In the years immediately preceding Wisława Szymborska‘s surprising Nobel Prize for Literature win, I devoured her work (what I could get my hands on). I would revisit the same poems again and again, always finding something new to savor. This applied in particular to “I Am Too Near”. Recently re-reading Szymborska, it/she no longer holds the same sway over me. Is it because I am older, different and respond to things differently? Or is it that I spent so much time and energy living inside the work back then that I find it almost too familiar… wandering into an abandoned house I lived in nearly 25 years ago to find the place similar but worn with time, much like myself? Am I, in fact, too near?
“For her now in him a valley grows…”
I Am Too Near
-Wisława Szymborska
I am too near to be dreamt of by him.
I do not fly over him, do not escape from him
under the roots of a tree. I am too near.
Not in my voice sings the fish in the net,
not from my finger rolls the ring.
I am too near. A big house is on fire
without me, calling for help. Too near
for a bell dangling from my hair to chime.
Too near to enter as a guest
before whom walls glide apart by themselves.
Never again will I die so lightly,
so much beyond my flesh, so inadvertently
as once in his dream. Too near.
I taste the sound, I see the glittering husk of this word
as I lie immobile in his embrace. He sleeps,
more accessible now to her, seen but once
a cashier of a wandering circus with one lion,
than to me, who am at his side.
For her now in him a valley grows,
russet-leaved, closed by a snowy mountain
in the bright blue air. I am too near
to fall to him from the sky. My scream
could wake him up. Poor thing
I am, limited to my shape,
I who was a birch, who was a lizard,
who would come out of my cocoons
shimmering the colors of my skins. Who possessed
the grace of disappearing from astonished eyes,
which is a wealth of wealths. I am near,
too near for him to dream of me.
I slide my arm from under the sleeper’s head
and it is numb, full of swarming pins,
on the tip of each, waiting to be counted,
the fallen angels sit.
Tongue
–Zbigniew Herbert
Inadvertently I passed the border of her teeth and swallowed
her agile tongue. It lives inside me now, like a Japanese fish. It
brushes against my heart and my diaphragm as if against the walls
of an aquarium. It stirs silt from the bottom.
She whom I deprived of a voice stares at me with big eyes
and waits for a word.
Yet I do not know which tongue to use when speaking to
her – the stolen one or the one which melts in my mouth from an
excess of heavy goodness.
If There Is a God
–Ewa Lipska
If there is a God
I’ll have dinner at his place.
Instead of a stoplight, a red hawthorn.
An angel will come for me in a car.
Doves of chubby clouds
will flutter over the folding table.
From empty jugs we will drink holy water and free will.
Even if God is near-sighted,
he will see eternity coming.
If God has a flair for languages, he can translate holy poems
for an anthology even holier
than the holiest first drop
from which a river sprang.
Later we will go cycling, God and I,
over a cherry tree, over the landscapes of paradise.
Earth’s reeds stand in vases here.
Beasts of prey lie fallow.
At last God will get off his bike and say
it is he
who is God.
He will take out his binoculars. He will command me
to behold the earth. He will tell me
how things have come to such a pass,
how long he has plied his trade and
how infallibly he has failed with the world,
launching tiny airplanes of ideas into the vacuum.
If God is a believer
he prays to himself for perpetual hope.
Oxen carry the sun upon their horns.
The folding table sways on its legs.
I will get medicine from God
and get well
soon after I die.
I posted the poem “Futility” from Macedonian Ante Popovski before. It springs to mind now because I was thinking about pens. But, as Popovski notes, “you cannot write on your soul with a pen…”
While I could not immediately conjure up another poem specifically referencing a pen/pens, I could, of course, count on Adam Zagajewski to supply one filled with “small objects” and citing “illegible script”. We can imagine the pen and its ink, intimate, singular and aged.
Small Objects
-Adam Zagajewski
My contemporaries like small objects,
dried starfish that have forgotten the sea,
melancholy stopped clocks, postcards
sent from vanished cities,
and blackened with illegible script,
in which they discern words
like “yearning,” “illness,” or “the end.”
They marvel at dormant volcanoes.
They don’t desire light.
Don’t allow the lucid moment to dissolve
Let the radiant thought last in stillness
though the page is almost filled and the flame flickers
We haven’t risen yet to the level of ourselves
Knowledge grows slowly like a wisdom tooth
The stature of a man is still notched
high up on a white door
From far off, the joyful voice of a trumpet
and of a song rolled up like a cat
What passes doesn’t fall into a void
A stoker is still feeding coal into the fire
Don’t allow the lucid moment to dissolve
On a hard dry substance
you have to engrave the truth
I stumbled across an article about the nature of affairs – how happily married people often “cheat”. It was an interesting article in general, but what struck me fundamentally were the ideas that underpin so many other aspects of life – not just romantic relationships. I debate quite frequently, as I have written about before, about the difference between privacy and secrecy and where that boundary is. What kind of information – how much information – do I owe someone just because they have asked, just because of the nature of our interaction (i.e., do I tell a potential employer X, do I keep Y private, do I reveal those same Xs and Ys to my husband or wife or potential husband or wife?)? Is total openness and transparency required – and what are the rules governing this? Are there any? In my case, there are a lot of things that are deeply private for me, but keeping them private is not always all about me if I have invited someone else into my life.
