Constellation of images

René Char shares with visual artists a love for the gesture of writing, drawing, a love for the line traced by hand on paper. His poems often re-appear, in handwritten form, in his correspondence, on painted pebbles, or in what we call today "artist's books," often one-of-a-kind. This beautiful Trousseau de Moulin Premier, which I picked up a few years ago at Librairie Compagnie, rue des Écoles, is a reproduction, in shape and size, of a slim cahier of postcards that a tourist to Char's native L'Isle-sur-Sorgue could acquire in the 1930s, as a souvenir of his visit. 

Trousseau suggests trousseau de jeune mariée, a bride's outfit consisting of linens, clothes, quilts. At first glance, then, this trousseau seems to contain "sights, monuments, places, curiosities, costumes," all carefully folded into a neat container. As one would expect of a bridal trousseau, this container is "embroidered" with birds and insects. The bridal metaphor is sustained by the word "album," through the evocation of the color white, albus. Moulin Premier, by reference to the many mills on the River Sorgue, brings to mind the manufacture of cloth (fulling mills), and so the stuff that would normally go into a trousseau.

Words printed on the tourist souvenir, like the images inside, become sort of "ready-mades," or mots/images trouvés, that through the action of verbal fulling are turned into the matter of poetry. 

Below each "postcard," there is a variant of an aphorism from Moulin Premier, and on the verso, starting with the dedication to Greta Knutson-Tzara, runs a poem, Dent prompte (printed in Dehors la nuit est gouvernée).

All the photos are taken along the river -- sometimes hinted only by a low brick embankment bordering a canal. The river, encircling the city, is like the weft weaving through its fabric, feeding the many mills and locks. It also runs through the poem; and it is perhaps the liquid that allows the images of the poem to develop.

 Salut, chasseur au carnier plat!

 ... we read on page "3." And in Moulin Premier, no. XXVI:

Salut, chasseur au carnier plat!
À toi, lecteur, d'établir les rapports.

Merci, chasseur au carnier plat!
À toi, reveur, d'aplanir les rapports.

Greetings, hunter with a flat gamebag!
Up to you, reader, to establish the connections. 

 Thank you, hunter with a flat gamebag!
Up to you, dreamer, to smooth out the connections.

This is a clue to reading the Trousseau, and perhaps Char's work as a whole: as a constellation of connections, between words and images, between writings and rewritings where poems depart, travel, encountering other poems, fragments... Words and images are wedded to each other, not merely illustrating, but sparking a dialog.

In an attempt at establishing connections, here is a translation of the poem that runs across the versos of the Trousseau:

The prompt tooth

1
Light descends from the parasol to the crop
And takes comfort by the anvil

By harming you hostile concordance
Arbitrary as a wave
To which I am chained
At the level of exactitude.

2
The precursor dies silk sensed blood boils over
Cultivate cloth
Capable of extending to the point a frontal storm

The early post submissiveness sweetness of the disrobed
Slumbering beyond capture

A true pair of pleasures
Shouting in the reeds of the bay the river’s pantry
The magic of alternation

3
Laughing scratching amid protests
The enclosed striking the enclosure
The bystander refracting its facets

And again the triple-tongued night lamp poorly lit and dependent
Where prolonged gray snow is squeaking
Exciting its polymorphous
Innocent star
We will then bleach its hold with wounds.

4
The sea having returned to the cork
The giddy color of laundry
I adopted the stage of its source
The phoenix of salt spread its wings
And the source climaxed.

5
Like noon stains glass with smoke
Everything I loved has faded
Tangible trivial familiar
A face that I felt keeper of the amphitheater
A body that turned the teeth of wind to ice
A few festive voices cleverer than creation
A shield of immunity that thwarts every daring move
I’ve become accustomed to the perpetual motion of solitude
To its pennant adorned with dust
To its belvedere with a flight of exhausting stairs.

6
Night light at the threshold of our embankments
Uncouples beauty

The runner is becoming
Less and less obstructedVanished at the sun’s whim.

7
Fury you treat me like sadness
When it sweeps my path
In the evening bordered with disparate seed
Thus thunder erect on the volume of water
Captive slack and disarmed
Quick as a proverb though in bloom

If union brought sleep
Not the desert
The lust of cooperators would leave these dividing walls
That punctuate us
And lie in the sinkhole
Clean with fright and matinal with future.

8
We tend towards an encounter with scarves
Across the nocturnal grove and the vines
Lost to the wind were those
Whose blood is of the soil beneath their bellies
Whose odor split wide open scorches with no flame

For a long time desire kept up pace with our figures
As night was growing yellow
The eye of the leech was unshelled on the branch
The bread bakers had risen from their soft beds
Our banks blind happy grew rusty.

9
Freedom destroyed by absence
Maybe the resource of hope at the gates of a lynched train station
The plural body of love battling against apes

A day will pass friendship inert from forgetting.

10
The ban struggled on happily
He had risked the fold
Dispatched the road
Extended the frontal storm
Gave back fresh water to the ghosts
In truth he cared little
That his back was broken and betrayed by the sun
He was entering pure into the frame.