Vast is the chasm, and in the deep below Silence has fallen asleep beneath its tree; Yet we, above the stark declivity, Still hear the hush of winds we do not know; For, in the vague that covers all, the slow Trail of the air, like floating hair flung free, Draws with the moving earth; which far stars see As some titanic head swayed to and fro.
O pigmy man, so like a thistleseed, Blown hitherward from distant space! O note In an eternal wind! O little float On time’s scarce entered sea, art thou the crown Of all immensity? Nay, wouldst thou read Thy pleas, o’er this dark brink look down, look down!
Here are perhaps the first inklings of a modern Australian poetic tradition. The linguistic archaism is certainly there, the form is a very traditional one and the descriptions of the landscape colonially European but there is nonetheless a hint of something that’s starting to burst through the seams. Look at the uncanny nature of certain images or take in the overhangning existential trepidation of the poem. While they might be redolent of the work of some European romantics, this poem really does distinguish itself from the simplistic bush-ballading that otherwise characterises nineteenth-century verse in Australia. The likes of Kenneth Slessor might well have been the ones to kick the modernist door open but a special mention has to be made for Dame Mary Gilmore who first dared to peek out and leave it ajar.
Form
Sonnet, written in iambic pentameter.
Analysis
The poet is looking out over a vast landscape. Although silence reigns, she imagines that she can hear the sound of a great and distant wind. With this the perspective in the poem zooms out from the immensity of the natural world to the immensity of outer space as earth is viewed from the stars as a “titanic head swayed to and fro”.
The focus in the second stanza shifts to man and his insignificance in the face of all this. The contrast between him and the magnitude of creation is repeated with three images (the ‘thistleseed’ blown through ‘space’, the ‘note’ in the ‘eternal wind’ and the ‘float’ on the ‘sea of time’). The question is posed whether or not he is the crown of creation. Want an answer? Look down the precipice!
Det var först efter att ha läst Östersjöar som jag frälstes av Tomas Tranströmers diktning. Även om jag sedermera fattat en stor beundran för hans mer sedvanligt korta stil är det hans långdikt Östersjöar som förblivit min favorit ur hans författarskap. Jag skulle till och med våga säga att det är Tranströmers mästerverk.
Och nästan som ett symtom av dess kvalité är det en dikt som är omöjlig att precisera. Hur kan man egentligen förklara eller sammanfatta dess subtila skiftningar mellan minne och samtid, mellan minutiösa detaljer och tidlösa vidder, mellan fysisk verklighet och andlig närvaro där liv och död, tid och rum ömsom delas, ömsom sammanfogas? En orättvis sammanfattning skulle kanske lyda så här: att verket är en mycket personlig gestaltning av den plats som för dess skapare var ett slags själslig hemvist–nämligen, Östersjön.
Jag ska göra mitt bästa att kortfattat förklara de olika delarna genom att återge en del av dikten i taget följd av en kommentar. Mer än de flesta dikterna som jag skrivit om på denna sida är detta dock ett verk som måste erfaras. För läsaren som vill läsa helheten, skonad av mitt svamlande, kan ni hitta den här (scrolla ner i sidan tills ni kommer dit).
Östersjöar – Tomas Tranströmer
Del 1
Det var före radiomasternas tid.
Morfar var nybliven lots. I almanackan skrev han upp de fartyg han lotsade – namn, destinationer, djupgång. Exempel från 1884: Ångf Tiger Capt Rowan 16 fot Hull Gefle Furusund Brigg Ocean Capt Andersen 8 fot Sandefjord Hernösand Furusund Ångf St Pettersburg Capt Libenberg 11 fot Stettin Libau Sandhamn
Han tog ut dem till Östersjön, genom den underbara labyrinten av öar och vatten. Och de som möttes ombord och bars av samma skrov några timmar eller dygn, hur mycket lärde de känna varann? Samtal på felstavad engelska, samförstånd och missförstånd men mycket lite av medveten lögn. Hur mycket lärde de känna varann?
När det var tät tjocka: halv fart, knappt ledsyn. Ur det osynliga kom udden med ett enda kliv och var alldeles intill. Brölande signal varannan minut. Ögonen läste rätt in i det osynliga. (Hade han labyrinten i huvudet?) Minuterna gick. Grund och kobbar memorerade som psalmverser. Och den där känslan av “just här är vi” som måste hållas kvar, som när man bär på ett bräddfullt kärl och ingenting får spillas.
En blick ner i maskinrummet. Compoundmaskinen, långlivad som ett människohjärta, arbetade med stora mjukt studsande rörelser, akrobater av stål, och dofterna steg som från ett kök.
Kommentar: Första delen är en kort berättelse om Tranströmers morfar som lotsade fartyg i Östersjön. Det enda karaktärsdrag som gestaltas hos morfadern är dennes intima förståelse av platsen. Trots Östersjöns väldiga komplexitet (“denna underbara labyrint!”), avsaknaden av radiomaster och en dimma som förringar synenvet morfadern exakt var han är och hur han ska navigera.
Det kan tyckas vara ett märkligt sätt att inleda, men jag tror att Tranströmer använder berättelsen för att han vill leva upp till samma djupa förhållande till Östersjön som hans morfar hade. Precis som morfadern lotsade passagerare på sitt fartyg ska Tranströmer genom dikten lotsa läsaren genom det poetiska landskap som han ämnar skildra.
Del 2
Vinden går i tallskogen. Det susar tungt och lätt, Östersjön susar också mitt inne på ön, långt inne i skogen är man ute på öppna sjön. Den gamla kvinnan hatade suset i träden. Hennes ansikte stelnade i melankoli när det blåste upp: “Man måste tänka på dem som är ute i båtarna.” Men hon hörde också något annat i suset, precis som jag, vi är släkt. (Vi går tillsammans. Hon är död sen tretti år.) Det susar ja och nej, missförstånd och samförstånd. Det susar tre barn friska, ett på sanatorium och två döda. Det stora draget som blåser liv i somliga lågor och blåser ut andra. Villkoren. Det susar: Fräls mig Herre, vattnen tränger mig inpå livet. Man går länge och lyssnar och når då en punkt där gränserna öppnas eller snarare där allting blir gräns. En öppen plats försänkt i mörker. Människorna strömmar ut från de svagt upplysta byggnaderna runt om. Det sorlar.
Ett nytt vinddrag och platsen ligger åter öde och tyst. Ett nytt vinddrag, det brusar om andra stränder. Det handlar om kriget. Det handlar om platser där medborgarna är under kontroll, där tankarna byggs med reservutgångar, där ett samtal bland vänner verkligen blir ett test på vad vänskap betyder. Och när man är tillsammans med dem som man inte känner så väl. Kontroll. En viss uppriktighet är på sin plats bara man inte släpper med blicken det där som driver i samtalets utkant: någonting mörkt, en mörk fläck. Någonting som kan driva in och förstöra allt. Släpp det inte med blicken! Vad ska man likna det vid? En mina? Nej det vore för handfast. Och nästan för fredligt–för på vår kust har de flesta berättelser om minor ett lyckligt slut, skräcken begränsad i tiden. Som i den här historien från fyrskeppet: “Hösten 1915 sov man oroligt … ” etc. En drivmina siktades när den drev mot fyrskeppet sakta, den sänktes och hävdes, ibland skymd av sjöarna, ibland framskymtande som en spion i en folkmassa. Besättningen låg i ångest och sköt på den med gevär. Förgäves. Till sist satte man ut en båt och gjorde fast en lång lina vid minan och bogserade den varsamt och länge in till experterna. Efteråt ställde man upp minans mörka skal i en sandig plantering som prydnad tillsammans med skalen av Strombus gigas från Västindien.
Och havsblåsten går i de torra tallarna längre bort, den har bråttom över kyrkogårdens sand, förbi stenarna som lutar, lotsarnas namn. Det torra suset av stora portar som öppnas och stora portar som stängs.
Kommentar: I den andra delen av dikten har platsen förbytts från det öppna havet till en ö–troligen Runmarö i Stockholms skärgård där Tranströmer tillbringade sina somrar. Diktaren promenerar med en kvinna som han är besläktad med och som är död sedan trettio år tillbaka(troligen hans mormor som också är med vid diktens slut).Hon var öbo och levde ett hårt liv med Östersjön i bakgrunden. Sålunda tar Tranströmer avstånd från ett enkelt romantiserande av platsen. För henne står Östersjön för något mycket mer fientligt (“Fräls mig Herre, vattnen tränger mig inpå livet”).
I slutet av den första strofen träder en folkmassa fram ur ett litet skärgårdssamhälle och därmed introduceras ett tema som kommer att bli central för dikten: “gräns”. Alla individer i denna hop bär på en egen erfarenhet och förståelse av den platsen där de bott. Östersjöns betydelse avgränsas därför till någonting subjektivt men samtidigt öppnas det upp: det blir något mycket mer komplicerat där gränsen mellan såväl det fysiska som det abstrakta suddas bort.
I den andra strofen blåser två vinddrag och därmed upplöses två av dessa gränser. I den första är det en tidsgräns: vi är kvar på samma plats fast nu är den öde. Därefter upphävs en landsgräns och läsaren förs till andra sidan Östersjön i Östeuropa där människorna lever under ett totalitärt styre. Dikten antyder farhågorna som då fanns kring det kalla kriget och detta för oss tillbaka i tiden då ett annat krig rådde i Europa. Det är 1915 (är detta morfaderns almanacka som citeras igen?) och en mina på drift bogseras från sjön till stranden.
Havsvinden blåser en sista gång i den tredje strofen. Vi är tillbaka i nutiden och vinden susar genom en kyrkogård. Trots bilden av död står vindens rörelse i kontrast mot detta för att visa att tillvaron är i konstant förändring–“portar som öppnas och portar som stängs”.
Del 3
I den gotländska kyrkans halvmörka hörn, i en dager av mild mögel står en dopfunt av sandsten–1100-tal–stenhuggarens namn är kvar, framlysande som en tandrad i en massgrav: HEGWALDR namnet kvar. Och hans bilder här och på andra krukors väggar, människomyller, gestalter på väg ut ur stenen. Ögonens kärnor av ondska och godhet spränger där. Herodes vid bordet: den stekta tuppen flyger upp och gal “Christus natus est”–servitören avrättades– intill föds barnet, under klungor av ansikten värdiga och hjälplösa som apungars. Och de frommas flyende steg ekande över drakfjälliga avloppstrummors gap. (Bilderna starkare i minnet än när man ser dem direkt, starkast när funten snurrar i en långsam mullrande karusell i minnet.) Ingenstans lä. Överallt risk. Som det var. Som det är. Bara därinnanför finns frid, i krukans vatten som ingen ser, men på ytterväggarna rasar kampen. Och friden kan komma droppvis, kanske om natten när vi ingenting vet, eller som när man ligger på dropp i en sal på sjukhuset.
