Most of us are drowning in bewilderment at where the time goes, burning with the urgency of being alive while waiting to start living, wandering the labyrinth of life with wayward presence, wishing that time ran differently as the cult of productivity turns each minute into a blade pressed against the vein of our transience. And all the while, our time is nested within our times — the epoch we are living through together, born into it with no more choice in the matter than the body and brain and family we have been born into. In his magnificent essay on Shakespeare, James Baldwin countered the commonplace lament of every epoch: “It is said that his time was easier than ours, but I doubt it — no time can be easy if one is living through it.” A century before him — a century of unrest and transformation — Emerson issued the ultimate antilamentation: “This time, like all times, is a very good one, if we but know what to do with it.” Not knowing what to do with the time we have been given, not knowing how to hold time in our personal and political lives, is at bottom an act of forgetting how time hold us.
Pablo Neruda (July 12, 1904–September 23, 1973) casts a spell against forgetting in the fourth canto of his long poem “Morning,”: You will remember that whimsical ravine where the vibrant aromas rose, and from time to time a bird dressed in water and languor: winter’s garment. You will remember those gifts from the earth: piquing fragrance, gold clay, thickets of herbs, wild roots, bewitching thorns like swords. You will remember the bouquet you brought, a bouquet of shadow and silent water, a bouquet like foam-covered stone.
And that time was like never and always: We go where nothing is expected and find everything waiting there. If time is the fundamental problem of human life and poetry is our most precise technology for parsing the aching astonishment of being alive, then time is the prime subject of poetry. Neruda knew this — time is the subterranean current coursing beneath his vast and varied body of work, the substrate upon which all of his stunning love poems and his meditations on the inner life grow.
He reverenced the stones for how they have “touched time,” reverenced the minute for how it is “bound to join the river of time that bears us,” reverenced “the inexhaustible springs of time,” longed for “a time complete as an ocean,” then made that ocean with his poetry. In his poem “The Enigmas,” composed during WWII, he writes: You’ve asked me what the crustacean spins between its gold claws and I reply: the sea knows. You wonder what the sea squirt waits for in its transparent bell?
I’ll tell you: it’s waiting for time like you. A decade later, in one of his “Elemental Odes,” Neruda laid out his most explicit instruction for how to hold time: Listen and learn. Time is divided into two rivers: one flows backward, devouring life already lived; the other moves forward with you exposing your life.
For a single second they may be joined. This is that moment, the drop of an instant that washes away the past. Racing, slipping, tumbling like a waterfall.
Extract — continue reading at the source.
