ELIE-CHARLES FLAMAND: A QUEST FOR THE WORD IN THE MEANDERS OF MEANING

par Michel Passelergue

February 16, 2020

Communication at the Halle Saint-Pierre February 8, 2020

Elie-Charles FLAMAND: a quest for the Word in the meanders of meaning

I have traversed deserts of crushed bones of cold lava
For a long time I sought traces of footsteps under the ash
I thought I saw the flame that flickered in the depths of closed darkness go out
Hermit at last
Inhabiting the haughty vestiges of a leaning tower
On the flank of suffering
Having exiled my fears my angers
Drunk with patience I waited
In the primordial humidity of silence
Yet close was the footbridge where I met you
Above the black water of the extinguished water
Nocturnal pearl in the mobile casket of the wind
You were then descending from your castle in flames
At the zenith
The tentacular star that you had just flushed out in your course was casting its last fires

DELIVERED
She who invited me to witness
The birth of the crystal
In an ardent grotto
Facing the very high pistil oscillating at the heart of the storm
The sealed amphora
Lying at the bottom of the river with carbuncle pebbles
Which traverses me from side to side
And which I climb back to its source
YOU ARE
The closed flower
Reigning over the secret garden
Enclosed in the skull of lyre-bird
That the stone casket of eagle contains caught between the roots of the sun
Casket whose key I seek
Among those that rust in the moss of the great woods
2 She who knows the secrets of light and shadow
The bird-woman who draws me into her dance
On the cord of iris petals stretched between dusk and dawn
DELIVERED

We have just read two of the five pages of Elie-Charles Flamand's poem "To a coal bird perched on the highest branch of fire," a 1953 poem. First publication (in 1957) of the one who had just discovered, upon reading Maurice Nadeau's "History of Surrealism," the poetry of Éluard and Breton. A revelation that led Elie-Charles Flamand to interrupt his studies in geology and paleontology which, however, fascinated him, and to leave his native city of Lyon to join Paris. It was through Pierre Seghers and Jean-Louis Bédouin that he met André Breton. And, from 1952 to 1960, he would participate in the meetings and publications of the surrealist group of that time.

This poem "To a coal bird..." testifies to an evident maturity. And if one notes the manifest influence of that surrealist "magic" that had so seduced the young Flamand, one can also read there clear signs of his future orientation in favor of spiritual research, of his commitment to the quest for a "distant light." For example: "I have traversed deserts... I sought traces of footsteps...," the evocation of the hermit, the allusion to exile or the multiple references to the four elements:

– fire (the flickering flame, the castle in flames, the last fires of the star); – earth (the deserts, the lava, the ashes); – water (the river, the primordial humidity, the black water); – air (the mobile casket of the wind, the bird-woman).

These elements also combine (the extinguished water, the roots of the sun, the ardent grotto). We are therefore in the presence of a form of alchemy of the word. And alchemy will very early be one of the domains explored by Elie-Charles Flamand in his esoteric quest.
For his part, André Breton (whose fiercely antireligious spirit is well known) has always been fascinated by astrology, clairvoyance ("Letter to the Seers"), tarot and particularly alchemy. He was interested not only in occult sciences but also in ancient mythologies, those of "primitive" societies, in beliefs that were maintained on the margins of religious dogmas. André Breton (whose motto was "I seek the gold of time") had emphasized, in a long study entitled "Fronton-Virage" published in 1948, the determining role of alchemical symbols in Raymond Roussel's "Poussière de soleils," a leading author of surrealism.
One cannot therefore be surprised that it was Breton himself who, through René Alleau, put our poet in contact with Eugène Canseliet, disciple of the alchemist Fulcanelli. But Elie-Charles Flamand's research on alchemy will intensify and contribute to gradually distancing him from the surrealist group, of which moreover he cannot approve certain options, among others political. There is no need to dwell on Flamand's exclusion in 1960: the "trials" of exclusion, the "calls to order" and excommunications 3 were part of the ordinary ritual of the (very unstable) group that surrounded the "pope of surrealism." But we will retain that Elie-Charles Flamand did not for that reason modify his poetic conception in any way and that he was able to maintain friendly relations with Breton, outside the group. In "The Meanders of Meaning," he thus evokes these years 1952-1960:
"What have I therefore retained from this surrealist adventure? First of all that poetic creation is not a gratuitous literary exercise, but that it engages the entire being. It is the means of an expression of consciousness and must lead to a radical spiritual transformation.
By breaking the dam of censorship that prevents us from accessing our deep sources, it allows us to discover the secret relations between man and the cosmos and reveals to us the infinite horizons where the intimate nature of things communicates to us through symbol, illumination, the "voice that speaks within," the original language."
One recognizes there a manner of surrealist credo that would have integrated convictions of a spiritual order. As for the continuity of a surrealist line in the poems, one can verify it by listening to two poems from "The Leafed Moon," a 1968 collection: same abundance of symbols, united to a certain preciousness (in the best sense of the term) in the writing:

