longing

Du im Voraus
verlorne Geliebte, Nimmergekommene,
nicht weiß ich, welche Töne dir lieb sind.
Nicht mehr versuch ich, dich, wenn das Kommende wogt,
zu erkennen. Alle die großen
Bildern in mir, im Fernen erfahrene Landschaft,
Städte und Türme und Brücken und un-
vermutete Wendung der Wege
und das Gewaltige jener von Göttern
einst durchwachsenen Länder:
steigt zur Bedeutung in mir
deiner, Entgehende, an.

Ach, die Gärten bist du,
ach, ich sah sie mit solcher
Hoffnung. Ein offenes Fenster
im Landhaus—, und du tratest beinahe
mir nachdenklich heran. Gassen fand ich,—
du warst sie gerade gegangen,
und die spiegel manchmal der Läden der Händler
waren noch schwindlich von dir und gaben erschrocken
mein zu plötzliches Bild.—Wer weiß, ob derselbe
Vogel nicht hinklang durch uns
gestern, einzeln, im Abend?
–Rainer Maria Rilke

You who never arrived
in my arms, Beloved, who were lost
from the start,
I don’t even know what songs
would please you. I have given up trying
to recognize you in the surging wave of the next
moment. All the immense
images in me – the far-off, deeply-felt landscape,
cities, towers, and bridges, and unsuspected
turns in the path,
and those powerful lands that were once
pulsing with the life of the gods -
all rise within me to mean
you, who forever elude me.

You, Beloved, who are all
the gardens I have ever gazed at,
longing. An open window
in a country house – , and you almost
stepped out, pensive, to meet me.
Streets that I chanced upon, -
you had just walked down them and vanished.
And sometimes, in a shop, the mirrors
were still dizzy with your presence and, startled,
gave back my too-sudden image. Who knows?
perhaps the same bird echoed through both of us
yesterday, separate, in the evening…
(Translated here by Stephen Mitchell)

I think often of the word saudade, that sense of longing and incompleteness so deep.. a melancholy with it, but in that, a beauty. Many a Brazilian song expresses this feeling, this gnawing lack. Other languages have similar words– Sehnsucht, for example–but what do we say in English? Sadness does not quite capture it… not melancholy. Longing?

So, I say longing, but it is a productive sort of longing, perhaps in its desire to recreate that missing part. So many songs, so many poems.

For years when I was young, I kept Rilke’s poem hanging on my bedroom wall. Perhaps then it was a testament to teenage angst, but it seemed more predictive than that…

I do not really believe in the idea of a soul mate, but I do have some sense of fate. Who are we meant to be? What are we supposed to find in this life? Do we find glimmers of interconnected beauty in our lives, moments that we feel we really are known, share this space in love? Or are we forever to wander, with a sense of longing so great? Are we forever to search, to want something.. one moment, oneness? Perhaps it is this that those of us who long seek. Perhaps it is this that drives our creation… Ah, but to find it–but then, to long again, perhaps for something else. And then, to create again. Perhaps this is the rhythm, the meaning in our life.

reading aloud: Cortázar

“Toco tu boca, con un dedo todo el borde de tu boca, voy dibujándola como si saliera de mi mano, como si por primera vez tu boca se entreabriera, y me basta cerrar los ojos para deshacerlo todo y recomenzar, hago nacer cada vez la boca que deseo, la boca que mi mano elige y te dibuja en la cara, una boca elegida entre todas, con soberana libertad elegida por mí para dibujarla con mi mano en tu cara, y que por un azar que no busco comprender coincide exactamente con tu boca que sonríe por debajo de la que mi mano te dibuja.

Me miras, de cerca me miras, cada vez más de cerca y entonces jugamos al cíclope, nos miramos cada vez más cerca y los ojos se agrandan, se acercan entre sí, se superponen y los cíclopes se miran, respirando confundidos, las bocas se encuentran y luchan tibiamente, mordiéndose con los labios, apoyando apenas la lengua en los dientes, jugando en sus recintos, donde un aire pesado va y viene con un perfume viejo y un silencio. Entonces mis manos buscan hundirse en tu pelo, acariciar lentamente la profundidad de tu pelo mientras nos besamos como si tuviéramos la boca llena de flores o de peces, de movimientos vivos, de fragancia oscura. Y si nos mordemos el dolor es dulce, y si nos ahogamos en un breve y terrible absorber simultáneo del aliento, esa instantánea muerte es bella. Y hay una sola saliva y un solo sabor a fruta madura, y yo te siento temblar contra mí como una luna en el agua.”

from Julio Cortázar, Rayuela (Hopscotch), chapter 7.

Fluency in Spanish escapes me now. It was another world, one of passion and silliness both, and sometimes I miss the person I was when I spoke it well. So, to compensate, I read.

Cortázar is difficult, even translated, but so rewarding in the end–and in moments like the chapter quoted above. I read it aloud, and I believe I have been studied, kissed, merged into another, transposed into something more beautiful.

It starts (I translate roughly), “I touch your mouth, with my finger along the outline of your mouth, I keep drawing it as if I were creating it with my hand, as if your mouth were opening for the first time, and I only need close my eyes to erase it and start again, I create each time this mouth that I desire…” In the next paragraph, the world expands, scents grow, sounds, hair, flowers, fish, death and beauty, and finally, a trembling moment, moon shivering on water. Yes. These words find their power not in the translation, but in the reading, and in hearing our own voice find the shape and sound of them, like ice cream on a hot day and all that eating it conjures up, like summer, like a world away.