Beautiful ink painting by Wang Yu 王云 (1968~)

In waiting for a new post here on the blog, I wish to share this beautiful image by Wang Yu.







 If anyone is wondering why there has been so little activity for the last year, my nine and a half month old daughter is the answer.

See you!

T. S. Eliot's dark night: East Coker, III

T. S. Eliot. Four Quartets. You might have seen me going on about it before.

Today, on this pentecostal national holiday, I got to thinking about this excerpt from "East Coker", the second of four Quartets. There is something incredibly restful and silent and vast about this section of the poem. The darkness Eliot evokes digs itself into me, creating space where it goes.

Emptiness and darkness - we all carry it within. And I don't mean in a negative way. From emptiness comes everything, as we know from the Big Bang.

III

O dark dark dark. They all go into the dark, 

The vacant interstellar spaces, the vacant into the vacant, 

The captains, merchant bankers, eminent men of letters, 

The generous patrons of art, the statesmen and the rulers, 

Distinguished civil servants, chairmen of many committees, 

Industrial lords and petty contractors, all go into the dark, 

And dark the Sun and Moon, and the Almanach de Gotha 

And the Stock Exchange Gazette, the Directory of Directors, 

And cold the sense and lost the motive of action. 

And we all go with them, into the silent funeral, 

Nobody's funeral, for there is no one to bury. 

I said to my soul, be still, and let the dark come upon you 

Which shall be the darkness of God. As, in a theatre, 

The lights are extinguished, for the scene to be changed 

With a hollow rumble of wings, with a movement of darkness on darkness, 

And we know that the hills and the trees, the distant panorama 

And the bold imposing facade are all being rolled away— 

Or as, when an underground train, in the tube, stops too long between stations 

And the conversation rises and slowly fades into silence 

And you see behind every face the mental emptiness deepen 

Leaving only the growing terror of nothing to think about; 

Or when, under ether, the mind is conscious but conscious of nothing— 

I said to my soul, be still, and wait without hope 

For hope would be hope for the wrong thing; wait without love, 

For love would be love of the wrong thing; there is yet faith 

But the faith and the love and the hope are all in the waiting. 

Wait without thought, for you are not ready for thought: 

So the darkness shall be the light, and the stillness the dancing. 

Whisper of running streams, and winter lightning. 

The wild thyme unseen and the wild strawberry, 

The laughter in the garden, echoed ecstasy 

Not lost, but requiring, pointing to the agony 

Of death and birth. 

You say I am repeating 

Something I have said before. I shall say it again. 

Shall I say it again? In order to arrive there, 

To arrive where you are, to get from where you are not, 

You must go by a way wherein there is no ecstasy. 

In order to arrive at what you do not know 

You must go by a way which is the way of ignorance. 

In order to possess what you do not possess 

You must go by the way of dispossession. 

In order to arrive at what you are not 

You must go through the way in which you are not. 

And what you do not know is the only thing you know 

And what you own is what you do not own 

And where you are is where you are not.  

***

"Nobody's funeral, for there is no one to bury"

"I said to my soul, be still, and let the dark come upon you / Which shall be the darkness of God"

"Wait without thought, for you are not ready for thought / So the darkness shall be the light, and the stillness the dancing"

These are paradoxical sentences, but they are opening a well of wisdom in us, I find. We understand them, as we are humans, not machines working on algorithms and binary codes.
 
I am sinking into this text heart, hue and hide. "The vacant interstellar spaces, the vacant into the vacant" - this always hurls me into a great vastness and makes my chest light up like a starry night's sky. The darkness, emptiness, space and light all at once.

"Oh dark dark dark. They all go into the dark" - yes, we do. And how I cherish it, how restful it is. I particularily like how Eliot doesn't use commas between the three darks, and how he stops there before starting a new sentence. It gives the theme of this section, I think. Quiet yet deep.

The whole of the last bit is only paradox. Perhaps it tells you something anyway?

I am particularly drawn to "In order to arrive at what you are not / You must go through the way in which you are not". It gives me the sense that I am already here, already in place, already arrived at what I believe I am searching for. It gives me glimpses of timelessness and a vastness completely unrelated to space; something outside of it all. And this something is in us all along, and we are in it. 

If you want a musical companion to this dark, silent and deep piece, try Bach's Chaconne. (Not while you're reading, perhaps, but after. Don't want to spoil the rhythm of Eliot's words! - Or the simplicity and complexity of this everunfolding piece of music.)

It surely opens up something in me.

