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ruinsoftime3winter · 7 years ago

Text

Jean Gebster

http://rubedo.press/propaganda/2017/10/6/jean-gebsers-winter-poem

The Winter Poem (1944)

BY JEAN GEBSER

Translated by Aaron Cheak

Now at last the first snow falls like a blanket upon dim powers. Keep the fire alive now and do not disturb the sleep of roots and seeds. Let nature, who loves to hide, who conceals herself and who left you behind, let her pass, and go even further from her: out beyond the clarities, out beyond the pure, invisible air: What was once water, the fathomless dwelling of all dark voices, froze And found peace: A twofold sleep now lies in all things, where [before] there was merely dreamsleep, and once the year renews, the pale moons no longer find a response from the ponds upon which they shone.—

White winds and white woods, white sky and white mountain, even the white houses, which under their white rooves, almost appear grey against so much white. And then the sun. A single white sun.

Soft shadows, clearly define the contours of bough, branch, and thicket: No longer in abundance, yet each one uniquely this, that, or the other; Exact outlines sketched with precision, against a backdrop of sky and snow: Like hairline cracks shooting through an old glass.

The weaving streets of transience, are enmeshed with the dregs of toil. And cool is the forewarning to life concealed in the gentle traces, which fades from the first abundant clarity, with a mute cry pathless in blind despair. So this is winter: no longer facing the visible revealing the invisible. Now it is here, silent as hoarfrost Looming, frozen and destitute, over the snowladen lands of dawn and evening.

Who speaks of the future? Who qualifies it to say: ‘It will be’? Look without and see within yourself: It [already] is. Moonlike, the voice waxed in earthliness, and every actual waking day a piece of anguish broke out of dark fate broke out of heavy heritage and one blind shard or another broke forth and became knowing. For knowing is no longer fate. We were here: How painfully beautiful that new year was, how exuberantly full that summer, how free from contradiction that one autumn. What was, is; and now it is entirely within you, as long as you know what once was. But who speaks of the past? Only shadows fade; the residues remain. So release the mirror of the past, Let the future go: Visible things are inessential. Winter insists, Winter knows. Winter is powerless, yet unassailable. But power and force never have a future, a blind, black duration of assault, which at the very worst can kill. Winter however is bright, it is white darkness. So in spite of all darkness, awaken! When else, if not in winter, will you triumph? The white slopes of the mountains contain the reflection of an invisible lustre, of which they say: ‘Look, it will be!’ But winter says to you, it is.

What is? Only winter? Its whiteness? Perhaps a white wisdom? How it hurts, in wintry days, that simple word: Evening. And that other word, too: Land. For is there respite from colour in the twilight? Is there respite from terrestrial visibility in the snowfields of an evening sky? in the snowfields of an evening earth? What makes your heart falter and want to say: evening-land? So many questions, you see. And yet: With each question we only ask after ourselves.

The answer is also winter. (And each answer is the redemption of the preceding word)— Take it as a likeness, [a simile] of that final light, which yesterday night appeared upon the highest mountainside: who wanted to distinguish: was it the earth’s last lamp light? Or was it the first star? The shining winter sky is close enough to touch; and you too are this sky. No reason to distinguish. For all the stars flow through your veins. No reason to hearken after the echo of ancient myths, for the angel nested long ago deep in your heart, in its way and brushed the hair from our brows: for the dream of moon and earth has melted away, since it knew heaven; knew it once and for all.

What winter shows you, is the reconciliation of heaven and earth; and the concurrent loss of recompense, of what had only just been gained: from the majority, and from the others.

But listen, too, and hear this above all, through a clear, pure air, which for all invisibilities, and all ineffabilities, is sluggish Hear the call —Like no other— which comes to you from beyond the sky, which now, since winter carefully brought the lunar, the earthly, and even what is beyond them brought them carefully to rest— hear the call, which from beyond the starry firmament knows itself, and knowing, turns to you:

It is the west’s, the evening land’s white hour: it is its final knowing, or wisdom. For the earth, however and for humanity is it a first original foreshadowing. And one day this will be raised up as a new standard.

This is no wonder. Wonder is for the blind. Nothing had ever been so sober, So all wonder fell away, and it was wonderful: Crystalline like it is in the overlapping distances, like it is in winter’s white expanses over-ripening, for what is riper than that fruit and does not need to bloom, what imperishably, prepares itself, so that here and there, faultlessly, without fathoming, neither wound nor wonder, it secludes itself: strewing astonishment, a seed without ground without fruit, without fear, a solitary, crystalline tone, concealed in transparency, the realm of the angel soars above, completely noncommittal, yet beyond indifference, for from this vantage, everything that happens here, seems to the angels equally valid; of no essential difference: nothing follows anything else, For all things: our concerns, our cries, our laughter, have one single significance. of fleeting duration, and their silent accumulation slowly tips the scales from the realm of the stars into trans-stellar equilibrium: an equilibrium beyond the stars

And all this: Moon-waning death And earth-bearing life, are but empty and brittle concepts of appearance and being, of becoming and passing (for even the stars fade away):

Look, things and appearances exist all at once, rightly and correctly—

Is all this an illusion? In any case it is an exchange like everything.

