Everything carries me to you

Recently I came across a “ten poems you must read” list, and while I was slightly gobsmacked that nine out of ten were 20th century Americans (hello?), I was pleased to find this Pablo Neruda poem, “If you forget me,” which I'd never read. It's really rather quite perfectly beautiful.

I want you to know
one thing.

You know how this is:
if I look
at the crystal moon, at the red branch
of the slow autumn at my window,
if I touch
near the fire
the impalpable ash
or the wrinkled body of the log,
everything carries me to you,
as if everything that exists,
aromas, light, metals,
were little boats
that sail
toward those isles of yours that wait for me.

Well, now,
if little by little you stop loving me
I shall stop loving you little by little.

If suddenly
you forget me
do not look for me,
for I shall already have forgotten you.

If you think it long and mad,
the wind of banners
that passes through my life,
and you decide
to leave me at the shore
of the heart where I have roots,
remember
that on that day,
at that hour,
I shall lift my arms
and my roots will set off
to seek another land.

But
if each day,
each hour,
you feel that you are destined for me
with implacable sweetness,
if each day a flower
climbs up to your lips to seek me,
ah my love, ah my own,
in me all that fire is repeated,
in me nothing is extinguished or forgotten,
my love feeds on your love, beloved,
and as long as you live it will be in your arms
without leaving mine.

The breath of the author

I liked this article in the New Yorker, but in my experience, hearing writers read their own work is rarely as good as you hope it will be. You expect to hear something rare and golden, sacred even, in a writer breathing life into his own text, giving it the inflections and dynamics it was meant to have, dwelling, crooning, over cherished phrases. But more often than not (living) writers brush quickly, diffidently, across the surface of their creations, careless of the meter and the rhythm you thought were there. The words lose much of the resonance they had in your head.

With writers from the past it's often worse. One of the most simultaneously thrilling and disappointing experiences of my literary career was hearing a recording of Tennyson reading “The Charge of the Light Brigade.” It was extraordinary to hear the voice of a great poet more than a hundred years dead. But his manner of rendering the poem was so removed from our sensibilities it might as well have been another language.

Perhaps this is because as readers our imagination, interpretation, sensibility, and endowment of significance are what constitute most of our enjoyment of a text. I don't agree with everything Roland Barthes thought, but I think in “Death of the Author” he was onto something:

“It is language which speaks, not the author; to write is...to reach that point where only language acts...The Author, when believed in, is always conceived of as the past of his own book: book and author stand automatically on a single line divided into a before and an after. The Author is thought to nourish the book, which is to say that he exists before it, thinks, suffers, lives for it, is in the same relation of antecedence to his work as a father to his child. In complete contrast, the modern scriptor is born simultaneously with the text, is in no way equipped with a being preceding or exceeding the writing, is not the subject with the book as predicate; there is no other time than that of the enunciation and every text is eternally written here and now.”

The books not taken

We went by ship to Tasmania, spent half a week in the northwest and the other half in the southeast. Both were spectacular, and we were blessed with what locals thought uncanny sunshine. Packing Robert Frost was an afterthought, but one I was heartily glad of. I had decided not to take any fiction. Knowing myself, I knew any novel would sap the better part of my attention, and seduce me away from harder reading and from observation. So I took theology, philosophy, criticism - and Frost. By week's end most of the prose was still untouched, but I had read more than a hundred poems; by sunlight in the day, and by torchlight in our tent at night. There was something especially harmonious about reading Frost while living out of doors. There was scant resemblance to Frost's New England, but there was still a resonance in what I saw with what I read of tree and bird and apple blossom, of daybreak and nightfall. I relished Frost's quiet attention to his world. Without requiring too much interpretative labour, Frost's poetry gave me a liturgy for my enjoyment. Where fiction would have led me astray from where we were, his poetry led me to look more closely and see more clearly the road we travelled by. And that has made all the difference.

A world in servitude to time

Since you liked last week's so much, here's another RS Thomas poem, written on the death of his wife. His complete works are about 500 pages worth, so there's plenty more where these came from. I like the brevity of this one, its breathless sadness and simplicity. Like the immortalities of love and life, it's gone before you can catch it.

We met
under a shower
of bird-notes.
Fifty years passed
love's moment
in a world in
servitude to time.
She was young;
I kissed with my eyes
closed and opened
them on her wrinkles.
“Come,” said death,
choosing her as his
partner for the last dance. And she,
who in life
had done everything
with a bird's grace,
opened her bill now
for the shedding
of one sigh no
heavier than a feather.

The right to silence

Of all the freedoms, speech is the one most often misused, most often claimed as an amnesty for all kinds of rank abuse.

Andrew Bolt emerged from a courtroom in which a judge found that he had published factual errors and ‘inflammatory and provocative' sentiments in breach of the Racial Discrimination Act, and claimed that it was a blow against free speech.

Tony Abbott agreed with Bolt, as he often does, saying free speech means “the right of people to say what you don't like, not just the right of people to say what you do like.”

Free speech means people can say what they please. It doesn't mean that what they say will be true, or reasonable or sensible or good. It does not mean that what they say won't be held to some standard of common accountability. And it does not mean that a judge won't find that that freedom has been abused.