Tallinn sunset

 

(Click on the pictures for a larger image)

 

A farewell to her

I just finished reading Hemingway's A Farewell to Arms again, because even though it's described as a war novel, it's mainly a novel about love. And let's face it, I'm looking for solace. Yet I was looking for a particular passage (no, not that overhyped, overtattoed, decontextualised Instagram trope), but when the page finally came, I was confused, it winded me. The words struck me more personally than ever before. It was my second time reading it, and a decade earlier...I was less experienced. But now I realise how much less experienced I was. The sentiments Hemingway expressed, here and now they were mine...up until just a few weeks ago. There is no denying this experience greatly enriched me, and to paraphrase Woolf: I welcomed the wild horse in me. Here's the passage in question, halfway down Chapter 34. I sure hope you can relate...as even though these things have passed, they have been, and they were good. Probably the best.


“That night at the hotel, in our room with the long empty hall outside and our shoes outside the door, a thick carpet on the floor of the room, outside the windows the rain falling and in the room light and pleasant and cheerful, then the light out and it exciting with smooth sheets and the bed comfortable, feeling that we had come home, feeling no longer alone, waking in the night to find the other one there, and not gone away; all other things were unreal.

We slept when we were tired and if we woke the other one woke too so one was not alone. Often a man wishes to be alone and a girl wishes to be alone too and if they love each other they are jealous of that in each other, but I can truly say we never felt that. We could feel alone when we were together, alone against the others. It has only happened to me like that once.

I have been alone while I was with many girls and that is the way you can be most lonely. But we were never lonely and never afraid when we were together. I know that the night is not the same as the day: that all things are different, that the things of the night cannot be explained in the day, because they do not then exist, and the night can be a dreadful time for lonely people once their loneliness has started.

But with Catherine there was almost no difference in the night except that it was an even better time. If people bring so much courage to the world the world has to kill them to break them, so of course it kills them. The world breaks every one and afterward many are strong at the broken places. But those that will not break it kills. It kills the very good and the very gentle and the very brave impartially. If you are none of these you can be sure it will kill you too but there will be no special hurry.”

 

Solitary spaces

 

« Et tous les espaces de nos solitudes passées, les espaces où nous avons souffert de la solitude, désiré la solitude, joui de la solitude, compromis la solitude sont en nous ineffaçables. Et très précisément, l’être ne veut pas les effacer. Il sait d’instinct que ces espaces de sa solitude sont constitutifs. Même lorsque ces espaces sont à jamais rayés du présent, étrangers désormais à toutes les promesses d’avenir, même lorsqu’on n’a plus de grenier, même lorsqu’on a perdu la mansarde, il restera toujours qu’on a aimé un grenier, qu’on a vécu dans une mansarde. »

Gaston Bachelard (French philosopher, 1884-1962), Poétique de l'espace.

 

Fragment #113

I never said I would

ever write a poem

about us

writing about love

can’t have been

about us

those poems I never wrote

and never will write

about us

are like the tears

we’ve never shed

as they weren’t

about us

The right to forget

– please let me go

so I can begin

to exist again

let me walk away

in the quiet of dawn

to deaden the hurt

– let go of my hand

so it regains the colour

unheld hands have

– for new things to begin

one needn’t

constantly resist

you know, or oppose,

you know, one can

simply unlove

simply forget

– please accept the return of

those gifts you left me

– those warm memories

that comfort as much

as they hurt –

only then can there be

the quiet, slow forgetting

one needs to uncast the mind

to trick the brain to unlove

– the skin hunger

will make the soul wilt:

this is expected

– it will ravage the mind:

that is also expected

– but it is necessary, 

like a soothing hand

wiping the sweat off

the evil the night accrued

shushing me back to sleep

– please give me back

my beloved solitude

so I can start anew

from the fond place

I once called home

– without you and

the memories of you

each of them like

the smell of a burning barn,

the screams of trapped animals

prickling the nape of the neck

in the afternoon heat

– let all your whirlwinds die down

– let your sandstorm be swept in corners

– erase yourself off of the back of my eyelids

where I hope to find a measure of peace

– fade from the mirror when next to me

you took a place none can take again

– let the ice sheet you cast about my heart

slowly thaw into caves, dark blue clearing,

where echoes thin into whimpers

and long-lost feelings of imprecision

of nearaboutedness resurface

slowly, drop after drop,

enabling me to crawl back to my old,

blurry, incomplete, terrible self

– inevident but firm, solid,

but much more vast and secure

than the island we lived on

in the comfortableness 

a loved one’s arms bring

in the sureness one feels

in the omphalos of the storm

where the calm jades

and love sustains

yet brings about that feeling

that it can be lost,

untrusted, or simply obscured 

by other islands coming into view

as the sun wanes

and the hand that once caressed

now blanches at the joints

in one last effort to retain

– please let me go

– because if you do not

I shan’t have the strength

it takes to break

the sentiments

to cover the soul

with that thin veil

against doubt and

against myself

and appreciate

the forgetting

the fading

of what

you once

were

Ukko

I have seen flame auroras

mirror across frozen lakes

the ice singing underfoot

the heart of the stars, pounding

a white fox on the hunt

twilit eyes straight at me

and the knife at my chest

both of us ignoring the call

In the night of night

dance crackling fireflies

spangle the dark of the eyes

fairy about the flames

A thunderstruck tree

split in twain, waits for me

nods at my presence

smelling of cinder and hope.

Intelligibility

 
”In science one tries to tell people, in such a way as to be understood by everyone, something that no one ever knew before. But in the case of poetry, it's the exact opposite.”

Paul Dirac, theoretical physicist and Nobel laureate (1902-1984)
 

Steve McCurry -- Children -- exhibition in Florence, 2023

 

Knowable

"It is a profound and necessary truth that the deep things in science are not found because they are useful; they are found because it was possible to find them."


J. Robert Oppenheimer, theoretical physicist, speech in McMaster university, Canada, 1962.


Found in City of the End of Things: Lectures on Civilization and Empire, by Pr. Jonathan Hart (2009)

Alter echo

 
"The problem was you had to keep choosing between one evil or another, and no matter what you chose, they sliced a little bit more off you, until there was nothing left. At the age of 25 most people were finished. A whole god-damned nation of assholes driving automobiles, eating, having babies, doing everything in the worst way possible, like voting for the presidential candidates who reminded them most of themselves. I had no interests. I had no interest in anything. I had no idea how I was going to escape. At least the others had some taste for life. They seemed to understand something that I didn't understand. Maybe I was lacking. It was possible. I often felt inferior. I just wanted to get away from them. But there was no place to go."

Charles Bukowski, Ham on Rye, 1982