and politics, without naming any names.
I pour him another drink.
“Between you and me,” he says, “I find you at odds
with the new,
not recognising the spirit of the age and
venerating dead masters far too much.
Where in your work is the exhilaration of technology?
Because if technology is our divinity and our destiny
shouldn’t we join together to reflect
on the laws of the Internet?”
Another jenever. With a beer chaser.
“And excuse me for saying so but
you’re sometimes very hermetic.”
Hermetic? Me? In my old age,
with my laughter tamed,
and my thunder all in vain?
Who sits here quivering,
copying the existing
all the same.
“And your rhyming patterns are so obvious,
so childishly obvious.
Rhyme doesn’t do a thing for me.
And apropos of that, what’s actually
the underlying concept in your flossofy?
You don’t leave me any the wiser.”
I think of an earlier life.
The rams’ heads clashed.
The rabbits all had names.
The turkeys gobbled for grain.
I shouldered my air rifle to shoot
the guinea fowl in their granny’s aprons.
I think of faraway countries.
The spectral moon rat that stays alive
because of its stench.
The lamp-eyed lemurs.
The orang pendek that steals children
and loves human liver.
I think of the dead masters.
Byron who kept and numbered
locks of his own hair. His manuscripts.
Lots of crossing out. Lots of second thoughts
but he always left the rhymes intact.
Ezra Pound in the cinema screaming
with laughter at idiotic comedies.
His Ezivursity.
How he kept silent for years and years
then said, “I did it all wrong.”
Stevie Smith who thought that everything
could swim in a wonderful wisdom.
“Stepping stones,” I say.
“Pardon?” he says.
“Stepping stones the poem can follow.
Gezelle and Minne
have led the way.”
And I help him into his coat.
And I lead him to the door.
Outside I point up at the moon.
He keeps staring at my finger.
from In Case of Emergency [2004]
Horizon
The horizon is the language, the language I am
expected to share
with the mutilated child,
the youth who’s become a soldier,
so proud of his boots,
the greybeard with his ripped bowels
in his arms.
It rains phosphorus and sirens.
The voices of my country,
mostly in the television.
Murderous families.
A criminal chorus.
And the blood-slurping gods all around.
Our Century
(for Pierre Alechinsky)
In my youth: smudges, curls
gouges
After my youth: coloured shadows
rusted, scorched
something like a past
written down, photocopied, enlarged
primary colours
— the reeds disobedient—
soot
hay
prickly or smothered in asphalt
Since my youth: salt and wind
Splinters in distant boats
It’s our century
It remains our youth
No better way to
waste it
than surrounded by fingers of grass,
lightning bolts in snow-covered
gardens
Norm
No other expectation—
No assault
No shadow of an offence
The revulsion resounds
up to the last
desecrated song
Imbalance as the norm
Swimming or flying
In nature
with its splotches and rags
Rehearsal
I wish I was dead.
Like forty-five per cent
of Belgians
I have no one
“Because you never invested
in love, sweetie”
I begin
Continue
Sodium thiopental
There, you’re almost unconscious
Then pancuronium bromide
Your lungs fail
Then potassium chloride
And your heart stops
I’ll never remember all that
Eris
There is sorrow’s rubbish
art’s obscene charter
always somewhere always elsewhere.
There is Eris who wanders
on blood-stained feet
searching the thirsty grass
for the bodies of my friends.
When you see her it’s too late.
Die while you, like always,
are saying your hellos.
For Hugo by CEES NOOTEBOOM
An Address Delivered Beside his Coffin at the Farewell Ceremony
Bourla Theatre, Antwerp, 29 March 2008
“Des chênes qu’on abat,” said Malraux on De Gaulle’s death. He was like an oak that has been felled. Suddenly there’s an opening in the forest, a place where light can penetrate and feed new growth. But first there’s a long period of nothing, a large hole, with weirdly shaped roots perhaps, raised up and clawing at the light, as if searching for life. We’re all familiar with such places. Walking through a dark forest, you suddenly come across a strip of clear, filtered light. You can still recall the shape of the enormous tree that stood there, you feel the forest’s phantom pain and your own — something that has always existed is gone. Many friends must have experienced it the same way. Hugo as one of the dead, that was new to us. We’d known him in so many guises and in so many settings, but dead, no, not that. It’s hard to get used to. We still find it difficult to believe. We hear his name constantly around us, in private conversations and broadcast on radio programs and TV talk shows. If there was a platonic listening post floating through space somewhere, it would be continually picking up those sounds, the U, the O, the AU. Hugo Claus. And if we think of all those voices together, making those sounds at the same time, we hear a deafening hurricane with the vowels and consonants of his name, a high-pitched whistling and a gale-force growl, something that takes your breath away, just as those who knew in advance of the day and the hour last week could not breathe on that day and at that hour.
And now? It’s still confusing. That bright spot in the forest, the place where the tree that should have been allowed to stand forever has disap-peared, fills slowly with images — fleeting and clear, melancholy and cheerful. Hugo bowing awkwardly at his umpteenth premiere, Hugo with his voice from the old days reading “Even Now” in an auditorium deep in the provinces, Hugo impatient and restless in a museum in Basel or Venice, but you know that he sees more than you, Hugo asleep next to you in the cinema, Hugo lazing on the couch while on TV the one hundred riders of the Tour de France work themselves into a lather racing up the Tourmalet. Followed by that other Hugo, the Hugo of the last years, the last weeks. Fragile, alert. It was like he was walking on mirrors, and because of that it was partly as if we had to learn how to walk again as well. Because how do you walk in the presence of death? How do you obey the unspoken commandment to avoid sentimentality, the question that is not allowed to be spoken out loud, how do you act at a court you are visiting for the first time, where an invisible guest we haven’t met before joins us at the table, our friend’s new friend, with whom he has a prior engagement? Had someone written our roles without writing them down? And had they made it so that it was impossible for us to act because everything was uncompromisingly real in a way that the theatre can never be real? We didn’t have any lines, how did we know our lines? Ceremonies of farewell, that I see as a gift he has given me for the time I have left, the clink of glasses, quiet conversations about the world that will retain its validity for a little while yet, laughter and song, and through it all that one unmistakable voice, recognizable always and everywhere, with the accent nobody could pin down because it, like the words he spoke in it, was an emissary from such an individual universe that we, the others, could have an inkling of it, but no more than that. No one could come all too close, his work was both an entrance and a barrier, the almost endless mass of words with the equally endless number of ways of combining them in sonnets or novels, dialogues or quatrains, ghazals, film scripts and deliberately lame haikus, litanies and novellas that rose like a rampart around the inner core of his being, which for me lies concealed in his most beautiful line about himself: “a happy man surprised by doubt.”