The Poet is above the intellectual because he not only contemplates, but produces from his contemplation

When one of my teachers came to live in Bahia, coming from Germany, he was immediately invited to a party. As soon as he arrived, someone told him that they were going to introduce him to a friend, who was a poet.

The German trembled at the foundations. At the first party, he had just arrived, and he was going to meet a Poet!

In his tradition, in his country, with his references, a Poet was that extremely cultured person, with monumental work, who after years dedicated to the most varied studies managed to create the most concise, dense, perfect work of art that is poetry, from an accumulation of knowledge and intellectual experiences.

Such was not his surprise when, afterwards, the same person continued to introduce him to one more, one more, and, in the end, the majority of those present were poets.

He, from time to time, repeated this story to me, in a good-humored tone about the folklores of Bahia, and explained to me that someone writing verses, publishing poetry, from his perspective, did not mean that, necessarily and consequently, the person could Give yourself the nickname Poet, like this: “the”, “the” Poet.

It was relatively easy for me to understand the perspective of my German master, as I grew up surrounded by some (very few and charming) poets, including my own father. Naturally, I ended up understanding THE POET through the references I had.

The poet, or poetess, for me, was always that person who, in an extremely cultured way and with total mastery of the history of the arts, literature, philosophy, talked to me from a prominent place, as a reference, master, with shrewd vision. It was an aesthetic and ethical perspective that always took me to other levels of thought and beauty. They were people who seemed essential to regulating, revealing and relativizing the beauty and thinking of the world.

The Poet is above the intellectual, based on this thought, because he not only contemplates, appreciates, thinks and criticizes beauty, but produces from his contemplation, appreciation, thought and criticism the beauty itself.

I still make the distinction in dialogue with my German teacher, thinking here about Antonio Cicero and the death of the Poets.

I have felt more and more resistance to erudition and aesthetic refinement.

People don’t want to read and they are angry with those who do, because whoever goes deeper, instead of being someone who can open paths of light, is someone isolated by those who dominate the surface. The deepening becomes a sinking, isolation, seclusion imposed by the army of comfortable and united mediocrity. And aesthetic refinement becomes, as a result, a sin.

Ildásio Tavares, my father, begins a sonnet of his by saying: “I’m different, / and you, are you too? / smile happily / that the rest is nobody.” This idea of ​​difference, of the search for the unusual, the more complex, which was once admired, is increasingly being jettisoned. Whether in thought or artistic creation.

Cool is someone who praises and applauds the same thing as me. The reference for criticism and thought is who exalts what I think is good and I agree. The search for other paths, for more diffuse, difficult, tortuous and distinct trails, has been extinguished and rejected.

Antonio Cicero, as is common with Poets, wrote about philosophy. In fact, on balance, I think I heard equal or more praise for his philosophical work than for his poetry. Especially because, considering someone a Poet, in these terms, is already elevating their work to a place of quality, since “a (well) executed poem is a text endowed with a very high degree of writing”, as Cicero himself would say when defining poetry. . Also separating the written text that endures, which belongs to the order of the monument, and not the document, which the poet does well in a pun, Antonio Cicero considers that “among the literary texts, which are worth in themselves and are the most written of the writings, The most written of all are poems. Why? Because they consist of pure forms. Ultimately, there is no difference between what they say and the way they say it. As one cannot, in a poem, separate the signified from the signifier, strictly speaking one cannot say its meaning in other words.”

To have a very high level of writing, you need a very high degree of erudition.

And we are in a world where increasingly, even in academic environments, scholarship has been considered a monster that needs to be caged and kept under lock and key, so that no one runs the risk of confronting it.

The decadence of thought becomes a snowball where those who increasingly prefer to know less contaminate their neighbors, the next generation and, thus, the celebration of mediocrity prevents something that generates concern for those interested in difference: will new generations form new Poets?

I always thought that talk about older people saying that “in my time it was better”, and that “in the old days” etc. was really cool. etc. But I look around and see that each Poet who dies is a black hole that is created between us.

The current formation, discussion and trend indicate that the emergence of new Poets is unfeasible. The celebration of the mediocre, if not the primary, as references for thought, criticism and reflection, is the daily dose of hemlock that is preventively instilled in the so-called contemporary intellect.

In his beautiful story The Mirror and the Mask, presented to me by Saja, who knew very well how to revere Poets, Jorge Luis Borges talks about a king who orders his poet to praise him for his war deeds. The poet brings poetry that the king considers perfect and above everything that has been created. And he gives the poet a silver mirror, asking him to write another one, since this first one, however perfect and beautiful it was, had not affected anyone who heard it.

The poet thanks him and says he understands, and returns after a year. It brings a poem that does not report the war, but is the war itself. More diffuse, more erratic, and more touching, wild than the first. Praised for his even greater feat, he receives a golden mask from the king as a reward, and the request to end the trinity with “a higher work”. The poet thanks him and says he understands, and returns after a year.

Upon his return, the poet “was almost different. Something other than time had wrinkled and transformed his features. The eyes seemed to look very far away or to be blind.” He barely has the courage to recite the poem, but he does so, alone, to the king. Just one sentence.

It came in the morning, almost like a profanation, says the Poet, and the king notices it and seeks an atonement, as they knew Beauty, thus, with a capital letter, “which is a gift forbidden to men”. The king gives the Poet a dagger, who kills himself, and leaves his country like a beggar, without ever repeating the poem.

My summary doesn’t reflect even 1% of the beauty of the story, which is almost poetry, like Borges’ short stories. As Antonio Cicero would say, “as one cannot, in a poem, separate the signified from the signifier, strictly speaking one cannot say its meaning in other words.” But I didn’t mean it in other words. I just wanted to bring, among the wealth of readings that can be had of the story, one specific one. In the course of writing, the Poet begins with the perfection of form, images, beauty, verses and rhymes. But it was not enough for the king, who wanted the poem to be a “fire that burns without being seen”, a “wound that hurts and cannot be felt”, as Camões masterfully defined love; which is, after all, the splendor of Beauty.

The poet, after a year, overcomes himself, goes deeper, delves into the soul of poetry, and brings the fire and the wound, reflected in the silver mirror.

The poet needs another year, he and his golden mask, to find the essence, the absolute, the pure form and the absolute poem. The gift of Beauty.

The opposite path, Borges knows, would never happen. It was necessary to follow the path through form, through technique, and then polish the art and make the verb become living, pulsating flesh. It is a tortuous, difficult, probably impossible path (the utopian and absolute poem in Borges arrives with death and wandering). But the Poet spends his life trying.

When Antonio Cicero decides to take his own life, in assisted euthanasia, because he doesn’t feel capable of being the Poet he was, he doesn’t just take his life, another rare, endangered specimen goes with him.

Roman Jakobson wrote a little book called The Generation that Wasted its Poets, commenting on the stupid Soviet persecution of his country’s great personalities. More than wasting it, sometimes it seems to me that successive generations have been rejecting and burying once and for all the possibility of the existence of a figure that, due to its exceptional character, seems to me increasingly necessary to a world of the light, superficial, primary and empty. If not as a mirror or mask, at least as a counterweight. If not transformative, provocative and destabilizing, as would be necessary, at least as a reference to another possible, imagined and fantasized world; where “beautiful is the splendor of order” (as Aristotle would say).

Poets live and die by this.