Poetry as Self‑Recognition

 

Stupor comes from the Latin stupeo, which Giovanni Semerano [1] compares with the Akkadian suppù, subbù (“to look upon something from afar, to form a concept,” etc.). This is particularly true in poetry. When I compose a poem, I look upon myself from afar, and from that distance I recognise myself.

But what kind of distance is this?

It is the distance between not being what you truly are and what you truly are within. It is this distance that stupefies me - stupet myself - and this recognition happens through that sentiment we call poetry. Poetry is first of all the presence of a feeling of stupor; only if you stupes - if you are struck, astonished -can you feel that sentiment.

Think of Pirandello’s Uno, nessuno e centomila and ask yourself why the protagonist cannot recognise himself. It is because he cannot feel that stupor, that looking‑upon himself from afar which allows one to recognise oneself from the distance between what one is not and what one is. He has become so many external aspects that his inner life has been emptied. He lives without interiority, in a nihilistic world where the Ground of Everything is dead; and when the Ground of Everything dies, one’s inner life dies with it.

The reason why I can compose poems is that stupeo: I look upon myself and I recognise myself. Without this self‑recognition, I would not be able to feel poetry, because poetry is born from stupor.

Is not a child - qui semper stupet - pure living poetry? A child stupet because he sees the world from afar, and while forming a concept of the world, he learns to know himself. He feels that sentiment (poetry) that arises when the external world meets the internal world that is being formed within him.

A nihilistic child does not exist, because he has only just been born, and this means that he still possesses the same essence or presence that generated him - the first ἦθος [2].

This essence has not yet been tainted by the second ἦθος: the historical, reflective, and cultural reconfiguration of the original dwelling, i. e. the world of institutions, traditions, technologies, and modern consciousness.

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[1] Dizionario della lingua latina e di voci moderne, Olschki.

[2] ἦθος understood in its primary meaning of “house, abode, dwelling,” cf. Akkadian bētu “house, shelter.” Giovanni Semerano, op. cit.