Intimate Stranger

by Breyten Breytenbach

  We are all beginners at the ‘useless’ pastime of planting the sun and later digging up the bone (which we will then venerate as an ancestral thigh), however long some of us may have been tilling the field pretending to put together the riddle of memory through the artifacts we found. Stanley Kunitz talks about the endlessness of beginning in a poem called “The Round,” and he’s now ninety-six years old and lately the poet laureate of his country. It just never stops. Also, it doesn’t get any better than this.

  Of course, to be a beginner is neither simple nor easy. I’m saying it is important to approach the act (or the suspension) of writing poetry as if for the first time, with awe and wonder, experiencing the words as familiar foreigners in the house: it is about time to get to know them better before they rob or rape you. (Or if you permit them to do so, at least have some pleasure in return.) Partly because no poem is ever a final cure or even curse — it is but ‘marking’ time.

  Neste papel

  pode teu sal

  virar cinza;

  (“On this paper / your salt could / turn to ashes;”)

  João Cabral de Melo Neto in Psychology of Composition

  Every beginner ought to be given, as you have surely received, the tools of the craft. Or else one must beg, borrow or steal them. (Better still to fashion one’s own. .) If you ask what poetry is ‘about,’ it means that you have already started learning alliteration and assonance and allegory (being ‘other-speak,’ as it means in Greek). You will perhaps have become familiar with the female or feline or ferocious forms of ballads and ballades and blank verse and the blues, of cantos and chants and concrete poems, of eclogues and elegies and epics and epigrams. In due course, as you go along, you will find your feet: the iambs and the trochees and the dactyls and the anapests and the spondees. You will move through found poems, free verse, odes and rengas and villanelles and pantoums and rap, ghazals and haikus and limericks and lyrics and madrigals — by means of metaphor (the ‘vehicle of transport’) and image and line and strophe and quatrain and stanza and rhythm and rhyme (ah, of many positions and several genders, even terza rima if that’s your perversion). You may end up as a dark well reflecting the stars in sonnets and sestinas. . Don’t be trampled by horses at the watering trough! Death starts at the feet.

  Please don’t take my fumbled mumbling for gospel and don’t be put off by my oblique approach: as a beginner I too am only now starting to understand why I set out on this journey.

  4. What is poetry, you ask? Put differently — what are its ambitions? No, we may not know once and for all what it is, but we can trace some of its characteristics in the movements. For it is of the essence of poetry to do, not just to be. True enough, it may well be in the nature of any language to be, fixing our approximations of meaning and serving as communication, but there too it must perpetually become in order to raise our desires — to allude, slide away, open spaces by looking for ambivalence and cracks, and thereby engender the images which will arise from these.

  The psychiatrist, D.W. Winnicott remarked somewhere: “Artists are continually torn between the urgent need to communicate, and the still more urgent need not to be found.”

  I’d suggest that poetry is a world (the world inside and outside us) shaped by breath. It is the breath of dreaming drawn from a hunger for awareness — the awareness that tells you that to be awake is also the result of dreaming expressed in the internal vibration of rhythm.

  Poetry is a love. Of what? Of the discovery and the celebration of words, things, feelings, ideas, undigested memories, insights, other people, yourself, other selves, mystery, sense, eternity, other eternities, nonsense, nothingness, the whales and the foam and the shadow of grass on the mountain, the bones of the dog buried in the garden. Of love itself. And it is an engagement with all of the above. It is a love-act.

  Poetry is a love of that art of making which will take you away from self-indulgence — for even as you fashion it, it takes on a life of its own. And although it is the freest of entanglements, capable of containing whatever you wish to put in it (provided you can make it fit), it does have form and tradition. Indeed, when the poem starts working its form will emerge to take possession of the shape. (“The very age and shape of time is form.”) This you have to recognize. You should curtsy or touch the brim of your hat. The paradox is that you imagine you are emptying the self on the page, and what you get is a mirror in which the triteness or relative (un)importance of your emotions is weighed. One finds that an endless fascination with self and the caressing of one’s own loneliness will not take you very far down the road of becoming other. Staking out the self is a lonely business; you end up finding your shadow a noisy stalker scaring the self into a fearful blathering. Nothing is as banal and common and goat-like as the self. It is true though, that this mirror of inconsequentiality can also, through recognition, constitute identification with larger attitudes and convictions and expectations; it will reflect the shadows and smoke of history’s movements even as these darken your eyes.