“Transparency is the whole culture. The way a regular person tells everything about themselves on television. The way technology allows us to find out anything—99 percent of the people I see, their affairs are discovered through email or phones. But transparency is also our organizing principle of closeness these days. I will tell you everything, and if I don’t tell you it means I don’t trust you or I have a secret. It doesn’t mean I choose to keep certain things to myself because they are private. Privacy is the endangered species in between two extremes of secrecy and transparency.”
Of course some private things are personal and don’t involve anyone else. But then other people and their expectations and feelings are a part – is there not some responsibility there? As this article on affairs – and the reasons underlying affairs – argues, there is “…a distinction between cheating and non-monogamy. Cheating is about a violation of a contract. People misunderstand me because they think I’m saying affairs are OK. No! But I do think examining monogamy is our next frontier.”
Is examining monogamy really the next frontier? The article explains the researcher’s point of view – that at one time, premarital sex was also considered to be wrong and not a topic for consideration or debate. Is this the next logical step? Maybe not just monogamy but in a broader scope, marriage. What is marriage, how is it defined – not just by society but by negotiation between an individual couple?
Today, as the article discusses, “We have this idea that our partner is our best friend, that there is one person who will fulfill all our needs, which is really an extraordinary idea! So by definition, people must transgress because something is missing at home. We think, if you had what you needed at home, you wouldn’t want to go anywhere else, instead of thinking that marriage is at best an imperfect arrangement.”
Maybe nothing is missing from a relationship or marriage at all that leads a party to the relationship to cheat. The most important takeaway from the article, actually, is a point that is applicable across life’s activities: Affairs are often not about wanting someone else but wanting to be someone else ourselves:
“Very often we don’t go elsewhere because we are looking for another person. We go elsewhere because we are looking for another self. It isn’t so much that we want to leave the person we are with as we want to leave the person we have become.”
This being me, I immediately think of a poem.
I Can Not
-Anna Swir (Poland)
I envy you.
Every moment.
You can leave me.
I can not leave myself.
Is that the feeling behind these urges to have affairs? Not to leave one’s partner but to leave oneself? Or the oneself one is or has become within that particular relationship?
“…Yet true life is led between dark and light:
“I locked the door,” you said,
An important sentence, full of destiny.
I still remember the words,
But I forgot on which side of the door they were said,
Inside or outside.
And from the only letter I wrote to you
I remember only the bitter taste of
The stamp’s glue on
My tongue.”
–Yehuda Amichai
“Who wants something real/when you could have nothing?” – Girls – “Substance“
I have never felt plagued by what I like to call “infinite possibilities syndrome”. I have always keenly felt that all things are limited.
“The greatest delight, I sense,
is hidden sublimely in the act of betrayal
which can be equal only to fidelity.
To betray a woman, friends, an idea,
to see new light in the eyes
of distant shadows. But choices are limited: other women, other
ideas, the enemies of our long-standing friends. If only
we could encounter some quite different
otherness, settle in a country which has
no name, touch a woman before she is born, lose our memories, meet
a God other than our own.”
–Adam Zagajewski, “Betrayal”
Our lives, our choices, our partners … we might take on many different guises and go to different places, but most things are ephemeral. We only have the right now – whatever choice we last made might be the last choice. I do not consciously think about that every time I make a choice, but generally I have never been under any illusion that there were infinite possibilities and opportunities open to me. I have always been laboring along under realistic ideas about the world, I tend to think… or at least about the little parts of the world I was making my way through.
It is possible that this sense of options closing themselves off hits men later than women, I have begun to think, given my own life’s circumstances. The idea of “settling down” or whatever seems anathema or distasteful to many men makes “infinite options” (or the idea of this, even if there are in reality no options) sound preferable to any other alternative, so keeping doors open (even those that would be better closed) to preserve the illusion of abundant or endless choice makes sense. In a way I could argue that at least in part, I think women like myself – who are often judged on their youth and physical appearance – understand only too well that time is of the essence. The choices one can make will never be better – generally- than when one is young – as a female anyway. This is a sweeping generalization, but I think it is stuff like this that fuels many women’s realizations that they do not have infinite options – certainly not forever. And of course women have the oft-cited biological clock to think about…).
A good example of this is the dubious world of online dating. In some ways, it presents a veritable catalog of infinite choices of nationalities, genders, ages, proclivities, interests. All these people who are presumably putting their best foot forward. We can choose one who will be fine, but because of the “window shopping” nature of the medium, we harbour the illusion that if we keep looking through the catalog we will find someone even better, brighter, more beautiful. Unlimited the ways we manage to limit ourselves and keep ourselves completely non-committal. It is the ultimate place for non-committal people – semi-interested in meeting someone, but not enough to make the ballsy move of meeting someone in reality. Not interested or courageous enough to cut off all the other “possibilities”. In the online realm, it seems, most people are equally as squeamish – all excitement and premature pronouncements in the beginning and then all the disappointment of reality. This can still happen in situations born in the real world but it is quite a different thing. Easy to get lost in this alternate reality, but eventually there is a polarizing decision: continue on, skimming the surface, feeling falsely popular and never making any choices or discriminating determinations OR choose the best option among those you have – trying to eliminate the paralysis that comes with the illusions of unlimited choice.
