Stavros Deligiorgis, Inter-Arts and Poetics of Intermittency

Stavros Deligiorgis – after discussing thoroughly the two poems Totul and Un creier apocaliptic that were written in Romanian by poet and visual arts critic Magda Cârneci, assumes also their translation into English under the title The All: AS IN THE ALL OF IT and An Apocalyptic Brain in the article you can read here (where you have both versions of the poems, in Romanian & English; see: https://www.fitralit.ro/27-10-2025-magda-carneci-totul-the-all/). A surprise that Stavros Deligiorgis makes us is adding also a poem in Romanian and its translation into English by the renowned French/Romanian playwright Eugen ionescu. It dates bak to the period he was very young, years before he left Romania for France tu pursue a stipendium. Written in the inter-war avant-garde period, the poem forsees the future absurd theatre playwright that changed – to a certain degree – the destiny of modern theatre. (Peter Sragher)

Two Romanian Verse Masterpieces by Magda Cârneci

Viață: Poeme ocazionale 1995–2015 (Life: Occasional Poems 1995–2015), Ed. Paralela 45, Pitești, Romania, 2016, „Totul,” pp., 45–47, „Un creier apocaliptic,” pp. 50–51.

Irish man eats cake with alphabet written on it;
miraculously he learns to read.
Stith Thompson, Motif Index of Folk Literature,
No. D1819.4.2; and J. C. Gospel of Saint John, 7.15.

If you will not accept what was already put down in writing [γράμμασι]
how will you accept what I am putting to you in speech [ρήμασι]?
J. C., Gospel of St. John, 5.47; S. D. Transl.

The true task of the critic is
‘to see the object as „in itself it really is not’
O. Wilde, The Critic as Artist, 1881

I

The art on the front cover of Magda Cârneci’s Viață: Poeme ocazionale 1995–2015 (Life: Occasional Poems 1995–2015) shows a hazy almost monochrome photograph of three left leaning trees probably on the edge of a far away wooded piece of land. Immediately below the root line of the larger tree’s soil the publisher’s graphics team airbrushed a faint symmetrical outline of a horizontal mouth hieroglyph to serve as background for the Viață: Poezii, in blue and white,coinciding with the downcurve of the lower lip. Cârneci’s 2016 book, it so happens, has several poems with macro- and micro-cosmic imagery, no small part of it dealing with the secretive earth’s animate and inanimate processes.

The fine print on the back cover, however, tells a far different, more anthropocenic story. Its two paragraphs seem to be speaking to the reader who just picked up the book and could not have guessed that most of the poems between the covers were once part of personal exchanges, the poems in hand being the responses to rather particular animadversions. This blurb indicates a specific weighty absence from the core of the book which, gradually, dissipates as soon as the Table of Contents ushers in titles such as „Un fel de poetică” (A poetics of sorts) and „Poetesa” (The poetess).

Note must be made that Cârneci’s first-person statement on the back cover also openly ascribes its cohesiveness to „life” itself, no less, and that she is at her creative best under conditions of intensity. A disarming self-representation, no doubt, yet also one that introduces the primal expositor of the performing Pirandellian maschera or, its roughly contemporaneous Poundian persona. Beyond the straightforward setting up of a confessional backdrop Cârneci raises the true possibility of an archetypal continuum that does not distinguish between positions stated inside fictive constructions and their presumed non-creative framing.*

For the English speaking reader who has no Romanian the Viață of the title* is the inflected form of the raw lexical entry under „Viața” but, semantically speaking, poles apart from it; the small diacritical mark above the „ă” making all the difference. „Viața” is derived from the Latin „vita,” a cognate of the wildly ambiguous Greek „bios” which, in the absence of context, could also stand, as Heraclitus had already noticed, for its death­-dealing homonym „bow.”*The desinentially marked Viață of the book could surprisingly mean a large portion of a life, an ergative or wished–for part of it.