"PREY TO THEIR GAZES"
to Toyen

A rain of eyes in fusion
Striates the frost cliff where the bevel of reflections is blunted
Vitrifies the ashy mist that drowned our most secret ruins
Calcines the cast shadow of our masks
Illuminated at the very bottom of our pit
Rich with a long heart-to-heart with the veins
We the vigilantes
We can lift our eyelids heavy with silt
And girded with the diadem of our tears
Break the locks of the ultimate hurricane

INTERREGNUM
for André Pieyre de Mandiargues

In the salamander's orchards
My triumphal water alley vaporizes
Where the hand was stringing its pearls of oblivion
Solitude lightens me
And my rags become iridescent
In this bitterly carnal earth
Bristling with torturing presences
Where I come to track my imaginary gestures
And mourn my legends
4
At the game of malemort
The arrow of perennial life pierces me
The acid sap of the word gnaws my iron crown
Surrounded by the round of edges
I shatter the mold of my visions
Then parting the curtain of sibylline afflictions
I am reborn on the omphalos area
Limpid escaping my resemblance
Once more here I am then a firebrand on the andirons of the arcana
Incantatory smoke at the cardinal points of ancestral wastelands
Cinerary eagle hovering over the vat of my anguishes
In the incandescent freshness of this night too long refused

The exclusion from the group has therefore in no way provoked a rupture with surrealism, on the level of poetry. Elie-Charles Flamand will preserve a very high vision of poetry and its mission. As proof this rather late declaration:
"... I think that creating requires a form of revolt, the freedom to free oneself from the servitudes of logic, to break prohibitions, to refuse fashions and current norms which are synonymous with stagnation, sclerosis. This surpassing of limits imposed by past generations leaves room for the revelation of the unsuspected, the unknown. Thus one can have access to true, living values and strip Tradition of the false appearances of traditionalism."

In this sense, poetry as Flamand conceives it, freed from logic, audacious in its surprising images and of great refinement in writing, demands from the reader a double effort of concentration and openness. It therefore risks arousing a certain resistance from readers who judge difficult the access to the work of authors qualified more or less as hermetic. From Maurice Scève to Mallarmé (to stick to hexagonal poetry), many poets have been suspected of cultivating enigma or mystery, of concealing meaning in convoluted, deliberately obscure formulas. On this point, it is not useless to return to what Saint-John Perse and André Breton said, in a rather complementary way.
Saint-John Perse first, about poetry that is said to be obscure or incomprehensible: "The obscurity that is reproached to it does not stem from its own nature, which is to enlighten, but from the very night that it explores, and that it must explore: that of the soul itself and the mystery in which the human being bathes."

What André Breton says relates more to what must be expected from the reader: "I have always maintained that a certain number of poetic and other works are essentially valuable by the power they have to appeal to a faculty other than intelligence. Beauty requires that one enjoy most often before understanding and it maintains with clarity only very distant and secondary relations." If Elie-Charles Flamand is in quest, through poetry, of a certain spiritual light, this will only be sensed, then perceived after a long crossing of the night to the "incandescent freshness" which is that of the depths of language. A language that must be worked by the poet with an engagement comparable to that of the alchemist when he approaches the operation of sublimation. This does not mean that one must read our poet's work as if it were conceived according to the science of Hermes Trismegistus. Flamand himself has wanted to dispel this possible misunderstanding: "For a true poet, it is obviously not a question of taking from the philosophical art a certain number of its most specific symbols, chosen because of their unusual or picturesque character, then arranging them in a pseudo-hermetic way. Nor must one attempt to create a coded writing where some knowledge of the art of Hermes would be expressed didactically, and which the reader could decipher only if he had the key to the sanctuary. It is essentially the Purification, the Sublimation of language that must be accomplished in all poetry worthy of the name."

