It’s a lovely, crisp
fall day. It’s chilly but here we are at
November 15th, mid-month and the frightful chill of winter has yet
to descend. I’ve talked to people back
home in New York and it sounds like they’ve had their first snow, up in
Westchester at least. I know. It’ll be here before long. But for now it’s all still rather enjoyable,
walkable. For some reason there wasn’t much traffic today on the access road at
the kids school. Drive in, drive out,
drive home without incident. Heading
along the boulevard, not a car in sight and Martha and the Vandellas presented
itself on rotation. “Dancing in the Streets” and you know we’re gonna be
turning that up. “Don’t forget the Motor
City.” Some good business calls, last
night. A promising meeting ahead for
today. All, in all, a fine day to write
about death.
Are you familiar with the Rainer Maria Rilke poem “The
Swan?” I’ve a collection of his poems that
belonged to my mom. The book itself is
from 1971. The poem was written
sixty-six years before that. I remember once hanging out with an Irishman, a
Frenchman and a Dutch gentleman. No,
this is not a set up for a joke. Any
rate I recall the French and the Irish gentleman were in fervent agreement that
Germans could not write poetry. “That language
can’t produce poetry. It would be silly
to even think of what it might sound like.”
It all seemed rather specious at the time but I didn’t really have
anything at hand to counter their emphatic anti-Tuetonic thrust. I wish I’d had this volume.
I became familiar with Rilke through his work “Letters to a
Young Poet” that a dear friend had recommended.
His voice is so earnest, sincere and committed to the craft of writing;
it feels like someone has you by the lapels when you read it. And obviously this work was the inspiration
for countless others who had their shirts grabbed beyond the initial recipient,
Franz Kappus, the lucky 19 year-old in the German military, to whom the
original letters were first written. The
heroic, infamous shirt-grabber Christopher Hitchens was sufficiently shaken by
the work that he wrote his own to no one and everyone, in particular: “Letters to a Young Contrarian.”
A friend and I were on the much-avoided topic of death the
other day. An old friend of his, a
contemporary, had passed. I had a
different tale where the Grim Reaper was
lurking around, but was given his temporary orders to vacate the premises. My friend has cancer and her recent surgery
appears to have been completely successful.
She’s healing and the lych with the scythe has shuffled off elsewhere.
I’m always reading, and reading, but it is hard for me at
least, to slow the pace down to properly read poetry. You can dive in to a history text or a novel
and chip away it, dig in meticulously, take most prose on at your own pace. But to read poetry, one really needs to slow
down and consider each word and punctuation mark, methodically, and that isn’t
easy, particularly in a busy world, with a packed schedule. The other day, however I stumbled upon this
poem of Rilke’s and it worked so effectively that I was put on pause:
This
misery that through the still-undone
must
pass, bound and heavily weighed down,
is
like the awkward walking of the swan.
And
death, where we no longer comprehend
the
very ground on which we daily stand
is
like his anxious letting-himself-go
into
the water, soft against his breast
which
now how easily together flows
behind
him in a little wake of waves . . .
while
he, infinitely silent, self-possessed,
ever
more mature, is pleased to move
serenely
on his majestic way
None of us know of course, what lies out there after we
enter the water. One would hope to view
things 视死如归[1]
A nice metaphor to dwell upon though, waddling through a sunny day.
Read it out loud when you scatter my ashes in the Hudson and
they flow down to the City and out to the world, won’t you?
[1] shìsǐrúguī: to view death as a return home / to not be
afraid of dying / to face death with equanimity (idiom)
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