Viața, not viață, for instance, would be a good match for the „Totul” poem in the collection, the totality; the „works,” in English idiomatic usage, could be about the all-engulfing entity, the „ALL” that consumes the universe, with all the appurtenance thereof, even as it births it. When that happens, and for a fleeting moment only, the cannibalized serving is likened to a pristine mirror* that was triturated into clastswhich have but scant resemblance to the former perfect reflector. Viață, might serve as a good descriptor of the life after its having been swallowed up.*

From this gulping down there is no more remembrance of or reflecting upon states past; only refraction. The poem doubles up on the ravages that man, the hypothetical apex of all existence, is reduced to the mere fodder of the ravenous „ALL.” When the latter condition is contemplated it permits the debris’ random projections to be superimposed in ways that resonate only with the lees of the last excre(a)tion.*

Except, of course, for Cârneci’s mouthpiece in the poem that subsumes its own survival across the unforgiving singularity of universal ingestion, assimilation and expurgation. The master trope behind the reeling out of the Totul poem towards its unmaking, is the fatal degrading of an original unblemished state that ultimately morphs into an incoherent heap of forlorn tesserae*. Could the ultimate prevalence of this shattered—graphemic?—byproduct, also entail the dissing of the artistic process that brought it into being, initially as a mirror—of the poet in the poem?—and finally as shards of an otherwise pre-and-post human ALL?

II

The bulk of the „Totul” poem and just like the „Un creier apocaliptic” (An apocalyptic brain) are lamentations that parade the long list man has been and is deprived of by the crude, all-engulfing ALL. Strangely, whatever does survive the all-absorbing ALL must still have enough consciousness intact and in place for it to be aware of the sum of things, Sisyphus-like, it does not have. Could it be that man himself is a scale model of the most awful, cosmic steam-roller ALL? If this is the case, the ALL is like the tail-biting dragon, the ouroboros reaching out to the slender limits of its own self.

Cârneci’s second reference to the repositioning of the digested subject „back to nature” occurs towards the end of the first poem, and indeed to a dense „forest of symbols.” The implantation is unexpected. This „forest”—etymologically parallel, non-nasalized, form to that of the Latin densus and Greek δάσος; the adjectival designation in the original, codrul des [English, dense] de simboluri—could stand for a Dantean limbo or a supra-temporal, cultural dump. Cârneci’s poem in the Viață collection titled Un creier apocaliptic (An apocalyptic brain) and the return to „nature” as a return to symbols recall Dante’s dark forest of the first tercet of the Divine Comedy with the words mi ritrovai per una selva oscura as a raw aporetic cliché, much like Job’s and Faust’s preambles „in heaven.”

The forest of symbols in Ch. Baudelaire’s sonnet Correspondances (from Les fleurs du mal, 1857; The flowers of evil) speak of a setting with rhizomes deep in the earth which, beyond the unceasing signaling of their origins, do two other things simultaneously: they babble endlessly with each other, and they scrutinize man! Cârneci’s theme would recognize in Baudelaire man’s insubstantiality* against a field of heterogeneous and indistinct subsets that communicate more often with each other than with the broken human leftover.

Baudelaire’s forest on the one hand emits such clashing streams of fragrances, colors and bright amalgams of freshness and decay that are supposed to nourish the soul and mind at the same time. But do they? These chords of correspondances are at such a synaesthetic distance from Cârneci’s surviving human’s point of view, they come across not as the high arts humanity takes such pride in but as the hollowest will-o’-the wisp The ALL did not bother to raid and annihilate.

III

Viață’s opening salvo is a modest sounding poem titled Un fel de poetică (A poetics of sorts). It begins with a bleeding woman which births a bleeding woman, which births another bleeding woman. At first blush the image recalls a set of nested matryoshka dolls that enunciate little else beside a conveyor belt serial simulation.*

Cârneci’s exiled human in a crowd symbols could be labeled as an individual arrested in perpetual undecidability. Man at the mercy of all things symbolic is exemplified by the horrors early Greeks subjected themselves to by supporting extravagantly expensive annual productions of their endlessly tragic mythological drama. In the cold mornings of January and February the plays dealt with incest, parricide, enslavement, foul-smelling gangrene, suicide, cannibalism, and a broad smorsgardsboard of psychoses. Re-casting the myths of trauma into theater was interpreted by Aristotle (Poetics 1449 Β 20) as an artful means of administering a homeopathic cure of people’s worst nightmares. The frills of drama competitions and city–wide awards pale in comparison with the state prescription for collective obsessing over Hecuba, or their Persian neighbors’ mourning over their navy’s defeat at Salamis.