Människor, bestar, ornament. Det finns inget landskap. Ornament.
Mr B***, min reskamrat, älskvärd, i landsflykt, frisläppt från Robben Island, säger: “Jag avundas er. Jag känner inget för naturen. Men människor i landskap, det säger mig något.”
Här är människor i landskap. Ett foto från 1865. Ångslupen ligger vid bryggan i sundet. Fem figurer. En dam i ljus krinolin, som en bjällra, som en blomma. Karlarna liknar statister i en allmogepjäs. Alla är vackra, tveksamma, på väg att suddas ut. De stiger iland en kort stund. De suddas ut. Ångslupen av utdöd modell– en hög skorsten, soltak, smalt skrov– den är fullkomligt främmande, en UFO som landat. Allt det andra på fotot är chockerande verkligt: krusningarna på vattnet, den andra stranden– jag kan stryka med handen över de skrovliga berghällarna, jag kan höra suset i granarna. Det är nära. Det är idag. Vågorna är aktuella.
Nu, hundra år senare. Vågorna kommer in från no man’s water och slår mot stenarna. Jag går längs stranden. Det är inte som det var att gå längs stranden. Man måste gapa över för mycket, föra många samtal på en gång, man har tunna väggar. Varje ting har fått en ny skugga bakom den vanliga skuggan och man hör den släpa också när det är alldeles mörkt.
Det är natt.
Det strategiska planetariet vrider sig. Linserna stirrar i mörkret. Natthimlen är full av siffror, och de matas in i ett blinkande skåp, en möbel där det bor energin hos en gräshoppssvärm som kaläter tunnland av Somalias jord på en halvtimma.
Jag vet inte om vi är i begynnelsen eller sista stadiet. Sammanfattningen kan inte göras, sammanfattningen är omöjlig. Sammanfattningen är alrunan – (se uppslagsboken för vidskepelser: ALRUNA undergörande växt som gav ifrån sig ett så ohyggligt skrik när den slets upp ur jorden att man föll död ner. Hunden fick göra det…
Dopfunt av Hegvald från Stånga kyrka på GotlandEn konstnärlig teckning av Alrunan
Kommentar: Första strofen utspelar sig i en medeltida kyrka på Gotland. Diktaren betraktar dess dopfunt och de reliefer som en stenhuggare (Hegvald) ristat i den. Bilderna återger bland annat Kristi födelse och en berättelse om Sankt Stefan och beskrivs som levande (“på väg ut ur stenen”) och dopfunten som en snurrande karusell i minnet. Denna något tumultartade energi ställs i motsats till vattnet i funten, vilken är stilla och fridfull. Vattnet som en symbol (speciellt i en dopfunt) kan tillskrivas en religiös betydelse men som så ofta är fallet med Tranströmers symbolik är den aldrig entydig, och den sakrala dimensionen undergrävs senare av en bild av samma vatten som rinner i en dropp på sjukhuset.
Kyrkan är full av ornament och landskapen från de föregående delarna saknas. I diktens tredje stycke inträder en Herr B*** (den sydafrikanske aktivisten Dennis Brutus som en gång satt fängslad på Robben Island). Han säger att för honom är landskap av inget värde–det viktiga är de människor som finns där. Detta kan ses som en inbjudan för Tranströmers dikt att ta en politisk vändning. Tranströmer gör ett försök att skildra människor i landskap genom att beskriva ett foto som var taget 1865 men människorna är svårnådda–de är “på väg att suddas ut”. Det igenkännbara, det förståeliga i bilden är just detaljer i landskapet–krusningarna på vattnet, tallsuset och texturerna i berghällarna. I femte strofen vandrar poeten längsmed en strand i samma landskap och noterar hur samhället förändrats–tystnaden och avskildheten från förr har försvunnit.
Jag tror att de två sista stroferna ska kontrasteras mot varandra. Det första beskriver ett vetenskapligt sökande efter att förstå en plats (planetariet vars astronomer tyder himlavalvet genom att mata siffror i en dator). Det andra är poetens uttryck för omöjligheten att skildra sanningen på detta vis. Att göra så blir också liksom att ta död på den. Tranströmer utvecklar detta genom en symbol–alrunan–och en gammal vidskepelse som fanns kring denna växt (att den gav ifrån sig ett livsfarligt skrik om någon tordes rycka upp den ur jorden).
Del 4
Från läsidan, närbilder.
Blåstång. I det klara vattnet lyser tångskogarna, de är unga, man vill emigrera dit, lägga sig raklång på sin spegelbild och sjunka till ett visst djup–tången som håller sig uppe med luftblåsor, som vi håller oss uppe med idéer.
Hornsimpa. Fisken som är paddan som ville bli fjäril och lyckas till en tredjedel, gömmer sig i sjögräset men dras upp med näten, fasthakad med sina patetiska taggar och vårtor–när man trasslar loss den ur nätmaskorna blir händerna skimrande av slem.
Berghällen. Ute på de solvarma lavarna kilar småkrypen, de har bråttom som sekundvisare–tallen kastar en skugga, den vandrar sakta som en timvisare–inne i mig står tiden stilla, oändligt med tid, den tid som behövs för att glömma alla språk och uppfinna perpetuum mobile.
På läsidan kan man höra gräset växa: ett svagt trummande underifrån, ett svagt dån av miljontals små gaslågor, så är det att höra gräset växa.
Och nu: vattenvidden, utan dörrar, den öppna gränsen som växer sig allt bredare ju längre man sträcker sig ut.
Det finns dagar då Östersjön är ett stilla oändligt tak. Dröm då naivt om någonting som kommer krypande på taket och försöker reda ut flagglinorna, försöker få upp trasan–
flaggen som är så gnuggad av blåsten och rökt av skorstenarna och blekt av solen att den kan vara allas.
Men det är långt till Liepaja.
Kommentar: Poeten betraktar några exemplar av Östersjöns flora och fauna. Till havs råder bleke och i omgivningens stillhet står även tiden stilla. Havets symbolik av oändlighet antyds (“perpetuum mobile”, “ett oändligt tak”) och kontrasteras mot de minutiösa detaljer i landskapet (blåstångens luftblåsor, hornsimpans vårtor, småkrypens rörelser). Havets oändlighet gör den också gränslös men till slut blir poeten också varse de fysiska gränsernas verklighet genom att nämna avståndet till Liepaja, en stad på Lettlands kust.
Del 5
30 juli. Fjärden har blivit excentrisk–idag vimlar maneterna för första gången på åratal, de pumpar sig fram lugnt och skonsamt, de hör till samma rederi: AURELIA, de driver som blommor efter en havsbegravning, tar man upp dem ur vattnet försvinner all form hos dem, som när en obeskrivlig sanning lyfts upp ur tystnaden och formuleras till död gelé, ja de är oöversättliga, de måste stanna i sitt element.
2 augusti. Någonting vill bli sagt men orden går inte med på det. Någonting som inte kan sägas, afasi, det finns inga ord men kanske en stil…
Det händer att man vaknar om natten och kastar ner några ord snabbt på närmaste papper, på kanten av en tidning (orden strålar av mening!) men på morgonen: samma ord säger ingenting längre, klotter, felsägningar. Eller fragment av den stora nattliga stilen som drog förbi?
Musiken kommer till en människa, han är tonsättare, spelas, gör karriär, blir chef för konservatoriet. Konjunkturen vänder, han fördöms av myndigheterna. Som huvudåklagare sätter man upp hans elev K***. Han hotas, degraderas, förpassas. Efter några år minskar onåden, han återupprättas. Då kommer hjärnblödningen: högersidig förlamning med afasi, kan bara uppfatta korta fraser, säger fel ord. Kan alltså inte nås av upphöjelse eller fördömanden. Men musiken finns kvar, han komponerar fortfarande i sin egen stil, han blir en medicinsk sensation den tid han har kvar att leva.
Han skrev musik till texter han inte längre förstod– på samma sätt uttrycker vi något med våra liv i den nynnande kören av felsägningar.
Dödsföreläsningarna pågick flera terminer. Jag var närvarande tillsammans med kamrater som jag inte kände (vilka är ni?) –efteråt gick var och en till sitt, profiler.
Jag såg mot himlen och mot marken och rakt fram och skriver sen dess ett långt brev till de döda på en maskin som inte har färgband, bara en horisontstrimma så orden bultar förgäves och ingenting fastnar.
Jag står med handen på dörrhandtaget, tar pulsen på huset. Väggarna är så fulla av liv (barnen vågar inte sova ensamma uppe på kammarn–det som gör mig trygg gör dem oroliga).
3 augusti. Där ute i det fuktiga gräset hasar en hälsning från medeltiden: vinbergssnäckan den subtilt grågulglimmande snigeln med sitt hus på svaj, inplanterad av munkar som tyckte om escargots–ja franciskanerna var här, bröt sten och brände kalk, ön blev deras 1288, donation av kung Magnus (“Tessa almoso ok andra slika / the möta honom nw i hymmerike”) skogen föll, ugnarna brann, kalken seglades in till klosterbyggena… Syster snigel står nästan stilla i gräset, känselspröten sugs in och rullas ut, störningar och tveksamhet… Vad den liknar mig själv i mitt sökande!
Vinden som blåste så noga hela dagen –på de yttersta kobbarna är stråna allesammans räknade– har lagt sig ner stilla inne på ön. Tändstickslågan står rak. Marinmålningen och skogsmålningen mörknar tillsammans. Också femvåningsträdens grönska blir svart. “Varje sommar är den sista.” Det är tomma ord för varelserna i sensommarmidnatten där syrsorna syr på maskin som besatta och Östersjön är nära och den ensamma vattenkranen reser sig bland törnrosbuskarna som en ryttarstaty. Vattnet smakar järn.
Aurelia aurita eller Öronmanet
Kommentar: Denna del är i sig indelad i mindre, dagboksliknande inlägg. Den 30 juli beskriver poeten vimlet av maneter ochhur de blir formlösa när de dras upp ur havet. Det finns sålunda en koppling mellan maneten och alrunan fråndel 3. Återigen vill Tranströmer betona att han inte kan skriva om Östersjön genom att “rycka upp den” ur dess element. Att skilja den från dess essens vore också att ta död på den.
Detta är dock ingen enkel uppgift och inlägget från den 2:a augusti är ett uttryck för en skrivkramp som poetens genomgår. Han berättar om svårigheten för konstnären att uttrycka sig mot en antagonistisk omgivning. I den fjärde strofen berättar han om en sovjetisk tonsättare (Vissarion Sjebalin) som, motgångar till trots, såsom myndigheternas fördömande, sveket från en elev (tonsättaren Tikhon Kherennikov), anpassandet till regimens propaganda samt en förlamande hjärnblödning ändå lyckas hålla kvar vid musiken.
I strofer sex, sju och åtta återgår poeten till att skriva om sin egen skrivkramp och nämner en ofruktsam studietid, dikter som han skrivit och som han känner att ingen förstår och distraktioner i livet som småbarnsförälder.
