The Book of Margins by Edmond Jabes, Rosmarie Waldrop (Translator)

Book of Marginsby Anonymous

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July 24, 2003: 'Writing is the measure of all things' could be more than a poorly conceived aphorism these days if it points to the amount of effort being invested to redirect the intention of writing. To be sure, writing at one point in history pretended to record life, then it attempted to re-create it. At other moments, writing attempted to replicate speech and then, in different ways, it attempted to replicate thought. As if following a process of elimination, writing is trying to replicate itself these days, sometimes falling in extremes such as self-parody, self-deprecation, and self-aggrandizement. What seems to be definitive this century is an effort to reduce writing to itself which often takes the form of a denial of its character as mediation (of thought, of language, of meaning) or of an affirmation of its 'material' essence (as sign, word, text) but, fundamentally, it betrays a tendency to deny every form of meaningful spirituality. This is offered to us as a triumphant, courageous, stoic, and omnimode verbally-based rationalism: Jab?s donning his disguise as a hero of renunciation, wearing the sheepskin of clinical pulchritude. One can easily think that, when in disgrace and misfortune in human eyes, an individual will see all his qualities, all his virtues, gradually swept away. But even then, we are reminded, there remains the hope of a simple, yet sacred, singularity: 'after all this, I am still I'. The individual is reduced to a point, an 'I' which, although still real, is a merely subsisting one. In the poetry of Edmond Jab?s we are witness to the wounded disappearance of this 'point', of the I, which is fragmented and scattered by the wind into the emptiness of the desert. The text of Jab?s' poetry, these ciphers, these written words, are the purest expression of a soul bereft of masks, a faceless soul, become the fleeting lines drawn on a desert floor. The signs of this desert, delicate and ephemeral as the are, cannot be declared a death of the soul as an end, nor are they nothingness. Rather, these traces, these words, are most ardent and forceful in their being the enacting of original gestures: thoughts and words ex nihilo, as poor, and yet as divine as those that God first wrote, tentatively, far before He declared: 'I Am That I Am'. This, of course, is the strength of Jab?s poetry: the act prior to all acts, the first gesture after death, willed into being out of nothingness. That is, The Beginning, precarious as it always is. A cold, abstract pain germinates throughout the Book of Margins: a pain not felt, but known. It was perhaps born of a schism, a cutting choice made between living and writing: living meant pure suffering, or death; writing meant abstract living, thinking suffering, thinking death; that the later was chosen, was perhaps, something forced upon Jab?s, resulting in the indelible condition of his being branded a poet. Thus, the pain, for Jab?s, stems from this very condition itself: that of living through writing. One explanation, an existential one, is that for Jab?s, writing is the only medium of perception. All of life's appetites are reduced to effecting revolutions and shifts within and for this perception. In this way, life is pictured through the window of writing. Desire can never grasp the substance of feeling; it can only write it. And, as all perception, writing cannot be avoided, only redirected. This means that Jab?s, cannot stop writing, simultaneously wishing to go beyond...