He Who Creates Re-Creates Himself

for René Passeron* You may not grow old too soon if Things you have known will come back to you again No revision nor recall need put them back in place Time was when you knew the time the place the face Even the scarce women in prized moments gone in pain Who would care nor what would it matter in which life upon what water you have trailed your fingers upon waves of papers Let your mind brush some canvas in a rush Left your mark upon some bark Wed some wanton women spawned wholesome omens Made as if the artier your words held some moment in a perennial frame Never to be banged away by fading suns collapsing quasars asteroid storms puncturing galaxies usurping black holes Can this act of writing seize the moment Or is it your way of saying What else is there to be done? Let the unknowable undermine the unknown Here on this planet we have made our sinuous conventions stick to paper and canvas stone and sound And words that are haloed by the sickness of the poet though all is not lost for the pen whose blood will possess anchor expose our futile justifications explications ratiocinations doctoral dissertations And generations will tremulously grant him The right to unravel the eternities For one who dared capture the moment In the capsule of a poem *René Passeron, b. 1920, a surrealist painter and philosopher, was the principal figure conducting research into “poietics” in France, since the eighties, after the renowned aesthetician Etienne Souriau took over from the internationally famous poet Paul Valéry who first mooted the project in 1939, though the Russians had already begun publishing in this field of research during the First World War. Professor Passeron led a twin career as a Senior Research Fellow with the premier European research organization: the French National Centre for Scientific Research (C.N.R.S.) and as a Professor at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales and at the University of Paris-I-Panthéon Sorbonne where he was the Director of the Institute of Aesthetics and Fine Arts. ©: T.Wignesan 1987 April 12, 1987 [from the collection : back to background material, 1993] Pub. in Poietics: Disquisitions on the Art of Creation. Allahabad: Cyberwit.net, 2008.