Primitive Flowers

I've been thinking about the day the plants produced flowers, the first flowers. My daisy plant is through for the summer I think. She produced many for me, and I was well rewarded for my valiant dead-heading.

I love trimming rose plants, the big ones in a friend's garden, the miniature ones on a friend's balcony. Rose plants love to be pruned, they grow back bigger and better, they make more flowers in the secret clefts of their stems and leaves.

So the day plants produced flowers... I've been wondering what the first flower looked like. Apparently the first flowers may have been magnolias, which is a wonderful discovery. They also greeted me consistently this summer, with their big luscious petals and their almost unbearably sweet smell, at night, in parks. In a primitive forest with primitive leaves I would have loved to have lain under a magnolia tree. Also, magnolias have lovely, plush fruits, sweet to touch too, though hard, with bright red seeds, waiting, inside.

Ophelia 

Why, Ophelia, did you die?  
Your cracked mind, 
and all the different uses for flowers.

Your hair hanging on the wall
for a man who called you whore
and a father, innocent in liking.

Did you not study enough? 
Did language escape you?
The language of flowers, 
so much simpler before,
for you and yours, gentle souls,
for love professed by the body,
that floated by the shore
and crimson somehow, violet,
nosegay, forget-me-not and scarlet
roses tell the sorry tale.

Why, Ophelia did you die?
For loss, for keeping?
Keep coming, Ophelia,
through the cold water,
twisted with leaves and grass
not flowers. Tell your tale,
speak it now, to haunt the man
who in his lies and weakness
made you piecemeal and sore.

He tore a whisp of some sweet fragrance
from your chest and wrestled,
wrestled with another language, not yours.

I'm not sure what Ophelia is doing here, drowned among her flowers. I'm sure she loved to trim them too. A man I knew once likened me to her and this poem came out, a tribute to her, and also to my melancholy, since the man had gone. 

Maybe it is the end of summer which makes me think of the darkness to come, the end of naivity, the passing of girlhood, the marrow of mature life, harvesting the red fruit, or picking up the fruit that has fallen, no longer a flower. 

Ophelia got off the train, poor thing. She gave her flowers. I just learned that daisies mean forsaken love, unhappy love, so it is just as well mine are no longer blooming, though I thought I read they meant innocence. Maybe it is the same thing, or that one, necessarily, leads to the end of the other.

There's rosemary, that's for remembrance. Pray you,
love, remember. And there is pansies, that's for thoughts...
There's fennel for you, and columbines. There's rue for
you, and here's some for me. We may call it herb of grace o'
Sundays. O, you must wear your rue with a difference!
There's a daisy. I would give you some violets, but they wither'd 
all when my father died.... 
(Shakespeare, Hamlet, Ophelia speaking in Act IV, scene V)

What I love about this scene is Ophelia's bawdy language. Oh, she has lost it, she sees the truth, and learns, too late, that she shouldn't have let him steal her thyme.

Tomorrow is Saint Valentine's day,
All in the morning betime,(55)
And I a maid at your window,
To be your Valentine.
Then up he rose and donn'd his clo'es
And dupp'd the chamber door,
Let in the maid, that out a maid(60)
Never departed more.

I think I'm still getting over the loss of mine.

By Gis and by Saint Charity,
Alack, and fie for shame!(65)
Young men will do't if they come to't
By Cock, they are to blame.
Quoth she, 'Before you tumbled me,
You promis'd me to wed.'
(He answers:)
'So would I 'a' done, by yonder sun,(70)
An thou hadst not come to my bed.'

But I'm not about to die over it.

 

L'éternel retour

Reality is strange. Have you ever felt like you were going around again and again, seeing something you've seen before? Sometimes even when things are brand new there is a feeling of déjà vu. Sometimes I think, can't I just get off this train? You can't, here you are, or you don't, and then suddenly, one day, you do, but maybe then you just get back on somewhere else, who knows?


Untitled
 

I thought of kissing you on the train platform

and how you didn’t stop

and how the trains left

but then returned

(as though this poem should be nostalgic

but it ends with a reunion)

or how kissing ends

but then we kiss again;

our lips don’t really change.

Nor do tracks.

For every leaving,

there is a coming back.