Arnold van Gennep’s 1909 Rites de passage (Rites of passage)is a study of the periods of aging transitions from birth to death marked, in most societies, by stressful processes overshadowed by ominous significations. Ian Kott’s 1970 The Eating of the Gods: An Interpretation of Greek Tragedy barely scratches the surface of the horrid material that Greek audiences were expected, paradoxically, to experience annually for their own and their fields’ good.

Back in 1967 symbolic anthropologist, as he called himself, Victor Turner expanded and radically redefined van Gennep’s category of liminality*. He adopted Baudelaire’s phrase. His inspired discussions of the structure and execution of rituals go beyond Van Gennep’s concept of the life transitions in non-western societies as stabilizing exertions. Turner meticulously notes the physical and psychological demands made upon the participants as harsher than the abjectly debilitating conditions they live under.

The most recent user of the Baudelaire verset in a book title is Andrei Pop* in his A Forest of Symbols: Art, Science, and Truth in the Long Nineteenth Century (2019). Pop expands Turner’s use of the concept of liminality to cover Western creative settings of beleaguered collectivities as well as individuals’ self-imposed litanies for guilt-ridden metaepistemic forays, all aimed at keeping language’s ability to forgive unimpugned.

Cârneci’s Life is complemented by the sequences of the poem Un creier apocaliptic (An apocalyptic brain, pp. 50–51) which ends with the line „Lume, univers, floare albă de prun, carne moale de miel, ca să te cunosc, te  m ă n î n c !” (World, universe, white plum tree blossom, tender flesh of lamb, so that I may know you . . . I eat you!*). The triple hyperbaton is telling. In terms of purely idiomatic usage, her brain will always hover over the poem as a Sibyline mouthpiece.

And right where the picture of defrauded humanity Viață modulates into its recurrence—between niveluri și lumi (levels and worlds)—Cârneci resorts to catalysis. Here is T. S. Eliot’s way of redirecting the art of poetry back into its human space: „It is in this depersonalization that art may be said to approach the condition of science. I, therefore, invite you to consider, as a suggestive analogy, the action which takes place when a bit of finely filiated platinum is introduced into a chamber containing oxygen and sulphur dioxide.” Tradition and the Individual Talent, 1919.

It is the poem, not the poet, that makes it necessary to refer to other arts as keys to a proper ending. Interleaving and interweaving of representational and illusory space René Magritte’s 1965 Le Blanc–Seing—and what a Franglais pun on Magritte’s part!— sends the entire poem skipping between niveluri și lumi (levels and worlds) on the viewer’s retina as a problem in topology. Horse and rider both enter and exit illusionist space in synch too with Baudelaire’s multifocal Correspondances and the cosmos. Photons permitting, the viewer is given carte blanche (Le Blanc–Se[e]ing !) to unscramble the perspectival logics between the whole and its parts.*

The time-transcending universal ouroboros is being transferred to the poetess: THE ALL is a grinder that leaves only stray vestiges behind, signs perhaps of an Apollinairian spaced out printing of the letters so they may stand detached free to combine and recombine. There is no better prototype for this upturn than the Sibyl’s „raving mouth whose unsmiling and unaffected and unpleasing utterings reach a thousand years for the god” penned by Heraclitus.*

The ancient folk etymology, dating to the writings of Plutarch on the infanticidal god Kronos as a close homo–synonym for Chronos (time; „the Greeks allegorize Kronos as Chronos,” in De Iside and Osiride, 32) has traveled to Egypt and back. Unwavering languages of consciousness, Eminescu’s neclintita limbă in Cârneci’s breathless performances, is the protagonist of yet another life before its next benthic submersion.