I inlägget från den 3:e augusti befinner sig poeten återigen på Runmarö. Han hittar en vinbergssnäcka–en art som introducerats för dess kulinariska värde av franciskaner som bosatte sig på ön under medeltiden. Tranströmer känner en affinitet gentemot snäckan (han kallar henne “syster”), vars villrådiga rörelser liknar Tranströmers egna tvekande i konstnärskapet. Natten faller över ön och det är vindstilla. Förutom den otrygga stillheten avslutas delen med en känslomässig kalhet–sommarns vemod saknas i syrsornas läten, kranen står som en ryttarstaty och vattnet smakar järn.
Del 6
Mormors historia innan den glöms: hennes föräldrar dör unga, fadern först. När änkan känner att sjukdomen ska ta också henne går hon från hus till hus, seglar från ö till ö med sin dotter. “Vem kan ta hand om Maria!” Ett främmande hus på andra sidan fjärden tar emot. Där har de råd. Men de som hade råd var inte de goda. Fromhetens mask spricker. Marias barndom tar slut i förtid, hon går som piga utan lön i en ständig köld. Många år. Den ständiga sjösjukan under de långa rodderna, den högtidliga terrorn vid bordet, minerna, gäddskinnet som knastrar i munnen: var tacksam, var tacksam. Hon såg sig aldrig tillbaka men just därför kunde hon se Det Nya och gripa tag i det. Bort ur inringningen!
Jag minns henne. Jag tryckte mig mot henne och i dödsögonblicket (övergångsögonblicket?) sände hon ut en tanke så att jag–femåringen–förstod vad som hänt en halvtimme innan de ringde. Jag minns henne. Men på nästa bruna foto är den okände– dateras enligt kläderna till förra seklets mitt. En man omkring trettio: de kraftiga ögonbrynen, ansiktet som ser mig rätt in i ögonen och viskar: “här är jag”. Men vem “jag” är finns det inte längre någon som minns. Ingen.
TBC? Isolering?
En gång stannade han i den steniga gräsångande backen från sjön och kände den svarta bindeln för ögonen.
Här, bakom täta snår är det öns äldsta hus? Den låga knuttimrade 200-åriga sjöboden med gråraggigt tungt trä. Och det moderna mässingslåset har klickat igen om alltsammans, lyser som ringen i nosen på en gammal tjur som vägrar att resa sig. Så mycket hopkurat trä. På taket de uråldriga tegelpannorna som rasat kors och tvärs på varann (det ursprungliga mönstret rubbat av jordens rotation genom åren) det påminner om något … jag var där … vänta: det är den gamla judiska kyrkogården i Prag där de döda lever tätare än i livet, stenarna tätt tätt.
Så mycket inringad kärlek! Tegelpannorna med lavarnas skrivtecken på ett okänt språk är stenarna på skärgårdsfolkets ghettokyrkogård, stenarna uppresta och hoprasade. – Rucklet lyser av alla dem som fördes av en viss våg, av en viss vind hit ut till sina öden.
Kommentar: Tranströmer berättar om mormodern (troligen samma bortgångna släkting som är med i del 2). Hon blev tidigt föräldralös, överlämnad till ett kärlekslöst fosterhem och tvungen att jobba som oavlönad piga. Avsnittet om mormodern avslutas genom att återgå till ett barndomsminne när hon låg på sin dödsbädd. En halvtimme innan hon dog fanns det något slags kontakt mellan diktaren och den döende mormodern, men det som utbyttes i denna kontakt är otydligt.
I den andra strofen bläddrar poeten genom ett fotoalbum och betraktar ett kort med en okänd man i. Trots att han är okänd och död sedan länge blir han liksom levande och har en blick som försöker nå ut till poeten. Efter detta betraktar poeten en gammal sjöbod vars takpannor ser ut som gravvårdar i en kyrkogård. Även om dess skrifter är omöjliga att tyda (lik den judiska kyrkogården i Prag) finns det någonting vackert och levande i dem och dikten avslutas med en bild av den gamla, slitna sjöboden som lyser av de dödas närvaro.
Denna sista del handlar om döden och det som lever vidare efter döden. Mormodern, den okände mannen samt takpannorna som står för alla de anonyma människoöden är döda men i samtliga gestaltas något levande. Mormodern kommunicerar ordlöst med barnbarnet på sin dödsbädd, den okände på ett foto når ut med sin blick och takpannorna/gravvårdarna beskrivs som “inringade av kärlek” och “lysande”. Tranströmer vill med denna progression från det individuella till det universella också göra dikten till en mer universell uppskattning av och kärlek till det mänskliga.
Come, my Clarinda, we’ll consume Our joys no more at this low rate: More glorious titles let’s assume, And love according to our state;
For if contentment wears a crown, Which never tyrant could assail, How many monarchs put we down In our utopian commonweal?
As princes rain down golden showers On those in whom they take delight, So in this happier court of ours Each is the other’s favourite.
Our privacies no eye dwells near, But unobservèd we embrace, And no sleek courtier’s pen is there To set down either time or place;
No midnight fears disturb our bliss, Unless a golden dream awake us. For care, we know not what it is, Unless to please doth careful make us.
We fear no enemies’ invasion; Our counsel’s wise and politic: With timely force, if not persuasion, We cool the home-bred schismatic.
All discontent thus to remove What monarch boasts, but thou and I? In this content we live and love, And in this love resolve to die.
That when our souls together fled One urn shall our mixed dust enshrine. In golden letters may be read ‘Here lie content’s late King and Queen.’
One of the most viewed pages on this website is James Paulin’s. What makes this rather bewildering is the fact that Paulin is a completely unknown poet to whom (as far as I know) only a single poem can be ascribed–the one analysed here. I have found no information whatsoever about the man nor the origins of the poem on the internet. Judging by the surname one might guess that he was Irishman and that the poem, along with a spurious name scrawled upon it were stumbled upon in some dusty manuscript in an even dustier British archive. Perhaps it is a fabrication? Perhaps, perhaps…
Maybe the Paulinian mystery is all a part of the popular appeal then–we have a tendency to speak and write most about those authors of whom we know the least–and in writing this post I am reminded of the fabulations conceived around Homer and Shakespeare. While biographical details might elucidate many aspects of a work I tend to find literary criticism that speculates in personal details to be a little unnecessary. A good poem’s force and meaning should be sufficiently autonomous to be felt without knowing the person who stood behind it. Should those details be necessary, I more often than not see it as an aesthetic defect. That is not the case with James Paulin. Long live!
Form:
Eight quatrains in rhymed iambic tetrameter.
Analysis
The first line is so redolent of Marlowe’s The Passionate Shepherd to His Love that one suspects that Paulin had it in mind when conceiving this poem (a link to that poem). Where Marlowe’s love is one of pastoral simplicity however, Paulin’s diverges into something more richly metaphysical. The dominating comparison in the poem is that of love’s immensity and intricacies being akin to a courtly kingdom:
For if contentment wears a crown, Which never tyrant could assail, How many monarchs put we down In our utopian commonweal?
As princes rain down golden showers On those in whom they take delight, So in this happier court of ours Each is the other’s favourite.
The exuberance of such comparisons is cleverly contrasted with passages detailing a private intimacy:
Our privacies no eye dwells near, But unobservèd we embrace, And no sleek courtier’s pen is there To set down either time or place;
And it is this intimacy that trumps all the wealth and grandeur of the court. The use of the word “contentment” to describe the author’s love is to a large extent ironic because on the one hand it is far greater than anything a kingdom could contain. On the other hand, it is perfectly fitting because the author needs nothing else.
All discontent thus to remove What monarch boasts, but thou and I? In this content we live and love, And in this love resolve to die.
That when our souls together fled One urn shall our mixed dust enshrine. In golden letters may be read ‘Here lie content’s late King and Queen.’
This post will attempt to present Tolstoy’s theory of art. The previous posts have discussed his spritual crisis and religious beliefs respectively, and since Tolstoy’s views on art were largely shaped during this same period (starting at around the age of 50), they should to a very large extent be viewed as a continuum thereof. As a matter of fact, his vision of the purpose of art is very much congruous with that of his vision of the meaning of life itself and is in many ways no less radical and iconoclastic. Many of his views are no doubt highly controversial, but I think that even those who strongly disagree with him on any point must admit that he is one of the most interesting and original aesthetic thinkers that the western world has produced. His views on the subject of art are also quite easily accesssible as they are largely contained within a single work of his, What is Art? which I highly encourage everyone to read.
Tolstoy starts his book by presenting and comparing a number of interpretations of the term “art” given by major thinkers on the subject. While the main purpose of this is probably to juxtapose them with his own theory that he will present later on, another is simply to point out that hardly any two philosophers have ever agreed on either the definition of “art” or “beauty”, the latter being generally seen as the very foundation of the former. Starting with the founder of the school of aesthetic philosophy, Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten (1714-1762), to the philosophers of his own day, he roughly divides their views into two separate camps: those who believe that is an objective manifestation of a higher truth (i.e. God) and those who believe its purpose is a subjective experience of pleasure.
”What then follows from all these definitions of beauty offered by the science of aesthetics? If we set aside those totally inaccurate definitions of beauty which do not cover the idea of art, and which place it now in usefulness, now in expediency, now in symmetry, or in order, or in proportionality, or in polish, or in harmony of parts, or in unity within diversity, or in various combinations of all these principles – if we set aside these unsatisfactory attempts at objective definition, all the aesthetic definitions of beauty come down to two fundamental views: one, that beauty is something existing in itself, a manifestation of the absolutely perfect – idea, spirit, will, God; the other, that beauty is a certain pleasure we experience, which does not have personal advantage as its aim.”
A purpose in pitting them against each other, however, is also to support a claim that an objective understanding of art that rests on the vague notion of “beauty” is unattainable:
”An objective definition of art does not exist; the existing definitions, metaphysical as well as practical, come down to one and the same subjective definition, which, strange as it is to say, is the view of art as the manifestation of beauty, and of beauty as that which pleases (without awakening lust). Many aestheticians have felt the inadequacy and instability of such a definition, and, in order to give it substance, have asked themselves what is pleasing and why, thus shifting the question of beauty to the question of taste, as did Hutcheson, Voltaire, Diderot et al. But (as the reader can see both from the history of aesthetics and from experience) no attempts to define taste can lead anywhere, and there is not and can never be any explanation of why something is pleasing to one man and not to another, or vice versa. Thus, existing aesthetics as a whole consists not in something such as might be expected of an intellectual activity calling itself a science – namely, in a definition of the properties and laws of art, or of the beautiful, if it is the content of art, or in a definition of the properties of taste, if it is taste that decides the question of art and its worth, and then, on the basis of these laws, the recognition as art of those works that fit them, and the rejection of those that do not fit them – but instead it consists in first recognizing a certain kind of work as good because it pleases us, and then in constructing such a theory of art as will include all works found pleasing by a certain circle of people.”
