Roland Barthes suggests there are three ways to finish any piece of writing: the ending will have the last word or the ending will be silent or the ending will execute a pirouette, do something unexpectedly incongruent. Gaston Bachelard says the single most succinct and astonishing thing: We begin in admiration and we end by organizing our disappointment.
The moment of admiration is the experience of something unfiltered, vital and fresh—it could also be horror—and the moment of organization is both the onset of disappointment and its dignification; the least we can do is dignify our knowingness, the loss of some vitality through familiarization, by admiring not the thing itself but how we can organize it, think about it. I am afraid there is no way around this. It is the one try inevitable thing.
And if you believe that, then you are conceding that in the beginning was the act, not the word. The painter Cy Twombly quotes John Crowe Ransom, on a scrap of paper: “The image cannot be disposed of a primordial freshness which ideas can never claim.” Easy and appropriate thing for a painter to say. Cy Twombly uses text in some of his drawings and paintings, usually poetry, usually Dante.
Many men and women have written long essays and lectures on the ideas they see expressed in Twombly’s work. Bachelard’s sentence simply says this: origins (beginnings) have consequences (endings). The poem is the consequence of its origins. Give me the fruit and I will take from it a see and plant it and watch grow the tree from which it fell.