poetry: intellect desiring itself

Nel ciel che più della sua luce prende

Fu' io, e vidi cose che ridire

Né sa, nè può chi di lassù discende; 

Perché, appressando sè al suo disire

Nostro intelletto si profonda tanto,

Che dietro la memoria non può ire.

Dante, Paradiso, Canto I, 4-9

 

is poetry something akin to the intellect's deepening towards its own desire?

Dante's articulation clarifies the widely circulated idea that poetry expresses what cannot be expressed.

The verses delineate a temporal sequence between an experience and its retelling. Certain experiences, such as Dante's approach to Paradise, are such that one does not know how to, and cannot, retell them: memory can only go to a certain extent. The verses are not the rendition of the experience, just a statement about the impossibility of wording them. The distinction is subtle but definitive. There is a domain beyond language that language cannot access. All it can do is recount the conditions of such experience but not the experience itself. 

In such experiences the intellect moves so close to its own desire that the coincidence makes retelling impossible: memory cannot follow the intellect in its self-identification. The tautology of desire implicates the dissolution of language.

Seeking immediacy, contemporary media is constantly trying to elude the gap between presence and re-presentation. Recording (memory) has become the validation of true experience rather than its opposite. Only if something is recorded it can be experienced. Only if memorialized can the intellect near its own desire. and this is what is sometimes meant with the saying "poetry expresses what cannot be expressed" memory has overtaken intellect to the extent that poetry is supposed to replace the presence that is presented as unavailable. But unavailability, far from being "what cannot be expressed" is precisely what can be expressed in poetry: intellect nearing its own desire.

the apparent "positive" affirmation of a negation (poetry expresses what cannot be expressed) is a negative statement (poetry expresses [that memory cannot tell] what cannot be expressed)

 In this double bind lies one of the conditions for experiencing lyrical poetry under current circumstances. Pretending that poetry expresses the inexpressible, i.e. making everything expressible, liquidates language in a way that the limits delineated by Dante are substituted with an all powerful impossibility: poetry can express everything, therefore it expresses nothing. Everything is recorded, but the recording does not show anything, certainly not the impossibility of recording.