Jorge Luis Borges: "Everness"

Everness

One thing does not exist: Oblivion.
God saves the metal and he saves the dross,
And his prophetic memory guards from loss
The moons to come, and those of evenings gone.
Everything is: the shadows in the glass
Which, in between the day’s two twilights, you
Have scattered by the thousands, or shall strew
Henceforward in the mirrors that you pass.
And everything is part of that diverse
Crystalline memory, the universe;
Whoever through its endless mazes wanders
Hears door on door click shut behind his stride,
And only from the sunset’s farther side
Shall view at last the Archetypes and the Splendors.

Translated from Spanish by Richard Wilbur

This poem was given me by Jacques Felix, in his comment to my previous post on Borges' The Immortal. It bears the mark of Borges, all right. The first line unlocks the door into the Borgesian universe. 

Oblivion does not exist, because the universe is a memory, a consciousness. We are parts of the universe, meaning we are the universe itself, and are expressions of that memory, that consciousness. "Everything is".

The blankness of oblivion is mirrored by the sparkly, shiny image of the stars and moon, by mirrors themselves, and by crystal - "[a]nd everything is part of that diverse / Crystalline memory, the universe".

And the last line brings back the everness: the Archetypes and the Splendors.

This poem is so simple yet so intricate and deep. Time is nowhere - the universe is a memory, a consciousness.

Jorge Luis Borges: "The Immortal"

By Gisela Giardino

Reading Borges' ficciones is always rewarding in one way or other. I picked up his Collected Fictions one night, guided by I don't know what. Following my own hunch, I turned to the collection of ficciones called The Aleph. In this book one piece was called "The Immortal". This seemed to me the place to dive down that night.

One paragraph I read two times, slowly. In many ways this felt like the summary of the story, the  source of it, in a tone that to me feels like Borges is speaking directly to us, almost without the literary filter. It gives a sense of him stepping out of the role of narrator on the page, and into that of conveyor of depth.

I felt so tempted to type the whole paragraph here that I am actually going to do it, for those of you with patience for more than a poem. I will still put it out for everyone to see. Gems should be shared.

Here goes:

"There is nothing very remarkable about being immortal; with the exception of mankind, all creatures are immortal, for they know nothing of death. What is divine, terrible and incomprehensible is to know oneself immortal. I have noticed that in spite of religion, the conviction as to one's own immortality is extraordinarily rare. Jews, Christians, and Muslims all profess belief in immortality, but the veneration paid to the first century of life is proof that they truly believe only in those hundred years, for they destine all the rest, throughout eternity, to rewarding or punishing what one did when alive. In my view, the Wheel conceived by certain religions in Hindustan is much more plausible; on that Wheel, which has neither end nor beginning, each life is the effect of the previous life and engenderer of the next, yet no one life determines the whole... Taught by centuries of living, the republic of immortal men had achieved a perfection of tolerance, almost of disdain. They knew that over an infinitely long span of time, all things happen to all men. As reward for his past and future virtues, every man merited every kindness -- yet also every betrayal, as reward for his past and future iniquities. Much as the way in games of chance, heads and tails tend to even out, so cleverness and dullness cancel and correct each other. Perhaps the rude poem of El Cid is the counterweight demanded by a single epithet of the Eclogues or a maxim from Heraclitus. The most fleeting thought obeys an invisible plan, and may crown, or inaugurate, a secret design. I know of men who have done evil in order that good may come of it in future centuries, or may already have come of it in centuries past... Viewed in that way, all our acts are just, though also unimportant. There are no spiritual or intellectual merits. Homer composed the Odyssey; given infinite time, with infinite circumstances and changes, it is impossible that the Odyssey should not be composed at least once. No one is someone; a single immortal man is all men. Like Cornelius Agrippa, I am god, hero, philosopher, demon, and world -- which is a long-winded way of saying that I am not."

***

The narrator in this story is starting out as a Roman soldier. He travels through centuries and almost mistakenly attains immortality. Along the road he meets a man he first takes to be a simpleton, without language or the means of symbolic representation. After a while it turns out this man is Homer. This gives the text at the same time a heavy literary frame as well as a timeless one. Homer is more a mythical figure than that of a real man; no one knows whether he ever existed, or if his name is the expression of a conglomerate of storytellers and writers; you could even say Homer is a personification of human imagination or inventiveness. In a way Homer is something of an archetype, making out a solid brick in our (at least Western) cultural edifice. The ideas conveyed in "The Immortal" have that same quality of timelessness (hooha) and durability or imperishability as its Homeric counterpart, seeming to spring from common human ground.


