First Summer

Introduction

Malcolm de Chazal is a freak of world literature. In English, he is known as the author of Sens-plastique, a famously uncategorizable collection of short poetic sayings. Aphoristic we might call it, but that doesn’t always feel quite right. Chazal himself called it a “cosmogony of the Invisible.”

He wrote much more than just this one book. There is La vie filtrée, a 400-page philosophical companion piece to Sens-plastique, a poetics of sorts, in which he attempts to abolish the exterior world and refashion it into “an X-ray telescope of the human in order to see God.” There is a “novel,” Petrusmok, which imagines a mytho-cosmic origin for Mauritius, the remote island nation off the coast of Madagascar where Chazal was born and spent most of his life. There are books about Moses and Judas; dozens of parable-like pieces he calls “apparadoxes”; several frankly baffling essays in which, so far as I can tell, he tries to disprove Einsteinian physics by way of a homegrown theory of perception, light, shadow, and “immobilité palpitation”—palpating or trembling immobility. You can imagine how excited I felt in discovering that he also wrote poems.

For those who’ve never read Chazal, I’m not sure these poems are the right place to begin. They can be exasperating, even goofy at times, as often as they are (and they are) charming and profound. They’re best appreciated not in isolation but as part of a life’s work, one person’s lovingly eccentric dedication to rethinking perception anew.

As W. H. Auden writes in his preface to the 1971 edition of Sens-plastique: the French have a long, venerable tradition of moral aphorists, and Chazal is not one of them. This is not to say, however, that there is no ethical dimension to his work. I think of the ways he approaches the object-world with childlike wonder; his cosmic thinking is always grounded in the material. Flowers make him laugh. Objects in motion seem to move him to tears. “Personification” feels like a poor word to describe what he’s doing, for example, in the following: “The / White / Daisy / Breastfed / The / Lunar / Light” or “Tonight / The pale / Moon / Got / Its period.” He’s never bleak, or ironic, or nihilistic. He’s too busy looking at the world. In a certain sense, I think of him as a religious writer. The verb voir is his God.

When in de Chazal’s world, it’s best to remember that the laws of physics work differently here. His thoughts—and these poems are, if nothing else, little thought experiments—form a vrille. It’s a word with no English equivalent: often translated as “tendril,” it can be used to describe the curly feelers that help vines cling, a spiral plane dive, a gymnastics twirl, a corkscrew, a boar’s tail. Chazal uses vrille to describe a bone eating its own marrow; I translate it, there, as “whorl.” You can feel the twist of image transforming into an impossibly fragile truth.

It is this vrille at the heart of things that Chazal is a tireless observer of. It’s what he elsewhere calls sens magique, a perpetual turning in an instant of time, a state of continuous renewal, which is the foundation of everything. Our magical sense of the world.

---