  Yeats said love comes from the energy to create and the energy to create comes from love.

  Forgive me if I repeat myself. I have already said that poetry is the process of transfiguring words back into the original breath, the beat of the world. It goes without saying that words will always retain their intrinsic or agreed-upon characteristics — those that they evoke in sound and texture (the ‘heart’ is after all not an organ, but in its own way, as word, it beats with resonance, origin, sound and taste) — and then, when alert to the power of context, placed in a field of tension, modified by proximity and juxtaposition and in pattern with other words, tested by distancing. . they become the moments in a metamorphosis provoked by image and metaphor, “lucid objects of language”, to open on to a “third dimension” beyond the references of word-meaning.

  I’m suggesting that poetry can be a discipline of consciousness. It may furthermore embody an ethic of being. It can. It ought to. It can be a life-long mirroring meditation on life. It can be a companion light as you go toward and into the darker spaces of death to join the nocturnal tribes.

  Perhaps I was just giving way to anger and frustration when I tried to pit the languages of creativeness against those of academia. It is more likely a case of ‘horses for courses.’ Nevertheless, my ranting might inadvertently have highlighted the specificity and autonomy of the discourses of creativeness. In a well-known essay called “The Redress of Poetry,” Seamus Heaney wrote: “Poetry cannot afford to lose its fundamentally self-delighting inventiveness, its joy in being a process of language as well as a representation of things in the world. To put it in W. B. Yeats’s terms, the will must not usurp the work of the imagination. And while this may seem something of a truism, it is nevertheless worth repeating in a. . context of politically approved themes, post-colonial backlash and ‘silence-breaking’ writing of all kinds. (—) Poetry is understandably pressed to give voice to much that has hitherto been denied expression in the ethnic, social, sexual and political life. Which is to say that its power as a mode of redress in the first sense — as agent for proclaiming and correcting injustices — is being appealed to constantly. But in discharging this function, poets are in danger of slighting another imperative, namely, to redress poetry, as poetry, to set it up as its own category, an eminence established and a pressure exercised by distinctly linguistic means. (—) Poetry, let us say, whether it belongs to an old political dispensation or aspires to express a new one, has to be a working model of inclusive consciousness.”

  5. And what is poetry not? This too I have already said: it is not a way to power or riches or status or position. Not even at university. It is not an answer to loss and it cannot assuage the sorrows of the world. It will not bring down governments. It is not a blotting paper to life, sopping up the bloody ink to give back a fuzzy ‘truth’ all the more meaningful because now indistinct mirror writing. (Although, you should please keep in mind and in mouth the fact that what emanates as poetry is a
lways inserted in the public domain. We have to live this duality. Italo Calvino wrote in a text called “Questionnaire, 1956”: “And I believe that the writer must keep open a discourse which in its implications cannot but be political as well. . Everything that forces us to give up a part of ourselves is negative.”)

  I have learned (as a beginner) that one must read, read and read again. As well, that you must be reckless but patient. And if you want to be honest in your verse, if that is your thing, remember that honesty is to be open, unprejudiced and available — no matter if the digestion produces an enigmatic turd. Don’t let the dog in dogmatism and the Oedipal in the paranoid search for hidden meaning cloud your mind and stink up your nostrils. Freedom is a search, not a found fundamentalism. Beware of sloppiness, the dead word and the inflated simile. Protect yourself against easy sentiments (often no more than sentimentality), and especially from the blight of ‘correct’ moral and political postures. Don’t ever wave the flag: it is a shit-cloth meant for wiping the ass and polishing the easel; it is the rag in which you fold your dead flies. Eschew generally shared beliefs that are but ‘public opinion’ or ways to escape from the asperities of life and an intractable environment.

