A Poet of Weird Mystery, and What Our Roots Could Mean

04 Dec, 2022

I was recently introduced to—and blown away by—the work of French poet Jean Follain. What’s so special, at least about his collection Transparence of the World? Probably the fact that I can’t quite pin down the moods its author creates—and/or the fact that you think you get a clear picture of what Follain’s depicting, or even who or what the focus of his few lines is—but then the poet throws a small wrench into the works, and you’re left wondering how anyone’s supposed to behave when confronted with his scenes of death and decay and dogs and leaning houses and walls and nature that persists in a world that sometimes seems post-human. It’s a world of darkish wonder—a wondering that keeps drawing me in. Follain’s translator and fellow poet W. S. Merwin summed up the magic well when he said that “Follain’s concern is finally with the mystery of the present—the mystery which gives the recalled concrete details their form, at once luminous and removed, when they are seen at last in their places.”¹

So often in this collection, there’s an air of something sinister happening or about to happen. In one poem, a “sturdy waitress has turned pale” after witnessing “a hand com[ing] to rest on” the shoulder of a customer, who now “will have to let the winter night fall.” Whatever that may mean for this customer and the person who has approached him, the waitress, at least, knows it can’t be good—for “has she not often seen / on the last page / of a book of modest learning / the word end printed / in ornate capitals?”²

Then there’s “Black Meat,” whose “eaters of venison” are sitting around a bunch of “stones called precious” “carv[ing] in silence / their black meat.” Black meat? Is this venison? Something else, something whose greater definition or identifiable source is unknown to us because we, here, can’t know it—or maybe because it’s just best that we don’t? Were it not for the poem’s title, this dark lump of flesh might not stand out from an also vaguely located indoor scene surrounded by trees that “imitate in outline / a giant sentence.” The poem was written in 1964, almost twenty years after the publication of Paul Celan’s “Death Fugue,” with its repeated “Black milk of dawn” drunk and drunk over again. I’ve no idea whether Follain had read it, and it could very well be that, having heard Celan’s poem first, it’s simply and unfairly going to influence my reading of many others encountered thereafter, especially if they contain something hazily cruel, easily appropriable to Celan’s attempt to portray some truth about the Holocaust. But Follain’s poem isn’t the only one of his to feature an interesting use of the color black, from the thicket’s “black vertebrae” “reassembl[ing]” themselves while “being swallowed up by the night,” to a description of one character as the “Donor of the black garment,” “an old evening suit” now worn by someone out walking and sensing the presence of death at some distant remove. And if we include here “The man of dark politics” who “watched the untying of a black chignon,” the pieces continue to build up a dark undercurrent running throughout Follain’s strange snapshots.³

But not just dark—because so often, some unexpected minor character gains the upper hand against an easy gloom. Even while that creepy man of dark politics watches a probably-hired woman loosening her hair, we suddenly zoom into what’s going on in one of the roses in the room, from which “the mute insect / would not abdicate its existence / and clambered alone slowly / on the trembling petal of the flower / plucked from the ravines of death / in the course of a long day.” The insect seems to be the real star here, the long-suffering traveler just trying to get away from all this gilded nonsense—much like his compatriot in “October Thoughts,” another unspecified insect who, when faced with a brilliant fall evening and beautiful girls and “a threat of war” that might have the gravest consequences for the humans around him, “pauses / then goes on.” Representatives of the nonhuman are frequently the players who trouble a sure understanding of the scene or action or its aftermath, like the bird in “The School and Nature,” who appears in the penultimate line of a poem that had been describing an empty schoolroom and the fate of a couple of its onetime occupants—but that ends with that bird “letting fall / the dark drops of its blood.”⁴

Something so often seems off in these poems—but, I want to say, authentically amiss. All this decay and prosaic life succeeds somehow in not being depressing or stale, the grounds for one more poet basking in cultivated melancholy or lamenting the brevity of human life. There is no nostalgic call in these scenes to lose oneself in the good old times; there is no sentimental portrayal of peasants or village characters, but instead, something like a clear-eyed look at the mundane. And here, clear-eyed means the refusal to wipe the oddities out of the picture, to make these images easier to take in or understand. Because as Merwin mentioned, that mystery is part of the poem’s everyday present, which features beautiful girls “twisting in sumptuous hands” right next to “a horse lying near death,” or a “man dying” in a house filled with gossiping housewives, or a barn owl who “warms her blood / with the virgin light-giving oil” “in the village churches.⁵

So yes: mystery, the cycles of life and death, the shadows whose natures or intentions are unknowable. But for me, it’s one of the collection’s first poems that gives an idea of what Follain’s poetry as a whole holds within it, that feeling for or approach to what each of us is given when we’re set down into a particular time and place, a place like every other of slow decays and growths and unnoticed cruelties or escapes and minor mysteries. “Appeal to the Red-Haired Soldiers” may start out by describing the speaker’s Frankish ancestors, the red-haired soldiers who planted the roots of what would become that speaker’s world. And that past may have been glorious; its memory may still live in who we are and what we do. And yet, we learn, “at the hour when we look at ourselves / and the wood of the furniture gives / in an apartment without rats / without rot / without joints in the flooring / and without even / a scented glove / then one feels alone.”⁶

