With Trophies, Jean Arno not only pushes the art of writing to the heights of the ancient glories of France—Hugo, Baudelaire, Rimbaud, Eluard—with whom he competes; he joins depth of thought with the harmonies of his classical hexasyllables. Nietzsche himself would probably have made these verses his own: “ Free is the will / Sovereign and great / Whose lightning controls / The palaces of fate”.
The human being is called towards these summits, which he feels called to create : “It is up to us to change into Destiny the forces of which our being is composed (…) so that in the unity of the work triumphs all the immensity of the worlds that we carry”. In each poem, a humanist faith emerges with this ideal of a being capable of overcoming himself—of creating beyond himself : “O, indefinable visions / Of a heart, heroic and pure ! / O, inexhaustible fountain / The source of all our future ! ».
Everything that prevents the affirmation of the highest life and diminishes the power of being is criticized with passionate ardour: the temptation of fame and glory; the escape into entertainment and artificial paradises; the resignation and capitulation of thought in the face of today’s immense problems; the standardization of the spirit in the paradigm of common judgment; the passivity or the boredom-murderer who justifies the existence of reality TV, for example: “Crowds sate their hunger / Like hyenas seek revenge / On the torments and the terror / On the tears and blood of men”.
But above all, as a pioneer of chaosism (of which he is the theorist) and of a cryptic art or “palimpsestic” art (as he likes to define it), he multiplies the levels of reading in order to “give back to our reality the complexity which essentially constitutes it”. His NFTs’ digital canvases are also known to contain codes which, when deciphered, open a new aesthetic experience (Herodiad, Vanity …), reserved for those “whose soul is rich enough to make a universe out of our material world”. It is also a question “of insufflating into the spirit the ardour which animates the reflection, and provoking by the enigma the sparkling fires of curiosity which deepen what remains for him elusive and unintelligible”. The poet-philosopher makes himself a high idea of poetry, “supreme art, (…) it releases from the darkness of the being the invisible powers and lets bloom in their supreme clearness the germs of light inside them”.
The evocative and poetic force of a work is diminished as soon as it does not help you see the invisible and plural strata of which the world is shaped—as soon as it does not propose an enriched vision of it. But the work could not be fully realized without the reader’s active participation: “It is that the highest truths are not given; they are conquered. Their gleams dazzle those whom they do not illuminate”. Trophies is an exceptional work: a must read.
