out of need, I had to breathe
that last breath soaked
than between four doors
was closed.
give a number to the weight of my biggest fault,
it’s just testing
the free will of the wicked,
or the apathy of the wealthy,
or the arrogance of the proud,
that I would have bigger weight of relief,
making true that wish
that has always amused my days,
putting a purpose
to the usual lowest torment
of this death that breaks the ferment.
Commentary
In order for the following explanation to be well understood, I recommend one thing that would be obvious: read it while keeping the text of the poem under your eyes. You can do it in different ways, for example by opening another window on your screen, on this same site, and placing it alongside this one, in order to have both the poem and this comment under your eyes.
This poem contains great complexity, it is a concentrate of meanings, but it deserves to be studied because it is capable of proving to be enriching, it is a contribution to the world so that it can grow.
Let’s analyze it a little in detail to understand something and not get confused in the forest of echoes that it creates in us.
To orient ourselves we must first identify a core, a center around which the poem gravitates. It is not so difficult to find it: there is the expression of a desire that acts as a skeleton for all the poem:
If I could … give a number
This is the backbone of the poem: an expressed desire, only expressed, which has no answer. As if to say: “How much I would like it if I could …”. I could what? Give a number. Giving a number means being able to quantify, measure, specify, define, give a name to things, be able to master them, be able to understand them, be able to grasp them.
For now, let’s stop here: the poet manifests a desire that has no way of realizing: being able to master, understand, grasp.
Now we notice that other terms are linked to this idea of specifying, defining, grasping: he speaks twice of weight: weighing means really giving a number, establishing how much a thing is worth, based on how much it weighs. There is also the verb “to test” which expresses the same thing: testing means weighing, checking, evaluating. The expression “making true” indicates the same tendency: making something true means making it concrete, making it visible, understandable, measuring it and showing its dimensions. “Putting a purpose” indicates aswell the desire to reach something stable, secure, conclusive, defined; when an object is weighed on the scale, an end is set, that is, there is finally a basis for establishing, for example, at what price to sell it. Putting an end means putting an aim and an aim is something that presents itself as precise, defined, capable of giving orientation.
At this point we are going to understand that the poet feels the need for clarification, definition, concretization. In this sense the phrase “making true what I would like” expresses the same idea of “if I could give a number“. “If I could” is equivalent to “I would like“, “giving a number” is equivalent to “making true“, that is, being able to specify. “Making true what I wish” means “being able to define well (= making true) my deep aspirations (= that wish)”.
Now we can proceed with another question: at a certain point the poet speaks “of my biggest fault“. Fault for what? He himself does not know it, he says that he would like to give a number to the weight of this fault, that is, he would like to understand it, specify it, establish what it is.
At this point I try to intervene by trying to read behind the words: the poet does not seem to be aware of it, but it seems that, without realizing it, he actually has a very hidden suspicion on what this fault is. This guilt can be identified precisely in wanting to give a number, wanting to define, weigh, understand, grasp. This is the fault of the West, which has oppressed entire peoples with their pride, based on the pretense of having understood, of being intelligent, of being superior to other peoples. The poet perhaps suspects that this is the fault, but he does not become aware of it. He is distracted from this awareness by the fact that weighing, defining, giving a number, is also our right, they are our needs to live: we cannot live if we never get to specify anything. Here is the confusion: to live it is necessary to grasp, give a number, weigh, but this weighing is also the origin of pride, oppression, arrogance, pride in having understood. This is why the poet cannot understand what his guilt is: because it is a destructive act which, however, is also a human right and necessity.
Now that we have gained the essential coordinates in which to move, we can move more easily through the rest of the poem.
What is this being firm at a hanging rope in the first verse? The hanging rope can represent an anchor point, something to cling to, to support, but the poet has now understood that clinging to anything also means making that thing the cause of our death. We cling to a rope to escape suffering, but life has now shown us abundantly that any rope to which we cling is ultimately death; it seems to us a lifesaver to escape pain, but that lifesaver soon proves impossibility of giving space to all our movements. It is a contradiction, a deception of life: sometimes we run away from suffering, but we run away to meet death. This is the same contradiction expressed later: “between four doors I was closed“: let’s pay attention: he does not say “closed between four walls”, which would have been more logical. The doors should not serve to remain closed, but the poet unmasks this falsehood: it is the doors that close us, just as it is the rope that kills us, that rope that seemed to us a way out, just as the doors seem to be.
Now we can understand the meaning of this contradiction: it is about weighing, giving a number, which we talked about above: giving a number gives the feeling of mastering, but world history has shown that giving a number means killing, suffocating, oppressing, as a hanging rope does while seeming to allow us to escape.