Borges strays into rich waters here. He is for example touching into the midst of buddhism: The expression "I am not" points directly to the emptiness of phenomena, or doctrine of emptiness (shunyata), which is central especially in the Mahayana direction within Buddhism. I am not suggesting that Borges is hinting at Buddhism as such, but that he seems to be tapping into the same well of truth. And exactly this, that he is looking deeply into himself, and at our history and literature and bringing these theses out with him, which are shared with old and thoroughly worked-through schools of thought and insight gives me the impression of a man with great insight into humanity and the fabric of reality. Perhaps more important still: This passage rings true with me.


The piece gives me a sense of a great balance. In the long run, things even out: "over an infinitely long span of time, all things happen to all men [...] all our acts are just, though also unimportant. There are no spiritual or intellectual merits". A balance is conveyed, between important–unimportant, worthy–unworthy, meaning–emptiness without it leaving me as a reader with the feeling of insignificance. This seems to me to be the truth of things. And, paradoxically, at the same time all we do is immensely important. We are expressions of something deep, we all carry significance in one way or other, just by living and adding to the great web of life in which we are all interconnected. The question lying underneath it all: "what is life?" This will continue to be a mystery to me and no doubt the following generations of humans. A cycle of life, certainly (like the Hindu wheel Borges is referring to), but how does it start, or does it start or end? In a way these questions aren't that important. That we live, and give our lives the meaning we feel is most fulfilling for ourselves and the rest of life around us is certainly a good beginning. 


Rarely have I read a short text that gives me a such a broad scope of existence, also beyond human life.(How can you separate human life from life itself?)


In a way the opening and closing sentences sum up the content of this text. "There is nothing very remarkable about being immortal; with the exception of mankind, all creatures are immortal, for they know nothing of death." And the closing sentences: "No one is someone; a single immortal man is all men. Like Cornelius Agrippa, I am god, hero, philosopher, demon, and world -- which is a long-winded way of saying that I am not." Immortality as an idea has at all times been very attractive to humans. But how thoroughly thought through is this wish, I wonder. Reading Borges' The Immortal might alter or purge the urge for it.

Being human is irrevocably linked to mortality. That has its meaning.

By Sturt Krygsman, The Australian

Atonement: The writer's point of view

In the novel Atonement by Ian McEwan the main character is Briony, who at age 13 is a budding author. She already thinks like a writer most of the time, seeing plots for novels and stories in the family life and nature surrounding her. The world to her is a place of inspiration for something she can later put down in writing. In a way her life is lived more on the page than in her direct contact with the surrounding world.

The whole book is circling around the theme of writing, the word as expression, or even the word as a more real reality than reality. I think this is something many bookworms can recognise, readers and writers alike - the world of fiction and literature is the preferred place to hang out. More safe and controlled perhaps, but also a place where there is room for high ideals and strong, fatelike friendships, fantastic actions and heart-wrenching sacrifices in the name of love, humanity, truth etc. Of course literature is mirroring to some extent the world the authors live in, but still - a different place to reality.

A favourite moment of mine in this novel is Briony's literary culmination when she has had an awakening and is being hurled out of childhood, all through seeing a scene in the park surrounding her house, involving her sister Cecilia and the family friend Robbie. This scene is the structural hub of the novel. Briony is too young and misinterprets what she sees - a feud between two near adults who have known each other their whole lives and who are beginning to understand that they love each other. Briony sees them argue over a broken vase in front of the fountain on the lawn, and interprets the whole situation wrongly. She sees Robbie threatening Cecilia (he is actually trying to stop her from stepping on the broken bits of the vase) and is convinced she has to protect her sister from this man. Her suspicion is later galvanised when Robbie uses Briony as a messenger in bringing Cecilia a letter. The letter was supposed to be an apology for his behaviour around Cecilia lately, with him hinting at his new feelings towards her. But of course McEwan has him putting the wrong note into the envelope, one including a word Briony has never heard before but immediately understands as belonging to the just-discovered world of grown-up dealings; and of course he has Briony, the writer who needs to know everything about the world around her, reading it. ("The smooth-hollowed, partly enclosed forms of its first three letters were as clear as a set of anatomical drawings.") The scene and the word is spiralling her into a different existence.

