Jean Gebser’s Rose Poem
Pablo Picasso, Garçon à la pipe, 1905
IN THE PERIOD leading up to the publication of The Ever-Present Origin (1949/1953), Jean Gebser wrote a series of poems that can be considered among his most mature and revealing works: The Ariadne Poem (Das Ariadnegedicht), The Winter Poem (Das Wintergedicht), The Poem of the Dead (Das Totengedicht), The Poem of the Roses (Das Rosengedicht), and The Island Poem (Das Inselgedicht). These deeply meditative works must be considered poetic equivalents of his philosophical writings on the phenomenology of consciousness (Abendländische Wandlung, Ursprung und Gegenwart, Der unsichtbare Ursprung, Asien lächelt anders, etc.) Among other things, they notably explore the experience of nonduality, diaphaneity, and integrality, and do so in a much more intimate and personal way than we find in his philosophical writings.
An edition of these poems is presently being prepared for publication through Rubedo Press. Under the auspices of the Jean Gebser Society, we have previously presented a draft translation of the Winter Poem (since heavily revised). We felt it would be pertinent to share a selection from his Rose Poem (Das Rosengedicht, literally “The Poem of the Roses”), which he composed in three sittings: in December 1945, March 1946, and December 1946. Like the Winter Poem, the version that we present here is a tentative translation, which will be revised fully before publication.
If the Winter Poem is, among other things, Gebser’s answer to Rilke’s terrifying angel, Gebser’s Rose Poem must ultimately be understood in light of Rilke’s famous epitaph: Rose, oh reiner Widerspruch, Lust, Niemandes Schlaf zu sein unter soviel Lidern (Rose, O pure contradicton, lust to be no one’s sleep beneath so many lids). Rilke implies that there is a consciousness beneath the sleeping ‘lids’ of the rose, which are so many veils for a deathless awareness that persists eternally beneath all sleep, dreaming, and waking. Gebser’s Rose Poem also speaks to this theme in its own way: of lilac, lotus, and rose as mutating manifestations of the primordial consciousness coming to diaphanous awareness.
Aaron Cheak, PhD
The Rose Poem
Jean Gebser
(extract)
Translated by Aaron Cheak
1.
Release, dissolve
and relinquish the bonds of earth and heaven:
from Persian roots
she grows to you
and blooms upon the cross
in full transparency:
the rose beyond the heavens.
Imagine the lilac’s heart-shaped petals,
to grasp it in full measure
this early attempt by nature
to dare the form of the innermost human voice;
and thanks to this, your heart
remelted in the coldness and radiance of running tears,
lost the exquisitely numbing scent of the syringa
and emerged into the gentle diaphaneity of things;
see too the soft-coloured lotus,
this blooming of water,
this delicate flowering of sleep and death,
echo of the preformed image within,
which grew out of dreaming into a flower,
a nocturnal florescence
mirrored in the smiling lunation of the sublime.
But the entwining rose
is further awakened,
already surpassing appearance,
the brightest of all blossomings,
whose diaphanous splendour,
entrusts itself to the winds
as the freer form.
And sometimes
when the softened winds
allot their luminous equilibrium
to heaven and to earth,
you stand in its flow
celestial-terrestrial
knowing the diaphanous hour—
the rose;
the eye however raises her up
beyond flower and fruit,
gently absolving the heart
and so she grows out of the betwixt and between
into distances that no eye can see.
For they become transparent, as does the world
when we become transparent ourselves,
from that rose-petalled transparency,
which already advances ahead of its own reflection;
so too is our innermost knowing
always beyond us:
but this divine repose restores us
and perhaps dissolves itself
in an eternal blooming
high above the head,
and in darkening hours
returns to us:
Whatever we have thought and done,
all comes back
magnified by us, or diminished
for everyone still broods on the smallest gestures
of giving and taking
which made their world greater or smaller;
perhaps if he catches one of them in time
he might change things, and thus himself.
For even in the most honest act,
oh even here in the concision of words,
we still falsify:
the rare purity of every rose
serves as pretense and parable;
but all roses suffer
this accretion of significations
and we can only hope
that in the effortless form
of greater release
that now undulates upon us,
all this human tribulation
will become increasingly transparent
and transfigure itself.