L'éternel retour.
It is interesting that the Cocteau movie with this title is translated into English as Love Eternal. In my last post, I was thinking about Benjamin wondering about clouds and ruins, and how the two juxtaposed spell eternity. What is eternal? Maybe an inbetween place of juxtaposition, one thing next to another, a kind of eternal relation, or maybe that is all that is itself eternal, relation, you to me and me to you and to someone else again. It doesn't seem so sinister that way, and means there is something eternal about writer to reader and reader becoming writer. Maybe the relationship of word to word is also eternal. And before words?

"O Zarathustra," said then his animals, "to those who think like us, things all dance themselves: they come and hold out the hand and laugh and flee - and return.  Everything goes, everything returns; eternally rolls the wheel of existence.  Everything dies, everything blossoms forth again; eternally runs on the year of existence.  Everything breaks, everything is integrated anew; eternally builds itself the same house of existence.  All things separate, all things again greet one another; eternally true to itself remains the ring of existence.  Every moment begins existence, around every 'Here' rolls the ball 'There.  ' The middle is everywhere.  Crooked is the path of eternity”. 

Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra: a Book for Everyone and No-one. Also Sprach Zarathustra: Ein Buch für Alle und Keinen - The Convalescent

I'm not sure, but I'll build this house, this year. I'll laugh at what never ends, with a crooked smile.
 

Clouds

My friend sent me this poem, in German, by Bertolt Brecht, Erinnerung an die Marie A.

An jenem Tag im blauen Mond September
Still unter einem jungen Pflaumenbaum
Da hielt ich sie, die stille bleiche Liebe
In meinem Arm wie einen holden Traum.
Und über uns im schönen Sommerhimmel
War eine Wolke, die ich lange sah
Sie war sehr weiß und ungeheur oben
Und als ich aufsah, war sie nimmer da.

Seit jenem Tag sind viele, viele Monde
Geschwommen still hinunter und vorbei.
Die Pflaumenbäume sind wohl abgehauen
Und fragst du mich, was mit der Liebe sei?
So sag ich dir: ich kann mich nicht erinnern
Und doch, gewiß, ich weiß schon, was du meinst.
Doch ihr Gesicht, das weiß ich wirklich nimmer
Ich weiß nur mehr: ich küßte es dereinst.

Und auch den Kuß, ich hätt ihn längst vergessen
Wemnn nicht die Wolke dagewesen wär
Die weiß ich noch und werd ich immer wissen
Sie war sehr weiß und kam von oben her.
Die Pflaumebäume blühn vielleicht noch immer
Und jene Frau hat jetzt vielleicht das siebte Kind
Doch jene Wolke blühte nur Minuten
Und als ich aufsah, schwand sie schon im Wind.

You might know it from that movie, Das Leben der Anderen. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Idi4_zHUqZk 
Here is an English translation if your vocabulary in German is like mine. I like to go back and forth:
http://cecilhanibal.wordpress.com/2009/07/09/bertold-brecht-erinnerung-and-die-marie-a/

Here is what Benjamin says about clouds in his essay Einbahnstrasse (One-Way Street):

Heidelberg Castle: Ruins whose debris point into the sky tend to look twice as beautiful on those clear days when the eye, through their windows or simply above them, meets the passing clouds. Through the mobile spectacle that it stages in the sky, their destruction confirms the eternity of debris.

This is H. U. Gumbrecht's translation. I'm reading his book The Powers of Philology, trying to understand what he means by a philology devoid of interpretation or hermeneutics, devoid of the search for meaning. I am wondering how he reads, as though he hopes, still, for an ideal language that could somehow be pure and forego representation, or at least the complications of the human imagination. I'm not sure I understand him. But then, he doesn't understand Benjamin: 

I cannot quite follow the association that he suggests between ruins and eternity. More precisely, I do not understand why an awareness of the ongoing effects of destruction (Zerstörung) should ultimately lead to an impression of eternity (Ewigkeit) - even if this process of destruction is "doubled and emphasized by the transitory spectacle" ("bekräftigt durch das vergängliche Schauspiel") of the clouds in the sky.

He writes this at the beginning of the first chapter, called Identifying Fragments, p. 9. 

