"What is this enigmatic impulse that does not allow one to settle down in the achieved, the finished? I think it is a quest for reality. I give to this word its naive and solemn meaning, a meaning having nothing to do with philosophical debates of the last few centuries.... Undoubtedly, that Earth is and her riches cannot be exhausted by any description.
And yet perhaps our most precious acquisition is not an understanding of those ideas, which we touched in their most tangible shape, but respect and gratitude for certain things which protect people from internal disintegration and from yielding to tyranny. Precisely for that reason some ways of life, some institutions became a target for the fury of evil forces, above all, the bonds between people that exist organically, as if by themselves, sustained by family, religion, neighborhood, common heritage. In other words, all that disorderly, illogical humanity, so often branded as ridiculous because of its parochial attachments and loyalties. In many countries traditional bonds of civitas have been subject to a gradual erosion and their inhabitants become disinherited without realizing it.
Our planet that gets smaller every year, with its fantastic proliferation of mass media, is witnessing a process that escapes definition, characterized by a refusal to remember. .... In the minds of modern illiterates, however, who know how to read and write and even teach in schools and at universities, history is present but blurred, in a state of strange confusion; Molière becomes a contemporary of Napoleon, Voltaire, a contemporary of Lenin. Also, events of the last decades, of such primary importance that knowledge or ignorance of them will be decisive for the future of mankind, move away, grow pale, lose all consistency as if Frederic Nietzsche's prediction of European nihilism found a literal fulfillment. "The eye of a nihilist" - he wrote in 1887 - "is unfaithful to his memories: it allows them to drop, to lose their leaves;... And what he does not do for himself, he also does not do for the whole past of mankind: he lets it drop".
For how to be above and simultaneously to see the Earth in every detail? And yet, in a precarious balance of opposites, a certain equilibrium can be achieved thanks to a distance introduced by the flow of time. "To see" means not only to have before one's eyes. It may mean also to preserve in memory. "To see and to describe" may also mean to reconstruct in imagination. A distance achieved, thanks to the mystery of time, must not change events, landscapes, human figures into a tangle of shadows growing paler and paler. On the contrary, it can show them in full light, so that every event, every date becomes expressive and persists as an eternal reminder of human depravity and human greatness. Those who are alive receive a mandate from those who are silent forever. They can fulfill their duties only by trying to reconstruct precisely things as they were, and by wresting the past from fictions and legends.Thus both - the Earth seen from above in an eternal now and the Earth that endures in a recovered time - may serve as material for poetry. "
Not soon, as late as the approach of my ninetieth year,
I felt a door opening in me and I entered
the clarity of early morning.
Moments from yesterday and from centuries ago
-a sword blow, the painting of eyelashes before a mirror
of polished metal, a lethal musket shot, a caravel
staving its hull against a reef - they dwell in us,
waiting for a fulfillment.
I knew, always, that I would be a worker in the vineyard,
as are all men and women living at the same time,
whether they are aware of it or not.
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On the day the world ends
A bee circles a clover,
A Fisherman mends a glimmering net.
Happy porpoises jump in the sea,
By the rainspout young sparrows are playing
And the snake is gold-skinned as it it should always be.
On the day the world ends
Women walk through fields under their umbrellas
A drunkard grows sleepy at the edge of a lawn,
Vegetable peddlers shout in the street
And a yellow-sailed boat comes nearer the island,
The voice of a violin lasts in the air
And leads into a starry night.
Only a white-haired old man, who would be a prophet,
Yet is not a prophet, for he's much too busy,
Repeats while he binds his tomatoes:
No other end of the world there will be,
No other end of the world there will be.
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You walk by smashed stones
with the fragments of a name
Yet this water in the sun, the
scent of calamus,
The same ecstasy of discovering things
Unites us. You will find again
The sacredness they tried to expel forever.
Something returns, invisible, frail, shy.
Adoring, without a name, and yet fearless.
----Selections from C. Milosz
1 comment:
the Milosz poem is very beautiful, really the appearence of a kind of grace - to respond to these thoughts of memory and meaning I was listening to an interview with Brian Eno just now, and like most interviews I've read or heard with Brian Eno he said something that opened a little door in the mind. Most art he was saying has been ephemeral in nature it's only recently with technological means that we have been able to have repeated and accelerated viewing experiences or especially listening ones, until recently perhaps for humans to appreciate the ephemeral was the norm, the absolutely transient. It's interesting because we think of modern western life as a passage through fleeting and evolving landscapes,rather like the passage you quote on the sight of New York, but at the same time we can literally baracade ourselves into self-sustaining little worlds that we can watch perpetually go round; favourite books would do this, now we have the entire season of whatever on DVD, entire worlds we can disappear into, all the time.
talking about the original Americans, I read a book recently about the Lenni Lanepe, the tribe who lived where I live now in fact.
Their universe of meaning was literally inscribed into the local fauna and flora, not to mythologise them but their experience of the world must have been exceedly rich, but unfortunately they did not understand the technology of maps and the related technology of archiving, that is keeping the documents, that they're importance was that they persisted in time in some sort of abstract space. As a result of the famous 'walking purchase' they had no recourse to contest what could only be remembered in memory when faced with what was sold to them as actual material records of supposed agreements made previously promising the settlers more land.
The Lanepe understood that their reliance on oral tradition disadvantaged them only after they had been cheated of the land. It must have been bewildering.
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