Anyway, a passage I've always loved in this novel, culminating in a single sentence, is where Briony is writing down her opening line of a story after seeing the fountain scene and understanding that she must enter a new level of writing and existing; enter the grown-up world and write about more serious layers of reality than fairytale princesses and storylines always ending in good marriages.

She sits in front of the white paper, pen in hand, and after considering everything she has seen and started to understand that day, writes "There was an old lady who swallowed a fly".

This one sentence, seemingly a leap from the context she is consumed in, to me says a lot about what writing is. From one kind of material springs a whole new material or world, somehow related to its origins, but often very different in form and content (if 'origins' is a word possible to use around the writing process). Creativity doesn't move in orderly autobahn-lines, it makes the most surprising leaps, leading us to completely new places with strange and fresh connections to the world we know and the evergrowing literary geography.

Not magic, only the endless possibilities of human imagination.

Tomas Tranströmer: Schubertiana (English version)

Schubertiana 
by Tomas Tranströmer
translated by Robert Fulton


This poem includes an allusion to the Schubert Fantasia in f minor for two pianists: "We squeeze together at the piano and play with four hands in F minor, two coachmen on the same coach, it looks a little ridiculous." Under this wonderful poem you will find a link to Perahia and Lupu playing this piece.

This first video is Tranströmer reading his poem, in the original (and melodic) Swedish. The bluish grey-green tone of the colour fits the feel of Tranströmer, in particular this poem.

Schubertiana

I

In the evening darkness in a place outside New York, a viewpoint point where

             one single glance will encompass the homes of eight million

             people.
The giant city over there is a long shimmering drift, a spiral galaxy seen

            from the side.
Within the galaxy coffee-cups are pushed across the counter, the shop

           windows beg from passers-by, a flurry of shoes leave no prints.
The climbing fire escapes, the lift doors glide shut, behind  police -
locked doors  a perpetual seethe of voices.
Slouched bodies doze in subway cars, the hurtling catacombs.
I know too – without statistics – that right now Schubert is being played
in some room over there and that for someone the notes are
more real than anything else.

II

The endless expanses of the human brain are crumpled to the size of a fist.
In April the swallow returns to last year’s nest under the guttering of this

             very barn in this very parish.
She flies from Transvaal, passes the equator, flies for six weeks over two

continents, makes for precisely this vanishing dot in the land-

             mass.
And the man who catches the signals from a whole life in a few ordinary
            chords for five strings,
who makes a river flow through the eye of a needle,
is a stout young gentleman from Vienna known to his friends as `The
Mushroom," who slept with his glasses on
and stood at his writing desk punctually of a morning.
And then the wonderful centipedes of his manuscript were set in motion.

III

The string quintet is playing. I walk home through warm forests with the

             ground springy under me,
curl up like an embryo, fall asleep, roll weightless into the future, suddenly

            feel that the plants have thoughts.

IV

So much we have to trust, simply to live through our daily day without
           Sinking through the earth!
Trust the piled snow clinging to the mountain slope above the village.
Trust the promises of silence and the smile of understanding, trust that

           the accident telegram isn’t for us and that the sudden axe-blow

           from within won’t come.
Trust the axles that carry us on the highway in the middle of the three
           hundred times life-size bee swarm of steel.
But none of that is really worth our confidence.
The five strings say we can trust something else. And they keep us  com-
           pany part of the way .
As when the time-switch clicks off in the stairwell and the fingers –
          trustingly – follow the blind handrail that finds its way in the
          darkness.

V

We squeeze together at the piano and play with four hands in F minor,
          two coachmen on the same coach, it looks a little ridiculous.
The hands seem to be moving resonant weights to and fro, as if we were

          tampering with the counterweights
in an effort to disturb the great scale arm’s terrible balance: joy and
         suffering weighing exactly the same.
Annie said, `This music is so heroic,’ and she’s right.
But those whose eyes enviously follow men of action, who secretly
          despise themselves for not being murderers,
don’t recognize themselves here,
and the many who buy and sell people and believe that everyone can be

            bought, don’t recognize themselves here.
Not their music. The long melody that remains itself in all its transfor-

             mations, sometimes glittering and pliant, sometimes rugged

             and strong, snail-track and steel wire.
The perpetual humming that follows us – now –

up
the depths.

Rilke again: "I love the dark hours of my being" / "Ich liebe meines Wesens Dunkelstunden"

In line with the earlier excerpt from Rilke's Das Stundenbuch / The Book of Hours, there is a piece hinting at darkness and silence and depth that I would like to share with you.