What do clouds have to do with Philology? Well, along with orphaned lines, philology often deals with incomplete texts, so there is this ideal of the unified text as it was before fragmentation, before the philologist confronts the words he reads as a fragment. This ideal text, of course, is purely the invention of the philologist who can't truly grasp what this pre-fragmented text actually was. He imagines it. But what I like in Benjamin's essay is that the ruins are all there is. I don't think he sees the idealized completed castle. I think he just sees the ruins, which suggest to him the passing of time, which itself is eternal, and the clouds, passing at a quicker pace, remind him of time passing. But he isn't reconstituting the castle. He is just enjoying the contrast : eternity glimpsed through what changes eternally (the clouds) next to the slower decay of the castle, the ruins being in and of themselves complete. What I want to say is that there is no such thing as a fragment, just like there is no such thing as an orphaned line.

And that is the point of Brecht's poem for me. Things pass, but there is still this impression left, by the movement of clouds perhaps, by the turning of a wheel, the change of seasons or the sun, but not by the thing itself, which has gone, and ultimately no longer matters. But then again, the title of the poem contains a name, and an initial, so the person is remembered after all.

Or maybe all poetry is fragmentary? Perhaps all language too for that matter, and every line orphaned. But if everything is fragment and ruin, is anything?

Back from Berlin                                                                              

Germany still has pock-marked buildings,

but ones you don’t see, with all the shiny,

pretty, clean, and new.

Maybe we could look at death in a new way,

or see past the loss of the past.

Maybe today, in all its glitter, is a door,

a way to move on from what came before.

Maybe there is a way to see it all through holes,

like windows, from the inside,

maybe there is a way to shed this skin,

back from Berlin.

Anyways, the rhyme fights fragmentation.  

Insects

This morning there was a grasshopper on my curtain. I was flattered he mistook my apartment for the out of doors; maybe it was all the plants or the rabbits. I tried to put him outside, but he jumped very high up, and seemed to fall behind the dresser. I couldn't find him, but I left the window open so he could find his way out again.

Summer is a time for bugs. Perhaps because I am alone a lot, I enjoy speaking to them in my mind. I think of Dahl's James and the Giant Peach, and wonder what it would be like to have a conversation with one. Here is a poem I wrote for a moth: 

Insects

Wasps, ticks, spiders,
bees, houseflies,
gather round,
now is your time.

Settle in,
make it brown
or black
with the sounds of your wings.

You are drawn to my heart,
my breath like light
but soon again, move off,
say a prayer for me.

Leave me silent,
moths in the night,
sit tight on white
porchboard.

Fly off now,
sticky residue
of black burnt
feet, stubble, wing.

Sleep now,
tunnel,
buzz,
zs.

Reflections on insects hide my desire for focus and motivation. I like to think the grasshopper will bring me luck and help me finish the chapter I am working on, but only I can summon that. I don't always like what I read. Can I make true statements? True for myself, or being true to myself, that is what writing is. When I leave myself, it is sleep, or daydreaming, the lives of all the infinitely small beings around me. Perhaps I could draw them: all that infinity makes spacious unity. 

Berlin Notes

I'm leaving tonight, on the train, to go back to Geneva. The week went by quickly. We went to Quedlinburg so that I could look at a 12th century tapestry, now in fragments, representing the Marriage of Philology and Mercury. 
Here we see Piety and Justice embracing.

The Church this tapestry was housed in was an SS meeting hall for Nazi ceremonies during the war.

War as Timeless

In early pictures
Hitler wore shorts,
leiderhosen, sat with dogs,
a friend to babies.

These are the politicians
that make the decisions
that leave holes in faces
as well as places.

Shattered minds now
as when in ancient times,
altars destroyed, spears thrown,
the god of war cried out and made himself be sculpted.

I wonder what the Nazis thought of the tapestry, or of philology. Wagner was a great friend of Nietzsche, and philology was often used for nationalistic purposes. The origins of languages and the fascist cause, bosom buddies, and the dangers of wanting to own history, dictate the future. 

I think she looks lovely, holding hands with Mercury. He says, I am yours, in a ribbon unrolling across his body. I am still deciphering her words. The tapestry was apparently commissioned by an abbess named Agnes, for the Pope. I am glad she didn't have to live to see the 20th century.  

A visit to the Pergamon

Eros has wings and serpent legs,
and he is doing things to men.

With one bent foot under his squatting body,
his buttocks, muscles and folds of skin
betray the tension of battle, captured on the wall.

In the center of the hall gathers all the youth of Germany,
who spotted, braced and badly dressed, stare at each other,
as altars to new gods, at the Pergamon Museum.