In order to stand on more solid ground, Tolstoy argues that it is necessary to reject any theory of art that places “beauty” at its core. Although he hasn’t laid forth his conception of art thus far, one can already assume that art for him must have a more practically relevant purpose.
“Just as people who think that the aim and purpose of food is pleasure cannot perceive the true meaning of eating, so people who think that the aim of art is pleasure cannot know its meaning and purpose, because they ascribe to an activity which has meaning in connection with other phenomena of life the false and exclusive aim of pleasure. People understand that the meaning of eating is the nourishment of the body only when they cease to consider pleasure the aim of this activity. So it is with art. People will understand the meaning of art only when they cease to regard beauty – that is, pleasure – as the aim of this activity. To recognize beauty, or the certain kind of pleasure to be derived from art, as the aim of art, not only does not contribute to defining what art is, but, on the contrary, by transferring the question to a realm quite alien to art – to metaphysical, psychological, physiological, and even historical discussions of why such-and-such a work is pleasing to some, and such-and-such is not pleasing, or is pleasing to others – makes that definition impossible. ”
Now that the stage is set, Tolstoy gets underway with presenting his definition of art. Briefly,
“Art is that human activity which consists in one man’s consciously conveying to others, by certain external signs, the feelings he has experienced, and in others being infected by those feelings and also experiencing them.”
Tolstoy uses the word communion–an intimate kind of sharing and communication–in conjunction with his understanding of art. He thereby associates a quality of human necessity to it. Further, he suggests that the means of this communication are not intellectual, but emotional:
”Just as, owing to man’s capacity for understanding thoughts expressed in words, any man can learn all that mankind has done for him in the realm of thought, can in the present, owing to the capacity for understanding other people’s thoughts, participate in other people’s activity, and can himself, owing to this capacity, convey the thoughts he has received from others, and his own as they have emerged in him, to his contemporaries and to posterity; so, owing to man’s capacity for being infected by other people’s feelings through art, he has access to all that mankind has experienced before him in the realm of feeling, he has access to the feelings experienced by his contemporaries, to feelings lived by other men thousands of years ago, and it is possible for him to convey his feelings to other people.”
What might strike one with this definition is that it greatly opens the field for what can constitute art, and Tolstoy admits this:
“We are accustomed to regard as art only what we read, hear, see in theatres, concerts and exhibitions, buildings, statues, poems, novels… But all this is only a small portion of the art by which we communicate with one another in life. The whole of human life is filled with works of art of various kinds, from lullabies, jokes, mimicry, home decoration, clothing, utensils, to church services and solemn processions. All this is the activity of art. Thus we call art, in the narrow sense of the word, not the entire human activity that conveys feelings, but only that which we for some reason single out from all this activity and to which we give special significance.”
Tolstoy is far from claiming that he is unique in viewing art in this way. He even states that this, until fairly recently, has been the way that all people looked on it:
“This special significance has always been given by all people to the part of this activity which conveys feelings coming from their religious consciousness, and it is this small part of the whole of art that has been called art in the full sense of the word. This was the view of art among the men of antiquity – Socrates, Plato, Aristotle. The same view of art was shared by the Hebrew prophets and the early Christians; it is understood in the same way by the Muslims and by religious men of the people in our time.”
The reader should particularly keep the phrase “religious consciousness” (for Tolstoy, the correct way of living one’s life) in mind from the extract above as it is central to Tolstoy’s understanding of the purpose of art. He claims that art has up until quite recently always been the manifestation of a society’s religious consciousness:
“If religion places the meaning of life in earthly happiness, in beauty and strength, then art that conveys the joy and zest of life will be considered good art, while art that conveys feelings of delicacy or dejection will be bad art, as was thought among the Greeks. If the meaning of life lies in the good of the nation or in continuing the way of life of the ancestors and revering them, then art that conveys the feeling of joy in the sacrifice of personal good for the good of the nation or the glorification of the ancestors and the maintaining of their tradition will be considered good art, while art that expresses feelings contrary to these will be considered bad, as among the Romans and the Chinese. If the meaning of life lies in liberating oneself from the bonds of animality, then art that conveys feelings which elevate the soul and humble the flesh will be good art, as it is regarded among the Buddhists, and all that conveys feelings which enhance the bodily passions will be bad art.”
And he laments the loss of such a consciousness in nineteenth-century Europe, for whom art had instead become a vacuous vehicle of diversion for the upper class. And so it perhaps becomes clearer why Tolstoy, whose understanding of art is otherwise quite open, is so dismissive of so much of it–even of works that we would take for granted in just about any canon. Art should make manifest the the ideas and feelings that point toward the meaning of life: to serve the will of God, which for Tolstoy meant self-renunciation, humility and universal love. Good art is art that embraces these virtues. Bad art is bad because by shunning such virtues it is also immoral. Art that instead exists solely for the purpose of pleasure is therefore immoral.
It is probably in this judgment that Tolstoy is going to be appear most controversial to others. To further elucidate what good and bad art was to him, I feel that the best thing would be to give some examples that appear in the book. Some specific artists that Tolstoy rejects (and they are in all likelihood only a drop in the bucket in comparison to the “bad” artists who go unnamed) include include Wagner and Beethoven in music along with almost all opera; Shakespeare and Ibsen in drama; Dante, Goethe and Baudelaire in poetry and Manet, Monet and all depictions of miracles in the visual arts. He is particularly excoriating of the novel (not least the ones he himself authored) as in general being the pastimes of the self-conceit, lust and world-weariness of the European upper classes.
An example of “bad art” —The Miracle of Saint Mark by Iacopo Tintoretto
Even more interesting no doubt must be the examples of art that Tolstoy considers good. Examples of works of the highest order are those that he sees as universally accessible and understandable and include, in literature, certain biblical stories (a recurring example is that of Joseph), Victor Hugo’s Les Miserables, Charles Dickens’ A Tale of Two Cities, George Eliot’s Adam Bede, Friedrich Schiller’s Robbers, Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin and Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s Dead House. Below this, Tolstoy considers works that are valid expressions of religious truth but are only comprehensible to a certain nation and society. Among these he mentions some literary works like the plays of Molière, Don Quixote and David Copperfield alongside certain short stories by Gogol, Pushkin and Maupassant.
In music, Tolstoy appears to appreciate songs from folk traditions more than anything else. While dismissive of most “classical” music, works from this genre that he does mention as being examples of “good” art include the still very commonly played Air by Bach(https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GkWjO8ZJcpc), and Chopin’s Nocturne, Op. 9 No. 2 (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p29JUpsOSTE)along with certain passages by Haydn, Mozart, Schubert and Beethoven.
In painting he often cites paintings that depict a sympathetic view of the hardships of rural life, such as Jean-François Millet’s Man with a Hoe:
Man with a Hoe – Jean-François Millet
He also approves of works that express an accurate aversion to moral iniquity. Here he cites Nikolai Ge’s Judgment of the Sanhedrin:
Judgment of the Sanhedrin – Nikolai Ge
and Alexander von Liezen-Mayer’s painting of Queen Elizabeth signing Mary Stuart’s death sentence:
Signing the Death Sentence – Alexander von Liezen-Mayer
Towards the end of What is Art? Tolstoy elaborates on the degeneration of art of his own time and the negative effects of bad art on human beings. Besides the huge waste of material resources and human life that both then and now go into producing art that is of no value, he particularly laments its corrupting capacity–not just because it diverts us from the natural conditions of life, but because it all too often inspires, through patriotic superstitions and licentiousness, the perpetuation of much suffering and evil in the world.
Just as in his more directly religious works, where Tolstoy sees the Kingdom of God as necessarily being at hand, so in rejecting most art that has ever been produced, he sees the inevitability of a radical reunderstanding of it as having come. The few works mentioned above would be considered by Tolstoy to be indications of the forms that art of the future would come to take:
”The art of the future – that is, as much of art as will be singled out from the whole of art spread among mankind – will consist not in the conveying of feelings accessible only to some people of the wealthy classes, as happens now, but will be that art alone which realizes the highest religious consciousness of the people of our time. Those works alone will be considered works of art which convey feelings drawing people towards brotherly union, or such all-human feelings as will be able to unite all people. Only such art will be singled out, allowed, approved and disseminated. But art that conveys feelings coming from obsolete religious teachings, outlived by the people – Church art, patriotic art, sensual art, art that conveys the feelings of superstitious fear, pride, vanity, the admiration of heroes, art that arouses sensuality or an exclusive love of one’s own nation – will be regarded as bad, harmful art, and will be condemned and despised by public opinion. All the rest of art, which conveys feelings accessible only to some people, will be considered unimportant, and will be neither condemned nor approved. And, generally, it will not be a separate class of rich people that appreciates art, but the whole people; so that for a work of art to be recognized as good, to be approved and disseminated, it will have to satisfy the demands, not of some people who live in identical and often unnatural conditions, but of all people, of the great mass of people who are in natural working conditions.”
And as such Tolstoy places on both art and the artist a supreme importance in society, for they are the heralds that will help usher in the Kingdom of God on earth. He ends the book thus:
”The artist of the future will understand that to invent a little tale, a touching song, a ditty, an amusing riddle, a funny joke, to make a drawing that will give joy to dozens of generations, or to millions of children and adults, is incomparably more important and fruitful than to write a novel or a symphony or paint a picture that will for a short time divert a few members of the wealthy classes and then be forgotten for ever. The realm of this art of simple feelings accessible to all is enormous and as yet almost untouched.”
…
“The task facing art is enormous: art, genuine art, guided by religion with the help of science, must make it so that men’s peaceful life together, which is now maintained by external measures – courts, police, charitable institutions, workplace inspections, and so on – should be achieved by the free and joyful activity of men. Art should eliminate violence.
I started the last post by claiming that perhaps no work has had such a profound influence upon me as that of Tolstoy’s non-fiction. While I certainly will not renege on that statement, I am at the same time not going to pretend that I have overhauled my life with the often very strenuous and radical principles that are laid out therein. I am not even claiming to agree with all of them–what I mean was rather the impression that they had and continue to have on me, for in comparison with just about any other author that I have read, I have never found myself so completely bowled over by such a force of truth as I have with Tolstoy.
That all might seem like a bit of a cowardly cop out since I understand perfectly well that for Tolstoy ideology mattered nothing unless practically applied in the world. Where I have therefore been personally convinced by something he has written but have not put it into practice myself is plainly the result of personal shortcoming.
With that out of the way, let’s get into the core of this post–namely, to present what constituted Tolstoy’s religious beliefs.
