‘Time is the evil’, we read in a poem by Ezra Pound. And it is, certainly. But, powerful as it may be, it is only external. There is another adversary, still more terrible, more devastating: the enemy within. It will not ravage us physically, like time, but may annihilate us inside. Ausiàs March saw as much at the close of the fifteenth century, and he described the experience in this way:
Badly lives he
who has thought as his enemy…
For what arms do we dispose of to combat our own thoughts? If thought turns against us, it finds an armory inside us: it assails us with insomnia, depression, neurosis, excitability, with that mania for labor that prevents the mind from finding repose, or with lassitude, so we live mechanically, like sleepwalkers. But its greatest danger is the covertness of its hostility. When conflict turns pathological, we may draw the enemy into pitched battle. But should we do so, should we insist on doing so, when our adversary seems to be nothing more than thought, which, however pernicious and destructive, remains within the limits of what we take to be normal? This is a literal example of a ‘wicked thought’, not the kind we are warned about in Sunday school, but another, far deeper, far graver sort. It is the enemy within, that part of ourselves that brings us to grief, that makes us lose sight of what we are. Persistent, tenacious, thoughts revisit us impertinently; we cannot hold them at bay; silently, they govern our comings and goings, cast their shadow over our judgments, walk eternally at our side. Our enemies, they subvert us in silence. We may wrestle against them, like Jacob against the angel; there is no saying whether the struggle will ever end.
One of the highest purposes of literature is a kind of moral hygiene with respect to thoughts. Putting them in writing, we establish their precise limits, demarcate the outer edges of their domain, map them, expose them. At times, we may fail to put them into words, but we can almost always suggest their presence obliquely, and in any case, writing forces us to set out clearly – even to ourselves – our relationship to the thoughts that govern our conduct. Not the mirror carried along a road that the novel represented for Stendhal, but a mirror in which our conscience sees itself. The extreme tension of moral poetry – in Ausiàs March, in Baudelaire, in Carles Riba, in J.V. Foix – proceeds from the effort to apprehend a clear image in this mirror.
2 December 1979