Visages en filigrane (extraits)
John Burnside Alain Charra Françoise Lebeau	Michelle Paré Jean Revol Maureen Smith Georges Thinès

The Unknown Crafstman by John Burnside

The more I pursue this lifelong apprenticeship, the more I feel that the craft is all that matters. Like God, art is no respecter of persons: the more I think about it, the more I feel that, for the work to be fully realised, the poet should be invisible. Jorge Guillen, who saw his life's work as the creation of a single book, a book he called Cantico, knew that the artist's life is a work of art in itself &emdash; but it is the art of the conjuror who makes himself disappear, as opposed to the bohemian or the dilettante, who enacts the role of the poet. Or again: the fine Ulster poet, Michael Longley, once said that he knew a poem was finished when he no longer occupied it, when it had a life of its own. Or again: Pessoa's creation of many personae, which amounted, in the end, to an elaborate disappearing act. The goal is to forget oneself, so that the poem may live; what matters is the game itself, and not the infinitely interchangeable players of the game.

The face that is glimpsed en filigrane, is not the face of a known person: it is not the named, conditioned, contingent person who enacts the social roles he or she has been assigned, nor is it the person he or she conceals beneath the mask. What is revealed is a verb rather than a noun, a space rather than an object, a possibility rather than a fact.

The best example of this, in poetry, is the love poem. A naïf reader always assumes that a love poem is necessarily addressed to a person (either openly, or in secret). Yet this is rarely the case, even when the poet says it is: it is love that the poem loves, not the seeming object of that love, just as it is love that we love when we say we are in love (for love is always an imagined and willed fact, it is never the mere accident that the romantic tradition insists upon). The creation of a love poem is, more often than not, the creation of a space: the love poem says that, between any one person and another, there is nothing except the space in which they both appear to exist, and in which they both may vanish. In this sense, a love poem is the essential poem, the "abstract" poem, as it were. All love poems are, in themselves, abstract: the addressed beloved is a pretext for the self-forgetting in which art begins.

Love is willed as a poem is willed, not by force but by the moment of surrender. We fall in love, and we write, by surrendering to a power which is not our own; love and the poem are imagined facts, and imagination is the act of forgetting oneself &emdash; one's expectations and masks &emdash; and allowing the full play of possibility. So it is that, in love and in art, we say: I am free, I do not need to be anyone in particular, and I do not ask you to be anyone that I necessarily recognise.I only wish for the moment in which we are both free.

So the poem "In Transylvania", an abstract love poem, begins with the impulse to say: the Bible story is wrong, Adam and Eve should have named the animals together, as a form of play, rather than an act of classification. But it ends in the simple fact of the names, and the play of

conversation: the names are written in my body, and they are written in your body, but they existed before the selves we seem to be ever existed. If the soul is anything it is this: the one I was, that you were, before we had these faces, these masks, these names.

So it is that, in love, we remember our souls, in the moment of self-forgetting.

So it is that, in a conversation, each of us takes turns to disappear, in order to listen to the other.

So it is that, in a poem, the poet vanishes, absolved of the need to exist.

IN TRANSYLVANIA

I wanted to know the name

of every plant

- not Latin, or Linnaeus' gold

taxonomies;

nothing scientific; nothing fixed;

but local words for fogged veronicas

amongst the grass;

for lilacs that flower in clouds along a wall

and melt into the dark for miles around

while we sit talking, sleepless, mystified;

for kingcups; plums; Egyptian lotuses;

for baize leaves stilled with frogs, and flowers

forming in the mud

like pleated skins;

names you might give to newborn

children, or the way the darkness seeps

like ink between the trees: more blue than black,

more revelation, making sense of how

it aches in the quietest way when I try to find

a name for this: the not-quite

blue-black in your eyes that never stops

beginning; or the moment of your voice

which is nothing like bells, or rain,

or the bated air

that fills the chiming towns, on Easter days.

Morceau-de-vie par Michelle Paré

L'art révèle ce que le langage est particulièrement inefficace à traduire : quelque chose de la vie sentie, quelque chose du monde perçu. Si le langage courant suffisait, quel besoin aurions-nous de rechercher des formes si variées d'expression ? C'est autre chose que nous cherchons à dire.

Cet autre chose qui cherche à se dire est d'un ordre différent. Ce n'est pas les faits ni l'apparence des choses que l'artiste révèle, c'est son expérience de ces faits et de ces choses, la perception qui donne vie. Ce n'est pas non plus son propre monde intérieur ni sa vie à lui qu'il exprime, c'est la connaissance de la vie et du monde qui passe par lui.

Avant de mettre au monde, l'artiste a porté, il a perçu. Il a reçu. Il a d'abord été touché, impressionné. Il a senti. C'est en lui que le travail s'est fait, que le courant s'est transformé, que la vie s'est imprimée. Parce qu'il est un être de pensée et de sensibilité, c'est de lui qu'il est parti pour créer l'oeuvre, amalgamer matière et vie. Ne pouvant manipuler le senti, c'est la matière que l'artiste travaille. C'est avec elle qu'il se confond. A son contact, il se nourrit et nourrit l'oeuvre. En transformant le matériel, en montrant l'immatériel, l'artiste donne aux choses l'apparence de la vie. Par les sons, les couleurs, la forme, le mouvement il provoque dans son oeuvre un transfert d'existence. Ses mains, ses yeux, ses sens sont investis dans l'ouvrage même. L'impalpable passe dans son être, par son corps tout entier pour se traduire. Comment la matière peut-elle ne pas être teintée de ce que porte cette personne, de ce que comporte son humanité ? Comment l'oeuvre achevée peut-elle ne pas être impressionnée par l'être qui l'a fournie ?

Lorsque nous créons, nous sommes là tout entiers. L'oeuvre nous travaille et nous travaillons l'oeuvre. Nos gestes y sont inscrits comme s'est inscrit en nous cet « autre chose », innommable. Ce qui était indicible a pris forme grâce à l'être qui lui a prêté vie, qui a prêté son corps et son âme à la matière, l'espace d'une création. Que son essence transparaisse dans l'oeuvre serait souhaitable. Que ce soit son visage qui se découvre en filigrane, cela ne serait pas impossible bien que ce ne soit pas le but de son travail.

Que naisse l'oeuvre, que transparaisse ce qui doit. Nous aurons le plaisir de goûter à ce morceau-de-vie qui se transmet à nous, qui s'offre à sentir dans un moment donné comme par la communion de l'être et de l'objet, comme par un attouchement des êtres, de leurs pensées, unis dans l'oeuvre ainsi créée.