Tolstoy identied himself as a Christian, and through him Christianity–which throughout my fundamentally atheistic upbringing had seemed so outlandish–for the first time ever made sense to me. To weed out what constitutes Tolstoyan Christianity, however, it is necessary for the reader to briefly suspend any definition he or she has of that word, for while Tolstoy certainly used it to describe himself and his worldview, what he meant by it is so radically different from any other manifestation of Christianity that I can think of. Now that I come to think of it, it wouldn’t surprise me if Tolstoy called himself a Christian for no other reason than to distinguish himself from the institutionalised church of his day, which he considered fundamentally anti-Christian.
For Tolstoy, Christianity was exclusively a practical guide to how one ought to live one’s life, and this was exemplified by Christ and his moral teaching. It is nonetheless important to note that Tolstoy did not believe that this truth was exclusive to Christianity, rather, he held that the truths revealed by Christ were universally dwelling in the hearts of all men, and that many particularly wise individuals throughout history–among them Christ–have recognised and proclaimed these:
Both before Christ and after Him men have said the same: that there lives in man a divine light, sent down from heaven, and that light is ‘reason,’ and each must follow that light alone, seeking for good by its aid alone. This has been said by the Brahmin teachers, by the Hebrew prophets, by Confucius, Socrates, Marcus Aurelius, Epictetus, and by all truly wise men who were not compilers of philosophical theories, but who sought the truth for their own good and that of all men.
What I Believe
With all this in mind one might perhaps wonder why he called himself a Christian in the first place. The answer to this is that he felt that nowhere were these truths more clearly and eloquently stated than through Christ, particularly in his Sermon on the Mount. He held that Christ’s moral precepts, particularly the command of not resisting evil, were so evident and true that they was the only principles by which humans could reasonably co-exist. Turning the other cheek and loving and forgiving your enemy were not for him unrealistic ideals that could under many conditions be circumvented (as is the case with many major denominations), but rather perfectly rational imperatives. Reflecting his insistence on the practical value of these teachings, Tolstoy in one passage restates them with the admonition: “don’t be foolish”:
Christ says, ‘Never give way to angry feelings, nor consider another as worse than yourself; it is foolish. If you give way to anger, if you abuse others, it will be worse for you.’ Christ says, too, ‘Do not lust after all women, but take one to you, and live with her; it will be better for you.’ He says, likewise, ‘Make no promise, lest you be forced to act foolishly and wickedly.’ He says, likewise, ‘Never return evil for evil, for it will fall back upon you.’ Christ says, ‘Consider no men as strangers to you because they live in other lands and speak in other tongues than you do. If you consider them as your enemies, they will do the same with respect to you, and it will be worse for you. Do not act thus, and it will be better for you.’
What I Believe
It is through fulfilling these principles that we also realise the Kingdom of God. The centrality of this concept is reflected in the title of Tolstoy’s most comprehensive work detailing his worldview, The Kingdom of God is Within You. It also reflects his belief in the worldly nature of the Kingdom as well as our personal responsibility in bringing it about. In his more prophetic passages he sees the inevitability of it’s foundation as having come:
So that the prophecy that the time will come when men will be taught of God, will learn war no more, will beat their swords into plowshares and their spears into reaping-hooks, which means, translating it into our language, the fortresses, prisons, barracks, palaces, and churches will remain empty, and all the gibbets and guns and cannons will be left unused, is no longer a dream, but the definite new form of life to which mankind is approaching with ever-increasing rapidity.
But when will it be?
Eighteen hundred years ago to this question Christ answered that the end of the world (that is, of the pagan organization of life) shall come when the tribulation of men is greater than it has ever been, and when the Gospel of the kingdom of God, that is, the possibility of a new organization of life, shall be preached in the world unto all nations. (Matt. xxiv. 3-28.) But of that day and hour knoweth no man but the Father only (Matt. xxiv. 3-6), said Christ. For it may come any time, in such an hour as ye think not.
To the question when this hour cometh Christ answers that we cannot know, but just because we cannot know when that hour is coming we ought to be always ready to meet it, just as the master ought to watch who guards his house from thieves, as the virgins ought to watch withlamps alight for the bridegroom; and further, we ought to work with all the powers given us to bring that hour to pass, as the servants ought to work with the talents entrusted to them. (Matt. xxiv. 43, and xxvi. 13, 14–30.)
The Kingdom of God is Within You
Tolstoy’s Christian pacifism was also the basis of his acceptance of anarchism. He saw the state, legitimised through the use of violence, as well as the ideologies propping it up as being evil:
To deliver men from the terrible and ever-increasing evils of armaments and wars, we want neither congresses nor conferences, nor treaties, nor courts of arbitration, but the destruction of those instruments of violence which are called governments, and from which humanity’s greatest evils flow.
To destroy governmental violence, only one thing is needed: it is that people should understand that the feeling of patriotism, which alone supports that instrument of violence, is a rude, harmful, disgraceful, and bad feeling, and, above all, is immoral. It is a rude feeling, because it is one natural only to people standing on the lowest level of morality, and expecting from other nations such outrages as they themselves are ready to inflict; it is a harmful feeling, because it disturbs advantageous and joyous, peaceful relations with other peoples, and above all produces that governmental organisation under which power may fall, and does fall, into the, hands of the worst men; it is a disgraceful feeling, because it turns man not merely into a slave, but into a fighting cock, a bull, or a gladiator, who wastes his strength and his life for objects which are not his own but his Governments’; and it is an immoral feeling, because, instead of confessing one’s self a son of God (as Christianity teaches us) or even a free man guided by his own reason, each man under the influence of patriotism confesses himself the soil of his fatherland and the slave of his government, and commits actions contrary to his reason and his conscience.
Patriotism and Government
So far Tolstoy’s brand of Christianity might not seem so radically different from that of some groupings that you might be able to think of, but just as we have to highlight what Tolstoy’s Christianity consisted of, so do we need to point out what it did not consist of. This list is quite extensive and here the divergence from mainline Christianity should become more obvious.
As I mentioned, Christianity was for Tolstoy an exclusively, practical relation to the world. Anything that he found absurd, incomprehensible or contradictory was promptly done away with. This included many of the basic doctrines that make up the foundations of Christian belief, including the Trinity, original sin, the atonement, the resurrection, Christ’s divinity and many more, not to mention his rejection of most of the Bible itself, including the Pauline epistles, as well as the rituals and outward practices of the Church.
Not even the gospels themselves, the only books where Tolstoy found religious value, were infallible, but admixtures of occasionally very noble truths with immoral and blasphemous falsehoods. In the quest of getting to the flashes of truth, Tolstoy learnt Greek and translated and consolidated the Gospel stories into one, bringing together all the parts of the Christ story that he found credible, comprehensible and of value while rejecting those that he found irrelevant, absurd and immoral in his Gospel in Brief, published in 1881. In a vaster work, The Four Gospels Unified and Translated, published the same year, he provides a far more meticulous commentary on this work while detailing his method of translation:
God has revealed the truth to men. I am a man, and so am not only entitled, but also compelled, to make use of it and stand face to face with it without any mediation. If God speaks in these books, he knows the weakness of my mind and will speak in such a way as not to lead me into deception. The argument of the church that the interpretation of the scripture by individuals must not be permitted, lest those who interpret it be led astray and the interpretations multiply greatly, can have no meaning for me. It might have had a significance, if the interpretation of the church were intelligible, and if there were but one church and one interpretation; but now, since the interpretation of the church about the Son of God and about God, about God in three persons, about the virgin who bore a son without losing her virginity, and about the blood of God which is eaten in the form of bread, and so forth, can find no place in my sound mind, and since there are thousands of different interpretations, this argument, no matter how often repeated, can have no meaning whatever. Now, on the contrary, an interpretation is needed, and it has to be such that all could agree on it. But an agreement will only then be possible when the interpretation is rational, in spite of our differences. If this revelation is the truth, it cannot and must not fear the light of reason, if it wishes to be convincing, and is obliged to invoke this light. If the whole revelation will turn out to be abused, so much the better, and God help it. God can do anything but this: he cannot talk nonsense. And it would be stupid to write a revelation which cannot be understood.
The Four Gospels Unified and Translated
He believed that the Church’s insistence on the infallibility of scripture inhibited the understanding of Christ’s message and further, was the cause of the great ruptures seen throughout the history of Christianity:
The church erred in this, that, wishing more emphatically to reject what was not received by it, and to give more right to what it did receive, it put one general seal of infallibility on what it accepted. Everything is from the Holy Ghost, and every word is true. With this it ruined and harmed everything which it received. By inevitably accepting this strip of the tradition the white, the bright, and the grey, that is, the more or less pure teaching, and by imposing on everything the seal of infallibility, it deprived itself of the right to combine, exclude, elucidate what was accepted, which, indeed, was its duty to do, and which it has never done. Everything is sacred: the miracles the Acts of the Apostles, Paul’s advice concerning the wine, and the delirium of the Apocalypse, and so forth, so that after the eighteen hundred years of their existence these books lie before us in the same coarse, clumsy, absurd, contradictory form in which they have ever been. By assuming that every word of the Scripture is sacred truth, the church tried to combine, elucidate, solve the contradictions, and understand, and did everything which could be done in this sense, that is, gave the greatest possible meaning to what is absurd.
The Four Gospels Unified and Translated
Yet these are far from Tolstoy’s harshest attacks on the Church. They are rather innocuous in comparison to his execrations of religious institutions and figures that sanction and promulgate what he conisdered the greatest of all evils: war. The following extract is from an essay entitled Bethink Yourselves!, written in response to the Russo-Japanese war of 1905.
Christian pastors continue to invite men to the greatest of crimes, and continue to commit sacrilege, praying God to help the work of war; and, instead of condemning, they justify and praise that pastor who, with the cross in his hands on the very scene of murder, encouraged men to the crime. The same thing is going on in Japan. The benighted Japanese go in for murder with yet greater fervour, owing to their victories; the Mikado also reviews and rewards his troops; various Generals boast of their bravery, imagining that, having learned to kill, they have acquired enlightenment. So, too, groan the unfortunate working people torn from useful labor and from their families. So their journalists also lie and rejoice over their gains. Also probably—for where murder is elevated into virtue every kind of vice is bound to flourish—also probably all kinds of commanders and speculators earn money; and Japanese theologians and religious teachers no less than the masters in the techniques of armament do not remain behind the Europeans in the techniques of religious deceit and sacrilege, but distort the great Buddhistic teaching by not only permitting but justifying that murder which Buddha forbade. The Buddhistic scientist, Soyen-Shaku, ruling over eight hundred monasteries, explains that although Buddha forbade manslaughter he also said he could never be at peace until all beings are united in the infinitely loving heart of all things, and that, therefore, in order to bring into harmony that which is discordant it is necessary to fight and to kill men.
Tolstoy recognised that religious fawning on the state and its affairs has always existed and, though horrified, would not in the least have been surprised had he lived today to see Kirill, the current Patriarch of Moscow, giving his blessing to the Russian invasion of Ukraine. I wish he were alive to excoriate such hypocrisy and sacrilege because words fail me in trying to express my own indignation.