I might actually be more fond of the first seven stanzas than the five that conclude this poem. More of that later.

I love the dark hours of my being
in which my senses drop into the deep.
I have found in them, as in old letters,
my private life, that is already lived through,
and become wide and powerful now, like legends.
Then I know that there is room in me
for a second huge and timeless life.

But sometimes I am like the tree that stands
over a grave, a leafy tree, fully grown,
who has lived out that particular dream, that the dead boy
(around whom its warm roots are pressing)
lost through his sad moods and his poems.

*


Ich liebe meines Wesens Dunkelstunden,
in welchen meine Sinne sich vertiefen;
in ihnen hab ich, wie in alten Briefen,
mein täglich Leben schon gelebt gefunden
und wie Legende weit und uberwunden.
Aus ihnen kommt mir Wissen, dass ich Raum
zu einem zweiten zeitlos breiten Leben habe.

Und manchmal bin ich wie der Baum,
der, reif und rauschend, über einem Grabe
den Traum erfüllt, den der vergangne Knabe
(um den sich seine warmen Wurzeln drängen)
verlor in Traurigkeiten und Gesängen.

*

Again I am seduced by the tangible singing blackness of Rilke's. My senses drop into the deep as I read his lines. I see that Bly, the translator, has made a choice in translating "vertiefen" into "drop into the deep". This is not a direct translation, which I don't think possible with this Germanic word (we have the same, "fortape", in Norwegian). However the interpretation Bly makes here I think gains the reading of the poem. "Drop into the deep" fits very well with the tone of the poem and where it comes from.

Through the dark hours of his being, Rilke has found endless room in himself, "for a second huge and timeless life". This I understand well. It is perhaps nothing I could explain very well, but this notion of a huge and timeless life, depersonalised, speaks its blackly glimmering language in my ears.

The ending I to some degree find a little pity-me, a kind of melancholy feeling sorry for himself. A hard judgment perhaps, but the concluding line "lost through his sad moods and his poems" doesn't ring well with me. On the other side, Rilke is pointing to something very human and understandable. He sometimes feels like he is in another depersonalised form, that of a a vast and upright tree looking down on the boy (himself) who got lost in his sad moods an poems/songs. Actually this is just another way of saying what he said in the first part of the poem. The tree-boy is purely that vital and timeless part of him that the moody and broody poetry writing boy doesn't get to experience.

With the seasonal darkness pressing in on the windows from around 4 pm everyday, the darkness is quite tangible here. Still I can conclude with the opening line: I love the dark hours of my being.

Tomas Tranströmer: Madrigal

This is also a very good poem by Tranströmer. Although the more usual set-up of the poem isn't there; or rather, that this looks like a piece of prose, the text rings like a poem to me. The imagery, the rhythm, the silences between the words and the sentences; and of course the weight of each word. If you hear this poem recited, you probably wouldn't think of it as a prose poem. However the form, Tranströmer seems to shine through.

* * *

Madrigal

I inherited a dark forest where I seldom walk. But a day is coming when the living and the dead trade places. Then the forest will be set in motion. We are not without hope. The most serious crimes will remain unsolved despite the efforts of many policemen. In the same way there is somewhere in our lives a great unsolved love. I inherited a dark forest, but today I am walking in the other forest, the light one. And the living things that sing, wiggle, wave and crawl! It's spring and the air is very strong. I have an examination at the University of Oblivion and am as emptyhanded as the shirt on the clothesline.

* * *


I have always loved the closing line:

I have an examination at the University of Oblivion and am as emptyhanded as the shirt on the clothesline.

How wonderfully simple yet recognisable that image is! The cheerfully waving shirt hanging out to dry on a clothesline. No worries, just existing right there and then, with the sun shining through its cotton white and blue stripes.

I also like that the air is very strong (stark is the Swedish word, the emphasis on the rolling 'r'). The air can be strong. When life holds meaning and your stride is full. When the time of year is spring as well, I get his meaning clearly.

The dark and light forests he speaks about is hardly difficult to recognise. At least not to me. Again I guess the Northern or even Scandinavian landscape I share with this poet informs my reading and makes me feel right at home in the world he paints. But beyond that, the forest isn't exactly an unknown image to mental landscapes. Yet powerful, I find, a valid illustration.

Here the balance between the light and dark is quite visible. You just don't have one without the other. 

Squeezed in is the line about unsolved love. This I find in a way very hopeful. That somewhere in our lives there is a great unsolved love. That puts some light and warmth into areas one might often think of as dark and mysterious, just because one doesn't see what is there, what it is within you that feels unsolved, unilluminated. Why shouldn't it be a great unsolved love rather than a deeply forgotten dark something?

