The Hölderliniae by Nathaniel Tarn

Author:Nathaniel Tarn
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780811230636
Publisher: New Directions
Published: 2021-04-06T00:00:01+00:00

the hölderliniae 17.

For him the rivers carried life backward and forward. He

loved them dearly as the demigods, brothers and sisters to

other demigods: the poets. True that the rivers begin high

in some deserted alps or towering mountains and true that

they work downward as they move toward sea. But in the

poetry, you cannot ever trust, cannot ever be sure, a stream

for him also does not carry back whatever loads it met on

the sea’s other side. In fine, a river also is the human mind

working in recollection back from ocean into the poet’s life.

The mind is full of stops, full of remembered latitudes and

longitudes of life where the mind’s body dwelt for short or

longer times and, in the recollections, the mind works back

to every kind of source; to every stop along the long, long

way until it rests awhile, looks at deep ocean it has ended in

and can prepare to face a final door, open the door and sink

below the waves, the ships, the islands . . .

Thus I must take you from Rhine and Danube, far from yr.

native Swabia, to a wider world where sundry rivers run

that stopped me in my tracks. I take you to the Thames; the

Seine; the Po; the Tiber; Petersburg’s Neva and then across

old continents over to Ganges; Brahmaputra; an Irrawaddy

and a vast Mekong -- drawing at least three countries into

their final sea -- then to a Yangtze and a Yellow River; the

Baram, the Kinabatangan and the Rajang (Borneo); then

down to the Australian Murray and the Darling. And, after

this, across to Nile, mother of Egypt, and to Zambezi at

Victoria; thus the gigantic falls right there in Africa and

tropical Brazil (the Xingu and the Amazon, the Paraná) up

through volcano country to the Usumacinta, path of the

Maya into my own country, with Mississippi and Missouri

and the American-Canadian huge array of falls around, aha!

Niagara. Nor does the count stop here. No, not far off, after

my own demise, mankind will sail along the boundless seas

of space, finding the Lord alone knows -- should there be a

Lord -- how many rivers, among his countless planets and

the deep stars gone wild beyond all calculation. Did you not

sometimes stop to consider this when looking up at your

sky full of stars still pure, unglazed by so much human light?

To think of it, the stars also have courses up in the oceanic

heavens from which they shine like distant ships carrying

gods backward down to their dwellings -- then humans joy

in their kindness, their tenderness to them while they suffer

the pains of any era and mankind’s lack of culture; wisdom;

lack of the means to move with satisfaction into other ways,

other dimensions, with hearts at rest.

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