| The Hölderliniae 7. The roses never looked so good before we gained a dormant garden help. But roses burn in just one day of this appalling desert heat. An effervescent sun burning the roses as I must wish it would inflame all features of the abhorrent politicians plunging a nation into ruin ... and archaeology! We look in vain for faces from a human past. Merely to glimpse those faces - and they are fed to us each day dumb media write of the disgusting swine - leads into sickness of the spirit, even to suicide of the eternal mind. I am / I am not. Unhappy daily at a one we once called “life” now in a constant downgrade into the latest updated slavery. “Einst” / “At one time.” So there were not, for this one (“this one” is I), shades of the prison house that had “begun” to close: they’d been so definitely closed by the king spider’s window. Yet He, the not yet famed and celebrated one, threw up on a lost childhood to gather spirit from love & claims. “Jetzt” / “At this time”: ambition: a most primal devil held to heart: in such pursuit an endless sadness since fame could not be guaranteed. Oh, we are seeming free! We live democracy. We not: NO - not dividedinto small principalities at the hard mercy of autocratic princes. We harbor imbecilic faith groups who spend their hymns destroying minds -- but we’re not at lifelong mercy of consistoria governing lives as His was governed until death. The best of us have known the radical philosopher: the Kant from Königsberg: his skepticism laid mines under that faith. At the start, in the beginning: wholeness, a vast infinity. When shades had gathered: breaks, classes, poverty. But thus could enter world -- and opposition would manifest as battle with the world, tension forever and everlasting motion. Likewise the art of poetry, in nature infinite, demands form’s limitations to speak at all. A ceaseless mode of discontent is daily bread and wine: the inability to be pure spirit in the world’s grip measures the endless slavery. But yet there are surprises: “If what you bear inside you as truth ever approaches you as beauty” / “Wenn Dir als Schönheit entgegen- kommt” -- accept it gratefully for you need every helpful hand Nature can offer you. Where do I turn? Which country have not been to? Which disappointment still to be wept at? The world, a cyclopaedia of gorgeous places now known by all and overrun by all. All populations swell, all sights to fill the heart to overflowing: trashed. Disaster strikes: no mention of the fact that more will follow in its wake: that, finally, the planet loses its battle with mankind in the umpteenth extinction. Did He divine this? His tears for beauty’s sake manifest urgent purpose and they suggest it. |
| The Hölderliniae 8. This land is oil’s; this land is gas’s; this land is minerals’; this land is metals’; this land is electricity’s; this land is propane’s; this land is bones’; this land is jewels’. This land is burning’s; this land is digging’s; this land is mining’s; this land is excavating’s; this land is quarrying’s; dredging’s; drilling’s; tunneling’s; fracking’s. This land is bombing’s; gassing’s; this land is subject to nuclearization. This land is open to subtraction; redistricting; all mortgaging; theft; tax; development. This land is open to devaluation; to alienation; to all abstractions; to all disfigurations. This land is open to uglifications; to flood, to arson; to destruction: in one form or another it can be taken from you -- although in truth you never owned it in the first place: but by misunderstanding. However many pages were signed over; how many affidavits were designed to certify an ownership; how many bona fide lawyers, estate agents, bankers, accountants were drawn into proceedings to swear the land is owned by he who sits on it, no one under this crest, this emblem, shield or flag can ever claim to be a lord or lady over it. For centuries the people of this land claimed it was motherland or fatherland; for years they fought some other lands for it; for days they marched over the land with noise and shouting. The land in truth was never theirs; they never came into their own; there was no ownership involved -- for everything initially had borne another mark than theirs. No growth into a patrimony, or matrimony, or any grant that they could recognize. And was no coming into their own nation. And notwithstanding all men of war; all the campaigns and all the revolutions, the day would never dawn over their heads; nightfall would never fade over their houses. Deep down under the earth, the inadmissible abyss would yield no treasure. High up the sky’s ecstatic light would never yield the sight of stars, of the deep Aether in which the angels walked, in which the gods prepared their love to float above their worshipers to bring them any certainty some space of life were theirs. I have been walking ground throughout this world, each time enslaved to some deep country in the spirit that I would recognize, make my own, call my own. This right should by some law be every human’s. Each time I landed from the sea, or rode whatever vehicle over the land, arriving to some promising adventure, a first and foremost love would bend into some work; the lares & penates would be greeted at some house gate; acceptable companions be discovered to sign community. That is what my progenitor had looked for all His life, fallen in love with all His life -- until the others’ unrecognizable behavior had frightened him, strengthened His desire to call back solitude. I sense that solitude as well and know there is no greater strength than in acceptance - yet, back there, you could find community, you could find brotherhood and sisterhood; you could find love. Ah! what a word is “love;” how sole it is; how unaffordable it stays deep in the mind! It stays deep Selah! I am a citizen of everything and nothing. I live in everywhere and nowhere. I sleep in silences, sing in absences, never bring home a daily bread untainted. I am quietly “mad” though not incarcerated. To be quietly “mad.” You grant me that. In the far distance I see roses. In the far distance I can smell lilac. There is the place where all the flowers bloom: the ones I did not find in this terrain. I know that there are people there. They cannot see me. They do not know me. They never will. Our man, our holy poet knew that some distant day a present darkness would abstain from people and a so distant and so forgotten glory in the past would be recovered: it was a plot to found a Patria. Now it is not available. A hell mistook for progress grew uncontrollably throughout this epoch. A future now became a lasting situation and He disguised himself to it without regret. |
| The Hölderliniae 28. There is a break in the work, in the proceedings: one Feiertag: can you believe it? I am immeasurably far away in the beloved islands, islands adorable, islands most beautiful in the whole universe. You fly three hours north of Tahiti: it’s taken one whole night to reach Tahiti and you go on from there. I’m taking you to Polynesia, Ia orana maeva! No way to get away to Greece from there; we cannot get to Swabia. A lovely France in the deep Ocean carries the title of French Polynesia and France owes it a free and nobler ride: her independence. What has now journeyed under the stars? Under the ocean? I have a France to love, at birth known as Great Nation & Great Work, during our own America’s Great War of Independence. My home in this existence. In media res. No other center to the ocean than this one center multiplied. This is the Internationale and yet no single nation. The deep Marquesas, Melville’s own islands (I wrote in a first book) have arched from out an Eden into this heart of the Pacific and I have traveled with them, these divine islands. They are both in the center of the world and north of every place that you can ever think of. The sea has carried me and I’ve been nursed in the great waters. There’s not a single spot in everywhere has not believed me held in the great waters. Deep in those woods, the forests of the coastal green, children of fire and of volcanoes, there is a deeper green, infinitely more green than any green on earth far from these islands. It is the place to take some rest, to collect some rest in those same arms of the deep waters. Off Fatu Hiva. Off Hiva Oa. Off Nuku Hiva, Ua Huka, Tahuata, Ua Pou, off all desert and all inhabited, speaking our people’s idiom. Viikona mahina hei mahina. Puaha te ani. Haa pokeekete ani. Tai nui. Tai Tokapuha. Hora o te tai. The language quite another than the Tahitian. Where is the floor in those deep seas? Where is the base of world? The ocean dives down into the arms of Sun this time and into sound surrounding, urging you down, sinking you down into the last face of these waters. Sun turns over in a somersault to touch those buried faces of this planet. |