IV

The absence of Cârneci’s correspondents from the Viață is nothing less than the writer’s touching the corpus proper of the western lyrical tradition. The wealth of variations on the self in and of the cosmos as well as the countless alternating recastings of the self between parody and sublimity is the equal of the occasionally scabrous ripostes between the cohorts of Dante da Maiano and Dante Alighieri. Poetry brings language into being, no matter how profane, and being brings the sacred into being, at long last, with or without man at its epicenter.

Background Matters

* Viață of the title: Idiomatic use of viață in a sentence: „Tot ce scriu a fost cândva viață adevărată“ (Everything I write was once real life…), Max Blecher, Vizuina luminată, posthumous publ. 1947–1971.

* Non-creative framing. Authorial self representations according to Wayne Booth’s 1961 The Rhetoric of Fiction are always suspect. Point–of–view perspectival application of Ausdruck als Inhalt (expression as content) has been applied to the domains of theology, psychiatry, propaganda and art history. Much less in literary analysis. It has a long history in the unfolding of European ideas going back both to Cicero and Horace if not to Plato’s Cratylus, e. g., Socrates, Cratylus here says I don’t look like a Hermogenes. SD paraphrase.

* Homonym „bow”: in Die Fragmente der Vorsokratiker, D–K, B 48; Heraclitus’ persistent recourse to the interplay between bios and thanatos is an essential undercurrent throughout this essay. À propos of Heraclitus’ instance of contrary vocabulary Carl Abel’s Über den Gegensinn der Urworte (Regarding contradictory meanings of primal words, 1884), a grievously flawed book, claimed that a large segment of the Proto Indo European lexicon carried semantically opposed senses. Clement of Alexandria, in entirely different contexts, cites comparable examples repeatedly in his Stromateis, e.g., III.3.21.1, most famously for Heraclitus’ calling birth (γένεσις) death (θάνατος). In Freud’s hands Abel’s still debated observations, became a very convenient instrument in the psychoanalytic process. Laurence R. Horn’s valuable overview of the issue of ambiguous signification in Etymythology and Taboo, „Redeeming Gegensinn: On the hazards of Homonymy,” pp. 1–30.

Speaking of linguistic polysemy Walter Benjamin, in his 1923 essay Die Aufgabe des Übersetzers (The translator’s mission), the foreword to his translation of Charles Baudelaire’s Tableaux parisiens in German. Benjamin suggests that translation is perhaps the best way of foregrounding the root dynamics of a text and hence the most insightful investigation of the „pure,” untrammeled language which alone would confirm its presumed status as a work of art. It bears repeating that Benjamin’s essay was written in times when gusts of „depth” and „purity” were blowing across mystifications of every imaginable kind in every public platform of the globe. With terrible consequences of course.

* Even as it births it: The narrative tradition in the West begins with Kronos eating his children as they are born (Hesiod, Theogony, 453–460̀. Ιt was about the 3^rd century B.C.E., that Livius Andronicus stabilized the Roman equivalents of the Greek pantheon: Minerva for Athena, Mercurius for Hermes, Saturn and the Saturnalia for Kronos and the Kronia).

Plato speaks of THE ALL, or Soul of the World—the Anima Mundi—that feeds on its own decay(Timaeus 33c, φθίσιν, deterioration; or „waste,” according to Benjamin Jowett’s paraphrase). The circularity of an insatiable cosmos must have intrigued the better traveled neo-Platonists, probably of Ammonius Sakkas’ circle in Hellenistic Alexandria, who saw didactic and magically empowering symbols behind every bush. The imploding serpent could be assumed to anticipate the textual expositions of rituals whose effectual range as gnosis was and still is immense. The immortalizing gambit of theocannibalism is at the beating heart of Christianity (J. C., The Gospel of St. Matthew 26:26–28). It reaches all the way to the „great-sign” finale in the Apocalypse of the New Testament: A red serpent is about to swallow the male offspring of a woman who weeps heartbreakingly although she is crowned with the sky and the stars (J. C., The Revelation of St. John, 12:5). The emergent new order hearkens back to the theme of ​​the surviving olympian Zeus under whose rule gods and men once escaped the cyclical Kronian time that ushered in the ideal but illusory eternity for all the formerly disjected members who make up the present world order.

