Saturday Night, 11/21/15, Nowheresville, Deep South
I can’t figure out how to upload images, or I'd show you a naked Picasso drawing, but I can write. But Neruda, he could write:
Tonight I can write the saddest of lines.
Write, for example, “The night is starry
and the stars are blue and shiver in the distance.”
The night wind revolves in the sky and sings.
Late this evening, I happened to check the pseudonymous email account of my alter ego, Francisco, for the first time in a week. There I saw that one of my dear comrades who was supposed to write the Anti-Capitalist Meetup piece for Sunday night has fallen ill. So I volunteered to write, as I can write tonight and even enjoy doing so.
I don't have much to say, but I have a couple of great writers to quote from, one an American anarchist and the other a Chilean communist, who happened to have served as bookends on my last ten days or so of existence.
A little over a week ago, also late at night, for some reason I picked up the pocket version of Walden, Or Life in the Woods. I enjoyed skipping around, reading most of it in a single sitting (or actually hot bath—damn I love hot baths), focusing on parts other than "Economy." I really enjoyed it. I worked my way back toward the front, and put it away and went to sleep right after reading the famous part about
I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived. I did not wish to live what was not life, living is so dear; nor did I wish to practise resignation, unless it was quite necessary. I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life, to live so sturdily and Spartan-like as to put to rout all that was not life, to cut a broad swath and shave close, to drive life into a corner, and reduce it to its lowest terms, and, if it proved to be mean, why then to get the whole and genuine meanness of it, and publish its meanness to the world; or if it were sublime, to know it by experience, and be able to give a true account of it in my next excursion.
Something about driving life into a corner and reducing it to its lowest terms has always appealed to me. Maybe you feel the same way.
Well anyway, a day or two later, on Friday, November 13, I took off early from work and went on a long drive across the Deep South to meet with old friends I see only once every few years. As we were laughing and sharing thoughts about our lives, one of my closest pals, who has been dealing with brain cancer for a long time (beats the alternative), told me about the Paris attacks, which had just occurred.…
After getting the email asking me to write something for this weekend, I was once again seemingly mysteriously "moved” to read something from a writer I love (once again while taking a long hot bath—ahhh.) This time I read back cover to front cover the English translation (tr. by W. S. Merwin, illustrations by Pablo Picasso) from the bilingual version of the famous love poetry by Pablo Neruda.
I keep volumes of Neruda by my bed but have been mostly uninterested in “the famous love poems"—until now. They were published in 1924, when he was only 20, a hick from the sticks trying to find his way much like I was at that age. I highly recommend them in these days of brutal treatment of Parisian lovers, Syrian refugees, and other innocents at home and abroad.
Cristina Garcia’s introduction is quite nice. I will quote the first, second, and last paragraphs. I will not omit the introductory portion from “Body of a Woman" she also quotes. I am not engaging in censorship, but some of it strikes me as misogynist and capitalist, particularly in the use of the term “surrender.”
Why should a lover be viewed in the language of conquest? Too often leftist men of the past forgot that two equal workers, or peasants, should have been taking part in the private lovely earthy non-dirty dances of life, denying women equal rights, expression, and fullness.
However, I hope we can appreciate Neruda’s integrated articulation not only of nature and everyday people but also of the bareness of his lust, not to mention of his lover, with life reduced and yet infinitely magnified in its lowest terms. And while it is no excuse for sexism that this was how a young heterosexual radical male modernist (who could write) might want to express himself in 1924, the overall sentiment of honest nakedness is ever resonant:
Body of a woman, white hills, white thighs
You look like a world, lying in surrender.
My rough peasant’s body digs in you
and makes the son leap from the depth of the earth.
(From “Body of a Woman”)
From the opening lines of this stunning collection by the twenty-year old Pablo Neruda, it is immediately obvious that we’re in the hands of a nascent master, of someone who can lead us, confidently, lyrically, from darkness into the sweet realm of the senses. That this poem, “Body of a Woman,” along with twenty others, was published in 1924—when the world was still recovering from the ravages of the first truly global war—is all the more remarkable. That this collection was instantly, rapturously received signaled that the public, after being “alone in the loneliness of this hour of the dead,” was hungry for a more personal, more intimate art, that they yearned for an endorsement of the individual and his struggles, loves, and losses. In Pablo Neruda, they found their poet.
Neruda arrived at the age of sixteen to the capital city of Santiago to study French literature after a childhood spent largely in Temuco, a densely forested region in the south of Chile, with his railroad worker father and his loving step-mother (Neruda’s mother died of tuberculosis when he was an infant). He’d read widely and indiscriminately as a boy the adventurous tales of Jules Verne, the sentimental novels of Victor Hugo, the pirate stories of Emilio Salgari, the experimentations of the French symbolist poets. As a teenager, he'd tried his had at translating Baudelaire and tackled Don Quixote.
***
Whether whispering or shouting them exultantly, the poems in Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair encourage me to look closely at my own world for its small miracles and the persistence of love. They speak to me from the heart, as if for the very first time. They remind me that renewal and change are possible, cycling through life like so many seasons, inevitable and surprising at once. They do something that only great art or faith or children, if we’re lucky, do with any consistency: they offer hope.
I would add to the list of things that give me hope: the fledgling devotion around the world to deep democracy and solidarity that rejects the inhumanity and barbarism of totalitarianism and divide and rule, and that insists on leaving none of the oppressed of the world behind. In other words, our tenuous but sincere understanding of our naked equality, a queer socialist poet’s affectionate comradeship. Walt Whitman’s ardent love for dewy humanity is a bridge not only from Thoreau to Neruda but also to us, the desperate we.
I will end as Ms. Garcia did, with an excerpt from “Almost out of the Sky.” We persist in celebrating the beautiful simplicity of humanity, even in our failures and defeats, from break-ups to neoliberal economic duress to physical agonies to murderous acts of religious fundamentalists to drone-dropping and bombing by superpowers to chicken hawks who send the poor to war to promote their political careers.
After sad lessons are learned, we may look for a road to follow without anguish for us and others. It may or may not lead to winter, but it is still a human road like Thoreau’s to and from Walden Pond. In our grief, we may want it to lead away from "everything," but realistically others will have their eyes open through the dew.
Longing that sliced my breast into pieces,
it is time to take another road, on which she does not smile.
Storm that buried the bells, muddy swirl of torments,
why touch her now, why make her sad.
Oh to follow the road that leads away from everything,
without anguish, death, winter waiting along it
with their eyes open through the dew.
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