Today is Sunday September 16th of 2012 and I spent the day in reflection. Recounting events of my life's journey and how I felt during times where I felt like I lost a piece of my heart or a piece of my identity; somehow thinking, during past space of time, the possibility of how I would recover parts of me that felt like I would never get them back, periods of time in which I experienced deep grief, the type of grief that shuts you down, making it near impossible to function or even rationally think about what you do to survive on a daily basis.
During those periods of my life, I was in college. College was a good place for me to heal, one could say. Not only did I have tremendous obligation to my studies but even with the formidable schedule of study, handling day to day life which was spent working too and little slices of social time, here and there, I found myself drawn to the works of Czeslaw Milosz.
I found him, in author form, one day, in the stacks of literature at my college campus library. I was wandering in the literature section and came across his name and thought to myself,
"What a name this person has! They are not from the western hemisphere, I must find out what they write about, what they think upon and maybe there, in their works of literature, I may discover something about me."
Well, I did. I found out about the deep suffering Milosz endured in his home country - on the outskirts of Russia, having lived in Poland and Lithuania and during tumultuous eras of political and social strife, his family sought safety near the Carpathian Mountains - which lasted for not too long. Eventually, during the years of exile that he and his family endured, Milosz wrote about life in terms of his own worldview that was shaped by the years of exile and post-exile safety of having taught literature and linguistic studies at University of California - Berkeley.
Miloszian philosophy acts like a healing balm to me and I go through periods even today where I have to have my fill of writings authored by Milosz. I've featured two of his poems here before: How It Was & Bells In Winter. In other poetry forum threads, I've left one or two other poems of his, but cannot recall them tonight. Tonight, I leave the poem below as an offering to anyone who might find a strand of thought or glimmer of light as the read this particular Mioszian strand of thought.
Esse
I looked at that face, dumbfounded.
The lights of metro stations flew by; I didn't notice them.
What can be done, if our sight lacks absolute power to devour objects ecstatically, in an instant, leaving nothing more than the void of an ideal form, a sign like a hieroglyph simplified from the drawing of an animal or bird?
A slightly snub nose, a high brow with sleekly brushed back hair, the line of the chin - but why isn't the power of sight absolute? - and, in whiteness tinged with pink two sculpted holes, containing a dark, lustrous lava.
To absorb that face but to have it simultaneously against the background of all spring boughs, walls, waves, in its weepinng, its laughter, moving back fifteen years, or ahead thirty.
To have. It is not even a desire. Like a butterfly, a fish, the stem of a plant, only more mysterious.
And so it befell me that after so many attempts at naming the world, I am able only to repeat, harping on one string, the highest, the unique avowal beyond which no power can attain: I am, she is. Shout, blow the trumpets, make thousands strong marches, leap, rend your clothing, repeating only: is!
She got out at Raspail. I left behind with the immensity of existing things. A sponge, suffering because it cannot saturate itself, a river, suffering because reflections of clouds and trees are not clouds and trees.
Czeslaw Milosz (1954): The Collected Poems 1931 - 1987
Translated by: Czeslaw Milosz and Robert Pinsky
Copyright (c) Czeslaw Milosz and Robert Pinsky (1988).
