Today I want to introduce the poetry of someone my US readers will likely be unfamiliar with. I chose the poet and the (excerpted) poem because they represent so much of what I admire: a review of both, the good and the bad that surrounds us, a strong desire for justice or the fight for it. A will to remember history, awe of nature, and pleasure derived from language that uses patterns related to science while sounding lyrical as we expect from poetry.
It also fits with last Monday’s Jewish holiday of Tu B’Schevat, the Festival of the Trees. It’s not a biblical holiday but marks the beginning of the annual agricultural cycle for trees (and tithing.) Starting with the 17th century, the date was celebrated with a Seder meant to repair our standing in the earthly and spiritual realm. Four cups of wine are offered, from white to shades of red symbolizing different levels of creation. Foods are served that remind us of the complexity of our existence. The first fruits and nuts have inedible shells, like pomegranates or almonds, and represent the physical world in which protection and defenses are necessary. Then fruits with inedible cores like apricots or olives, to recall both physicality and inner emotions that need protection. The third group are fruits like figs or blueberries that can be fully eaten. They stand for the highest level of physical and spiritual perfection achievable in the corporeal world. The final “fruit” is not physical and cannot be eaten, standing in for the spiritual realm.
Today’s poem includes numerous fruits and trees and certainly thinks through how we can integrate, change or repair the many layers that make up our existence.
Danish writer Inger Christensen was one of Europe’s leading contemporary poets until her death in 2009. (Here is a link to a great overview of her approach to life and work.) A staunch progressive and a visionary, she focussed on community over individualism and encouraged all of us to act on our beliefs. In my more blasphemous moments I think of her as the Hannah Arendt of poetry.
I am currently reading a brilliant collection of her essays, The Condition of Secrecy, that was published posthumously. For today, though, I offer a long-form poem based on the alphabet and the pattern of the Fibonacci sequence of numbers (each number the sum of the two previous ones.) Yes, by definition it gets long – and no, I am not posting all 76 pages of it – but also ever more inclusive of the many aspects of our world. The alphabet pattern is slightly lost in English translation (a superb one) – it’s simply not possible to maintain the beginning letters. I don’t speak Danish, but I can “hear” the pattern. Here is the comparison for one of my favorite sections:
5
efteråret findes; eftersmagen og eftertanken
findes; og enrummet findes; englene,
enkerne og elsdyret findes; enkelthederne
findes, erindringen, erindringens lys;
og efterlyset findes, egetræet og elmetræet
findes, og enebærbusken, ensheden, ensomheden
findes, og edderfuglen og edderkoppen findes,
og eddiken findes, og eftertiden, eftertiden
5
early fall exists; aftertaste, afterthought;
seclusion and angels exist;
widows and elk exist; every
detail exists; memory, memory’s light;
afterglow exists; oaks, elms,
junipers, sameness, loneliness exist;
eider ducks, spiders, and vinegar
exist, and the future, the future
The poem gives me goosebumps every time I read it, with its intricate world-building, its ability to conjure the beauty of nature and the horror of our human potential for destruction, often in the same breath. Published in 1981, the psalm-like verses include the terror of nuclear annihilation, but the vision beneath it all really speaks to timeless ways of mankind endangering itself (and the planet) in our struggle for riches and power. It also reminds us of all that exists independently of us, to be cherished and protected.
My photographs are of some of the plants and trees she mentions.
