08/07/2025
enters a resonance process with existence itself through -this is the poetics of "dialogue"
1.
The following is an in-depth analysis of Ardakh Nurgaz's poem "Dark" from five key dimensions: language operation, time perspective, subject structure, sensory strategy, and symbolic system. These dimensions are intertwined and together constitute a complex poetic system of dark perception and existential dilemma.
📘 1. Language operation: self-entropy of language and negative rhetoric
The language in the poem is not a window to describe the world, but itself lost in the world. Its basic logic is:
Language → Burning → Ashes → Dissipation → Melting
For example:
"The tongue touches the stone and turns into stone"
"Like the words on the tip of the tongue, burning, glowing, disappearing, and blending into the body / In the end, it is impossible to find where it went"
The language loses its naming, expression, and communication functions here, and instead reveals the failure mechanism of the language itself. This is a kind of negative poetics:
Language no longer says "what is", but points to "what cannot be said"
The existence of language is the outline left by the loss of its meaning
This is contrary to what Heidegger said, "language is the home of existence". Here, Ardakh transforms language into a dark container that is constantly collapsing, constructing the shadow zone of existence in the incapacity of language.
🕰️ 2. Time view: non-linear, non-causal collapse time
The time in the poem is not a linear process from past-present-future, but a "time crumb" full of breaks, fragments and instantaneous burning:
"I can't feel, imagine the past centuries / Century is time, century may not be time"
"The waves that rise when the meteor slides through the black night sky and burns out"
Time in the poem is:
Instantaneity (such as meteors)
Sedimentation (such as "the mountains are flattened")
Invalidity ("cannot feel, imagine")
This is similar to Walter Benjamin's "fragmented time of history": time is no longer a continuous existence, but a fragment that suddenly erupts through the cracks of perception.
“Burn – Ashes – Integration” is not only a language mechanism, but also a dynamic model of time: time is not a line, but ash, a “perceptual climate” that can’t be traced after sliding past.
🧍♂️ 3. Subject structure: the interpenetration mechanism of I-you symbiosis
In this poem, the relationship between “I” and “you” is not the opposition between subject and object, but:
“You are in my body / Who are you? Who am I?”
The “I” in the poem:
Perceives the existence of “you”
Invaded and pe*****ted by “you”
Even redefined by “you”
This writing method that blurs the boundaries of the subject reflects the fission structure of postmodern subjectivity: the subject is no longer independent, self-consistent, and controlled, but a heterogeneous space constituted by others.
This also makes a structural loss appear in the poem: “I” do not know myself, nor can I grasp “you” - just like the perception in the dark, it brings constant collapse rather than certainty.
👁️ 4. Sensory strategy: oppressive sensory summons and traumatic cognition of the body
In his poem, Ardakh did not adopt visual centrism (i.e. "seeing" the world with his eyes), but mobilized marginal senses such as smell, touch, and pain:
"The stimulating body odor like the smell of the dry land that sucks your flesh"
"Touching your fingers, face, forehead and hair"
"Throwing stones will sound a thousand-year roar"
These sensory experiences have the following characteristics:
Heavy sense of oppression (the smell is "stimulating", "dry flesh" reminds people of death)
Sensory loss of control (touch is difficult to recognize, "gray butterflies" bring unstable visual interference)
Body passivity (the body is not a sensor, but a receiving field of perception)
The senses here are not only a tool for feeling the world, but also a physical evidence of memory, history, and scars. It constitutes a **"sensory-existence map"**, making "I" no longer a subject, but a place of suffering for existence.
🌌 V. Symbolic system: Darkness as a polysemous existential force field
"Dark" is not only a title, but also a fundamental symbol of the poem, running through the metaphysical, sensory, emotional and linguistic levels.
The darkness in the poem has multiple symbolic meanings:
Level The symbolic meaning of darkness
Language layer The silent field after the failure of expression
Existence layer The abyss of the other, the untouchable entity
Time layer Compressed and burned nonlinear time
Body layer The area of sensory dysfunction and desire stimulation
Historical layer The background of the deposition of "century", "mountains" and "ruins"
The poet does not try to eliminate the darkness, but:
"In the black night, I imagine tearing your black sky apart / I want to see your face in the dark..."
-This is not an enlightenment-style "illumination", but a poetic entry into the darkness, symbiosis with it, and dialogue with it.
This is in line with Blanchot, Bataille, and even Rilke's "Poetics of Night": Night is the matrix of existence, and darkness is the original field before meaning occurs.
✅ Summary: A "poetics of perception in darkness" structure
Dimension Mechanism Function
Language Negative language, self-disassembly Revealing language failure and unreachable truth
Time Non-linear rupture and flash Opposing historical continuity, emphasizing sedimentation and explosion
Subject "I-you" interpenetration structure Subject is no longer self-consistent, but turns to heterogeneous generation
Sensory Smell, touch, oppression Senses become the exposure field of history and existence
Symbol Darkness as the central image Collects all structural tensions such as language failure, historical sedimentation, and body perception
🌀 Final judgment:
"Dark" is not a lyric poem in the traditional sense, but a complex existential experimental poem. It does this by:
Disassembling the meaning structure of language
Deconstructing the continuity of time and subject
Reshaping the perception of history and existence through the senses
Transforming darkness into a poetic generation field
Finally, a complete poetic experimental system belonging to the contemporary existential dilemma and perceptual philosophy is constructed.
2.