Trains

There are few things I like better than taking the train. I went all the way to China once, with a friend, but shorter trips are nice too. I’m currently on the train to Berlin, waiting to leave Basel, Switzerland, for flat Germany and industry. Many people are surprised I want to take this trip by train. Since the flight costs just as much, most people want to go by sky. But I love the rail. I love watching the villages go by, with spires and surrounding mountains, the pink sky rising out of the mist. I saw a dewy field with early morning brown sheep running, a fox jumping after a black bird, rare moments of new day life, often unseen. Once I wrote a poem about some of those things:

Some Things People Don’t See

A hare by the side of a train,

standing ear-tall in the golden grass.

An ancient wooden door,

rounded, brown and weatherworn

welcoming.

The smells of centuries,

lakes and walls,

cracked books and waterfalls.

Strawberries wild

gathered in a garden,

under leaves, secret and red.

Water drops, spiders and insects,

colonies below ground

that come out again.

You never know what you are going to see on a train, or from a train. People waving, embracing, carrying too many bags, with picnics, like me. There is something very human, and touching, about train travel. Conversations arise. Right now I’m alone in my little compartment though, and I can shut out the noise. I can sit and drink tea and work. I found a plug for my computer. I’ll post this later.

I think it is easier to write on trains because you are constantly moving, so your train of thought, and your words, follow the same movement. Funny, I just realized we say "train of thought": I lost my train of thought… I found my train. That is why it is easy to write on trains, you can’t get lost, or lose your thoughts.

I wrote a lot when I took the Trans Siberian. I wrote "list poems", trains of words? It was August then too, and we kept going east under the clear sky, the horizon was always new. The air was different, clearer, and it felt as if it were pushing us forward. We read and embroidered and talked and slept and drank tea and ate what the babushkas sold us by the side of the tracks. The white and black birches, or poplars with pale green, heart shaped leaves, stretched on for days. We stretched our legs. We kept going east until we were in the East, and then we went south. And after a dip in the clear, cold, deep, Lake Baikal, the desert.

Carpe Diem

As an obvious rejoinder to my reflections on death, I wanted to post a poem about seizing the day; I couldn't find one of my own. Then I realized, all my poems are the result moments that I seized, a kind of verbal carpe diem, so perhaps they never need to address the issue. Maybe that is poetry, seizing the day, in words. 

Death

I said I would post more on Death today, since in Pasternak's poem August the poet sees his own death; his writing at the end, as his own death approaches, as his friends come to him, as he dies. Sometimes I feel like we ignore death so much it becomes like the vacant center, the unsaid, around which everything turns. I don't think it's such a big deal, really; I like the rhyme, in July, maybe I'll die which came out in song I was writing the other day. Since it's August now, I can share it. 


I recently saw the movie "The Sea Inside" (Mar adentro, which, incidentally, was also directed by Alejandro Amenábar, director of the movie on Hypatia I wrote about the other day, Agora), which I think is an apt metaphor for death, a going in instead of a going away. Death is a mystery, but there are other mysteries. People die and we keep their pictures, or make movies about them, idolize them, use them in some way. We don't want them to die, but they do. I would have more to say on memories, memory, and how it shapes the mind, and shapes who you are, long after some people only wander through your dreams. But then how many of us are actually awake today?


Then there is writing, which dresses the corpse and keeps it talking long after the dust has been blown away. The holy grail of the written word for many authors I think, Pasternak's angel: Immortality. Which makes me think of an Emily Dickinson poem. I'll see if I can find it.

Because I Could Not Stop For Death
Because I could not stop for Death,
He kindly stopped for me;
The carriage held but just ourselves
And Immortality.

We slowly drove, he knew no haste,
And I had put away
My labor, and my leisure too,
For his civility.

We passed the school where children played,
Their lessons scarcely done;
We passed the fields of gazing grain,
We passed the setting sun.

We paused before a house that seemed
A swelling of the ground;
The roof was scarcely visible.
The cornice but a mound.

Since then 'tis centuries but each
Feels shorter than the day
I first surmised the horses' heads
Were toward eternity.


That was easy. I love the false subtlety of the rhymes in this poem. I love the way the word Immortality is placed.
Well, people die and we do miss them, still:

Why do we focus on death
when it is not the road?
A transfer station, 
a place to switch over,
circle back. 

