Robert Kelly

THE INTERPRETER

 

a conversation for Eric Mottram

 

ENRICO
It wasn't Karl Marx that made Marxism. It was the burn of justice.

MARTIN
Burn...is that a stream or a fire?

ENRICO
Of course a fire. The stream's a dialect. A dialect's a river that goes nowhere. But that nowhere is where we live.

MARTIN
But where should a river go? Do you own an ocean that you want everything to go to one place, move to one measure, common, like some old Greek? I want to love the wayward in places, the exactly-going-nowhere. The only telos we all have is to die.

ENRICO
That just switches Greek into Roman. Everybody dies, you know, but the Romans were the ones who invented Death. I will allow you to insist, if you do, that Marx invented a usable vessel for our fire, a lantern that condensed the mere blaze into functional rays. To burn.

MARTIN
Marx gave us the language to talk about that fire, and to move from talk to action. No, I'm beginning to think that Marx gave us language itself.

ENRICO
Then the world is becoming dumb in more ways that one, turning away from Marx to, what is it they..

MARTIN
we...

ENRICO
turn to? We have no language now, if you're right.

MARTIN
Maybe. It may be that in the holy paradox of history (isn't that what telos really means?), Marx's language is only now fully useful, now that it's not mired in the eternal war of the haves against the have-nots, and on the wrong side at that. How terrible when the haves called themselves by Marx's name!

ENRICO
I don't trust all this business of sides. Things have outsides and insides. What side are you on?

MARTIN
I don't know. How can I know...the outside belongs to them, and the inside is corrupted with their language, the churches and the psychologues. The inside they say belongs to God, and the outside belongs to the rich. The differences are verbally huge but pragmatically meaningless.

ENRICO
Last winter we sat in a small city in northern Germany. Snow sifted down in a kind of trivial way over the blackish waters of the local river -- nobody knew its name when I asked in the street. Or maybe they didn't want to understand my German. One of us had brought bread from the good bakery on Beer Street, right there, you could smell it at dawn through the window I left open a crack -- I know that's against the law. But the wine was something else. Someone had brought it from Herzegovina -- it was a bottle of the last wine they could make before the war destroyed vineyards and winemakers alike. Cool green wine, you know, stony and fine. On the label was an old engraving of the ancient stone bridge that gave Mostar its name. The bridge that had just been blown up a few weeks before we sat at three a.m. drinking it slowly and chewing the local bread, made from so many grains. I could taste rye and oats and...

MARTIN
[interrupting] Why are you telling me this? I thought Bosnians were Moslems, and didn't use wine?

ENRICO
I thought the Irish were Christians, and were men of peace. Oh, I don't know, Martin. Maybe it's just Herzegovina. Who knows what religion wine is?

MARTIN
People travel on strange passports sometimes. That's sad, the last bottle of wine, the bridge. What were you doing there?

ENRICO
The strange thing is that I can't remember the taste. I remember the black river, the broken bridge, the conversation about some friend in Budapest, he's shaved his beard, what difference does that make? I'm trying to say that the passion for justice, to try to save people -- save us all -- from the cruelty of the rich and the empty contrivances of government, that passion is the only thing worth cultivating in the world. The only one. It's stupid to think of it as political, that's just an invitation to make us partisan, something else to fight about. Whereas it should be the first thing for us all to do.

MARTIN
You want us to rescue this passion for justice from any perceived connections with specific parties, attitudes, religions. And let it loose. How?

ENRICO
That's the energy I find in Mottram's work, an urgent energy, a clearing away of old mistakes. Trying to push against the local and foreign despots using the edge of language, image, the wedge of syntax to pry open a crack in the wall. Leftist, sure, but that's not the point of it. The man has built a huge critique of the society in which he functions, and built it while he just seems to be writing poems of place, talking about young poets, American literature and other innocent things. He is using all the tools. The tools that are weapons. The man can think, and work the sinews of language till he makes us learn the difference between the language we say and the language that says us. The despots of capital are always trying to say us.

MARTIN
I agree, he is a strange poet-- the words are calm and learned, the syntactic rhythms are angry, the anger that goes into Blake's "mental fight." Not a brawl on a television talkshow. He's figured out a way to talk writing so that if we listen at all, we're given materials and methods for cutting through. And what else is language for?

 

Robert Kelly May 1994