Some books leave you with the strange impression that you’ve been awakened. Reading Jean Arno’s Trophies is an intellectual experience, as the author claims on his official website www.jeanarno.com, from which the informed reader comes out brighter. His claim would be arrogant if his verses, which sometimes touch the sublime and sometimes resemble Baudelaire’s These Dreams of Stone, were not so deep and full of optimistic faith in the power of the human spirit: “That each one can throne majestically in his own skies, as a splendid Sphinx dominates its desert! Indeed, the poetic aphorisms that Jean Arno offers require an intellectual effort, as he said himself : “the greatest truths are conquered”.
The poet, like Nietzsche, reminds us of an obvious fact that we should never have forgotten: human beings reach their highest freedom as creators. However, we have moved away from this path because it requires qualities that are difficult master. High creation requires us not to succumb to the temptations of our time — the temptations that lead artists and intellectuals to produce only works that conform to a determined horizon of expectation, which are often uniform and superficial. The mind that wishes to produce exceptional thoughts must necessarily make an effort to “[persevere] in being” to use Spinoza’s words, or to overcome itself in creation. Readers must gather all their intellectual forces to reconstitute the reasoning contained in the final and triumphant poetic formula. Arno delivers these explanations of his poetic art in unpublished and hidden texts. In the manner of Leonardo da Vinci, the poet hides codes in his texts that lead to “sacred relics.”
The game is worth the candle: new fragments appear when one manages to elucidate the mystery: “Every soul that darkness stirs up digs the world with such a stubbornness that chasms blossom with stars of unknown splendor.” When it is not the pleasure of the “game” or the Orphic enigma which carries away the heart of the reader, it is the philosophical accuracy of the subject (“In our reasons murmur/Mysteriously/the eloquent speeches/of our obscure passions”) and the symbolic and Parnassian beauty of the tamed verse: “In her eyes of sapphire / Full of light and clarity / Desires lose themselves / In avid immensity).” When one loves great literature and philosophy, one can only be conquered by this monument of splendor.