Alphabet
(Excerpt)
by Inger Christensen
translated by Susanna Nied (1-8) and Pierre Joris (9-end)
1
apricot trees exist, apricot trees exist
2
bracken exists; and blackberries, blackberries;
bromine exists; and hydrogen, hydrogen
3
cicadas exist; chicory, chromium,
citrus trees; cicadas exist;
cicadas, cedars, cypresses, the cerebellum
4
doves exist, dreamers, and dolls;
killers exist, and doves, and doves;
haze, dioxin, and days; days
exist, days and death; and poems
exist; poems, days, death
5
early fall exists; aftertaste, afterthought;
seclusion and angels exist;
widows and elk exist; every
detail exists; memory, memory’s light;
afterglow exists; oaks, elms,
junipers, sameness, loneliness exist;
eider ducks, spiders, and vinegar
exist, and the future, the future
6
fisherbird herons exist, with their grey-blue arching
backs, with their black-feathered crests and their
bright-feathered tails they exist; in colonies
they exist, in the so-called Old World;
fish, too, exist, and ospreys, ptarmigans,
falcons, sweetgrass, and the fleeces of sheep;
fig trees and the products of fission exist;
errors exist, instrumental, systemic,
random; remote control exists, and birds;
and fruit trees exist, fruittherein the orchard where
apricot trees exist, apricot trees exist
in countries whose warmth will call forth the exact
colour of apricots in the flesh
7
given limits exist, streets, oblivion
and grass and gourds and goats and gorse,
eagerness exists, given limits
branches exist, wind lifting them exists,
and the lone drawing made by the branches
of the tree called an oak tree exists,
of the tree called an ash tree, a birch tree,
a cedar tree, the drawing repeated
in the gravel garden path; weeping
exists as well, fireweed and mugwort,
hostages, greylag geese, greylags and their young;
and guns exist, an enigmatic back yard;
overgrown, sere, gemmed just with red currants,
guns exist; in the midst of the lit-up
chemical ghetto guns exist
with their old-fashioned, peaceable precision
guns and wailing women, full as
greedy owls exist; the scene of the crime exists;
the scene of the crime, drowsy, normal, abstract,
bathed in a whitewashed, godforsaken light,
this poisonous, white, crumbling poem
8
whisperings exist, whisperings exist
harvest, history, and Halley’s
comet exist; hosts exist, hordes
high commanders, hollows, and within the hollows
half-shadows, within the half-shadows occasional
hares, occasional hanging leaves shading the hollow where
bracken exists, and blackberries, blackberries
occasional hares hidden under the leaves
and gardens exist, horticulture, the elder tree’s
pale flowers, still as a seething hymn;
the half-moon exists, half-silk, and the whole
heliocentric haze that has dreamed
these devoted brains, their luck, and human skin
human skin and houses exist, with Hades
rehousing the horse and the dog and the shadows
of glory, hope; and the river of vengeance;
hail under stoneskies exists, the hydrangeas’
white, bright-shining, blue or greenish
fogs of sleep, occasionally pink, a few
sterile patches exist, and beneath
the angled Armageddon of the arching heavens, poison,
the poison helicopter’s humming harps above the henbane,
shepherd’s purse, and flax, henbane, shepherd’s purse
and flax; this last, hermetic writing,
written otherwise only by children; and wheat,
wheat in wheatfields exists, the head-spinning
horizontal knowledge of wheatfields, half-lives,
famine, and honey; and deepest in the heart,
otherwise as ever only deepest in the heart,
the roots of the hazel, the hazel that stands
on the hillslope of the heart, tough and hardy,
an accumulated weekday of Angelic orders;
high-speed, hyacinthic in its decay, life,
on earth as it is in heaven
9
ice ages exist, ice ages exist,
ice of the arctics and ice of the kingfisher;
cicadas exist, chicory, chrome
and the chrome yellow iris, the blue iris; oxygen
indeed; also ice floes in the arctic ocean,
polar bears exist, as fur inscribed
with an individual number he exists, condemned to his life;
& the kingfisher’s mini-drop into the ice-blue rivers
of mars exists, if the rivers exist;
if oxygen in the rivers exists, oxygen
indeed; exists indeed there where the cicadas’
i-songs exist, there indeed where chicory
heaven exists blue dissolved in
water, the chrome yellow sun, oxygen
indeed; it will exist for sure, we will
exist for sure, the oxygen we breathe exists,
eye of fire crown of fire exist, and the heavenly
inside of the lake; a handle infolded
with bulrushes will exist , an ibis exists,
and the movements of the soul inhaled into clouds
exist, like oxygen storms deep inside Styx
and in the heart of wisdom’s landscape ice-light,
ice identical with light, and in the inner
heart of the ice-light emptyness, live, intense
like your gaze in the rain, that fine life-