Now we can understand what the poet says below: his guilt consisted in the desire for justice, which he has now understood that turns into guilt. This is what all the courts do continuously: the courts exist to do justice, but in reality they perpetrate continuous injustice in all their actions because they do nothing but giving guilts. Here is another form of the ambiguity in which the poet feels tangled: justice would be a right, but in reality it kills, because it makes people consider it from the point of view of guilt. So here is his temptation to enter people’s hearts, including his own soul, to see where free will is, where apathy is, where arrogance is, in a word: where is the fault. But by now he has understood that this search is itself guilty, and even, to put it better, giving people guilt.
All poem therefore expresses this feeling of the poet about feeling tangled, intricate, cheated, enveloped. This corresponds to the sentiment expressed in the first verses: he feels suffocated, would like to untie these knots and feels that there has been a breath. But what he breathed is not the pure of the open air; what he breathed is his own breath, not at all pure, a “soaked” breath; soaked in what? Soaked in himself. Here too there is an ambiguity that lets us see a light, but also hides it: the poet has now understood that what seems to us to be open air, fresh air in the morning, is nothing more than having given a number, having weighed , having dominated, and therefore has nothing fresh, is only the pleasure of having affirmed ourselves. So he suspects that the true opening, the true freshness, lies in breathing one’s breath, that is, knowing oneself, exploring one’s own depths: this is where the real opening lies, rather than in the illusion of going outside to breathe fresh air. But it is only his suspicion: in fact he breathed his breath not by choice, but because he had to do it: “I had to breathe“.
At this point we can go to the other expression that would seem to contrast with the rest: at a certain point he says “now, since I know“. But what does he know, since hes feeling is all about feeling tangled, feeling in the impossibility, or if anything, temptation, to give a number, in the impossibility of making the wish come true? It cannot be intellectual knowledge, it cannot be the knowledge of who managed to give a number. Therefore his knowledge can only be a knowledge of experience that goes beyond what can be said in numbers, beyond what can be expressed in words. His knowledge is the experience of himself, indicated by having breathed his own breath. The experience of oneself is not the experience of someone who has managed to create exact and precise ideas: that is the knowledge of the number. The experience of himself is instead that which is expressed in the totality of all the poem, that is, in discovering himself a poet, which as such is like having felt crossed by the muse, by art, by this spirit that moves within him and prompted him to write these verses.
At this point, a curious thing happens, which contributes to the poet’s feeling of being cheated: the experience of himself leads him to want to weigh, to number, to grasp, to do justice. In short, he sees the road, he expresses it in the form of a wish, but he is afraid of it, for what we have said above regarding Western arrogance. He is afraid of it because he is afraid of falling again into the error of universalising, imposing knowledge of the number that oppresses him. How to do then? We do it by trying not to forget that we are particular beings and that therefore every weight we give a number to is still questionable, it is tied to the person. What kills, oppresses, is saying that mathematics is not an opinion. The poet, on the other hand, suggests that even mathematics is nothing more than breathing your own breath, it is not being out in the open air. So numbering acquires the right of citizenship, as humble, aware of its own particularism.
This particularism is life, it is the ferment about which the poet speaks at the end, which opposes the “firm” expressed in the first verse instead: the poem moves in this tension between firm and ferment, that is between illusions of the arrogant West and authentic life of the individual who reads his own breath.
After what has been said, there is almost no need to explain the rest: the fact that the torment is said to be “lowest“, the “would” considered a plaything: they are also signs of the tension in which the poet sees himself pulled from both sides.
It is interesting that the poem does not have a conclusion, it does not have an answer to its problems, and this can be considered a fundamental message of it: attention must be paid against conclusions, answers, because they hide the temptation of arrogance. In the depths of the spirit it is better to go by questions, desires and aspirations, as this poem does, rather than by answers, conclusions, numbers.
Additional notes
What we call “objectivity” can be considered, in a drastic way, as “evil”, that is, objectivity is anything that imposes itself and which I am unable to oppose with my subjectivity. For example, if a stone is falling on my head, that fact is an objectivity that imposes itself: I am not certain that it cannot be a dream, but, despite being unable to impose its certainty, this situation imposes itself: even if it might be a dream, in the meantime I have to get out of the way, otherwise that stone will fall on my head. This is violence, the self-imposition of objectivity.
Objectivity has this characteristic of forcing us to react with another objectivity, that is, to take some steps that are equally objective. In the case of the stone, the objective measure is getting out of the way. The problem, in this situation, is that objectivity, by forcing me to take objective measures, leads me to reduce myself to a machine, to a mechanism, to having to obey by force and, above all, it leads me to forget my subjectivity, my being, my spirituality.
To try to compensate for this problem we can consider three ways.
The first way is that of dialogue between subjectivity and objectivity. Objectivity cannot be eliminated, but I can make it dialogue with my subjectivity. An example of this dialogue is the theological language. In theological language we reason, reflect, but we also listen to our own faith, our own spiritual experience, therefore there is a dialogue between objectivity and subjectivity.