One will perhaps have an idea of this intense work of language in the first of the two poems that will follow. To echo Dürer's famous engraving "The Knight, Death and the Devil," Elie-Charles Flamand uses all the powers of analogical thought and visionary writing. Then, it will be the poem "The Glass Ladder," also of great density.

RITTER, TOD UND TEUFEL
The power of contrasted semblances
Installs a chaos of angles of openwork and darts
That becomes petrified under algid lightning
There is still time to throw there the eglantine of prefigurations
This night light surreptitiously
Chosen by the impersonal presence
Alone completes
The apprenticeship of innovative returns
Erases the mark of fictions on their decline
They restrain the nuances of infallible light
My solicitudes grope on the slope of the unrevealed
I am waiting for myself
The convulsive lineage of a derisory apogee
Is perfected
In the irreverence that diverts from the defilements
Perpetuated by my malandrous enemies
Sanctuaries studded with abysses
Have safeguarded the taciturn emissaries
6 Who defer the too fatal reconciliations
When temporal adversity accomplishes me
For having sacrificed even to the bitterness of this versatile Death
And even to the beauty however vigilant
Of the One who leads dawn to its defeat
In order to ruin the compromises of a sifted terror
The sword and pike forged in the fire of clemency
Conjure the cathedral vicissitudes
Each time that the probatory gap
Arouses a transfiguration

THE GLASS LADDER
Had one apportioned a fountain of faded promises
To this recumbent that I was
My desert with moving boundary
Did it protect me from the perverse design of nativities
It matters not
Since in beginning to climb the backlight
Of respite that commemorates the attractions
Knotted by a perspicacious oblivion
I see the negating prows
Tarnish then sink low
When the misunderstandings that the polar wheel
No longer conjures
Return fearfully to the past
Without resonances
At each step the fauve accord
Fissures a servitude
Or some mossy haunting
Buttressed on the unreal
And the hermitage in abyss rises
Toward the meadow of immortality
Man of profusion and heaviness
High enough will I invert myself
To unfold the silence of love