The poetic mechanism of "Dark" - language operation, time view, subject structure, sensory strategy, symbolic system - has established a deep philosophical and aesthetic connection with the opening quote "We are a kind of dialogue" (Hölderlin). On the basis of in-depth analysis, we can say that "Dark" realizes its ontological exploration through "symbiotic dialogue in the dark", and this core path forms a potential echo and variation with Hölderlin's "dialogic ontology".
🌀1. Dialogue is not between people, but between "I" and "unknowable"
The opening quote "We are a kind of dialogue" comes from Hölderlin's late poetic thought. The meaning of this sentence is not daily conversation-style communication, but:
Existence itself - the way people are human - is in a state of eternal unfinished dialogue.
Heidegger explained this as: people exist in language, and language is not an exchange of information, but a call from existence itself to people.
In Darkness, this "dialogue" is reconstructed in a hidden and profound way:
It is not a dialogue between "I and you", but a dialogue between "I" and "darkness", "unknowable", "destruction", "history", "language failure", and "other flesh".
Dialogue is not for understanding each other, but for coexistence in mutual misunderstanding.
For example:
"You are in my body / Who are you? Who am I?"
This is not the completion of dialogue, but the infinite suspension of dialogue. Language cannot name the other party, and "I" cannot define myself, but this constitutes a deep existential symbiotic state: we are vague to each other and therefore cannot be separated.
📘2. "Existential Dialogue" Generated in Language Failure
In the previous language analysis, we mentioned that language in Darkness is a mechanism that constantly burns, collapses, and cannot reach meaning.
But this is precisely the premise for the possibility of dialogue: it is not because we understand each other, but because we can never fully understand each other that we always stay in dialogue.
"Tongue turns to stone": language loses its expressive power
"Words burn and melt into the body": language no longer leads to meaning, but becomes an organ of body and time
This is closely related to the "poetry = dialogue with existence" in Hölderlin-Heidegger's poetics. In "Darkness", the poet does not use language to "express" darkness, but lets language itself fall into darkness and resonate with it.
This means that "Dark" does not use language to describe a state of existence, but enters a resonance process with existence itself through the fragmentation of language-this is the poetics of "dialogue".
🕰️Three, echoes in non-linear time: history, destruction and unfinished dialogue
In "Dark", time is not linear, but broken, collapsed, and "century may not be time" fragments:
History is not about the past, but an unfinished process of destruction
Every destruction (such as "moths flying into the fire" and "Tao Weng's broken") leaves traces and forms sediments
These sediments are not the end, but "remains waiting for dialogue"-the poet walks on them and steps out his own footprints in the darkness. These footprints are not "engravings" but some kind of "response", responding to history, responding to the land, and responding to the voices in the ruins.
In this sense, dialogue is a symbiotic way of existence with the destroyed and silent things.
👁️Fourth, sensory strategy and "silent response"
Hölderlin's "dialogue" is a very poetic form of existence. In him, "silence itself" is also part of the dialogue.
In "Dark", the senses, especially touch and smell, become important media for dialogue:
"Sucking the smell of the dry land of your flesh"
"Touching your fingers, face, forehead and hair"
This is not sensory pleasure, but the sensory exploration of the unspeakable.
Here:
The dialogue is no longer conducted through language, but through the deep interaction of body and perception.
The subject in the poem is not the "I" who actively speaks, but an existence that is "responded" through pain, smell, dreams, ashes, and waves. This response does not appear through language, but:
Through the rising tide of the sea
Through moths flying into the flame
Through the flickering and destruction of candles
Through the falling stars in the night
This is the "call of the gods" in the sense of Hölderlin, an update in the modern context: the world calls people through the perception of darkness, and the way people respond is to perceive, destroy, and enter the poem itself.
🌌V. Darkness: The ultimate symbiotic symbol and dialogue space
In this poem, "Dark" symbolizes all things that are invalid and unsolved-language failure, perception confusion, historical rupture, identity ambiguity... However, "darkness" is not exclusion or negation, but:
A "symbiotic force field" that allows all things to coexist.
Darkness is:
The space where time is deposited
The expansion area of the body's senses
The place where the other and the self blend
The ultimate space after language cannot reach
This makes "Dark" not only a poem about darkness, but also a poem of **"coexisting with darkness"**-and symbiosis is a deeper structure of dialogue.
As Hölderlin said, "Because we are a kind of dialogue" - in this poem, the object of the dialogue is not another clear "you", but:
The unknowable that coexists with us in the dark
The historical voice that echoes through the fragments of time
The "existence" that we can never fully name
✅ Summary: From poetic mechanism to dialogue of existence
Dimension Operation mechanism Relationship with the theme of "dialogue"
Language Language failure, collapse Dialogue does not continue because of clarity, but because of continuous failure
Time Non-linear, collapse Every moment leaves an echo of response
Subject "I-you" symbiosis Subject ambiguity makes "symbiotic dialogue" possible
Sensory Pain, smell, touch The perceptual call to complete the dialogue in silence
Symbol Darkness as a field Darkness is the space for dialogue, the ultimate symbiotic domain
🌀 Conclusion: Poetry as a practice of dialogue in darkness
Ardakh Nurgaz's "Dark", through the negativity of language, the sedimentation of time, the oppression of the senses, and the fission of the subject, is no longer a communication between people, but a continuous and unfinished dialogue between people and existence, destruction, and history.
This poem practices exactly what Hölderlin said:
"People have experienced a lot. Self is a dialogue."
- A dialogue in darkness that does not rely on confirmation but is based on symbiosis.
In the darkness, it is not to illuminate each other, but to coexist in the unspeakable aftermath.
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