  El Greco wrote as a note in the margin of someone else’s treatise: “Although it may seem that the masses have a vote in architecture and in music or rhetoric or painting, the fact is that this happens only when time and informed opinion have revealed the truth. And if once in a while popular taste is right, it is usually by accident and is not worth taking into account.”

  Don’t be ‘nice.’ Don’t try to be clever. There is such a thing as creative intelligence, kneaded into the dough of your art. It has little to do with the acquired monkey cleverness of the person wanting to impress and please the powers that be. Wanting to be ‘relevant’ is piddling pomposity. Leave that to the politicians.

  Please don’t imagine that poetry is a cool way of double-speak so as to hide meaning. Don’t make of the poem a cheap riddle. Don’t be a furrowed brow in quest of wisdom. Enough already! The poem is meaning. The poem is its own meaning. Poetic knowledge is born in the deep silence of phenomena not understood, thoughts unformulated and fate unknown of scientific knowledge. From that which cannot be explained comes poetry. (Or, by default, it will at least be the sextant allowing you to “keep watch over absent meaning,” as Maurice Blanchot said.)

  (mirror note 1)

  This is what I come across, leafing through Habitations of the Word of William H. Gass:

  “Our oblivion has been seen to. . and unless we write as though the ear were our only page; unless upon the slopes of some reader’s understanding we send our thoughts to pasture like sheep let out to graze; unless we can jingle where we feed, sound ourselves and make our presence heard, unless. .

  So hear me read me see me begin.

  I begin. . don’t both of us begin? Yet as your eye sweeps over these lines — not like a wind, because not a limb bends or a letter trembles, but rather more simply — do you find me here in your lap like a robe? And even if this was an oration, and we were figures in front of one another. . holding up the same thought, it would still not be the first time I had uttered these sentences (though I seem to be making them up in the moment of speaking like fresh pies), for I was in another, distant, private place when I initially constructed them, and then I whispered them above the rattling of my typing. .; I tried to hear them above the indifferent whirring of their manufacture, as if my ear were yours, and held no such noise. . God knows what or where I am now — now as you read. Our oblivion has been seen to.”

  READER, SWEET READER

  Reader, sweet Reader — I know I ask much of you. You have been very patient with me, waiting for the meaning of my rambling (if any, if ever). But the longer I hold forth the closer you will come to me until, at last, you sigh in my arms.

  This is my dearest desire. I start to sense you through the words, the way they bounce off you. You are still young and so beautiful, you have a curl to your lips, you sometimes look askance at me through your eyelashes. Dare I think that your heart thumps a little quicker as you turn the pages? How well you know me by now! (Or think you do.) At night I toss restlessly when I dream of you and in the morning there’s the odor of your sex on my pillow.

  And yet, I do not want to tie you down; for us love will be in leaving, just as it is without end or design. For this story to move forward to closure there must be the two of us — like Huitzilopochtli, the white sun god as personification of day and summer and south and fire, and the black Tezcatlipoca, s/he of the set sun and of night and firmament and winter and north and water. Yes, eventually there will be parting.

  The presence of both of us for now will ensure that the book remains in equilibrium. Where are you? I certainly need to continue talking to you, I search for you from day to night. Maybe I am looking for myself, maybe because I only exist in your mind. But I start to sense myself through the words, in the way your reading and looking bounce off me. This book will be our meeting ground and our shared existence. Of course, I’m making of it the bed in which we shall lie for me to whisper stories in your ear. I don’t want to be forward, but perhaps then you’ll turn and look at me and the sun will set in the water.

  Will you? Without the one the other cannot exist. Today I heard about two twin ladies in their great old age, having lost both their husbands and the memory of orgasms and names, sitting together in a room warmed by an evening sun, and the one turning in utter uncertainty to the other to enquire plaintively: “Tell me, am I alive?”

