The Matter of Will: Throwing Stones

In section one, the stone motif is either examined by its intrinsic, material

characteristics of primitive and stillness, or through the second layer of meanings, the tombstone, to address the fundamental predicament of man. Nevertheless, in some of the poems we examined there is still found a potential, spatial positiveness in the seemingly negative context through the assemblage of conflicting components. The purpose of this subsection is to further advance the previous readings on stone poems to present the third stage of stone’s transmutation: one that is vivacious and active, and able to manifest the will of the imagining being. One of the nine stone poems is noticeable for its frankness in praising the power of imagination as well as its capability of revitalizing the former sensations:

Spare, bare, transfigurable: the things In our rooms were simple as stones.

We loved the crevice in the wall, a bursting Ear of grain that spilled out worlds.

Clouds, this evening,

The same as always, like thirst, The same red dress, unfastened.

Imagine, passer-by,

Our new beginnings, our eagerness, our trust. (CP 13)

In the first stanza, the details of the room are magnified to the extent that they acquire certain space for themselves, like stones scattering on the ground; what occupy, to be precise, are things out of use, inadequate, simple, yet able to transmute (“Spare, bare, transfigurable”).

The following poetic lines can be recognized as a demonstrative process on how things of exceptionally mediocre are given dynamic characters: the crack in the wall appears to be productive and fertile by its juxtaposition with the grain; the clouds and the dress in the

second stanza are brought up by their sameness (“The same as always”), yet within that repetitiveness are “thirst” and the status of being “unfastened” (CP 13). The dynamism not only appears in the content but also in the form, as the whole stanza is divided into little fragments with the heavy employment of punctuations and end-stopped lines; the repetitive words such as “the same” and “our,” on the other hand, ensures the consistency between the fragments. Two dynamic verbs “unfastened” and “imagine” are given special focus to infuse motion into the static, stone-like space, turning the ordinary (“The same as always”) to novelty (“our new beginnings”) where the desire and confidence potentially lies (“our eagerness, our trust”). Undeniably, the verb imagine proves to be the key factor that emancipates things from their previous, static states.

The stone image also penetrates the final section of the volume “Throwing Stones,” a section consists of three single-page prose respectively titled “Driving Faster,” “Driving Farther,” and “Throwing Stones.” These titles already foreshadow a gradual development of determination and dimly take-shape hope. “Driving Faster” recounts a particular moment of driving experience on the road that seems to pierce “straight toward” the horizon before dawn, at sunrise, and after sunset; however, the sunrise is but transitory, and soon after its flame “died out,” “again the great night loomed ahead, empty of stars” (CP 175). The prevailing conflict between space and time, the former being a “stony expanse” while the later transient and compressed, is purposely made by Bonnefoy to emphasize the fleeting joy when the light makes the faces recognizable: “in the car they could look at each other now”

(CP 175). “Driving Farther” continues the theme, yet with two variations: the stony landscape appears not on the side of the road but is part of it, “the road itself had started getting rocky,” and the sun no longer stands for the anxious wait, for “[n]ight ruled the world from now on, with no conceivable end” (CP 177). The previous stone-related poems are collectively presented here with their all-pervasive presences: they not only physically occupy the entire surface but also attempt to paralyze the motion of the car.

Then the stone began to bulge, splitting the pavement; after that the outcrops thickened and expanded. The car had to jot along these swollen veins as they broke into sharp points … At times we had to clamber out and lift it to one side to skirt a rock barely visible in the dark, much larger and longer than we’d thought. (CP 177)

Even in such a rugged surface and hostile environment, the car continues functioning,

“[d]riving anyway, driving ahead, since miraculously the engine never gave out” (CP 177). If the aim of the first prose is to demonstrate how man should “drive faster” to chase the final sunlight, the dim hope, then the image of the miraculous engine depicted here captures

precisely humankind’s determination to venture even in the vacancy devoid of light: “Moving forward at any price, always moving forward” (CP 177).

This long drive stops at the third prose “Throwing Stones” in which passengers are seen throwing and pulling stones in the night, a vain, painful struggle that immediately finds its root in Sisyphus:

How far we would throw them now, throw them over there to that other side

without a name, that abyss without a high or low, with no roaring waters, no star …

Hands that were shredded soon. Bloody hands. Hands pushing roots aside, digging at the earth, gripping the rock that strained against our grasp. Blood

crimsoned our faces too. But always we raised our eyes from the devastated ground toward other eyes, again with that laugh. (CP 179)

The purpose for such performances is absent, the determined course and the destination untold, and the labor itself the most excruciating. The performers, however, is well aware of

the futility of such a laborious process; the meeting of each other’s eyes indicates the

equivalent exchange within the community, which, with the laugh that immediately succeeds, even illustrates the willingness and confidence shared by humanity. Although such awareness of futile labor forces man to recognize their predicaments, it also, as Camus inspiringly suggested in “The Myth of Sisyphus,” “crowns [their] victory” (109). Perhaps the final remarks by Camus are enough to address the confidence Bonnefoy left unsaid:

This universe henceforth without a master seems to him [Sisyphus] neither sterile nor futile. Each atom of that stone, each mineral flake of that night-filled mountain, in itself forms a world. The struggle itself towards the heights is enough to fill a man’s heart. One must imagine Sisyphus happy. (111)

In Earth and Reveries of Will (1948), Bachelard has given different investigations on terrestrial matters; as always, he values the dynamism of the opposing features with the intention to search “their many hidden attractions, all their affective space concentrated in the interior” of material substances (6). The interrelationship between the imagined matter and the imagining subject is proposed through such a discussion. “The earthen objects we work return an echo of the inner forces we expend on them,” Bachelard suggests, “[t]he moment we give it the full benefit of our dreams, working with matters awakens in us a narcissistic love of our own courage” (6). In The Poetics of Space Bachelard also illustrates the

correlation between the two with the co-constitution of the human-house experience when facing the natural threat together. Bachelard delineates such discovery from a passage of Henri Bosco’s Malicroix: when man is situated in a house which interior is completely silent regardless of the storm violently taking over the exterior, even the resident within is “seized with the sensation of something vast and deep and boundless,” described by Bosco (PS 64).

With this passage, Bachelard argues that the value owned by the house is infiltrated to man:

[F]aced with the bestial hostility of the storm and the hurricane, the house’s virtue of protection and resistance are transposed into human virtues. The house acquires the physical and moral energy of a human body. It braces itself to receive the downpour, it girds its loins. (CP 67)

The alliance between the house and the resident within is established to withstand the force of the universe, a must-subsist hostility for man to retrieve the most intimacy of the human space. With this particular bond, the house image and the imagining subject perform a collaborative resistance, and, significantly, a collective will. Indeed, what has been presented through these scenes of “Throwing Stones” is the intertwined working of the imagined image and the imagining subject, which, in their collective bond, a united will is demonstrated: the values that stone possess have now enlivened man. Similar to the hardness of stone, the narrator and his companions who once trapped in a Sisyphus-dilemma proclaim their

fortitude that will lead them to the ultimate, human victory. “[T]he imagination and the will,”

Bachelard concludes, “are in truth interdependent” (6); though their intertwined correlations will be further discussed in Chapter Three, we can surely glimpse at present how they can be inseparable from each other with the demonstration of stone image.