​Lebens ohne Eigenschaften, by DB Jonas

The Hunter (Catalan Landscape), by Joan Miró (Spain) 1924

​Lebens ohne Eigenschaften *
 
Joan Miró’s existence was so lacking
in adventure, so utterly devoid
of interest, that it is almost as though
he had deliberately planned to make
 life difficult for his biographer.
Jacques Dupin, Miró
 
It’s all composed of surfaces, I’m afraid, looking back on things. Endless plains, prairies, featureless savannah, veldt and steppe, one after another. But curiously discontinuous, decoupled, when considered from where I sit: discrete, disjunct, defying assembly into what you’d call a life. More like lives, really, the years, without clear succession, and seemingly without number. These lives we lead, nothing like the substance of what you’d call a life. Searching in the mind’s eye for the illuminating detail, we encounter only shards, scatterings, fragments, fugitive aromas, fugitive voices, the flatness of the road beneath a cautious step, the hummocked soil, the endless clumpgrass, a pale horizon impossibly distant. And always the absoluteness of abrupt discontinuity, of change without transition. Never the prospect of an isthmus or embracing panorama. Never the linkage of connective tissue. As though each imagined past were the womb of countless others, like stories told by someone else, about someone else, nested like galaxies, like unstable elements containing more than they are able. One after another, did I say? Maybe every one within some other without end, into the many that is any one, into the infinite, abyssal journey that is recollection. You need to tell the story of this life, I often hear, You’ve seen and done so much. But to undertake that task, to organize the fragments as a sequence, into the master syntax of a single lifetime, as if time’s detritus described a causal or purposeful journey down highways or through scenic terrain, is to tell a tale of pure imagining, to muster all the dislocations of experience into the fanciful passion play of narrative. And yet. And yet is it likely that the past, that which we call our past, can ever remain entirely silent? Can the fragmentary, the involuntary, the disorientations of living, the featureless domains of the inactual, ever remain securely buried in the unrecollected, ever fail to erupt into the precincts of present thought, the self-assertions of our confident speech? So it’s our story, I maintain, that speaks, not the speaker. The story spins a tale that won’t be quelled despite the best efforts of the story-teller to reveal or withhold. A tale of the involuntary, spoken involuntarily, speaks always in the here and now, extends before us here in plain sight, haplessly exposed to the elements and scudding clouds, endlessly offered up in these ineloquent fragments, in the halting cadences of someone’s stumbling speech, always interrupting, endlessly repeating, forever erupting from this impersonal, undifferentiated terrain into the endless landforms of these inscrutable canvases, a succession of flattened images lingering relentlessly in the enigmatic intonations, the unfathomable flatness of poems.

DB Jonas

*Life without Qualities
 
DB Jonas is the author of two collections of poetry, Tarantula Season and Other Poems (2023) and Flight Risk, Poems and Translations (2025). Further examples of his work can be accessed through jonaspoetry.com