A few years ago, a leading Danish poet said in an interview that if a poem or novel did not concern itself with the current global crisis of our climate, he was not interested in reading it.
However sympathetic to that particular cause one may indeed be, an artistic environment so limited in scope must necessarily be stifling to writers and readers alike. The political work of art, as it is now conceived, has become unbearably concrete. The work must deal directly with global warming or else fail to qualify even as legible material. And yet, reading the works of, say, Percy Bysshe Shelley today, there can be no doubt about their artistic and political relevance, and yet Shelley fails to mention green house gases even once.
The issue is decidedly not whether one should create unpolitical works (whatever that might mean). The issue, rather, is that our understanding of what is potentially political has shrunk. John Ashbery has said that all great art was to him political, in the sense that it makes one want to improve in every aspect of life. The implication is not only that everything is in some way political (a familiar truism), but equally that our politics are an expression of how we perceive ourselves and the world around us, and that an awareness of ourselves inevitably leads to an awareness of others. The implication also – one that is not as absurd as it may at first seem – is that a poem about birds or hills or flowers has at least the potential to make us behave differently as political animals.
The illusion that some works are political and some are not is closely bound to another equally illusory idea; the notion that, because political art must be allied with progress, art itself must also ‘progress’. But art does no such thing. It is pointless to say that the plays of Aeschylus are less evolved or refined than the novels of Henry James, say, or the poems of Inger Christensen. This is important not just because one should be able to read without the numbing preconceptions of historicism, but because any appreciation of our current political urgency must recognise that we are defined by the past we imitate as much as by the past we want to break away from. In others words, to censure Aeschylus or James or Christensen for not dealing with our present reality is to miss what they have offered us, and still do, here and now.
Novels and poems must be allowed to speak in every way, to examine every thing, to present every problem. This goes equally for the issues of the past, social or otherwise, as for the soft apartheid still deeply entrenched in the politics of the United States, to choose one relevant example. It goes equally for the social issues of the 19th century as for the climate we may or indeed may not leave behind after the 21st. If our literature is not capable of representing whatever it wants, to present whichever problem it deems worthy of attention, then we have lost something very valuable: our ability to think without constraints, to write plays or novels or poems without limit.
*
Love is the thing. It walks over late at night
To breathe in the fine blues of his wardrobe,
To watch, as if over the stirring of tea, the shaking
Drifts of white, the steam lifting itself across
His pinkish belly, his seemingly useless locales –
Armpit, say. He sees small bodies of pine,
Pink limbs needled against a rimless sky –
A flash to whiten his squiggly reds. No idea
What shifts beneath the pattern of what is, what
Paints birds’ feathers, what lights the morning,
In his streaming kimono, flashes over stone.
Half-blind, he waits for changes in the gray
Edges of his thought, a bronze light submerged.
Some clarity is known to him: how one weaves.
A man offers you a dry red wine
directly from the bottle. You can
smell the knowledge on him.
You tend not to show your best
impressions to strangers. They may
prefer the fraudulent if
illustrious wave, the image as
surface, this glass stained yellow
to be passed and reflected
in sickly overcast. Knowing
the kind of food they serve here,
you turn down the brownish olive,
the crude rhubarb pie, that thing
you were certain held cilantro.
Then he comes back,
the waiter, leaving his tip
for you to divine. It occurs then
that the eye catches itself
in the very act of seeing.
You realise the ocean is
any number of reflections.
The finch is far out now,
though it is too late to assume
any normalcy of things as
some predetermined distance.
The finch never leaves
much behind – though it returns
for whatever it was. I was
once here as well, present
for the return of finches, all
yellow-breasted yolks
impossibly alive between
this coldly lit summer house
and some purplish distance.
These beaches here: they sang
Last night your praises.
They broke among the waves,
Blathered away with each fall
And rise of their blue thought.
Between their lines, your face
Billowed like a sail –
Between their winds, the word
Spoke something about God,
About His wandering here, also,
To sleep long nights through the cold.
These flashes of sand are His,
If you believe in that sort of thing,
And even the forlorn view of sandals
Spooling on the water’s edge.
Yet you are known only to yourself
As someone frail and angry; you
Recall slow shapes of palm trees
Turning greens to new golds;
You recall yourself in their shade.
He is away beneath the bridge
because the cops can’t get to him
and neither can you. Stark, freezing
blade – his flaked collar shattered
to its core – he holds one shoulder
as though letting go would split
the bone once more. This crazy
town we’re having, drowning
the noise of life ebbing from
his bluelit corpse. Yet, getting up
(and this is where your story begins),
the man bares you his nakedness.
He wears nothing but the soul
of the boy whose life he took,
t shirt in relentless dark, purple
reds like clouds rekindling lakes:
Old Joe, truckstop gasoline
peddler who wore his faith across
the chest, who let down a window
and called, Get outta there you
crazed kid you’ll freeze to death.
A cut moon slips his gold
light past and shows
his skin lit through, a yellow
like old paper, like the sun.
Soon the man refires, his nerve
back to life. Go to hell, he says.
