“A poem is a mystery to which the reader must seek the key.” This distaste for Stéphane Mallarmé could be explained by his romantic spirit and whims if it did not simply emphasize the secret, in the sense of initiation, side that the reader must decipher in order to be able to read the poem.

On the other hand, the same applies to the mysteries of life: if you cannot find your own way and perhaps some answer to them, you cannot live. After all, isn’t life a continuous initiation into something that we follow like the unknown, transforming it over the years into something quasi-known?

But is it? Can not a poem, as Mallarme puts it, be replaced by life? “Life (every life) is a mystery, the bearer of which must seek the key.”

Thus, here the reader, the first to approach the poem, even the poet himself as a reader of either other people’s poems or his own poem, and, above all, this latter, as the bearer of the secret of (his) life, is invited to look for the key, keys often, for this mystery. . And so, from the mysteries of poetry, we come in vain to the mysteries of life, which everyone is called upon to investigate, explain, decipher. Poetry is only one way. The routes are as numerous as the many-branched branches of a towering plane tree. We find such centuries-old trees on some routes around the world, as well as throughout Greece. It may not always be plane trees, but oaks or lindens. Their offshoots become veins of the ether as they rise and branch.

Isn’t life a continuous initiation into something that we follow like the unknown, transforming it over the years into something quasi-known?

Many people need to open their arms and the horizontal vector to hug their torso. Because how tall these trees grow and how much they open up, the secret of their life, circulating in their many-branched veins, takes root in the center of their trunk, which can gouge and open a gap where you imagine with the years. their most inaccessible and compact secret.

Of the plane tree on Kos, said to have been from the time of Hippocrates, all that remains is a perimeter tree encircling a column of void as if it were a multitude of plane trees captured in a circle dance. It is a mystery, this inner cavity which, emptying itself, continues to irrigate the whole tree, even if it looks like a lot of peripheral ones, while throwing branches up and roots down into an expansive growth that usually remains invisible. Here, the inner frame perfectly expresses the growth, pointing even more fully to the mystery of the hollow, which conveys life above and below.

This emptiness that we create day by day in our lives is the most personal secret, it becomes the secret of everyone’s life. And it fits more and more into a shrinking life. However, everyone will build their life around this, whether they want it or not, whether they know it or not, that a mystery surrounds them, the content of which they ignore and will ignore, since it is a pillar of emptiness.

This seems to be something mystical, if it were not completely natural, natural, as in the trunk of a plane tree, as it appears in the human body during illness and decay. But what appears at some point, taking death or such and such a deadly form, is made every day of our life from the same matter, which gradually decreases, decreases, shrinks. What it produces is emptiness. It’s more and more day by day. We are wasting days of our lives. We are empty of our days.

And everyone is called to live with this mystery, not unraveling it, simply understanding its existence. Without it, neither life can be real, nor experience is real. The possibility of life is definitely lost without it.