Friday
I look forward to the Nobel Literature Prize because it often introduces me to authors I don’t know. I’m somewhat embarrassed to admit that I barely know the poetry of American poet Louise Glück, this year’s recipient, but I like what I’m finding on the web.
In “Mother and Child,” a mother finds herself attempting to explain to her child who we are and why we are here. Other existential questions are why we suffer and why we are ignorant. In her search for answers, she looks both to the biological history of the human race and to the child’s specific genetic lineage.
Answers are elusive and she acknowledges that she, like all of us, has had to improvise. What else can we do as “cells in a great darkness”? Knowing that her child will be just as driven to find answers as she has been, she encourages him or her to follow the ancient line of thought. “It is your turn to address it,” she says.
By framing it within a mother and child framework, she gives the question a special intimacy and a special urgency. The address to a child follows a poetic tradition that I wrote about recently that includes W. B. Yeats and Anthony Hecht and, in fiction, Marilynne Robinson (Gilead).
We’re all dreamers; we don’t know who we are.
Some machine made us; machine of the world, the constricting family.
Then back to the world, polished by soft whips.
We dream; we don’t remember.Machine of the family: dark fur, forests of the mother’s body.
Machine of the mother: white city inside her.And before that: earth and water.
Moss between rocks, pieces of leaves and grass.
And before, cells in a great darkness.
And before that, the veiled world.
This is why you were born: to silence me.
Cells of my mother and father, it is your turn
to be pivotal, to be the masterpiece.
I improvised; I never remembered.
Now it’s your turn to be driven;
you’re the one who demands to know:
Why do I suffer? Why am I ignorant?
Cells in a great darkness. Some machine made us;
it is your turn to address it, to go back asking
what am I for? What am I for?
