To See Is To Love Is To See
From Dante’s Paradiso, Canto V (trans. Mark Musa). The speaker in the first passage is Beatrice, to the Pilgrim; in the second, after the ellipsis, it is the Pilgrim, speaking of Beatrice:
I can see how into your mind already
there shines Eternal Light which, of Itself,
once it is seen, forever kindles love;
and should some other thing seduce man’s love,
it can be only some trace of this Light,
misapprehended, shining through that thing.
And then Dante says:
… Her stillness, her transfigured countenance
imposed silence upon my eager mind,
already stirred with new questions to ask;
and like an arrow that has struck the mark
before the bow-string stopes its quivering,
we soared into the second realm, and there,
I saw my lady so caught up in joy
as she went into that new heaven’s glow,
the planet shone with more than its own light.
And if the star changed then and seemed to smile,
imagine what took place in me, a man
whose nature is transmutability.
As in the clear, still water of a pond
the fish are lured toward something fallen in,
as if they knew it was their food — so, here,
I saw more than a thousand splendors move
toward us, and in each one I heard the cry:
“Behold one more who will increase our love.”
Here is Esse, a poem by Czeslaw Milosz, which I found on Artur Rosman’s blog:
I looked at that face, dumbfounded. The lights of métro stations flew by; I didn’t notice them. What can be done, if our sight lacks absolute power to devour objects ecstatically, in an instant, leaving nothing more than the void of an ideal form, a sign like a hieroglyph simplified from the drawing of an animal or bird? A slightly snub nose, a high brow with sleekly brushed-back hair, the line of the chin – but why isn’t the power of sight absolute? – and in a whiteness tinged with pink two sculpted holes, containing a dark, lustrous lava. To absorb that face but to have it simultaneously against the background of all spring boughs, walls, waves, in its weeping, its laughter, moving it back fifteen years, or ahead thirty. To have. It is not even a desire. Like a butterfly, a fish, the stem of a plant, only more mysterious. And so it befell me that after so many attempts at naming the world, I am able only to repeat, harping on one string, the highest, the unique avowal beyond which no power can attain: I am, she is. Shout, blow the trumpets, make thousands-strong marches, leap, rend your clothing, repeating only: is!
She got out at Raspail. I was left behind with the immensity of existing things. A sponge, suffering because it cannot saturate itself; a river, suffering because reflections of clouds and trees are not clouds and trees.
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