the artist’s task

The artist’s task is not to alter the world as the eye sees it into a world of aesthetic reality, but to perceive the aesthetic reality within the actual world and to make an undisturbed and faithful record of the instant in which this movement of creativeness achives its most expressive crystilization.

- James Agee

Enigmas

 Translated by Robert Bly.

You’ve asked me what the lobster is weaving there with his golden feet?
I reply, the ocean knows this.
You say, what is the ascidia waiting for in its transparent bell?
What is it waiting for?
I tell you it is waiting for time, like you.

You ask me whom the Macrocystis alga hugs in its arms?
Study, study it, at a certain hour, in a certain sea I know.
You question me about the wicked tusk of the narwhal,
and I reply by describing how the sea unicorn with the harpoon in it dies.

You enquire about the kingfisher’s feathers,
which tremble in the pure springs of the southern tides?
Or you’ve found in the cards a new question
touching on the crystal architecture of the sea anemone,
and you’ll deal that to me now?

You want to understand the electric nature of the ocean spines?
The armored stalactite that breaks as it walks?
The hook of the angler fish,
the music stretched out in the deep places like a thread in the water?

I want to tell you the ocean knows this,
that life in its jewel boxes is endless as the sand,
impossible to count, pure, and among the blood-colored grapes
time has made the petal hard and shiny,
made the jellyfish full of light and untied its knot,
letting its musical threads fall from a horn of plenty made of infinite mother-of-pearl.

I am nothing but the empty net which has gone on ahead of human eyes,
dead in those darknesses, of fingers accustomed to the triangle,
longitudes on the timid globe of an orange.

I walked around as you do, investigating the endless star,
and in my net, during the night, I woke up naked,
the only thing caught, a fish trapped inside the wind.

from the 9th Elegy

…because being here is so much; because everything here

apparently needs us, this fleeting world, which in some strange way

keeps calling to us. Us the most fleeting of all.

Once for each thing. Just once; no more. And we too,

just once. And never again. But to have been

this once, completely, even if only once:

to have been at one with the earth, seems beyond undoing.

–Rainier Maria Rilke