* A pristine mirror: Nizam (ca. 1190 CE) tells the story of King Iskandar the Great arbitrating an artistic competition between Chinese representational craftsmen and Greek masters of the mirror. Echoes of the story have influenced both philosophy, mystical religiosity and theories of desire in Al-Ghazali, Rumi, and Sa’adi. Consult Arturo Ingenito, „Reframing the Persian Tale of the Greek and Chinese Painters,” SOAS University of London, Lecture on YouTube, 15 December 2022.

* Swallowed up. Two recent contributions supporting this perspective: First off Fabiana Lopes da Silveira’s The Searched-for Thing: A Literary Approach to Four Early Alchemical Texts, Ph. D. Thesis, University of Oxford, 2020; da Silveira cites, not surprisingly, C. G. Jung’s, Alchemical Studies, R.F.C. Hull, transl., Princeton U Press, 1967, p. 213. Da Silveira’s conclusion at the end of her meticulous study is that at least two of her chief source documents (Zosimus, Omega and the dream visions in Memoriae, 10–12) point directly to strong relationships between „language and subject matter,” and „language itself [as] the protagonist of experimentation rather than [the alchemists’ „lab”] technical endeavours” p. 258.

And second, Kostas Skordoulis’ and Kostas Exarchakos’ contribution to a renewed understanding of C. G. Jung’s theses regarding Alchemy: … the alchemical processes are conceived as the object on which the acting individual projects his/her emotional/psychological load. It is worth noting that Jung clearly accepts the historical distinction between Alchemy and Chemistry, and as a transition from theoretical patterns with no clear scientific features to explanatory patterns with distinct scientific conceptualizations;” in Gianna Katsiampoura, ed., ISSUES on Greek Alchemy, Institute of Historical Research National Hellenic Research Foundation, Athens, 2015, p. 204.

* The last excre(a)tion: Regarding ingestion, the phenomenon of language as an abreaction to psychological phenomena see the literature on the French-speaking, mentally ill American linguist Louis Wolfson, edited and prefaced by Gilles Deleuze, Le schizo et les langues, Gallimard, 1970; Schizophrenia and Languages. The Wolfson and Deleuze opus must be read in light of Antoine N. Rideau’s critique, An Escape from Language into Language: The Internal Exile of Louis Wolfson, City University of New York, 2016. In Greek, and from a stricter first-person, invective against himself Giorgos Aristinós’ Η Επιληψία της γλώσσας (The epilepsy of language), Estia, 2023, confirms the rejectionist perception of the world, the poet, and the language he works with and in: „… to write uncontrollably, to increase the power of every sound, and every phoneme, to fill my stomach with emetics so that, empty, I would be able to associate with everything I could hear, everything I could listen to in the future, to piss words and shit phrases, to become a total mouth-anus … Yes, I would let the language pour out like lava, to burn the Pompeii of this blighted duniá [Arabic via Turkish into Mod. Gr. for world] I, a dervish dying in his whirling dance.”

The Romanian poet Gellu Naum deserves special mention of his „Eraclit” section in the Athanor (1958–1968) collection. The poem extolls the sense of hearing throughout its fabric. Heraclitus would most certainly, appreciate it, down to the ending note of Naum’s „ears of stone.” From the perspective of the Greek bios’ notorious conundrum would obviously have not much use for the sense of hearing!

          * Forlorn tesserae: The sentiment of man as pathetic refuse is not without precedent: Psalms (Septuagint Version) 75.11: „ἐνθύμιον … and ἐγκάταλειμα ἐνθυμίου,” Man is but a thought … the leftover of a thought;” and Pindar, Pythian Victory Odes, 8.95: „σκιᾶς ὄναρ ἄνθρωπος,” man is but a shadow’s dream.