iridescent rain where gesture-like
the fourteen crystal lattices exist, the seven
crystalline systems, your gaze in mine,
and Icarus, impotent Icarus exists;
Icarus swaddled in melting waxwings
exists; Icarus pale as a corpse in
civvies exists, Icarus all the way down where
the pigeons exist; dreamers, dolls
exist; the dreamers’ hair with cancerous tufts
torn out, the dolls’ skin pinned together
with nails, rotting wood of the mysteries; and smiles
exist, Icarus’ children white as lambs
in the gray light, will indeed exist, indeed
we will exist, and oxygen on oxygen’s crucifix;
as hoar-frost we will exist, as wind we will exist,
as the rainbow’s iris, in the shining shoots of
mesembryanthenum, in the tundra’s straw; small
we will exist, as small as bits of pollen in peat,
as bits of virus in bones, as swamp pink maybe
maybe as a bit of white clover, vetch, a bit of chamomile
exiled to the lost again paradise; but darkness
is white say the children, the darkness of paradise is white,
but not white as a a coffin is white,
that is if coffins exist, and not
white as milk is white,
that is if milk exists; white is white,
the children say, darkness is white, but not
white as the white existing
before fruit trees existed, their flowering so white,
darkness is whiter, eyes melt
10
june night exists, june night exists,
sky finally as if lifted up to celestial
heights and simultaneously pushed down as gently as when
dreams are visible before being dreamed; a space like
swooned, like saturated with whiteness, a timeless
knell of dew and insects, and nobody in this
gossamer, nobody understands that
autumn exists, that aftertaste and afterthought
exist, only these restless lines of fantastic
ultrasounds exist and the bat’s
jade-ear turned towards the ticking fog;
never was the globe’s inclination so beautiful,
never were the oxygenated nights so white,
so dispassionately dissolved, softly ionised
white, and never was the limit of invisibility so nearly
touched; june, june, your jacob’s ladders
exist your sleeping beasts and their dreams of sleep
exist, a flight of galactic germs between
the earth so earthy and heaven so heavenly,
the calm of the valley of tears, so calm and the tears
sunk back, sunk back in like groundwater again
underground; earth; the earth in its revolution
around the sun exists; the earth in its itinerary
through the milky way exists; the earth on its way
with its load of jasmin, and of jasper and iron,
with its curtains of iron, its portents of joy and random Judas
kisses and a virgin anger
in the streets, jesus of salt; with the jacaranda’s shadow
on the waters of the river, with falcons and hunters
and january in the heart, with the well of Japoto della Quercias
Fonte Gaia in Sienna and with july
as heavy as a bomb; with tame brains,
with heart jars or heart grass or berries,
with the roots of ironwood in the exhausted earth
the earth that Jayadeva sings in his mystic
12 century poem; the earth with its coastline
of conscience, blue and with nests
where the large heron exists, with its neck curved
blue-gray , or the small heron exists, mysterious
and shy, or the night heron, the ash-colored heron exist
and the degrees of wing beats of sparrows, of cranes
and pigeons; the earth with Jullundur, Jabalpur and
Jungfrau exists, with Jotunheim and the Jura
exists, with Jabron and Jambo, Jogkarta
exists, with earth-swirls and earth-smoke exists
with water masses, landmasses, earthquakes exists,
with Judenburg, Johannesburg and the Jerusalem of Jerusalems
*
atombombs exist
Hiroshima, Nagasaki
Hiroshima 6
august 1945
Nagasaki 9
august 1945
140.000 dead and
wounded in Hiroshima
about 60.000 dead and
wounded in Nagasaki
frozen numbers
somewhere in a distant
and ordinary summer
since then the wounded
have died, many at first, indeed
most, then fewer, but in the end
all; in the end
the children of the wounded,
stillborn, dying,
many, continuously,
some, finally the
last ones; in my kitchen
I stand and peel
potatoes; the faucet
runs and nearly
covers the noise of the
children in the yard;
the children yell and
nearly cover the noise
of the birds in
the trees; the birds
sing and nearly
cover the murmur
of the leaves in the wind;
the leaves murmur
and nearly cover
the silence of the sky,
the sky which is light
and the light which since
then has nearly
resembled the fire
of the atom bomb
Here is a musical rendition on Soundcloud. It might cut off if you don’t have an account, alas.
As an alternative, we can listen to Danish composer Carl Nielsen’s 4th symphony, The Inextinguishable, celebrating “the elemental will to live” against the backdrop of WW I. It feels weird to write this while by all reports Scandinavian and Baltic nations are standing their defense forces at attention giving the developing situation with Ukraine.