"Glass Ladder": the title suggests a double allusion to Jacob's ladder and to the "house of glass" dear to André Breton. The text brings us back to the initiatory suggestions of the poem "To a coal bird..." with which we began. "The hermitage in abyss" is a reminiscence of the hermit's "leaning" tower on the flank of suffering. The poet evokes an initiatory ascent whose difficulty and slowness are probably related to his personal journey on the path of esoteric Tradition. Let us recall that Elie-Charles Flamand had undertaken before 1950 studies at the Faculty of Sciences in Lyon. Passionate from his youth about geology, mineralogy and paleontology, he worked in Lyon with Professor Jean Viret for whom he has always preserved a feeling of veneration. The taste for stones, fossils, prehistory, metals, botany, the search for signs, indices of past time, and more generally the love of nature, curiosity for the animal world – all this conditions as much his spiritual engagement as his poetic vision of the world. Flamand has expressed himself with warmth about his attraction to the natural sciences: "I have renounced nothing of my first fervor for the natural sciences: these, which have incontestably oriented my thought in a decisive way, have always remained in the background of my mind. The attention full of love toward the beauties of creation and the desire to pierce its mysteries first prepared the ground for poetry in me. Then the study of nature, even though often resumed in its positive form with an always keen interest in the evolution of knowledge in these domains, has also transmuted into a marvelled absorption, a meditative contemplation that came to nourish my inspiration. Correlatively, I was led to envisage the productions of the three kingdoms under their symbolic aspect, thus linking them to my esoteric preoccupations." Other texts let transpire the ancient passion for paleontology: "It is certain that everything is within us. The cosmogonic and mythical knowledge, the complete acquisition of the human condition have been conveyed thanks to genetic inheritance and the memory of the species by these humble unknowns whose innumerable generations go back to the appearance of Homo sapiens sapiens. And, beyond, throughout the fabulous, almost inconceivable geological past, this chain continues in animality and links us to the very sources of life. If one lets oneself be inhabited by the impulse of this primordial dynamism, something essential rises, through us, from the unknown. To thus re-accord oneself to one's roots is to open oneself to the sovereign freedom of the creative spirit; to re-harmonize with one's ancestors is to reconcile oneself with oneself. As Carl Gustav Jung remarks, 'I am an answer to a question from my ancestors.'" Such reflections illuminate the dynamic vision of the concept of Tradition that underlies Elie-Charles Flamand's work. The poems that will follow, extracted from "The Embellished Paths," perhaps testify to this. Their more airy texture characterizes quite well the poet's manner in the 1980s. They were written at Varengeville-sur-Mer: SALUTARY THE SHORE for O. It took an advance that seeks The whirling particle of the diverse So close to lightning Sometimes included In the somewhat lunar cliffs With patience the water led you To the pomp of an exacting limpidity Intimate geneses These pebbles honored you For a sky of awakening Had polished them as much as the sea That mingles your coming and your effacement THE IRREVOCABLE DESTINATION Between gravel and clouds Yesterday the unaccomplished could have led us astray An uneasy spiral Hastens its unfolding In feverish rain time And the motley sarcasms return Near some fatal half-light Although heaviness vibrates The peaceful domain continues to ripen Low sun and high moon Take care of it With happiness arrive Long promised The rustling followed by the tearing Supplicating purity at the very beginning Justness that shows us Arisen from the nocturnal age The near entangled with the far While they exchange their powers During multiple prophetic leaps Ornaments of early morning We will no longer misrecognize The immutable face

9 If there is evolution toward greater fluidity, it is not to the detriment of the intense life of images. The poetic image remains primordial. It is she who deploys, through the poem, a play of spiritual or esoteric resonances. In "The Meanders of Meaning," Elie-Charles Flamand expresses it with conviction: "I have remained faithful, in my constant practice of poetry, to the primacy of the image that surrealism postulates, even though, for me, this also opens perspectives of a mystical order. The metaphor [...] directs the text forward, toward the discovery of a secret. Following the laws of universal analogy – which are also those of esotericism –, it links the visible to the invisible, the material to the spiritual, the microcosm to the macrocosm. Reconciling opposites, it must lead to Unity; its extreme condensation is source of fulgurance that allows transgressing logic, its power of transmutation creates the idea, reveals an aspect of Truth. By their presence of suggestion and emotion, the images engender one another, develop gradually and organize the poem by chaining of planes. In their multivalence, they draw toward the heights, prolong themselves in the direction of the Open and express the ineffable." It is not without reason that Jacques Arnold, upon the publication of "True Center," hailed in Flamand an "image-language-maker." If we were just speaking of the poetic image, we must emphasize the preponderant role that the image (in the general sense of the term) will have had for our poet. His constant attraction to the plastic arts testifies to this. The catalog of his publications includes many works dedicated to painting. And his poetry collections are most often accompanied by creations of artists such as Toyen (for the very first poem), Chu Teh-Chun, Paul-Armand Gette, Louise Janin and, of course, Obéline Flamand. In "The Attentive Light is in the Crypt," reproductions of works by the sculptor Gaetano di Martino slip among the poems. We must also note the important role that the poet's passion for traditional jazz since the forties will have had. A fervent connoisseur of the music of Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington, Sidney Bechet or Buddy Tate, he even attempted to practice jazz as a drummer and personally knew several great jazzmen. If we add that, parallel to his poetic work and his esoteric research, Elie-Charles Flamand devoted himself to drawing, collage, we will not be surprised to see him collaborate with the review "Phréatique." Under the direction of Gérard Murail and Maurice Couquiaud, this one, initially a poetry review, had taken in the 1990s a clearly transdisciplinary direction by privileging dialogue between scientists (notably astrophysicists), philosophers, poets, artists, while making a large place for human sciences and spiritualities. The names of Elie-Charles and Obéline Flamand appeared in the table of contents of "Phréatique." To illustrate a little this multiplicity of the work, here is a poem from the collection associated with Gaetano di Martino's images, followed by "Flight" (a prose poem evoking the world of birds): STEP BY STEP Fill slowly the ravine of time Purify oneself through waiting Welcome these uprooting alliances That reanimate signs still frozen Follow even into the original grotto Refuge devoted to the diaprures of destitution The hieratic swells Whose foam will dissipate our relapses Imbue oneself especially with the murmur Flowing from the spiritual stone Discovered in a liminal night On the path that the unfigurable traces At the moment when the transparency that assists us No longer refuses to immolate the visible FULL FLIGHT Kingfisher, great spotted woodpecker, goldfinch, so many audacious generosities that borrow only from the prism of traversed spaces the turquoise, gold, snow, blood, coal, sulfur. Weight and non-weight, they have just traversed the translucent eyelids of the sky to attempt to initiate me to the warm trembling of the light of mercy, the one that privileges the Elsewheres in me. May the escape of these masters of the passages of above and below be able to guide mine; they will not mislead me, despite so many compact clouds that today deafen their voices. Upon return, when in my dead orchards, sacred folds and refolds become difficult to cross, overwhelm me, put me to the test, the discreet messengers of the source of the clouds leave again, closely grazing the invisible, their stream, forest, meadow. As soon as they appear, rises before me, before certain ones, the Tree of Life. And each of them, as guardian of secrets, comes to perch on a branch that immediately becomes nimbed with immediate past and future.