* Serial simulation: By way of generalization, a version of derided nuptials, filmed in 1937 by Buster Keaton, as A Love Nest on Wheels, ought to be viewed together with a much earlier publicity photograph of child Buster Keaton posing under his mother’s skirts and dressed precisely like his father.

* Category of liminality: From the Latin limen; the limits or boundaries of perceptible differentiation in extreme circumstances. German Schwelle, threshold; first used by J. F. Herbart in 1824 to describe the outermost edges of the perception of stimuli and the demarcation between conscious and unconscious processes.

Liminality is a working concept of Victor Turner’s in The Forest of Symbols: Aspects of Ndembu ritual, 1967, dovetails both with an earlier version titled „A Study of Ndembu Village Life,” 1957, and with the more recent „Revelation and Divination in Ndembu Ritual,” 1975; Turner draws admirable parallels between native African long, self-abating sacraments, American 19^th Century fiction, Judaeo Christian rites, and Zen Buddhist iconography, pp. 192–3.

People in extremis are everywhere in the classical canon. Stage instructions to moan and bewail can be found in Aeschylus’ Eumenides (Furies, v. 123). Greek villagers from the widely scattered communities Agia Eleni, Kerkíni, Langadá, Melíki and Mavroléfki, all in the north of Greece, gather on Saint Constantine and Saint Elena’s holy day on May 21, so that, following day-long non-ecclesiastical preparations, to the sound of a small bowed string instrument and a drum, walk barefoot on live embers for several hours after sunset. The annual event is called Anastenária (Αναστενάρια,”[Assemblies] of sighing;” from the verb anastenázein, Romanian a ofta), after the participants’ labored breathing.

* Andrei Pop: Dario Gamboni finds Andrei Pop’s reading of Baudelaire’s Correspondances inadequate. „[Pop] does not address the theory of correspondences, vertical (between the material and the spiritual worlds) as well as horizontal (between the various senses and the corresponding media) for which it stood.” Art Worldwide, 20, no. 1 (Spring 2021), p.126.

Of all symbolic anthropologists since Van Gennep and Pop, Cârneci’s use of Baudelaire’s poem is the most fully integrated as an ironic coda to her saga of man’s debased condition. By sheer coincidence she is perhaps on the same logical plane as Pop’s persistent analogizing of Baudelaire’s scordaturæ with the spazing of all of the European nineteenth century.

For a comprehensive reading of Baudelaire’s Correspondances see Ihab H. Hassan, „Correspondances: The Dialectic of a Poetic Affinity,” The French Review, Vol. 27, No. 6 (May, 1954), pp. 437–445.

* I eat you!: Greek sculptor George Láppas (1950–2016), ca. 1991, exhibited a series of „Red City Men” in small groups of middle aged urbanites in suits, all topped by casts of his own head. One of these men holds a mirror in his open mouth so that passing viewers could see themselves in there if they looked at him.

* The whole and its parts: See René Magritte’s meta-sketch of himself in his Aube à l’antipode, 1966. It captures his head’s explosion, not of the head itself but of a drawing of his head. Ears, tufts of hair, eyes, nose and ears are in a holding pattern as they are drawn on irregular pieces of drawing paper if not cardboard.

Congruent with the Magritte analogues for Cârneci’s insufferable Totul is Peter Blume’s 1948 The Rock for her „Un creier apocaliptic.” In it there are Babel-like construdeconstruction, work-and-worship in progress, both passivity and weighing in on every dimension of a liver red geode, both smaller and larger than itself, exactly like Magritte’s castle topped monoliths or asteroids which are every bit as „historical” as the craters and lacerations on Blume’s chained, reverse Buoy, 1941, the Romanian geamandură; derived from Greco-Romanian lower Danube sailors’ patois σημαδούρα, [water] place marker.

* Penned by Heraclitus: D–K, B 92, according to Plutarch’s De Pythiae  oraculis, 397A. Σίβυλλα δὲ μαινομένῳ στόματι ἀγέλαστα καὶ ἀκαλλώπιστα καὶ ἀμύριστα φθεγγομένη χιλίων ἐτῶν ἐξικνεῖται τῇ φωνῇ διὰ τὸν θεόν.

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