The Reversible Enchantment of the Rhythmical Knot of the Elemental Poetics

This paper investigates the intertwining of the role of the philosopher, the task of the poet, human existence, elemental poetics, the meaning of the soul, the question of rhythm, and the poetics of salt. These vast themes are explored starting from five brief quotations from Eugène Guillevic, Stéphane Mallarmé, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, and Gaston Bachelard. In dialogue with these quotations, the theoretical background to study Pablo Neruda’s poem “Ode to Salt” is advanced by developing a concept of human existence and being-in-the-world as an elemental rhythmical knot of relations between the world, others, and oneself. Neruda’s poem is read in dialogue with Bachelard, Merleau-Ponty and Guillevic for progressing an elemental and rhythmical understanding of being-in-the-world and how phenomenology and elemental poetics of salt could be part of this kind of being-in-the-world.