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The origins of poetry
Arnaldo Antunes
"12 Poemas para dançarmos" (12 poems to be danced: 2000
The origins of poetry blend in with the origins of language itself.
It might be wiser to ask when exactly did the verbal speech stop being poetry. Or, what are the origins of the non-poetic speech, for if one restores the most intimate bonds between signs and their corresponding objects, poetry points to a very primitive use of language, which seems prior to the outline of its occurrence in conversations, newspapers, classrooms, lectures, debates, speeches, essays or telephone calls.
As if poetry brought back – by means of a more precise use of the language – the integrity between "name" and "object", which has been split by civilized men and their different cultures over the ages.
The display of what we today call poetry insinuates minimum flashbacks of a probable infancy of the speech – prior to the cutting of that display’s umbilical cord – thus generating these two halves: meaningful and meaning.
Was there such a time? When there was no poetry simply because poetry was in everything that was said? When the name of a thing was part of the thing, as well as its color, its size, its weight? When the bonds joining the senses had not yet been untied, when music, poetry, thinking, dance, image, smell, flavor, substance were all united in unabridged experiences, associated with magic, healing, religious, sexual and warlike uses?
It may be that these conjectures are somewhat unreal or utopian, projected onto a pre-Babel, tribal, primitive past.
At the same time, whenever the present reaches a new poem of the future, it creates – with this fact – a little bit of this past.
I remember reading a comment by Décio Pignatari, in which he called our attention to the fact that in the Chinese as well as in the Tupi idioms there is not a verb TO BE as a linking verb. Thus, the things themselves express the substance of things and are not expressed by a verbal particle outside of the things, which turns them into poetic speeches by themselves, more inclined towards the analogous composition.
Closer to the common sense, we can see how American Indians express themselves on most of the "westerns". They say "red apple", "good water", and "speedy horse", instead of: the apple is red, this water is good, and that horse is speedy. This more synthetic form, telegraphic, brings the nouns closer to their substance – as if the speech was not making reference to those things but rather presenting them (at the same time that it presents itself).
As a language, on the dictionary, the words mediate our relationship with things, obstructing our direct contact with them. The poetic speech reverts this relationship because as it becomes the thing itself, it offers us a more direct and sensible approach to the world.
According to Mikhail Bakhtin (in "Marxism and Philosophy of the Speech"), the study of the primitive peoples’ languages and contemporary paleontology of the meanings leads us to a conclusion about the so-called "complexity" of the primitive way of thinking. Pre-historical man used one same and single word to designate very different manifestations, which, from our standpoint, have no connection, whatsoever. Besides that, one same and single word could designate diametrically opposed meanings: tall and short, earth and sky, good and evil, etc." Such uses are totally strange to the reference speech, but are quite familiar to poetry, which elaborates its paradoxes, double meanings, analogies and ambiguities to create new meanings over the ever-existing signs.
We have lost innocence of such a fulfilling speech. Words have moved away from things, just as the eyes have been separated from the ears, or as creation detached from life. But we still have these small oases – the poems – contaminating the desert of the standardization.
Part of the libretto printed for the performance "12 Poemas para dançarmos" (12 poems to be danced), directed by Gisela Moreau, São Paulo.
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