What shines through the clearest, I think though, is that although you inherit a dark forest or wood, you dont have to live in it. You don't have to reproduce the worldview you grow up in, the fights of your fathers. Through the University of Oblivion you wash free of static worlds and come out light and emptyhanded, translucent with sunlight and full of life.


In Swedish:

* * *

Madrigal

Jag ärvde en mörk skog dit jag sällan går. Men det kommer en dag när de döda och levande byter plats. Då sätter sig skogen i rörelse. Vi är inte utan hopp. De svåraste brotten förblir ouppklarade trots insats av många poliser. På samma sätt finns någonstans i våra liv en stor uoppklarad kärlek. Jag ärvde en mörk skog men idag går jag i en annan skog, den ljusa. Allt levande som sjunger slingrar viftar og kryper! Det är vår och luften är mycket stark. Jag har examen från glömskans universitet och är lika tomhänt som skjortan på tvättstrecket.

* * *

From För levande och döda, 1989 (For the living and the dead).

Tomas Tranströmer: Romanesque Arches (English) / Romanska bågar (Swedish)

Another of Tranströmer's poems I hold dear is "Romanesque Arches" or "Romanska bågar". This poem is deeply human, hence international.

From our shared heritage, here exemplified by a Romanesque church (rumoured to be the San Marco Cathedral in Venice/Venezia, Italy), we enter our shared world of spirit, of humanity, our nearly endless human potential.


Romanesque Arches

Basilica di San Marco

Tourists have crowded into the half-dark of the enormous
       Romanesque church.
Vault opening behind vault and no perspective.
A few candle flames flickered.
An angel with no face embraced me
and his whisper went all through my body:
"Don't be ashamed to be a human being, be proud!
Inside you one vault after another opens endlessly.
You'll never be complete, and that's as it should be."
Tears blinded me
as we were herded out into the fiercely sunlit piazza,
together with Mr. and Mrs. Jones, Herr Tanaka and Signora Sabatini;
within each of them vault after vault opened endlessly.


(Translated by Robert Bly, tweaked a little by me)

* * *




Here is the original:

Romanska bågar

Inne i den väldiga romanska kyrkan trängdes turisterna i halvmörkret.
Valv gapande bakom valv och ingen överblick.
Några ljuslågor fladdrade.
En ängel utan ansikte omfamnade mig
och viskade genom hela kroppen:
"Skäms inte för att du är människa, var stolt!
Inne i dig öppnar sig valv bakom valv oändligt.
Du blir aldrig färdig, och det är som det skall."
Jag var blind av tårar
och föstes ut på den solsjudande piazzan
tillsammans med Mr och Mrs Jones, Herr Tanaka och Signora Sabatini
och inne i dem alla öppnade sig valv bakom valv oändligt.


* * *
Read in Swedish by the poet. I have always loved the music of Swedish. Does it translate?

The openings within us, vault behind vault opening endlessly as we understand how sacred the act of being human is.

Tomas Tranströmer: Allegro (in English)

I wish to offer you a translation of the poem Allegro which I shared in Swedish in the previous post. This translation is provided by Lyle Daggett, and he has refined the translation of Robert Bly so that it sounds, at least to me, to be closer to the original Swedish. Some of you may have read it already in the comments to the previous post where I had just learned that Tranströmer had gotten the Nobel Prize of Literature.

Thank you very much for this, Lyle!

Here it is:


Allegro

I play Haydn after a black day
and feel a little warmth in my hands.

The keys are ready. Kind hammers fall.
The sound is green, lively and still.

The sound says that freedom exists
and that someone does not pay tax to Caesar.

I shove my hands in my haydnpockets
and act like one who is calm about the world.

I raise the haydnflag -- it signals:
"We do not give up, but want peace."

The music is a glass house on a slope
where stones fly, stones roll.

And stones roll straight through
but every pane of glass is still whole.


* * *

There will be more Tranströmer in English on this blog. I can hardly wait to put it out!

The Nobel Prize of Literature goes to Tomas Tranströmer!

How my heart is warming and glowing and sparkling -- Tomas Tranströmer, over 80 years of age, has finally gotten the Nobel Prize of Literature.

I am not exaggerating if I say that Tranströmer is my favourite poet. I don't usually deal with lists of favourites and "the best" of this or that. But Tranströmer hits a Nordic nerve that is so close to my bones, heart and hide and that it will be difficult to push him off the mossy throne I've put him on.