What were once teardrops, were transformed into crystals, what was once laughter, now resounded from the skies: no wonder, that the unified region of life and death, became real, and in recognising this —ah, what a singular fragrance, what a severe tenderness— in recognising this, it conferred that distinct measure of quality, the intimacy of love: that voiceless voice looming from the invisibilities, that the white winter renders perceptible even beyond all visibility, even beyond white day and white night, even beyond known space, and known time.

Everything is real to varying degrees. And yet there is truth, which is sometimes graspable if it is perceivable.

And O how the words of children carried upon the wind just now, O how they resound for me; And as I absorb them, Only now do they speak to me:

‘I’m going home now’.

To the child, mother means peace or bread and anguish: a silent, unknown presence, unthinkingly attached to the earth.

Yet that man there, Who stands carefully at the edge of the street, where he melts, apprehensively, into the gutter, and struggles, on that street whose name is tonight, or perhaps, early tomorrow morning: never again will he emerge from the night-constricted springs of his heart: a spiralling downfall through the brain’s labyrinth into one’s own nameless abyss. And that old woman, who timidly, through the destitution wrought by age, holds the entire wealth of her heart in her hardened hands, hands which still pray— and she calls that heaven, ah, and final salvation. Hope and homecoming, mourning a happily misunderstood bliss.

So they all go home: The owners, the owned, and those who also want to own: All bound none free, and all in one way or another, lost to life, or to death.

They all go through winter and forget the potential: they forget the winter’s clarity of their own hearts: And they are distributed among ancestors who vanish, and there are so many, so the harsh, clear air brings them the brilliant premonition of possible freedom, but they pass it by unknowingly. How closely to each foot and to each hand, how closely to every heart does this threshold run, the threshold which dissolves everything on this side and everything beyond: where our bonding with the outermost heavens, opens bright, hyperwakeful senses.

In the realms of that child, that man, in the realms of that old woman courage is required, and it will even be a courage to say no. (Later they will fetch the others, perhaps after thousands of years).

In the complete bondedness (if there can even be an ‘in’) all that remains is the sacrifice of this two-fold courage: the strict humility, which endures, where nothing else resists, since everything has been cleared from the scales.

Desire and deprivation, do not exist, yet are constantly present.

The dark realm of death and the soul: the exquisite realm of waking life, exquisite yet expensive, for it costs everything and so; the bright realm of sky and sublimation, is a necessary conquest, operating above, complement and fulfilment, where nothing more responds to recognition.

Spring, summer, and autumn too, Felt, done, and known; A picture, a flower, a star, An innerness, an outerness, a togetherness; Rest, movement, and realisation; Sleep, dream, and waking:

All this is thoroughly present and despite being intertwined at all times is also completely differentiated with every breath.

But above all that, and beyond, (you can also say: within all that, it makes no difference): [above all that, and within all that] there is the realm-that-is-no-longer the supra-wakeful realm.

But see too the poverty of knowing: In order to testify to something inexpressible, We even take the likeness [simile] from realms, which are barely even contained by the unsayable:

At the most, language converges, the word is multivalent, ambiguous, with double-meanings

Within sound, lies feeling Within name, lies image Within table, lies thingness And in concepts, at last, lies comprehension.

But what rests behind all this?

Forget the magical flexibility of all this flourishing, which blooms through rose, blackbird, evening.

Do not project any of your words, Nor your memories, which also fade, For already, with each name that we give to things we take a part of their reality away from them. And each name, each word, is unfathomable.

But at the right time, in the good hour language will correspond with what is intended, which is to say: not with the word’s dark origin which knowledge clarifies, but in its compass, its vicinity: in the shimmer, which, because it still visibly vibrates around every word, renders perceivable, what this supra-wakeful wisdom knows. Within, beyond the fountains, rivers, and stars the poet’s task to face the entire contents [of word, language] emerges, and accordingly it is an honest, soundless state of no-longer-speaking.

So soundless is winter, white time. Carefully, let the similitude that made you its sanctuary the likeness that took refuge in you from the invisible image, let it be gentle with you. Hide your face. Keep the poem secret. The angel came. And with it came also the realms beyond.

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ruinsoftime3 · 7 years ago