***
I hope this has given you a rough background of Tolstoy’s religious beliefs. They of course amounted to much more than this, and many of the lesser practices and principles that he espoused, such as vegetarianism, asceticism, sexual abstinence and many more, have not been touched on at all. I can only encourage you to read his works in order to find out more about them. Very many excellent translations of them are easily available in the public domain.
The fact that this series of posts was published in conjunction with Russia’s (to this day ongoing) invasion of Ukraine was no coincidence. I originally conceived the idea for it by asking myself what Tolstoy, perhaps the greatest example of Russian genius to have existed, would have made of it all had he been alive to witness it.While the reader will probably be able to guess an answer to that question I willlet the posts themselves explain itin detail.
It is tragically inevitable that cultural heritage will be weaponised in times of war,and it wouldn’t surprise me one bit if some political propagandist out there has twisted Tolstoy’s legacy, however unambiguous it is on the subject, to make it seem like it is part of something that Russia is out in Ukraine defending or, even more bizarrely, thathe would have condoned this invasion and been himself in the vanguard, clad in tactical gear and brandishing an assault rifle.
But every time I revisit his works, and those of so many other Russian cultural figures whom I admire so dearly, I recomfort myself knowing that these monuments are not here to serve the interests of just one people, one culture or one nation, but are as gifts to all humanity born out of only the most noble parts of a beautiful tradition and culture.
–The author
This is the first post that I write on a subject that is not poetical. I did not really have this in mind when starting this blog, though at the same time I never had any clear vision as to where this website would end up going when I first started it.
This is the first post of a planned three on Tolstoy’s non-fiction. The first will explore Tolstoy’s spiritual awakening and crisis, the second the foundations of his radical brand of Christianity and the third his view on art.
If I reflect on all the authors that I have read, I think no-one has influenced my worldview more than Leo Tolstoy and his philosophical/religious writings. I’m afraid most people shrug these off as being secondary to his novels–the perhaps eloquent but misguided ramblings of a titan well past his prime. Tolstoy himself, however, considered these works to be of far greater value than his novels–as a matter of fact, he considered his two masterpieces, War and Peace and Anna Karenina, to have been utter artistic failures.
Tolstoy’s renunciation of his own fiction has its origins in a profound spiritual crisis that he suffered in his fifties. He had by that point published both War and Peace and Anna Karenina and was widely considered to be the greatest novelist alive, if not the greatest of all time, yet in spite of this considered both his work and life to have been completely pointless. He came to this conclusion after having been confronted by a simple existential question that everyone faces and to which he had no answer: Why should I live, hope or to do anything with my life when the inevitability of death will destroy it all?
Tolstoy uses an oriental allegory to explain how he viewed his life:
There is an old eastern fable about a traveller who is taken unawares on the steppes by a ferocious wild animal. In order to escape the beast the traveller hides in an empty well, but at the bottom of the well he sees a dragon with its jaws open, ready to devour him. The poor fellow does not dare to climb out because he is afraid of being eaten by the rapacious beast, neither does he dare drop to the bottom of the well for fear of being eaten by the dragon. So he seizes hold of a branch of a bush that is growing in the crevices of the well and clings on to it. His arms grow weak and he knows that he will soon have to resign himself to the death that awaits him on either side. Yet he still clings on, and while he is holding on to the branch he looks around and sees that two mice, one black and one white, are steadily working their way round the bush he is hanging from, gnawing away at it. Sooner or later they will eat through it and the branch will snap, and he will fall into the jaws of the dragon. The traveller sees this and knows that he will inevitably perish. But while he is still hanging there he sees some drops of honey on the leaves of the bush, stretches out his tongue and licks them. In the same way I am clinging to the tree of life, knowing full well that the dragon of death inevitably awaits me, ready to tear me to pieces, and I cannot understand how I have fallen into this torment. And I try licking the honey that once consoled me, but it no longer gives me pleasure. The white mouse and the black mouse – day and night – are gnawing at the branch from which I am hanging. I can see the dragon clearly and the honey no longer tastes sweet. I can see only one thing; the inescapable dragon and the mice, and I cannot tear my eyes away from them. And this is no fable but the truth, the truth that is irrefutable and intelligible to everyone.
A Confession
At this point in life Tolstoy seriously considered suicide–not as a rash escape from some kind of unbearable mental breakdown, but rather as a despairing logical consequence of being unable to answer life’s fundamental question. In The Kingdom of God is Within You, Tolstoy speaks at further length on the topic:
People are astonished that every year there are sixty thousand cases of suicide in Europe, and those only the recognized and recorded cases–and excluding Russia and Turkey; but one ought rather to be surprised that there are so few. Every man of the present day, if we go deep enough into the contradiction between his conscience and his life, is in a state of despair.
Not to speak of all the other contradictions between modern life and the conscience, the permanently armed condition of Europe together with its profession of Christianity is alone enough to drive any man to despair, to doubt of the sanity of mankind, and to terminate an existence in this senseless and brutal world. This contradiction, which is a quintessence of all the other contradictions, is so terrible that to live and to take part in it is only possible if one does not think of it–-if one is able to forget it.
The Kingdom of God is Within You
He was not going to take his own life without expending all of his energy in an attempt to finding a solution to this question, however. Tolstoy found both philosophy and science fundamentally inept at providing an answer and so instead, turned to religion. The term “religion” is one that scholars will say is almost impossible to define, but Tolstoy had a clear definition of his own. For him,
The essence of any religion lies solely in the answer to the question: why do I exist, and what is my relationship to the infinite universe that surrounds me?
Religion and Morality
Not being able to reach an answer to these questions through his own pursuits, Tolstoy briefly converted to and accepted the rites of the Russian Orthodox Church. His conversion to orthodoxy was prompted through his perceived inability of personally understanding God and his divinely ordained purpose, but that this could be resolved by subordinating his belief to the Church, which, with all its theology, traditions and mystical rites, did understand it.
One can see why Tolstoy would have been uncomfortable with this. In his work, even in his fiction, one is struck by an almost ruthless insistence of representing and understanding sheer truth. In converting to orthodoxy, he had put much of this tenacity on hold, but everything that seemed absurd and conradictory in the Church’s practices quickly became too much to bear. Tolstoy’s dilemma was perhaps not much nearer to being solved, but it certainly had taken a step forward:
While listening to the church services I paused at each word and whenever I could I gave it meaning. In the liturgy the most significant words for me were: ‘Love one another in unity.’ But further on I ignored the words: ‘We believe in the Father, the Son and the Holy Ghost’, because I could not understand them.
A Confession
One sees in passages like the one above that there was something in the Christian faith that deeply resounded with Tolstoy–its doctrines of love, humility and self-denial–and that he wanted to winnow this from the incomprehensible chaff–its dogma and ritualistic superstition–that made up most of the church’s practices. Tolstoy quickly started drifting away from any conceivable branch of Christianity and became a church of one. Nonetheless, he unflinchingly identified as a Christian, and I suspect that a large part of this identification was actually to distinguish himself from most of the Christian institutions of his day, most of which he considered to be fundamentally unchristian.
Tolstoy’s hostility toward the Church was not something he was going to keep to himself, and It is no suprise that Tolstoy was excommunicated and excoriated by many prominent Christian figures of his day. He doesn’t hold back when going on the offensive:
Indeed no other faith has ever preached things so incompatible with reason and contemporary knowledge, or ideas so immoral as those taught by Church Christianity. This is without mentioning all the nonsense in the Old Testament, such as the creation of light before the sun, the creation of the world six thousand years ago, the housing of all the animals in the ark, and all the various immoral atrocities such as the order to murder children and entire populations at God’s command. Nor have we mentioned the absurdity of the sacrament of which Voltaire said that there have been and are a great many absurd religious teachings, but never before was there one in which the main religious act consists in eating your own God. And what can be more ridiculous than saying that Our Lady was both mother and virgin, or that the heavens opened up and a voice rang forth, or that Christ flew up to heaven and is seated up there somewhere, at the right hand of His father, or that God is three persons in one, not three gods like Brahma, Vishnu and Shiva, but three combined in one. There can be nothing as immoral as those dreadful teachings according to which an angry and vengeful God punishes everyone for the sin of Adam, or that he sent his son to earth to save us, knowing beforehand that men would murder him and be damned for it. Again it is absurd to suggest that man’s salvation from sin lies in baptism, or in believing that all these things actually happened, and that the son of God was killed in order to save people and that those who do not believe it will be punished by God with eternal torment. And so, putting aside those things some people consider to be additions to the essential religious dogma, such as faith in certain relics or icons of the Virgin Mary, prayers of supplication, addresses to various saints according to their speciality, or the Protestant doctrine of predestination, even so the very premises of this religion, accepted by all and formulated in the Nicene Creed, are so ridiculous and immoral, and so contradictory to healthy human feeling and reason, that people cannot believe in them. They can repeat certain words with their lips, but they cannot believe in things devoid of meaning. One can use one’s lips to say: ‘I believe the world was created six thousand years ago’, or: ‘I believe in God the Father in three persons’, but no one can believe it all because the words make no sense. Therefore, the people of our world who profess a distorted form of Christianity do not actually believe in it. This is the peculiarity of our times.
What is Religion and of What Does Its Essence Consist?
All this might perhaps leave you wondering what made up the foundation of Tolstoy’s Christian beliefs. I will get to that in the coming post.
Wilhelm von Gegerfelt, Vinterlandskap med gård i aftonstämning
En film som alla bör se, både för dess historiska och estetiska värde, är Landet som inte längre är (2012) av Peter Gerdehag. Filmen skildrar kvarlevorna av det småskaliga jordbruksamhälle som en gång utgjorde den verklighet som de allra flesta i detta land levde i. Det övergripande temat är döden, och detta skildras i första hand genom filmens centrala gestalter, Sture och Britta Caremalm, på en bondgård i Kroxhult, Småland. Som titeln antyder, verkar denna film samtidigt på ett mycket högre plan där Sture och Brittas öde företräder bortgången av en hel epok–ja, ett helt land som är vitt skilt från det landet vi idag lever i.
Filmen hade sålunda enkelt kunnat falla i en fåfäng sentimentalitet, men den undviker detta. Dess styrka ligger snarare i dess oansenlighet–där livets annalkande slut blir en lika anspråkslös och naturlig del av tillvaron som en höstbris bland vissnande blad. Detta återspeglas också i Sture och Brittas helt okonstlade inställning till livet–som in i det sista var präglat av enformighet, hårt arbete och materiell torftighet men som ändå var en självklar gudagåva.
Det är denna värld som Anders Österling skildrar i Lantlig kyrkogård. Dikten är från 1917 och fastän den utspelar sig i en verklighet som de flesta i Sverige fortfarande kände igen och levde i kan man redan här antyda ett vemod över dess bortgång.
Lantlig kyrkogård – Anders Österling
Konvolvens lätta blomsterrevor hänga som tusen klockspel på de dödas gravar, i allvarsam ligusterhäck de klänga och snärja vandraren, som namnen stavar.