The poem I first read of him and which opened me to his world of blue and grey and green, musicality, his deep love and compassion for the human experience, and the depths underneath and behind everything is the one called "Allegro". It remains one of the poems closest to my heart.






ALLEGRO

Jag spelar Haydn efter en svart dag
och känner en enkel värme i händerna.

Tangenterna vill. Milda hammare slår.
Klangen är grön, livlig och stilla.

Klangen säger att friheten finns
och att någon inte ger kejsaren skatt.

Jag kör ner händerna i mina haydnfickor
och härmar en som ser lugnt på världen.

Jag hissar haydnflaggan - det betyder:
"Vi ger oss inte, men vill fred."

Musiken är ett glashus på sluttningen
där stenarna flyger, stenarna rullar.

Och stenarna rullar tvärs igenom
men varje ruta förblir hel.




Sadly I don't have the English translation where I'm at (travelling), but I'll look into it when coming home.

Anyway, it is pure beauty.

You can read about him at the page of Poets.org, here as well, an article from the British newspaper The Guardian, recently in The New York Times, at the Poetry Foundation or just generally do a search on Google about him. A few volumes of his poetry have been translated into English.

Needless to say I find his work worth looking into.

Rilke: I have many brothers in the South/Ich habe viele Brüder in Sutanen

I've been touching the subject of blackness and stillness earlier. I have known Rilke for a while, but haven't really read that much of him. Why? My rather lacking skills in German as well as a lack of Norwegian translations of the works I am most interested in. I know there are quite a few English translations out there, but being a speaker of a Germanic language, an English translation just isn't the same as a Scandinavian one.

My interest for this poet has been ignited, though. Funnily enough through an English translation made by Robert Bly.

What attracted me is the following:

Ich habe viele Brüder in Soutanen
im Süden, wo in Klöstern Lorbeer steht.
Ich weiß, wie menschlich sie Madonnen planen,
und träume oft von jungen Tizianen,
durch die der Gott in Gluten geht.

Doch wie ich mich auch in mich selber neige:
Mein Gott ist dunkel und wie ein Gewebe
von hundert Wurzeln, welche schweigsam trinken.
Nur, daß ich mich aus seiner Wärme hebe,
mehr weiß ich nicht, weil alle meine Zweige
tief unten ruhn und nur im Winde winken.

* * *

I have many brothers in the South.
Laurels stand there in monastery gardens.
I know in what a human way they imagine the Madonna,
and I think often of young Titians
through whom God walks burning.

Yet no matter how deeply I go into myself
my God is dark, and in a webbing made
of a hundred roots, that drink in silence.
I know that my trunk rose from this warmth, but that's all,
because my branches hardly move at all
near the ground, and just wave a little in the wind.

* * *


This piece is part of a longer poem from the work Das Stunden-Buch or The book of Hours.

Strange when you recognise so much in a few words, that someone across time can express something so recognisable to you. Rilke is a Northern European and as much as he likes and admires the southern style of worshipping through "burning" paintings, Madonnas and the like, he sees that his own depths are different.  They are dark, a web of a hundred roots that drink in silence. That sentence alone opens my being to this poet.

There is a word in Norwegian (and German) which doesn't have a good correlate in English, which I think this poem reflects. The word is "inderlig" (German: innig) - an adjective or adverb, and "inderlighet" (innigkeit) - noun. What does this describe? A kind of intense personal longing, passionate, with a melancholy side to it - and very personal or even private. The longing is not necessary to this word (begriff), but I put it in this attempt to explain to get at the intensity this word describes. Also, "passionate" gives off rather too warm connotations. Innigkeit/inderlighet has something cool in it - hence the whiff of melancholy.

I understand only too well how he knows his trunk rose from the warmth of the southern cultures, but that up here, in this Northern European consciousness, it is cooler, sharper, and in a strange personal way more intense. Take Luther - the reformation of the Roman Catholic church began in Germany. Not a coincidence. Your relationship to God is deeply personal. Rilke's God is dark (dunkel) and drinking cool water from a deep well. This is the sense I get. The silence, darkness, the sinking feeling of an immense depth - all part of a strongly "inderlig" relationship to yourself and at the same time your god. The sentence "Doch wie ich mich auch in mich selber neige" / "Yet no matter how deeply I go into myself" also points to a Northern European tendency - that of turning inwards, of contemplating silently on your own, in an innig way. His branches growing out of his trunk embedded in the warm, southern history and mindset hardly move at all - they only wave a little in the wind. Why is this so recognisable? The whole image he gives off just fits with a sense I have of ground, of what I rest upon, spring from. A cultural layer, I believe, that easily can be mistaken as a personal layer.

