Drill a hole in the sky.
Cut out a paper the same size as the hole.
Burn the paper.
The sky should be pure blue.
- Yoko Ono (1961)
PAINTING FOR THE SKIES
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why read Szymborska?
Every other year, it seems, the Nobel Prize in literature goes to an obscure European writer, full of hard consonants and solemn purposes, whom we all agree to honor for a day and forget all about right after.
This list of the Great Obscure is long, but the bright exception to it is the Polish poet Wislawa Szymborska, who won the Nobel in 1996. Szymborska is not merely a great writer, like many others; she is a necessary writer, as necessary as toast. Every month, it seems, I give to someone a copy of one of her books …
A WORD ON STATISTICS
by Wislawa Szymborska
(translated from the Polish by Joanna Trzeciak)
Out of every hundred people,
those who always know better:
fifty-two.
Unsure of every step:
almost all the rest.
Ready to help,
if it doesn’t take long:
forty-nine.
Always good,
because they cannot be otherwise:
four — well, maybe five.
Able to admire without envy:
eighteen.
Led to error
by youth (which passes):
sixty, plus or minus.
Those not to be messed with:
four-and-forty.
Living in constant fear
of someone or something:
seventy-seven.
Capable of happiness:
twenty-some-odd at most.
Harmless alone,
turning savage in crowds:
more than half, for sure.
Cruel
when forced by circumstances:
it’s better not to know,
not even approximately.
Wise in hindsight:
not many more
than wise in foresight.
Getting nothing out of life except things:
thirty
(though I would like to be wrong).
Balled up in pain
and without a flashlight in the dark:
eighty-three, sooner or later.
Those who are just:
quite a few, thirty-five.
But if it takes effort to understand:
three.
Worthy of empathy:
ninety-nine.
Mortal:
one hundred out of one hundred –
a figure that has never varied yet.
nonrequired reading
… One more comment from the heart: I’m old fashioned and think that reading books is the most glorious pastime that humankind has yet devised. Homo Ludens dances, sings, produces meaningful gestures, strikes poses, dresses up, revels and performs elaborate rituals. I don’t wish to diminish the significance of these distractions-without them human life would pass in unimaginable monotony and possibly dispersion and defeat. But these are group activities above which drifts a more or less perceptible whiff of collective gymnastics. Homo Ludens with a book is free. At least as free as he’s capable of being. He himself makes up the rules of the game, which are subject only to his own curiosity. He’s permitted to read intelligent books, from which he will benefit, as well as stupid ones, from which he may also learn something. He can stop before finishing one book, if he wishes, while starting another at the end and working his way back to the beginning. He may laugh in the wrong places or stop short at words he’ll keep for a life time. And finally, he’s free-and no other hobby can promise this-to eavesdrop on Montaigne’s arguments or take a quick dip in the Mesozoic.
― Wisława Szymborska, Nonrequired Reading
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“How small a thought it takes to fill a whole life!”
Proverb by Steve Reich (1995)
Maggie Nelson’s Bluets is in part inspired by the writing of Ludwig Wittgenstein, both his Remarks on Colour and his style has been of great influence to Nelson. As Nelson the composer Steve Reich is also inspired by Wittgenstein. A single line: “How small a thought it takes to fill a whole life!” is the lyrical inspiration for his wonderful piece Proverb (1995).
“How small a thought it takes to fill a whole life!” supply the entire text of Steve Reich’s Proverb, and in doing so reaffirm their own truthfulness: in Proverb, a single kernel of an idea serves as the basis for an entire musical composition. It starts with a single voice, a soprano who is gradually joined by two other sopranos, two tenors, and an instrumental ensemble consisting of two electric organs and two vibraphones. This eclectic group continues to express the central theme in word and musical gesture, repeating the same text while inverting the original downward line into a melodic ascent or stretching it into a larger structural element by drastically augmenting the note values. Gradually the listener discovers the truth of the proverb; “How small a thought it takes to fill a whole life!” (or – how small a line it takes to fill a whole composition).
Isn’t it just fantastic?! And the link to Nelson? In appropriating from the same source, the two artists have made two very different, but equally beautiful works of art.
The short text, “How small a thought it takes to fill a whole life!” comes from a collection of Wittgenstein’s writing entitled Culture and Value. Much of Wittgenstein’s work is ‘proverbial’ in tone and in its brevity. This particular text was written in 1946. In the same paragraph from which it was taken Wittgenstein continues, “If you want to go down deep you do not need to travel far”.
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Steve Reich: Proverb; Nagoya Marimbas; City Life
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I think I summed up my attitude to philosophy when I said: Philosophy ought really to be written only as poetic composition. It must, as it seems to me, be possible to gather from this how far my thinking belongs to the present, future or past. For I was thereby revealing myself as someone who cannot do what he would like to be able to do.