A second way of trying to react to objectivity imposing itself, which forces me to think about objective things, forgetting my subjectivity, is trying to react directly with subjectivity, therefore trying to raise not reflections, trying to see “Let’s see what I can do”, but rather directly contrast with attention towards subjectivity. An example is the episode of Jesus and the adulteress. When they wanted to stone her they asked him “What should we do?” and at first he doesn’t answer anything, he starts writing on the ground, as if to say “I don’t offer you a reflection, a reasoning, but a spiritual experience that refers to my being. You brought me an experience, I contrast you with another experience”. We can even just sit down and meditate to contrasting experience with another experience.
A third way, which can possibly be considered a subsection of the second, is attention to the self, experienced above all in the awareness of one’s own uniqueness, in the sense that I am the only existing person perceiving this specific self and I cannot make anyone else perceive it the way I perceive it. This reveals itself as a unique, exclusive and, in this uniqueness, even incommunicable experience, to the extent that there is nothing common to refer to in order to make others understand it the way I perceive it.
In the background of this discussion there is the problem of the finger and the moon, that is, the finger that points and sometimes, instead of looking at the moon, which is indicated by the finger, we start looking at the finger and lose sight of the moon. The same question is sometimes called the question of distinguishing between the map and the territory. It’s the same problem, that is, the territory is the territory, but the map is just a piece of paper, so be careful when we look at the map: on it we are not seeing reality, but a representation of reality. We can also interpret this as the relationship between signifier and signified. The signifier, for example, a word, the meaning is what a word makes me think of.
In the relationship between the finger and the moon, actually the moon is a finger as well, because, when I say that I am thinking of the moon, actually I am still thinking of my idea of the moon and therefore I am still in direct contact with my thoughts, not with the moon. This way the moon takes the role of the signifier, orienting me towards my thoughts.
The opposite aspect could also be noted. That is to say, even the finger is a moon, in the sense that even the finger is already an experience, even the signifier is itself an experience, a contact with an experience. So, between the finger and the moon, the map and the territory, the signifier and the signified, each one can be signifier, but also a signified, because each one can be an experience, or just a pointer towards something else.
In this context we have the opportunity of trying to exploit them in this awareness that they are multiple, each one has many values, many ways of use. Meanings can be considered mega-structures, but still structures. That is, the signified is not the object, but still a structure that refers to the object and, even when I say “object”, that too is a signifier: I cannot say, by saying “object”, that I went directly to the object.
This effort to go, as far as possible, as close as possible, to the object, can be noticed in art. When I think about art, I can think about the artist, about the depicted object, but, in particular, I can keep in mind that that work of art aims to make me think about myself, about my inner experience, and so it’s as if the artist told me “I know that I can’t let you enter into my experience and I also know that what matters is not the painting, what matters is what you can find in yourself”. That way the work of art becomes a reference to something particularly objective, that is, the objectivity of my internal experience. In this context “objectivity” coincides with “subjectivity”, that is, the work of art tries to refer me to the truest and most authentic subjectivity. It is as to say “Don’t look at the painting, at the artist, think about what that experience is arousing within you”. This applies, for example, to music as well. I can look at the composer, the performer, the instrument, the melody, but I can think as if the music is telling me “Now forget everything and go think about what the music has aroused in you and that was there already before you listened to that song; that piece of music has tried to direct you to that experience that already exists in you”.
This can also apply to the experience of silence. In silence we can be careful not to get caught up in reflecting, being tormented by problems, having to find solutions. This is what alienates us, makes us objects, machines that obey the search for objective solutions. In silence I can try to react to this problem, trying to let go of all reflection and trying to follow the conscience of my interiority, that silence itself that is there, without any content, nothing, silence as it is, as it presents itself to me.
Enven all these things I am saying may risk, in turn, continuing to refer back to contents made of words, so that the best reminder, the best reference to experience, is not a note that I can take, an explanation, but the experience itself. That is, to remind myself to have an experience, the best reminder is not writing it down, but trying to go directly to the experience. This is a difficulty because there is always the risk of never going to the experience, but going to something that actually points towards it and therefore with the risk that, rather than pointing towards it, distracts. In this context, the third point, when I was talking about the self, is important. That is, precisely because we are unable to communicate the “I” in all that is unique in each of us, then precisely that can be considered the maximum of the subject’s objectivity, that is, the maximum of direct experience, no longer letting oneself be taken from words, precisely because we cannot put that “I”, as a unique experience, into words. Then, if in silence I am thinking, meditating, on that experience, there is high probability that I am really going to the true experience, which goes beyond the finger, the map, the signifier, goes directly to the experience. So, the best response to the risk of becoming victims of objectivity may be this one: cultivating the awareness of our ego as a unique experience, which each of us is unable to express to the other, precisely because it is unique and therefore there are no common, shared words to say it.
This way we discover a great universe, sometimes I have called it a microuniverse, but you might think that the microuniverse is what you look at with a telescope and the great universe is precisely the “I”, that we can explore, the spirituality that each of us can explore within themselves and this can be the best response to the world that tries to alienate us, to the evil constituted by objectivity.
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