Här vilar salig kantorn och poeten, så ljuv i rim som väldig i koraler, och själen fröjdar sig, att menigheten har rest en vård för modiga riksdaler.
Här står i vattenglas konvaljbuketten som gärd åt hustrun Boel Andersdotter, en av de små som knöto stramt schaletten och höllo ut i undanskymda lotter.
Här slumrar sjökaptenen, havets offer, som kände hamnarna från Kap till Kalmar, här unge åbosonen Lars Kristoffer, vars värld begränsades av hembyns almar.
Det är ett folk av levande personer, ehuru boende på undantaget; och den som läser korsens inskriptioner blir snart bekant med hela byalaget.
Se–blott en kalkmur skiljer från varandra en by för livet och en by för döden och vad den ena dock är lik den andra med sol och lummighet och mänskoöden.
Den enas gröngräs är den andras svepning, och i min dröm fördjupas detta grannskap och blir en släktidyll, en livsupprepning av samma människor i samma landskap.
Byns barnaröster äro eftermälen, som klinga trösterikt bland korsens skogar, och död är liv så länge bygdesjälen går lugnt i arv med sädesfält och plogar.
Form: Åtta korsrimmade strofer i jambisk pentameter.
Analys:
Poeten vandrar genom en kyrkogård som ligger tätt intill en by och läser namnen på gravvårdarna. Han noterar namnens tilläggstitlar (en kantor, en hustru, en kapten, en lantbrukare) och föreställer sig kunna se ett helt samhälle växa fram, som om den nästan vore vid liv igen:
Det är ett folk av levande personer, ehuru boende på undantaget; och den som läser korsens inskriptioner blir snart bekant med hela byalaget.
Avståndet mellan by och kyrkogård är knapp, och därmed är också de levandes och de dödas världar:
Se–blott en kalkmur skiljer från varandra en by för livet och en by för döden och vad den ena dock är lik den andra med sol och lummighet och mänskoöden.
I bysamhällets uråldriga livsföring är döden och livet mer nära sammanfogade, där livet blir en kontinuitet av det förgångna:
Den enas gröngräs är den andras svepning, och i min dröm fördjupas detta grannskap och blir en släktidyll, en livsupprepning av samma människor i samma landskap.
Den sista strofen kan till synes uttrycka en lugnande tröst att denna kontinuitet skall fortsätta, men det finns någonting ytterst vemodsfullt i konjunktionen “så länge” :
Byns barnaröster äro eftermälen, som klinga trösterikt bland korsens skogar, och död är liv så länge bygdesjälen går lugnt i arv med sädesfält och plogar.
A not so recognisable Sydney Harbour, painted by Arthur Streeton in 1907
Five Bells
Time that is moved by little fidget wheels Is not my time, the flood that does not flow. Between the double and the single bell Of a ship’s hour, between a round of bells From the dark warship riding there below, I have lived many lives, and this one life Of Joe, long dead, who lives between five bells.
Deep and dissolving verticals of light Ferry the falls of moonshine down. Five bells Coldly rung out in a machine’s voice. Night and water Pour to one rip of darkness, the Harbour floats In the air, the Cross hangs upside-down in water.
Why do I think of you, dead man, why thieve These profitless lodgings from the flukes of thought Anchored in Time? You have gone from earth, Gone even from the meaning of a name; Yet something’s there, yet something forms its lips And hits and cries against the ports of space, Beating their sides to make its fury heard.
Are you shouting at me, dead man, squeezing your face In agonies of speech on speechless panes? Cry louder, beat the windows, bawl your name!
But I hear nothing, nothing…only bells, Five bells, the bumpkin calculus of Time. Your echoes die, your voice is dowsed by Life, There’s not a mouth can fly the pygmy strait— Nothing except the memory of some bones Long shoved away, and sucked away, in mud; And unimportant things you might have done, Or once I thought you did; but you forgot, And all have now forgotten—looks and words And slops of beer; your coat with buttons off, Your gaunt chin and pricked eye, and raging tales Of Irish kings and English perfidy, And dirtier perfidy of publicans Groaning to God from Darlinghurst. Five bells.
Then I saw the road, I heard the thunder Tumble, and felt the talons of the rain The night we came to Moorebank in slab-dark, So dark you bore no body, had no face, But a sheer voice that rattled out of air (As now you’d cry if I could break the glass), A voice that spoke beside me in the bush, Loud for a breath or bitten off by wind, Of Milton, melons, and the Rights of Man, And blowing flutes, and how Tahitian girls Are brown and angry-tongued, and Sydney girls Are white and angry-tongued, or so you’d found. But all I heard was words that didn’t join So Milton became melons, melons girls, And fifty mouths, it seemed, were out that night, And in each tree an Ear was bending down, Or something that had just run, gone behind the grass, When blank and bone-white, like a maniac’s thought, The naphtha-flash of lightning slit the sky, Knifing the dark with deathly photographs. There’s not so many with so poor a purse Or fierce a need, must fare by night like that, Five miles in darkness on a country track, But when you do, that’s what you think. Five bells.
In Melbourne, your appetite had gone, Your angers too; they had been leeched away By the soft archery of summer rains And the sponge-paws of wetness, the slow damp That stuck the leaves of living, snailed the mind, And showed your bones, that had been sharp with rage, The sodden ectasies of rectitude. I thought of what you’d written in faint ink, Your journal with the sawn-off lock, that stayed behind With other things you left, all without use, All without meaning now, except a sign That someone had been living who now was dead: ”At Labassa. Room 6 x 8 On top of the tower; because of this, very dark And cold in winter. Everything has been stowed Into this room – 500 books all shapes And colours, dealt across the floor And over sills and on the laps of chairs; Guns, photoes of many differant things And differant curioes that I obtained…”
In Sydney, by the spent aquarium-flare Of penny gaslight on pink wallpaper, We argued about blowing up the world, But you were living backward, so each night You crept a moment closer to the breast, And they were living, all of them, those frames And shapes of flesh that had perplexed your youth, And most your father, the old man gone blind, With fingers always round a fiddle’s neck, That graveyard mason whose fair monuments And tablets cut with dreams of piety Rest on the bosoms of a thousand men Staked bone by bone, in quiet astonishment At cargoes they had never thought to bear, These funeral-cakes of sweet and sculptured stone.
Where have you gone? The tide is over you, The turn of midnight water’s over you, As Time is over you, and mystery, And memory, the flood that does not flow. You have no suburb, like those easier dead In private berths of dissolution laid– The tide goes over, the waves ride over you And let their shadows down like shining hair, But they are Water; and the sea-pinks bend Like lilies in your teeth, but they are Weed; And you are only part of an Idea. I felt the wet push its black thumb-balls in, The night you died, I felt your eardrums crack, And the short agony, the longer dream, The Nothing that was neither long nor short; But I was bound, and could not go that way, But I was blind, and could not feel your hand. If I could find an answer, could only find Your meaning, or could say why you were here Who now are gone, what purpose gave you breath Or seized it back, might I not hear your voice?
I looked out my window in the dark At waves with diamond quills and combs of light That arched their mackerel-backs and smacked the sand In the moon’s drench, that straight enormous glaze, And ships far off asleep, and Harbour-buoys Tossing their fireballs wearily each to each, And tried to hear your voice, but all I heard Was a boat’s whistle, and the scraping squeal Of seabirds’ voices far away, and bells, Five bells. Five bells coldly ringing out. Five bells.
It would be hard for me to argue that Kenneth Slessor is some kind of paragon of Australian poetry, but one could very well argue that Five Bells, by far his masterpiece, is the best poem written by an Australian–it is at least as good as any other I’ve read.
Five Bells, a reference to the five tollings of a ship’s bell, is a meditation on death explored through the fate of one of Slessor’s friends, Joe Lynch, who died by drowning in Sydney Harbour. The poem is scattered with many biographical details in the lives of both, and while these will be explained to some extent in the analysis below, they are scarcely necessary in order to appreciate the poem. The fact of the matter is that many of these details were entirely unknown to me before doing some research to write this post.
While Slessor remains a quite a well-known literary figure in Australia, his fame has not really spilled over onto an international readership. The cause behind this cannot be purely aesthetic, so I would rather speculate that it has to do with a certain prejudice towards Australian artists and the expectation that they be in touch with the romantic heart of the country–namely, the bush. This would at least explain the Les Murrays and Judith Wrights have received more publicity than the Kenneth Slessors or Peter Porters, say. Slessor was through-and-through a city lover and has little time for such rural sentimentality.
This is not at all to say that Slessor was any less an “Australian” poet. His poetry perhaps more accurately speaks for the experiences of modern Australia, which is today one of the world’s most urbanised countries.
Form
Blank verse
Analysis
The fact that the first stanza is written in italics indicates that we should see it as being in some way distinct from the rest of the poem. This difference has to do with voice, and while the rest of this poem can be said to be Slessor speaking, the first stanza is told from the perspective of a being (perhaps Death himself) for whom time is relative, and who, in the intervals of the tolling of a ship’s bell, is able to relive the life of a human being, in this case that of Joe Lynch:
Time that is moved by little fidget wheels Is not my time, the flood that does not flow. Between the double and the single bell Of a ship’s hour, between a round of bells From the dark warship riding there below, I have lived many lives, and this one life Of Joe, long dead, who lives between five bells.
The stanza that follows is an image of Sydney Harbour seen from below the surface of the water:
Deep and dissolving verticals of light Ferry the falls of moonshine down. Five bells Coldly rung out in a machine’s voice. Night and water Pour to one rip of darkness, the Harbour floats In the air, the Cross hangs upside-down in water.
The “Cross” could give a religious connotation, or even be a bit humoristically interpreted as a reference to “King’s Cross”–Sydney’s red light district, but these interpretations are wrong. It is rather the constellation, the Southern Cross, inverted on the face of the dark harbour water.
In the third stanza Slessor’s voice really comes into the picture. This must be some time since Lynch’s death, but involuntarily, in the stillness of the night and hearing the solemn sound of the bells, Slessor is haunted by his dead mate:
Why do I think of you, dead man, why thieve These profitless lodgings from the flukes of thought Anchored in Time? You have gone from earth, Gone even from the meaning of a name;
The impression is so strong that this memory is turned into an almost physical presence here. Slessor feels Lynch’s proximity in death’s dimension and implores him to make an effort to reach out to him:
Yet something’s there, yet something forms its lips And hits and cries against the ports of space, Beating their sides to make its fury heard.
Are you shouting at me, dead man, squeezing your face In agonies of speech on speechless panes? Cry louder, beat the windows, bawl your name!
