Truth-and-Darkness                                                            Page 42

The "space...most deep" that "will not close" is the proper place of the poet:

Whoever goes deeply into poetry escapes from being as certitude,

meets with the absence of the gods, lives in the intimacy of this absence,

becomes responsible for it, assumes its risks, and endures its favour.

Whoever digs at verse must renounce all idols; he has to break with

everything. He cannot have truth for his horizon, or the future as his

element, for he has no right to hope. He has on the contrary, to

despair. Whoever delves into verse dies; he encounters his death as an

abyss.⁴⁵

The despair of which Blanchot speaks is the despair of "certitude", an "absence

of the gods" a renunciation of "all idols", an encounter with death as "an

abyss". This kind of death:

forms a whole with life, forms the generous space of the two domains'

unity.... If we refuse death it is as if we refuse the somber and difficult

sides of life. It is as if we sought to welcome in life only its minimal

parts. So then would our pleasure be minimal. "Whoever does not

consent to the frightful in life and does not greet it with cries of joy

never enters into possession of the inexpressible powers of life. He

remains marginal. When the time for judgement comes, he will have

been neither alive nor dead." ⁴⁶

The search for truth, in the poetry of Judith Wright, is able to leave the gaps in

the-net of life open. She admits the spaces that "reach most deep and will not

close", spaces where there is no meaning, no answer, no way out, spaces that

are the negation of everything, except, perhaps, pain. She sees the journey as

one into a different kind of light:

What I am trying to express is my own experience that the modern

"journey into darkness" is, if it is honestly and completely taken a

journey into a new kind of light.⁴⁷

⁴⁵ Maunce Blanchot. The Space of Literature, Translated by Ann Smock (Lincoln University of Nebraska Press, 1982) p.38

⁴⁶ Blanchot, p.129. The quotation is from Rilke.

⁴⁷ T. Inglis Moore, "The Quest for Judith Wright”, Critical Essays on Judith Wright Selected by A. K. Thomson (Milton: Jacaranda Press 1968) p 76