Somewhere in you is
a free and seeking bird,
the white of its neck,
your body beautiful to it,
I need not hold.

This time could be long
or short, 
is on our side, what's next?

It doesn't matter still,
our small moments here
eternity were more than
bright lights intermittent.

We have smiled at each other
We have watched the sun rise.

I think the second to last stanza of this poem is nice in the same way the Emily Dickinson poem is nice, but I'm not sure about the rest of it. This stanza also reminds me that I read e.e. cummings a lot as a teenager. What do you think? Will it keep me alive after I'm dead? I wonder. Would a word or two suffice? Thousands of poems in drawers. In any case, thank you, Emily.

August

The words have slown to a trickle. I've been writing at home, listening to France Culture on the radio, washing rugs, baking, cooking, cleaning, putting corrections into my file, now saved on my old laptop, so young yet so old, in the current scheme of things.  


Technology makes me feel old. Do we think better with our computers? I don't think so. I love The Book of Memory by Mary Carruthers. I'm learning and talking about how we used to read, in medieval times. Our minds were huge, if one were to stretch them out in space, then the size of a football field, now the size of a thimble. They built mansions in their brains to house ideas in. I suppose I'm nostalgic. I think my mind, if well trained then, would have flourished. But how can I know? I found a tortorous past life there, once, in medieval times, and one in antiquity, a village in the desert, which was even more traumatic.


I suppose I'm glad I'm writing now, the ease with which I can here. I can look things up at the drop of a hat, what was her name again? What was that quote or the name of that book? The search engine allows me to make leaps in knowledge with an ease unavailable in ancient times.


But I'm still not sure we are smarter. On the contrary. Computers make us lazy.
But it's August, hot finally, and tired.

August

Waiting for summer to end.
Berries on carpets,
blue-black stains of summer ending,
I have flowers on my undergarments.

Five hundred grams of plums,
small, dark and clouded,
bites of time and sun
which I bought at the market today.

My mind changes every day
but my body stays the same.
I think, "Winter will be my Spring,"
I think, "Summer will end."

I'll send you a poem by Pasternak called August,
I'll write one too, which maybe I won't send to you,
waiting for melancholic Autumn,
waiting for summer to end.


I'm not sure I sent either, actually. I wrote that years ago. Here is the Pasternak poem: 

August

This was its promise, held to faithfully:
The early morning sun came in this way
Until the angle of its saffron beam
Between the curtains and the sofa lay,

And with its ochre heat it spread across
The village houses, and the nearby wood,
Upon my bed and on my dampened pillow
And to the corner where the bookcase stood.

Then I recalled the reason why my pillow
Had been so dampened by those tears that fell-
I'd dreamt I saw you coming one by one
Across the wood to wish me your farewell.

You came in ones and twos, a straggling crowd;
Then suddenly someone mentioned a word:
It was the sixth of August, by Old Style,
And the Transfiguration of Our Lord.

For from Mount Tabor usually this day
There comes a light without a flame to shine,
And autumn draws all eyes upon itself
As clear and unmistaken as a sign.

But you came forward through the tiny, stripped,
The pauperly and trembling alder grove,
Into the graveyard's coppice, russet-red,
Which, like stamped gingerbread, lay there and glowed.

And with the silence of those high treetops
Was neighbour only the imposing sky
And in the echoed crowing of the cocks
The distances and distances rang by:

There in the churchyard underneath the trees,
Like some surveyor from the government
Death gazed on my pale face to estimate
How large a grave would suit my measurement.

All those who stood there could distinctly hear
A quiet voice emerge from where I lay:
The voice was mine, my past; prophetic words
That sounded now, unsullied by decay:

'Farewell, wonder of azure and of gold
Surrounding the Transfiguration's power:
Assuage now with a woman's last caress
The bitterness of my predestined hour!

'Farewell timeless expanse of passing years!
Farewell, woman who flung your challenge steeled
Against the abyss of humiliations:
For it is I who am your battlefield!

'Farewell, you span of open wings outspread,
The voluntary obstinacy of flight,
O figure of the world revealed in speech,
Creative genius, wonder-working might!' 


Tomorrow, on death, for now, I love this allegory of writing!
Found online so sweetly and easily, perhaps the internet is the new library of Alexandria, but I miss the smells.