Look at the man's eyes and you can see the darkness, depth and stillness centred. I think maybe only this picture would have made me realise he is a poet to my liking.

And thank goodness for bilateral translations! Now I can learn a lot more of the German language, via English. Kind of ironic, but effective. It is possible to wish to learn a language fully because of an author you like. T. S. Eliot with Dante, J. L. Borges with Ibsen. Rilke definitely tickles that bone in me.

My God is dark, and in a webbing made of a hundred roots, that drink in silence.

Burnt Norton and the pool of light - T. S. Eliot

A part of T. S. Eliot's Four Quartets sprung up in my mind as I was reading "The glass of water" by Wallace Stevens. In the poem by Stevens the glass is at one point referred to as a pool, fed upon by the light with "frothy jaws".

Eliot's Four Quartets, quite a literary (and philosophical) masterpiece, can be said to have sprung from one experience he had in a once grand, then rather forlorn rose garden. In a garden with a kind of lost, old beauty Eliot passed through a hedge of tightly growing rose bushes and came upon an empty pool in the grounds.

The genesis of the Quartets reminds me of the incident in Proust's Remembrence of things Past, where his dipping a madeleine cake in a cup of lukewarm lindenflower tea made his whole childhood whoosh back to him in a split-second, bringing with it what developed into the twelve volume modernist novel.
 



The pool in Burnt Norton

 Eliot put his birthing experience into writing:

So we moved, and they, in a formal pattern,
Along the empty alley, into the box circle,
To look down into the drained pool.
Dry the pool, dry concrete, brown edged,
And the pool was filled with water out of sunlight,
And the lotos rose, quietly, quietly,
The surface glittered out of heart of light,
And they were behind us, reflected in the pool.
Then a cloud passed, and the pool was empty.

This is from Burnt Norton, the first of the Quartets. Burnt Norton is a real life garden belonging to an estate of the same name in England.

The experience of the dry pool that briefly filled with sunlight expanded in Eliot into an outstretched, timeless moment of stillness, beauty and a sense of the "heart of light" as he put it in a draft of this poem.

"Dry the pool, dry concrete, brown edged, / And the pool was filled with water out of sunlight, / And the lotos rose, quietly, quietly / The surface glittered out of heart of light". This is the heart of this part of the quartet, maybe even of the whole of the quartets themselves. Without this experience the Quartets probably would not have been written; at least not in the form they now exist. We see that the empty, dry pool is filled with sunlight, an ethereal and brilliant water substitute - or rather, a sunlight-water, existing in a dimension of its own. The surface, he says, "glittered out of heart of light" - somehow the essence of light seems to have presented itself to him in that brief, timeless moment. A silence of a sort, revealing itself to a present and observant onlooker.

The lotos is an interesting feature here. This flower has many properties and meanings in several Eastern cultures. It has a pure white blossom on the surface of waters, be they dirty or clean. Their roots go deep into the mud in rivers and lakes, which makes it stretch from the dirt through the water and flower in this pristine whiteness, making itself a symbol of the possible transformation from dirt to purity; from ignorance to enlightenment and so on. Eliot knew at least the Eastern philosophical tradition quite well, and also had a knowledge of Sanskrit, the classical language in India; the language many of the old Buddhist texts are written in. The lotos seems to represent a lot of things in this poem written by an American turned British, in something as British as a rosegarden belonging to a stately home. Simplicity, beauty, something deeply real, something mystical, a touch of the Eastern mindset - all in all a whiff of simple elegance incorporating a mystery which is almost making itself completely accessible to us. We only have to enter a quiet state of mind to sense its direct presence and have revealed whatever it might be presenting to us.

All these words to describe a quiet moment which brought a poet a deep stillness and a connection with something he called heart of light, which again brought him to write the section overhead. But this is really part of my fascination with thought/experience and language/art/poetry. From a tiny moment, a flash of insight, can spring a whole novel, a movie, a painting, a theory, a haiku. "Moments in and out of time" Eliot calls these kinds of experiences another place in the Quartets. The intersection of the timeless with time.

"The still point of the turning world, there the dance is". This about sums up the Four Quartets. And makes me come back to it again and again.