  WHERE IS MY LOVE

  in a big room behind a glass wall

  looking out above water

  the color of green oblivion

  how ferryboats waddle from quay

  to fog-written islands in the bay

  mirrored in pane the vague figure

  of a naked man as he waits

  now and then the veil blows away

  and a bone city on distant mountain coast

  flickers fleetingly

  flits and flattens again

  to an imagined memory

  where is my love my love

  on either side the soaring gray metropolis

  of concrete and shine and neon thoughts

  along streets the trees in a still

  fire of fall

  a few cars soundless and wet

  sometimes a pedestrian with mouth of cold breath

  a dog on a leash

  a crow flutters by and later a gull

  storied debates around the nature of being

  and for what will man be held to account

  the rush of voices

  as the heart bears its shout

  where is my love my love

  on the edge of this continent

  of forest and snow

  by the end of the world

  at the hem I say

  of a dark ocean

  where whalefish roam

  to hollowly sound their despair

  in waterlogged waiting rooms

  if one were to let darkness flood

  who would identify the corpse

  who fold the shroud like a wing around absence

  what name as solitary password

  will be pinned to the waterlogged heart’s hollow

  a crow flies by and later a gull

  where is my love oh where is she now

  Vancouver

  WRITING SUMMER

  The summer has been dense and crazy. More so than usual, and not easy to come to words with. Or is it just my imagination silting up as I grow older and less flexible? Am I having trouble imagining and therefore shaping the understandable? Maybe there is a point of saturation beyond which the digestion of impressions — through writing — becomes difficult.

  Still, the past northern or European summer was for me an illustration of how problematical it is to live in this world with some grace and equilibrium, let alone a sense of enjoyment and satisfaction.

>   I’m referring, of course, to the outside story of our times. There was the flaring conflict in the Middle East with seemingly no resolution in sight, despair and brutality and thus brutalization on both sides, depression and destruction and death. There were the days of Genoa which ushered in a fore-grounding of the divide between the official powers of a new world order (the G8) and contestants of many different origins and directions — eco-warriors, anti-globalists, anti-capitalists, so-called illegal immigrants (“people without papers”), anarchists and idealists and revolutionaries. . And what does the confrontation and its repression say to us? Where is it leading to? What will come next? How does it affect our local environments? There was the ongoing painting out of wars and horrors and disasters in Africa, probably not by design but because that continent just doesn’t figure on the radar screens of the powerful who interpret and classify information, those people and instances who decide what will be ‘news’ and what relegated to the obscurity of ‘non-events.’ But the unnamable will flow over into other parts of the world: pateras bring their cargoes of espaldas mujadas over the Gibraltar Straits to the coast of Andalusia (already 10,000 clandestine migrants have been intercepted so far this year, hundreds coming from deeper down Africa die in the desert on their way to the Moroccan ports of embarkation and many more drown when their makeshift crafts capsize); desperate Afghans and Kurds and Pakistanis try to walk through the tunnel under the sea between France and Britain; boatloads of refugees are adrift off Australia and Europe and probably America too; and there’s a continuing tide of people trying to get into the United States through Mexico. Mount Etna erupted, spewing its antediluvian anger in brimstone and smoke. There were floods and wildfires and catastrophes elsewhere. And earthquakes. Nearly all of the European continent is still afflicted by the plagues of ‘mad cow’ and ‘foot-and-mouth’ diseases. Soon there will be ‘bird flu.’ And then we witnessed a kind of low spluttering of international concerns and justice — Milosevic brought to The Hague to stand trial, the beginning of a resolution to the civil war in Macedonia. There was the bizarre wipe-out of the royal household in Nepal. The destruction of the Buddhas in Afghanistan and, worse, the darkening plight of all women in that sad country. Chinese authorities carried out the executions of ‘criminals’ by the thousand, shooting them behind the ear and often removing right there in the fields of death the vital organs for transplantation. In the West too, we entered the slippery domain of stem cell research and fetus manipulation and eventual cloning — how Mengele must be laughing in his grave! We could observe the gradual shifting into hostile positions of America and China, and more specifically the perturbing unilateralist stance America was taking internationally — renouncing the Kyoto agreement on attempting to turn back the pollution of our shared planet, protecting its ‘right’ to make land-mines and chemical and bacterial poisons, wanting to scrap anti-nuclear proliferation treaties in order to put up missile shields, its near total inertia in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, continuing to bomb Saddam Hussein ineffectually, walking away from the Durban Conference against racism. .