Ludwig Wittgenstein, Culture and Value
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Things I have been thinking about lately:
- how to work with fear without being submerged in it
- how to play with anxiety (ridicule?)
- how to investigate personal experiences in a way that will be of common interest
- how to explore personal life without compromising others
- how to equalize science & art (amalgamate?)
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I’m reading to learn, spying on the clever ones:
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The Waking
THEODORE ROETHKE, The Collected Poems of Theodore Roethke (Doubleday, 1961)
I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow.
I feel my fate in what I cannot fear.
I learn by going where I have to go.
We think by feeling. What is there to know?
I hear my being dance from ear to ear.
I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow.
Of those so close beside me, which are you?
God bless the Ground! I shall walk softly there,
And learn by going where I have to go.
Light takes the Tree; but who can tell us how?
The lowly worm climbs up a winding stair;
I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow.
Great Nature has another thing to do
To you and me; so take the lively air,
And, lovely, learn by going where to go.
This shaking keeps me steady. I should know.
What falls away is always. And is near.
I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow.
I learn by going where I have to go.
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For a very thorough analyses, see: On Roethke’s “The Waking” by Susan Pinkus
here is an excerpt:
Waking to sleep, and learning by going where you have to go are both paradoxes. A paradox is a statement containing two diametrically opposite ideas, such as sleeping and waking, that ultimately join together in one meaning. The effect is circular, like traveling east as far as you can go to reach the west. Because the poem is built on a series of paradoxes, the meaning of the poem becomes as circular as its sound pattern. The effect of a circular form and a circular content adds to the mystical nature of the poem. The circle is the ultimate mystery of our lives. As the poem develops, however, the meaning of the paradoxes becomes clear. (…)
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The first verse establishes the central paradox: “I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow.” The precise meaning, at this point, is not clear. The next line, “I feel my fate in what I cannot fear,” is another paradox. Normally, we fear fate because it is unknown, because it cannot be felt or anticipated. By feeling fate rather than fearing it, you accept it rather than resist it. The last line of the tercet unifies the stanza’s meaning. (…)
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The second stanza rejects the intellect as the road to enlightenment. To “think by feeling” is another paradox. The poem asks, “What is there to know?” The implied answer is that there is nothing “to know.” Life can only be felt. From here it is one short step into ecstasy: “I hear my being dance from ear to ear.” The fusion of the senses of sight and sound and the sensation of one’s being throbbing to the rhythm of life dissolves into the repetition of the first line of the poem. This time there is no ambiguity in the meaning of this line. Waking to sleep is to dissolve into the trance. We are a part of the visionary experience. (…)
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The first line of the final stanza unifies the entire poem. Within the paradox of keeping steady by shaking, we find an explanation of the seemingly opposed forces of life and death. The “shaking” is both the fear of accepting mortality and the ecstasy of absolute openness to experience. The point where fear and ecstasy meet, where logic becomes vision, where death changes to life, is the point on which we must balance.
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We are still somehow removed from the effect of Roethke’s poem. We must return to the harmony of its form and content. Ultimately, we perceive the poem as we would a piece of music, not in its themes and philosophy, but in the blending of sound, tone, movement, and recurring motifs. When we join this to the metaphor, we sense something of the beauty and complexity of Roethke’s poem. It is as vibrant and fragile and mysterious as the circle of our lives–birth and decay, life and death–that inspired this poem.
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Welcome to The Faraway Nearby
Writers are solitaries by vocation and necessity. I sometimes think the test is not so much talent, which is not as rare as people think, but purpose or vocation, which manifests in part as the ability to endure a lot of solitude and keep working.
- Rebecca Solnit: The Faraway Nearby (forthcoming)
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Colla Melosa, Italy, September 2012 (sub rosa)
Becoming intimate with fear
–Philosophy ought really to be written only as a form of poetry. (Philosophie dürfte man eigentlich nur dichten.)
Ludwig Wittgenstein, Culture and Value
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Maggie Nelson: I’ve often written about things that terrify me—likely out of compulsion more than hope for comfort, or catharsis; as Peter Handke says near the end of his horrified memoir of his mother’s suicide, A Sorrow Beyond Dreams, “It is not true that writing has helped me.” So it goes. And yet: follow the fear long enough, or far enough, and it may give way—to an unearthly clarity (à la Celan), or great comedy (à la Beckett). Or, the grill of your attention might just wear it out. In these places, I find peace.
Tarkovsky, Stalker (1979), film still
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Or you might want to choose the buddhist way – (ala Pema Chödrön):
Pema Chödrön describes a liberating way to relate to our fears: not as something to try to get rid of or cast out, but as something we became very intimate with. In so doing, she explains, we come to find that the journey of knowing fear is in fact the journey of courage. From this wisdom, we learn to embrace the fullness of our experience in life.