How is the poem perceived by its reader? The question preoccupies the poet from the writing, even knowing that uncertainty is de rigueur regarding the interpretation that will be that of the unknown reader. On this point, Elie-Charles Flamand expresses himself with precision and wisdom: "... my poems, in their sometimes enigmatic concision, not only play on several registers but associate a very great number of referential components other than alchemical, linked by correspondences. Not being frozen in a unique signification, they give birth to a network of suggestions and fluid allusions, deploy a plural space. These texts are therefore open to diverse interpretations, even sometimes – why not? – opposed, according to the law of the analogy of opposites. They present this character proper to the poetic function of language that the learned of the university call polysemy. At least I wish it to be so! It is also appropriate to remark that, always, the meaning very largely exceeds the author's intentions." A polysemic vision of poetic expression that is, today, widely shared... Whatever the case, our poet (whose life has remained very discreet, almost as secret as that of the alchemists) has been read, appreciated and commented on by very diverse personalities: poets, artists, academics, adepts of esotericism. As early as 1973, the name of Elie-Charles Flamand (then aged forty-five, and whose catalog is limited to a few works) appears in Serge Brindeau's large volume "Contemporary Poetry in French since 1945" in the chapter on "Esoteric Poetry." Chapter that opens with the reminder of a declaration by André Breton: "I ask that one be willing to observe that surrealist research presents, with alchemical research, a remarkable analogy of aim: the philosopher's stone is nothing other than what should allow man's imagination to take an éclatant revenge on all things." The chapter groups about ten poets who, with hindsight, variously belong to esotericism: among them, the great Pierre Torreilles, Robert Marteau, Marie-Claire Bancquart or Pierre Esperbé (whose memory remains dear to the faithful of "Arts et Jalons"). And therefore our poet who first inspired Brindeau with a rather embarrassed judgment: "If one is not initiated... one will have great difficulty discerning some points of reference in Elie-Charles Flamand's work..." But finally the critic will defer to André Pieyre de Mandiargues' opinion: "Flamand's poems have a power of charm and suggestion almost incomparable." To conclude thus: "The esotericism of his approach does not seem irreconcilable with the forms of imagination and language proper to the surrealists." What will perhaps confirm the strange poem "New Presences" (written much later), which presents itself as a mosaic of very brief notations, spontaneous verbal concretions that are these "new" presences suggested by the title: NEW PRESENCES Pollen of smile Iridizing the globe that passion prophetic fashions Clearing and gusts of wind that have chased The bitter constraint of the banks Empty mirror forever Diamond placed on the snow Piece of sky prop of an offered past Ember thrown to the rubies Violets listening to the old trees Coal velveting our midnights Pearl drowned by the moon Who then knew that very suddenly You were there? A PEBBLE Naked wet stone Near a nocturnal sea Stone caught in the concentric encirclings Sometimes distress sometimes joy Rock captive of the place that the wave will carry away When will unify The gloomy heights with the sumptuous abyss But only if a rough littoral That sees elucidated only few convulsions or gaps No longer inclines before the succession of encounters Stone Lying face of the impenetrable Pebble that secretly aspires to its perfection Stone recalling another Stone