That poem was first published in 1932, in the wake of a war that changed Europe for good—and in a time in which much or all of the continent may have begun wondering just what lay before it. The poem’s admission that roots will only reach so far, at least in a way that means anything, would be taken up during the next war by Follain’s compatriot, Simone Weil, who saw in 1943 that being French was a pretty confusing thing to be. Are you still French if you collaborate with the Nazis? If you resign yourself to despair? More French if you’re in the resistance? What’s the point of trying to do anything, if you’re occupied by bastards and have no reason to believe in the country you were so proud of not so long ago? Weil tried to construct a new form of patriotism built not on aggression and self-aggrandizement, but compassion for both self and other. That compassion, though, was heavy on what Weil openly referred to as a “spiritualization of sufferings,” grounded in the reality that suffering was a part of everyone’s life.⁷

I’ve always found weird that refusal to let go of national particularity, when the call being issued is something like “Sufferers of the world, unite!” But that attempt to hold onto, or identify with, a national or cultural origin, is obviously nothing new, and something that will probably always be with us. I often wonder about the popularity, in the US in particular, of genealogical study, of, as Henry Louis Gates’s PBS show has it, Finding Your Roots.⁸ On the one hand, I suppose it makes sense for a nation of mostly immigrants to figure out how they got here—and even more sense for those brought here against their will to discover something of a past that others had tried to deny them. On the other hand, I also wonder what difference a filled-out family tree makes in anyone’s life—or rather, not for the elites who’ve kept wealth and so forth intact and expanding over the course of generations—but for those who’ve suddenly found out that hey, their family’s been in this country for a really long time.

Finding Your Roots has been running since 2012, and more than once, some celebrity has been treated to the fact that an ancestor came over on the Mayflower or fought in the Revolutionary War. Inevitably, Dr. Gates asks how the lucky person feels, knowing someone in their line was part of getting this whole USA thing started. Everyone on the show is, of course, a media-trained professional, and so regardless of what might really be going on in that moment, they all know they’d better be pleased as punch, and sit up a little straighter in sudden recognition of the patriotic genes they carry. But I always wonder what might be going on in any of their heads, whether any of them are admitting to themselves that that poor drummer boy probably didn’t have much of a choice, that circumstances often force themselves upon you, and that someone’s toting a blunderbuss didn’t necessarily have anything to do with what sort of person he was or what he was hoping to get out of the whole thing. When I see this sort of ancestral history being revealed as the best surprise ever, I’m reminded, oddly enough, of John the Baptist.

Hanging out by the Jordan in scratchy clothing and subsisting on locusts and whatever honeycombs he could snatch from wild bees, John didn’t seem to have cared much for hygiene or social niceties, much less keeping his family tree intact. His religious zeal—and his diet and fashion choices—were certainly grounded in Jewish tradition, and he might have had some link with the ascetic Essenes. So yes, John was definitely part of a particular cultural community—but maybe only in similar fashion to the way that Simone Weil wanted the French to be French; he would have had no time for weighing himself against his peers based on who’d begotten whose great-grandfather. As John spat at some Pharisees and Sadducees who wanted to get in on his baptizing trend, “You brood of vipers!... Do not presume to say to yourselves, ‘We have Abraham as our ancestor’: for I tell you, God is able from these stones to raise up children to Abraham. Even now the ax is lying at the root of the trees; every tree therefore that does not bear good fruit is cut down and thrown into the fire.”⁹

A harsher way, that, of reminding insignificant, mortal you that it’s what you do with your own life that’s key here, even if you might be the spitting image of old Abraham.

And that’s where I’m pulling Follain back in, with his apparent alienation from the red-haired soldiers who’ve passed their genes and their lore and maybe their looks down to him. The poem’s speaker doesn’t deny his connection to the Franks; he doesn’t seem, really, to feel one way or another about them—only detached. It’s their exploits, the speaker seems to realize, that have led to his comfortable life in his comfortable present, free from rats and rot. Credit where credit’s due, he seems to admit—but what’s he supposed to do now, alone in a nice apartment apparently empty of other human attachments?

It’s almost like the luckier half of the story that’s completed by Gil Scott-Heron’s “Whitey on the Moon.” Here, there are plenty of rats feasting on the apartment’s human inhabitants while the descendants of those old revolutionaries and colonialists are out now in space, finding more territory to clear for their use. The nation’s heroes may be planting the flag on alien ground, just as Follain’s ancestors “left in the earth / a Christian souvenir / a piece of jug”—but in Scott-Heron’s poem, where there’s no money to pay for doctors or food or rent down below, what’s so great about a footprint left on a barren ball of dust?¹⁰

Given this situation, maybe Weil’s call for compassion is at least a start; I mean, many of us seem to have trouble even admitting to the suffering of whole swathes of the population, human and non-. If we could at least cough up that acknowledgment, we might then, as Weil hoped we could, recognize that all of us will at one time or another suffer in some way—and so, maybe be a little less able to believe that our fates, as nations or individuals, are disconnected. It would only make sense, then, that lessening everyone’s suffering—making sure everyone can see the doctor, can feed their family—would probably lessen our own.

But look, even in the wake of a global pandemic that doesn’t even see boundaries of any kind, of a war in Ukraine that’s meant chaos for food and fuel supplies, and weather that’s smashed one region after another, a lot of us are sitting here, thanks to the work of generations who came before us, in our rat-free apartments staring at our phones, not even connected enough to the world to feel anything, whether other people’s misery or other species’ disappearance or the death rattles of the planet as a whole. Pull out your Follain, then, people, and take heed: look at his close and fearless connection with the cycles of nature’s birth and death and strange interventions; look how he reveals that no matter whose child you are, your shoes will become the “toys of some homeless cat” or “go to join / a heap of old flags,” and the ground will reclaim your body.¹¹ And as that ground keeps shifting and warming and churning, consider, too, what our lives should mean, and that the ax may even now be lying at the root of the trees.

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