The Unforgivable by Cristina Campo

Author:Cristina Campo
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: New York Review Books
Published: 2024-02-06T00:00:00+00:00

3.

“Every great painting is painted against painting—in fact, it destroys all painting.”

So it is every time I read a great book: I witness the destruction of the language, I watch the language levitate above all languages and not lie down in ullo, the way the language of Dante levitates above spoken Italian.

•

What a mysterious secret binds the great writer to his reader, and what an abyss there is between them. It is the quite familiar tone of a private conversation, such as only kings can grant: full of arcane allusions and delicate questions, which everyone who hears it will remember into old age and recount to his grandchildren, like the encounter with Henry V on the field at Agincourt. From the first lines of the Commedia to the last letter of Pasternak, for example, we find the same sublime nonchalance, the same confident, serious, gentle detachment.

That is the way with the sovereign writers. We submit to them before we understand them. We know their meanings must be caught on the fly because we sense that, while they are speaking to the individual, they are also answering before God for an entire community.

•

What is missing in X.’s beautiful prose that keeps it from truly being writing? I can find no word except ceremony. Noble writing without ceremony has never been possible, even if the ceremony was concealed in a conventional whisper. There is supreme ceremony in the great Gothic tercets of Dante, as there is ceremony in Chekhov: a rustic chapel where the rain-soaked boots of the faithful—distracted hypochondriacs racked by boredom and misery—is suddenly superseded by a Byzantine chant, incarnating centuries of gestures. (And it makes no difference if it’s a question of a guitar in an orchard threatened with destruction or a breath of wind interrupting a smile.) It was no less ceremonial for Williams to describe a crimson cyclamen’s journey from budbreak to death than it was for an ancient Taoist monk to cook rice, eat it, rinse his three bowls in the waterfall, and then place them one inside the other, all with the gestures prescribed.

•

Marvelous moment in the parable of a poet. When he no longer needs to summon the legions of angels and demons from the four cardinal points and set them clashing in celestial lamentations. When the lightest touch on the strings is enough to have us in tears at his feet. Two words: “Thymesou soma . . . Body, remember . . .”

But for this to happen, the voice must speak—like Cavafy’s voice—from the far side of death.

•

Unnamable desolation of a painting: Carpaccio’s Two Venetian Ladies. Where does it come from? Another perfect work composed of opposites. . . . On the graceful terrace, every form of beauty has been gathered, as in a heraldic image: flowers, puppies, tamed white turtledoves, peacocks with precious tails, pomegranates more ardent than rubies. The sky is very calm, almost bronze in the amazing depth of its blue. It is the profoundly beautiful, motionless hour, which one would like to hold still forever.

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