Poems Late In June - Joy and Presence in Zagajewski, Ammons, Blake and Clifton

 

Poems late in June 2021 – Part 1

 

I’ve been thinking about joy and presence

The Polish poet, Adam Zagajewski, and his poem ‘Try to Praise the Mutilated World’

The word ‘mutilated’ has troubled me since I first read the poem years ago, and after seeing Cronenberg’s film ‘Crash’ (1996)

‘Mutilate’ – maimed, disfigure, cut-off - but before that, the word has an uncertain origin

 

Try to Praise the Mutilated World (2002) by Adam Zagajewski, translated by Clare Cavanagh

 

Try to praise the mutilated world.

Remember June's long days,

and wild strawberries, drops of rosé wine.

The nettles that methodically overgrow

the abandoned homesteads of exiles.

You must praise the mutilated world.

You watched the stylish yachts and ships;

one of them had a long trip ahead of it,

while salty oblivion awaited others.

You've seen the refugees going nowhere,

you've heard the executioners sing joyfully.

You should praise the mutilated world.

Remember the moments when we were together

in a white room and the curtain fluttered.

Return in thought to the concert where music flared.

You gathered acorns in the park in autumn

and leaves eddied over the earth's scars.

Praise the mutilated world

and the gray feather a thrush lost,

and the gentle light that strays and vanishes

and returns.

The whole poem relies of that word. It would not work with any other. Try it …

 

The old figures of speech are destabilized, unhinged by that word

 

The eternal return - ‘and the gentle light that strays and vanishes / and returns’ – it’s the ‘gentle’ light. Not ‘cut off’, sudden and discontinuous, but continuous

 

And to the radiance and light of A.R. Ammons in The City Limits

 

When you consider the radiance, that it does not withhold

itself but pours its abundance without selection into every

nook and cranny not overhung or hidden; when you consider

 

that birds' bones make no awful noise against the light but

lie low in the light as in a high testimony; when you consider

the radiance, that it will look into the guiltiest

 

swervings of the weaving heart and bear itself upon them,

not flinching into disguise or darkening; when you consider

the abundance of such resource as illuminates the glow-blue

 

bodies and gold-skeined wings of flies swarming the dumped

guts of a natural slaughter or the coil of shit and in no

way winces from its storms of generosity; when you consider

 

that air or vacuum, snow or shale, squid or wolf, rose or lichen,

each is accepted into as much light as it will take, then

the heart moves roomier, the man stands and looks about, the

 

leaf does not increase itself above the grass, and the dark

work of the deepest cells is of a tune with May bushes

and fear lit by the breadth of such calmly turns to praise.

 

From the directive ‘you must praise the mutilated world’, to the gentler appeal of ‘when you consider’

 

In which Ammons builds a case

 

As an atheist, Ammons believed in the existence of realities beyond human explanation -

Which is to say I am a mystic - but by memory only. For an instant, about ten years ago, I felt the perspective from space to earth. Sick as I may have been, I was there. By the use of the intelligence, of course, you can work up such perspectives at will, but it’s a very different thing from being there — in the mixture of joy and a sort of mad sorrow at the lot of man. What I seemed to see has remained literally the weight of the world. All the good realists, materialists and rationalists I’ve been able to get my hands on have done nothing to that experience. Perhaps only an equally powerful experience, certainly stronger than intellectual conviction, in another direction can ever move me.

A.R. Ammons, An Image for Longing

 

The ‘radiance’ has a tactile quality, whereas the ‘light’ is only seen

 

Consider the senses - the ‘radiance’ – light; ‘awful noise’ – sound; moral sense (‘guiltiest swervings’); the sense of efficiency, where everything, including the fly and shit, are ‘storms of generosity’; enough room for all (spatial sense) in ‘the heart moves roomier’; each ‘breath’ ‘calmly turns to praise’

 

The beauty and fragility of the fly - ‘skein’ is usually used to refer to a coil of thread, indicating the fineness and fragility of a fly's wings, while the emphasis on their gold color makes the fly valuable, not some bothersome or filthy thing to be discarded

 

As a little boy, I was reluctant to step on insects because I imagined that a giant could, on a whim, step on me – or god could disturb the integrity of earth which is only a molecule in an object he is holding, or about to drop

 

And speaking of flies, and to the many conceits of Blake, who told his mother, as a boy, that he saw Ezekiel (and who was scolded for his account)

 

 

The Fly (1794) by William Blake (1757-1827)

 

Little fly,

Thy summer’s play

My thoughtless hand

Has brushed away.

 

Am not I

A fly like thee?

Or art not thou

A man like me?

 

For I dance

And drink and sing,

Till some blind hand

Shall brush my wing.

 

If thought is life

And strength and breath,

And the want

Of thought is death,

 

Then am I

A happy fly,

If I live,

Or if I die.

 

Life is presence (attention) in thought - ‘thought is life’, and ‘the want (or absence) / Of thought is death’ - that is, absence, a kind of death, is inattention

 

 

Presence is a present (gift). It is the joy of being present

 

God’s relation to man, like man’s relation to the fly; the arbitrariness of life in the hands of god, and in the ‘thoughtless hand’ of the speaker

 

A ‘hedonistic trivialization of life’ with concluding ‘nihilistic equalization’ according to Ashley Cross

John Beer - ‘a cryptic jest to send a message of respect and humility for all life’ ending with a ‘mental puzzle’ (Borges would concur)

The possibility of two different narrators given the disagreement between the beginning and ending, or is the multiplicity of the one

Or is it the fly who speaks (replies), ‘Then am I / A happy fly’ – where the miniscule creature becomes the teacher

 

American poet Lucille Clifton prefers the empowerment and liberation of the ‘heat of the morning’ over the confinement and limitation of her people who are ‘still trying to get home’

 

hag riding by Lucille Clifton (1936 – 2010)

 

why

is what I ask myself

maybe it is the afrikan in me

still trying to get home

after all these years

but when I wake to the heat of morning

galloping down the highway of my life

something hopeful rises in me

rises and runs me out into the road

and I lob my fierce thigh high

over the rump of the day and honey

I ride      I ride

 

From Blessing the Boats, New and Selected Poems 1988-2000 (BOA Editions, Ltd, 2000)

 

You can only mount this horse, with such vitality and exuberance, once in your life

 

Is ‘hag’ an old woman, or witch, or, etymologically, enchantress or pure fury?

 

‘Carpe diem quam minimum credula postero,’ which translates to, ‘pluck the day, trusting as little as possible in the next one’

 

 

 

Carpe diem in Kierkegaard –

 

Of all ridiculous things the most ridiculous seems to me, to be busy — to be a man who is brisk about his food and his work.

 

The unhappy person is one who has his ideal, the content of his life, the fullness of his consciousness, the essence of his being, in some manner outside of himself. The unhappy man is always absent from himself, never present to himself. But one can be absent, obviously, either in the past or in the future. This adequately circumscribes the entire territory of the unhappy consciousness.