One More Contradiction (As translated from Polish)
Czeslaw Milosz
Did I fulfill what I had to, here, on earth?
I was a guest in a house under white clouds
Where rivers flow and grasses renew themselves.
So what if I were called, if I was hardly aware.
The next time early I would search for wisdom.
I would not pretend I could be just like the others:
Only evil and suffering come from that.
Renouncing, I would choose the fate of obedience.
I would suppress my wolf's eye and greedy throat.
A resident of some cloister floating in the air
With a view on the cities glowing below,
Or onto a stream, a bridge and old cedars,
I would give myself to one task only.
Which then, however, could not be accomplished.
My first note on it:
As for the poem, it eludes me.
What is he renouncing?
What does he mean he’d choose the fate of obedience?
Obedience makes me think of obeying convention, a duty filled, rote life, but he wouldn’t pretend he’s just like the others. And”the others” suggests to me those who live routine lives.
I’m still not seeing what a cloister floating in the air is? I get that a cloister here seems to suggest a cloistered life, a life removed from the daily hurly burly but why floating in the air?
And why give himself to one task only?
And I’m not getting the connection between his floating cloister and his imagined single task devotion, though as I write this, the thought comes to me that his reference to “obedience” might relate to the intimation of a life of piety as maybe suggested by “some cloister.” But, be that thought on or off the mark, I’m nowhere near able to put this all together.
Btw, he’s not renouncing his “wolf’s eye“ and “greedy throat” is he? Or is he? Renounce typically goes to giving up some right or claim, like citizenship or some such.
R:
My main beef with it is that it feels like (what is the case I of course don't know) the writer SET OUT TO WRITE A POEM rather than had an experience which moved him to write. It’s idea driven rather than passion driven (and by passion I don't mean noisy passion, but some emotional seriousness or comic spirit in what the speaker says.
Its meaning seems obvious.
Person has a sense late in life of having had no calling, or if called did not hear it, just drifted like many others through life, no big deal. Now imagines a "next time," which is actually funny now I say it, as there obviously isn't, but now merely fancies a different life, also funny, "I would, I would" as if that was anything but more or less what he had been doing, nothing of moment. And the lack of feeling in the last line caps it off. Even the imagined recognition of his futility doesn't much move him. He is in imagination what he was in life, and found neither very satisfying for reasons he does not understand. Another person without whatever it is makes life more than getting by. But the poem itself ends by being itself dreary.
Me:
Thanks.
I’m opposite of you in having a sense of only some impressions of what bits of it might mean but that I can’t put together and that raise more questions for me than answers, your nice comments, much appreciated, notwithstanding. I give Milosz the benefit of my doubt: it’s me, not him. I just have to, want to, come to better terms with
I liked it right off the bat even not understanding it. It has a feel to it, the glimmering for me of an idea that attracts me even while I’m in the dark about it for the time being, for my being and time—a bit of Heideggerian humour.
I say nothing prescriptive about how poems come about. Their genesis, be it in passion, from an experience, from someone just mucking around, whatever, is irrelevant to me. All that matters for me is whether I like the poem, whether I sense it works for me, and whether I’m prompted, which I am by it, to work at getting it. I also couldn’t care less whether a poem is idea driven, or any other way driven, save for by a driverless car, as long as I feel it works for me.
R:
I can't argue with that. I get impatient when I am not getting it in some sense, to some degree, or the drift, the first or second time round. Not quite true. Sometimes it sounds very good but makes no sense. Hart Crane's Repose of Rivers sounded fine to me, but who was speaking on what occasion I didn't get. Then one day it struck me, it was a river speaking on its journey to the sea. Boom! Actually Kafka has been like that a few times. Once I suddenly realized what I, like everyone, thought was deep allegory, when suddenly I was laughing, it was comedy, very weird, but very funny. I later learned that Kafka used to read it aloud and crack up his friends. (It was The Trial and of course turned dark further on.)
Me—a few days later:
Hey, maybe I have it.
It’s the poetry of calculated absurdity, cleverly meant cynically not to make any sense, intended as a series of paradoxes, contradictions and non sequiturs, so even the title shares this, one more contradiction and instance of meaninglessness among many in the poem. So the questions I posed you in an earlier note, why this, why that, what does this or that mean, how do this and that go together, they’re all unanswerable. As in gaze down on “glowing cities,” “a stream, a bridge and old cedars.” One wants to add, “whatever.“
There’s a hard to accomplish complex tone of mordancy, flippancy, world weariness, dreariness, sad playfulness, depression, black humor, satire, deep self deprecation, mockery and self mockery, nihilism, fatigue and other things. Describing the tone is like peeling away the layers of an onion. The effect is quite an achievement.
So if you meant it’s finally “dreary,” as in it’s a dull, dreary poem, a bad poem for that, I disagree. If you meant it gives off the effect of dreariness and it’s a good poem for that, then I’d agree, but add that the effect includes but isn’t reducible to dreariness.
P.S. Add resignation, listlessness and indifference to the elements of the tone.
Me:
I right off intuited that there was something about this poem that I liked. I instinctively liked its tone and how self assured whatever it was that I couldn’t understand seemed. The images intrigued me as did the philosophicality of it. I kept going back to it. I kept trying to make sense of of its parts. I kept trying to interrelate them. Then this afternoon, trying yet once more, like a bone the dog in me kept coming back to chew on, I suddenly had an “aha” moment. It came unbidden. How does that even happen, as though my unconscious was working overtime for no pay and then just waiting to explode into consciousness as an insight? And after it arrived, I felt a little tremor of pleasure at it. Then I started thinking about it and the more I did the more it felt right to me and the more suffused with pleasure I became. Now I wonder if anyone else sees the poem as I do. I couldn’t find, without searching intently, any commentary of it.
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