He snaps his fingers like snow
flung to jump and pivot in the air,
his toes a wild elderberry, blackened
to the vein. (You did not see
the abandoned lots of dandelion,
the rows of cars turning eastward
through barely lit evenings.)
He stumbles, gets up to lean
on the world. Go to hell, he says.
But he’ll never drop, you think, we
all will die before he gets that cold.
A day like any other:
The fine tuning of the weather,
The wooded sections withering on –
The quiet reaches of the surf
Stranger and stranger in the reeds.
The new slip of the sound
Closing its mind about us. Unfathomable
Reaches of the air, dithering
Lives of small birds through blue.
How the cold touches this wild room –
How the hail of the grand piano
Sounds this winter’s small approach.
How the music of a lessened thing,
These blue chords rattling along,
Leaves us scattered and weightless.
The day is one of restlessness,
Of light sleep and few arrangements.
We reach for the slipshod wave,
The waters touching water –
The old news of some abandoned beach.
And so the rain
sleeted the curious heirloom.
The wind stooped the trees from
their winding ascents, yellowed
their bodies with language.
There is being after this
mottled persistence
within each crag top and shaggy bustling
heather in the reeds; there is
the jostling of silt, lichen,
the dried stalks that darkness falls
suddenly upon. There is the rain
returning to us its findings –
this rain that seeks us here where
one thing must follow the other,
parades glowing underneath a staggering of waves,
this slanted brick and stone
flawed in their light. There is
this rain that clouds these cities
in sequences of ash heaps and scraggy lows:
it will slip into the order of things
as they appear to be, as thoughts
scattered over dirt roads.
Dimly the stone
recalls a spangled sea –
wave on wave of
blue-lit chimes in
this rocky light. One
addresses this blue,
as you are wont to do
crossing your blue bridge
on mildly strange after-
noons. Being yourself
remnant in nature,
you ebb also
with coral reefs and shells
falling and rising yet
falling. You speak of the sea
as if it would return
one day to stay your bridge
along the edges – shape
the land blue and pale
with blue. But the sea
does not spin or pivot
or roll: it remains
in blue repose, no more
than the fragment of a thing,
bare and small and partial.
Then on the way we left behind
the apples and their blossoms, the system
threatening to change most things into
something else. The assembly of fruit stands
withered and browned, the idea
of time simply passing along the edges,
became the dust-slathered roadsides
ineffably streaming into view.
It was the selfless act of skinning an orange,
of emptying one’s pockets into the day,
the day that passed quietly and without much
to go back to – it was this that you remade
unquestioningly and furiously within
your never-resting mind: as if in anger
you struck against your sense of things
as they must be, as they are
bound to be in the very end,
when the trees will stand in bloom,
when a figure you have met and forgotten
will return and demand what he is owed.
I shall make the sun set at noon
and bring darkness to earth on a bright day.
No sooner would the noon approach –
the specious lodestar sits in the pines.
One drunken sailor abets the frieze:
approaching in the dark these bare feet
must recall somehow their cunning.
One should have had a mind like that of
D’Artagnan – noble, yet hollowed out
by winter and the proud antics of Maurice.
Instead one is in one’s penultimate trunks.
Nothing left to do. Nothing left to see.
One is at the end of one’s simplicity –
the day dropping like a hawk, a thundering of hours
trailing us through sleepless nights.
I should have broken this hereafter;
the stench of the leaves astounds me.
There is only the noon. It is here and never ends.
Secure in introspection
he peers at the watery pillars of his reflection.
Bishop
Such lights as I have seen
beaten on the prow: those ships
twitching on the wave. Soon, out
of distances recalling sleep,
I shall walk closely in these streets,
closer to the world I saw beneath
the dim lights of a battered sky.
I shall have small reason to complain;
not the hare nor the peacock
shall disturb me as I lie
deeply within the hold of my ship.
The fish shall not disturb me,
the clipper and the sable shall pass
along the white edges of my view.
The women who toil at the sails
shall shake me and speak
to me as I recall my name:
‘Come with us and see the sea,
it knows that you are here. It falls
again and again for you.’
It is this simple matter of defining
whatever moves beyond those pines and birches.
As though their speckles were the finest
forms of conceiving light: amongst themselves –
flashings of sunlight, amass of birds.
Speaking of trees, these moments seem
their own procession: here fades a memory
of you withdrawing like smoke through the pines.
In fact there are few things like this moment
when the birds lift up their heavy heads,
and the unmoved proprietor of sleep, being
of course the red-breasted goose or the finch
leaning closely to her mate, at long last
stops to consider these restless shores.
He, Thomson, was not always of this shining
disposition. Sunlight frightened him,
as did his own reflection, mirrored in the night,
whenever he would stumble out to meet it.
The birds seemed busy with their own conjectures,
having also to adjust to their observer,
much as seeing a thing will leave it open
to its seeing you – to looking away and returning
to the line you had long forgotten you were reading
before the birds appeared, before
these endless nights among the pines
became the tilt and the motion of the light.
*
BENJAMIN NEHAMMER is a writer and translator from Copenhagen, Denmark, where he lives with his wife, Minna, and his son, Jacob. His work has previously appeared in SSYK and PN Review.