the natural world, and, at the end, moments of fear at losing that very self’s ability to sense, he writes in hope that the paradoxes he has provided will help to free us as well as himself: “Writing throws out a bridge that it destroys with every page.” - Kate Schapira

https://artsfuse.org/37920/fuse-poetry-review-pierre-albert-jourdan-writing-that-wagers-on-beauty/

We cannot imagine any kind of life without development, evolution, change, forward motion. We cannot imagine our own lives without some sense that we are moving forward in time. Our forward motion is intrinsic to our being.

And our forwardness, our continuing, is marked, continually, by our relationship to repetitions, variations, caesuras, new beginnings and the patterns that link them. From childhood, we are discovering patterns, and as adults imposing them as well. In old age, when we face our end, the end of moving and doing, when a great translucent luminous wall of uncertainty looms before us, again we look for patterns in this strange unfolding which we can call ourselves but is about not to be. As the patterns that have shaped us fall away, still we feel the intimacy of a patternless awareness continuing.

I never knew Pierre-Albert Jourdan, but he was the first person to ever publish my work. This was in 1969 when a mutual friend, Nicolas Calas, sent him some poems I had written. Pierre-Albert arranged for superb translations and a year later they appeared in his wonderful journal, Porte des Singes. I was young and callow, living in N.Y. and did not make the effort I wish I had to be in touch with Pierre-Albert who lived in Paris. Only last week, more than 50 years later, did my friend and neighbour, Suranjan Ganguly, give me a volume of Jourdan’s work. Now, it is with a kind of rueful admiration that I can return to this remarkable artist who was so long ago so very kind to me. What an extraordinary and courageous man he was.

In the following, written in the countryside during the last days of his life, as mind and body suffered in the final stages of lung cancer, Pierre-Albert’s perspective shifted in and out; he sometimes calls himself ‘you’.

Hide in a landscape, vanish behind foliage, burrow into a hill…

The eye can roam freely. It feels no pain when pausing to contemplate these faded blues. It does not experience that inner trigger mechanism that locks you up…”

Last night, the north wind cooled off the heat and cleared the horizon, At present, it is playing the game you know well: shaping clouds with the aid of Mt. Ventoux. There they are, as if caught in a trap, unable to pass over the ridge and coming apart like immense soft spinning top. I don’t wish to push the similarities any further.

I cannot truly distinguish my own suffering, at least at this bearable stage… from that of, for example, these trees assailed by the violence of a wind gone mad, from their own struggle; and from that of animals who are tortured, poisoned, stalked, and hunted down and who are yet, each of them, our sustenance. I refuse to pay the slightest attention to those, their ego bleating at the slightest warning, are surprised to discover that they have not remained at the centre of the world. Suffering extends so far beyond our understanding…

We are settling into a new life (we’ll have to find another word), one in which we are so completely uprooted…that it could make us weep. And this, moreover, happens often. Everything is perfectly regulated in all ways, nothing to say about that. But you are excluded. Those maple trees outside, that sky no longer belong to you. What is this “new life”? It is separation.

It is true that we incessantly roam just outside this spaceless space that we never enter, alive. Sometimes it even seems to constitute us. Yet we have this regrettable habit of approaching it from the wrong side: this fear it inspires is perhaps only the fear of being alive….

The gentleness of twilight has no name.

How I understand this!

Through great rifts in the landscape?

Pierre-Albert Jourdan wrote this last question on the eve of his death. - Douglas Penick

https://www.berfrois.com/2022/03/douglas-penick-on-pierre-albert-jourdan/

Selections from The Straw Sandals

From L'angle mort (The Dead Angle)

Chants d'oiseaux invisibles. Seules voix pures. Peut-être parce qu'ils sont flammes dans l'air. Qu'ils brûlent sans déchets. Oiseaux condamnés dans un mond encombré. Un rêve que je fais: que ce soit eux qui m'accueillent, que je m'avance dans un nuage de plumes. (Que ce soit la dernière image.)

Invisible birds chirping. The only pure voices. Perhaps because birdsongs are like flames in the air that burn up completely. As for birds themselves, they are doomed in this crowded world. One of my dreams: that birds be the ones who greet me. that I go forward through a cloud of feathers. (That this be my final sight.)

*****

Tu as été conduit en aveugle prè de ce paysage. Alors tu l'as reconnu. Comme on se transmet une lampe allumée avec prècaution, ainsi, peut-être, seras-tu conduit prè de cet paysage—le tien depuis toujours.

You were led like a blind man near this landscape. And you recognized it. Even as a lighted lamp is handed over cautiously, perhaps you will similarly be led near that other landscape—yours from the beginning.

From L'entrée dans le jardin (The Entryway into the Garden)

Vraiment le paysage vient à toi—qui n'est plus enfermè dans ton regard. Un immense troupeau d'arbres est lâché dans l'espace. Le berger dort dans ta pointrine.

The landscape really comes to you—it is no longer locked up in your eyes. An immense herd of trees is released into space. The shepherd sleeps in your breast.

From Les sandales de paille (The Straw Sandals)

Jeudi 10 janvier.

Il faut se hisser jusqu'à la brance trop fragile pour percevoir avec nettetè ce qui se passe en dessous.

Thursday, 10 January.

You have to climb all the way up to the branch that is too fragile if you wish to perceive clearly what is happening below.

From L'approche (The Approach)

Situation somme toute banale. Mais n'interrogez pas trop la banalité. Vous risqueriez de buter sur une terrifiante énigme.

Ultimately, an ordinary situation. But don't question ordinariness too much. You risk running up against a terrifying enigma.

Pierre-Albert Jourdan (1924-1981) worked from 1947 to 1981 as the manager of an workers insurance firm, spending his non-working hours in pursuit of spiritual understanding and literary clarity. He was known as a poet only by a small group of better-known fellow poets. His focus was on nature, particularly his garden in the Vaucluse village of Caromb and the surrounding landscape, which included the snow-capped Mount Ventoux. In 1981 he received a diagnosis of lung cancer and decided to note down his thoughts as it progressed. Thus resulted L'approche /The Approach. In the first decade after his death, the prestigeous firm Mercure de France astonished the poetic world by publishing two collections of his work, each more than 500 pages. From these collections John Taylor introduces this singular and self-effacing poet to English-language readers.