The poem "New Presences" was extracted from "Pact with the Source." Poetry of source? Without doubt this is what the author of "The Quest for the Word" attempts to arouse: "Poetry is the art of Unity, and one must go seek this at its uncreated source. Then the poem will express an aspect of the divine." But this quest also passes through the ordeal of inner listening: "To restore as well as possible the inflections and rhythm of the mystical voice, to incarnate the idea it expresses in living images tending to make grasp the ungraspable, to 'precipitate,' clarify, intensify this vibration sometimes so tenuous, so difficult to capture and translate, such are some of the phases of poetic alchemy." The poem born of this transcription of the "mystical voice" will then be read by others. Multiple reading, often unpredictable. Thus will deploy the tree of a poetic word rooted in the mystery of Time, of the original Word. 13 Over several decades, many voices have accompanied, commented on Elie-Charles Flamand's poetry and enriched the knowledge of it. First of all Eugène Canseliet, André Pieyre de Mandiargues or Yves-Alain Favre (author of a communication at the University of Caen in 1989). And numerous poets and critics: Alain Mercier, Edmond Humeau, Jacques Arnold, Jean-José Marchand, Simonomis, Jean Chatard, Marc Kober, Pierre Esperbé, André Lagrange, Armand Olivennes, Gwen Garnier-Duguy. The latter, in the preface to the anthology "Ember of Unity," invites us to discover the "quintessence of a word exercised by the faithful observance of an ascetic practice, and bringing back from this asceticism the marvelous that, tamed, observes all the human, expects everything from the human." One could not say it better. Here, to conclude, two significant poems of the spiritual dimension of inspiration, but also of the continual interaction of the lived with the always relaunched approach of "The Promised Apogee": THE PROMISED APOGEE You climb toward the extreme point Minuscule and which often closes It would impoverish itself if it were not supported By scintillations rooted in the depths It was once entrusted to those who willingly abandoned themselves To the vertigo flowing from fertile ruins To survive the rigor of a patience Is to vanquish the opacity issuing from a wound Yet salvific gift of the unfathomable Enclosed in a single rapid gesture When one knows that attempts to insinuate itself An absence little tamable The halo of a challenge encircles the torment Its gradient will liberate the completion That will merge with a wise repose Thus is fashioned the panorama of tomorrows The vibrato of an ocean animates What is found behind the wall of transparency And the beam of original cadences Also revigorates the open pact On the vigils propitious to major fusion 14 FIRES ON THE WATCH Without contour nor lassitude A sagacious night Strolls but watches Over our patience To conclude the first act The most evanescent act The defoliated trees Are embellished by the moon At the rising of friendly winds The target rolls its center Around the disappeared cities In the thickness of the world The rejection and the gap Burned themselves at the bush of embers That the end of day places On the surface of the sea It only remains for us To break all the mirrors In order to seek the fault of time Through which to enter into the light

These last four verses seem to us to summarize Elie-Charles Flamand's journey who confided to us: "... I have never doubted that the ways of poetry lead to the discovery of that supreme point of which Breton spoke, without him however going to the bottom of the metaphysical signification of such a term. Through poetry can operate a return to the Principle: is not the Word one of the modalities of the Uncreated Light?" Michel Passelergue The poems read are, for the most part, borrowed from the Anthology "Ember of Unity" (La Lucarne ovale) and the quotations have been extracted from E.-C. Flamand's autobiographical narrative "The Meanders of Meaning" (Dervy).