Groundwork for Ontopoetics

Abstract

Poetry is presencing action whose objectivity gives itself as a living and unpredictable form of consciousness. The reflexive act lives in it, without distancing it from the life that impels it. It is immanent and transcendent; sensate and categorial because it gives sensation to the concept and category to the sensation. It works in this way even when it involves representations. Its transcendence is also given as the possible of an impossibility that occurs in the act of giving itself. A streak of donation is possible. Its absolute permanence, of which, nevertheless, it is possible to catch a glimpse, a present and unavoidable duration that continuously revives despite the escape of the instant, is, on the other hand, impossible. The poem reaches the depth, constituting the constitution a little further than what has been constituted, which is a plus included in life. The occurrence of such an act makes it present. The prefix re has the mark of the present, because the constitution is constituted again. As it represents, it draws what is given towards another way of being, remodeling the language and the experience already acquired and constituted in it. To represent means here to present the presence. Its constitution diachronically makes contact, at a synchronic point, in spite of the interposed break with past and future life that develops in that instant. In this presence the life of reflection is an offer transcending itself, because the encounter with novelty is already the future of the past. In this also consists the youth of a work and the joy of the spirit that rejuvenates everything old, all of which Holderlin had already sung in his poem „Die Entschlafenen“.¹ But in representation there is an unrepeatable initial point that originates the process. The re, however, arrives late, although it supports the motion. It is the delay nearest to the origin, the curve not yet repeated of an echo, because language starts in it as rhythm, making everything that affects it fresh. Its delay works from the initial instant, which it contains without its being retained. Rhythm precedes the will that perceives it, as Levinas explains in «La réalité et son ombre».² There is a priority of origin over the originated. Language, like existence, precedes us says Martin Buber. We do not choose one or the other and we only notice it a posteriori, from and in themselves. The synchronic point that touches diachrony is a temporal conation, of which we have clear examples in Spanish Romance ballad poetry. In that locative instant, where existence impinges on what precedes it because there is a locus-tempus of the event, the poem, the pneumatic matter of the voice contained in the word, is also involved as a present state. This connection or diachronic synthesis of a presence founds a living universal of matter in thought. Each articulated act of language enlivens the common air of men in such a way that the different forms of presence are the diverse presents of each epoch, culture and individual. The difference occurs in the ordinary sphere of life, without ever being repeated in the same way. There is no diachronic cloning.