But it is all in vain, and the inability to comprehend the mystery of death is the main theme of the poem. All that is left for Slessor to cling to are the memories of the dead man:
But I hear nothing, nothing…only bells, Five bells, the bumpkin calculus of Time. Your echoes die, your voice is dowsed by Life, There’s not a mouth can fly the pygmy strait— Nothing except the memory of some bones Long shoved away, and sucked away, in mud; And unimportant things you might have done, Or once I thought you did; but you forgot, And all have now forgotten
What follows are three specific memories that the poet has of Lynch. The first is of conversations at the Riverside vineyard in Moorebank, a popular venue for many of Sydney’s artists and eccentrics at the time:
Then I saw the road, I heard the thunder Tumble, and felt the talons of the rain The night we came to Moorebank in slab-dark, So dark you bore no body, had no face, But a sheer voice that rattled out of air (As now you’d cry if I could break the glass), A voice that spoke beside me in the bush, Loud for a breath or bitten off by wind, Of Milton, melons, and the Rights of Man, And blowing flutes, and how Tahitian girls Are brown and angry-tongued, and Sydney girls Are white and angry-tongued, or so you’d found.
The second memory is from Melbourne, where Slessor and Lynch first met and were colleagues at the Melbourne Punch magazine. He recalls entries from Lynch’s journal and reproduces them here, together with their orthographical errors. Their banality might be questioned but they give the reader an eery intimacy with Lynch:
I thought of what you’d written in faint ink, Your journal with the sawn-off lock, that stayed behind With other things you left, all without use, All without meaning now, except a sign That someone had been living who now was dead: ”At Labassa. Room 6 x 8 On top of the tower; because of this, very dark And cold in winter. Everything has been stowed Into this room – 500 books all shapes And colours, dealt across the floor And over sills and on the laps of chairs; Guns, photoes of many differant things And differant curioes that I obtained…”
The third and final memory is from Sydney, where Slessor and Lynch moved after the Melbourne Punch stopped publication in 1926. In Sydney Lynch had returned to live with his family. A rather lenghty reference is made to his father, a stonemason and sculptor who had grown blind in old age:
And they were living, all of them, those frames And shapes of flesh that had perplexed your youth, And most your father, the old man gone blind, With fingers always round a fiddle’s neck, That graveyard mason whose fair monuments And tablets cut with dreams of piety Rest on the bosoms of a thousand men Staked bone by bone, in quiet astonishment At cargoes they had never thought to bear, These funeral-cakes of sweet and sculptured stone.
The penultimate stanza returns the reader to Slessor by the Harbour at night. The reminiscence of Lynch’s life and death turn into a more general meditation on death:
I felt the wet push its black thumb-balls in, The night you died, I felt your eardrums crack, And the short agony, the longer dream, The Nothing that was neither long nor short; But I was bound, and could not go that way, But I was blind, and could not feel your hand. If I could find an answer, could only find Your meaning, or could say why you were here Who now are gone, what purpose gave you breath Or seized it back, might I not hear your voice?
And the final stanza is more on the same theme as the bells ring out their mystery for the last time:
At waves with diamond quills and combs of light That arched their mackerel-backs and smacked the sand In the moon’s drench, that straight enormous glaze, And ships far off asleep, and Harbour-buoys Tossing their fireballs wearily each to each, And tried to hear your voice, but all I heard Was a boat’s whistle, and the scraping squeal Of seabirds’ voices far away, and bells, Five bells. Five bells coldly ringing out. Five bells.
Pilen som kastar sig upp mot ljuset mattas snart och vänder och borrar sig ned i jorden. Den som flyr från tyngden fångas av tyngden. Varför fly från sig själv? Att finna sig själv är ju konsten: att sluta sin andakt i trängre och trängre kretsar kring hostian i sin egen mitt, den dolda solen, som bränner allt och ger liv åt allt– Där födes, oberört av den tunga jorden, undret som inte är jag och ändå mitt egnaste: molnet av blommor, genomandat av gryningens ljus.
Så gott som alla Kurt Almqvists skrifter genomsyras av en okonvenionell religiös världsbild. Han var konvertit till sufismen och förutom detta Sveriges mest framstående språkrör för philosophia perennis (“den eviga visdomen”)–en religionsfilosofisk strömning som menar att världens religiösa traditioner är i grunden uttryck för en och samma gudomlig essens.
Det är därför föga förvånande att Almqvists viktigaste intellektuella eftermäle är som religionsfilosof. Hans första inklination tycks dock ha varit till poesin och bland de första publicerade verken kan man räkna två diktsamlingar, Vallfärd till mitten och Gryningen är pärlemor. Även om han inte lät publicera fler dikter än dessa under sitt liv vore det lite orättvist att tolka detta som ett skärt uppbrott med poesin eller en verkan av intellektuell mognad. Almqvist må aldrig ha återvänt till vers men de dikter som han skrev utgör en sammanhängande del av av hans livsverk och samma idéer och andliga strävan kan urskönjas lika väl i hans diktning som i hans essäistik.
Det är väldigt ledsamt att Almqvists dikter nästan helt fallit i glömska i dag. Några av dessa kan räknas bland de finaste religiösa dikterna som vi har i det svenska språket.
Form
Frivers
Analys
De första tre raderna visar bilden av en pil som skjuts upp mot himlen för att sedan återvända till marken. Att pilen är siktad mot “ljuset” ger en aning om att den strävar mot någon högre insikt eller kunskap. Almqvist menar dock att denna strävan är förgäves–pilens energi utmattas innan den når sitt mål och återvänder till dess ursprung. Det externa sökandet av det gudomliga ljuset är ouppnåeligt, men den interna är inte det:
Varför fly från sig själv? Att finna sig själv är ju konsten: att sluta sin andakt i trängre och trängre kretsar kring hostian i sin egen mitt, den dolda solen, som bränner allt och ger liv åt allt–
Man behöver kanske inte tolka dikten i strikta religiösa termer, men ordvalet gör denna tolkning ganska självklar (“ljuset”, “hostian”, “andakt”). Den kan vidare tolkas i ljuset av Almqvists perennialistiska världsbild: extremiteterna av pilens färd motsvarar religionens yttre, exoteriska manifestering (dess riter och dogmer, till exempel), men i dess ursprungskälla finner man dess universella och esoteriska kärna.
Denna kärna finns i den enskilde individen och det är där som vi finner ett förenande med det absoluta:
Där födes, oberört av den tunga jorden, undret som inte är jag och ändå mitt egnaste: molnet av blommor, genomandat av gryningens ljus.
This is an extract from part of a larger poem by Thomson entitled The Seasons. The entirety can be read here: https://www.lookingtoleeward.se/james-thomson-1700-1748/
And yet the wholesom herb neglected dies In lone obscurity, unpriz’d for food; Altho’ the pure, exhilerating soul Of nutriment and health, salubrious breathes, By Heaven infus’d, along its secret tubes. For, with hot ravine fir’d, ensanguin’d man Is now become the lyon of the plain, And worse. The wolf, who from the nightly fold Fierce-drags the bleating prey, ne’er drunk her milk, Nor wore her warming fleece: nor has the steer, At whose strong chest the deadly tyger hangs, E’er plow’d for him. They too are temper’d high, With hunger stung, and wild necessity, Nor lodges pity in their shaggy breasts. But Man, whom Nature form’d of milder clay, With every kind emotion in his heart, And taught alone to weep; while from her lap She pours ten thousand delicacies, herbs, And fruits, as numerous as the drops of rain, Or beams that gave them birth: shall he, fair form! Who wears sweet smiles, and looks erect on heaven, E’er stoop to mingle with the prowling herd, And dip his tongue in blood? The beast of prey, ‘Tis true, deserves the fate in which he deals. Him, from the thicket, let the hardy youth Provoke, and foaming thro’ the awakened woods With every nerve pursue. But you, ye flocks, What have ye done? Ye peaceful people, what, To merit death? You, who have given us milk In luscious streams, and lent us your own coat Against the winter’s cold? Whose usefulness In living only lies? And the plain ox, That harmless, honest, guileless animal, In what has he offended? He, whose toil, Patient and ever-ready, cloaths the land With all the pomp of harvest; shall he bleed, And wrestling groan beneath the cruel hands Even of the clowns he feeds? And that perhaps To swell the riot of the gathering feast, Won by his labour? This the feeling heart Would tenderly suggest: but ’tis enough, In this late age, adventurous to have touch’d, Light on the numbers of the Samian sage. High Heaven beside forbids the daring strain, Whose wisest will has fix’d us in a state, That must not yet to pure perfection rise.
James Thomson’s The Seasons was included in Oscar Wilde’s list of “Books not to be read at all”. I am not sure to what extent this was seriously meant (it is hard to imagine Wilde ever being serious about anything at all), nor on what grounds he included it, though I hope it wasn’t purely aesthetically motivated. One of the most popular poets of his day, I believe he has been unjustly forgotten. He is one of the finest and most fluent craftsmen of blank verse in English (as good as any) and in contrast to the age in which he lived–bountenous of wit yet barren of soul–Thomson’s poetry stands out by containing a sensibility and humanity that presages the romantic movement that would kick off towards the end of his century.
Thomson’s artistic sensitivity also extends to an ethical one in the extract above. It is naïve to assume that a good poet must also be a good human being, yet poetry in its best manifestations is always one that exudes feelings and thoughts that are morally noble, upright and universally humane. It is hard in those moments to not see those qualities as grafted to the very fibre of their human vehicle, and so I cannot help when reading the lines above but imagine that Thomson was anything other than a good bloke.
Where love dwells it must also extend beyond itself to encompass all forms of life. A compassion that does not do so is tainted and incomplete. Think of how inhumane–not to mention psychopathic–we consider someone who remains cold-blooded and unflinched in the face of a suffering animal. And in regard to mankind’s relation to animals, particularly in our slaughtering and eating of them, Thomson points out one the most infuriating hypocrisies of our condition. The predating animal does not pity his prey, yet Man, born
With every kind emotion in his heart, And taught alone to weep (…) ..shall he, fair form! Who wears sweet smiles, and looks erect on heaven, E’er stoop to mingle with the prowling herd, And dip his tongue in blood?
How much more infuriating this is when one considers how far humanity has morally progressed today and yet how, with the industrialisation of agriculture, our treatment of animals has at the same time become far worse, with unprecedented levels of brutality on scales that are almost unimaginable–beyond homeric, beyond biblical: https://www.anonymousforthevoiceless.org/kill-counter. I cannot think of a greater example of callous, hypocritical human selfishness when I remind myself that we do this because our tastes take precedence over our moral responsbilities.
There will, mark my words, come a time when mankind superates this stumbling block in our development and we will look back at our current complacency and complicity in this crime with bafflement and horror, much as we look back today in shock at the complacency and complicity of good, ordinary people in the perpetuation of slavery.
I hope my reader will in the end stand on the right side of history in this question. Who knows–if the book-burnings of cancel-culture are still ablaze at that time to engulf all the authors who ate meat and did not repent of their ways, perhaps it will at least spare the works Thomson at the unfortunate expense of just about everyone else.
