Prompt: The Music of Dreams
TOMAS TRANSTRÖMER
I’d love to make a prompt inspired by Nobel prize-winning poet Tomas Transtromer. It could be a music prompt, but to do so would be wholly incomplete — as to sit down for a first piano lesson and attempt to play Mozart. But maybe we could attempt Haydn instead?
Let’s call the prompt The Music of Dreams.
Transtromer’s thoughts often emerge from sleep. I imagine him with a notepad by the bed, scribbling thoughts in midnight moonlight — ideas that were vague feelings in the daytime are now full verses piercing the darkness with the crystal clarity and nonsensical reasoning of dreams.
I will echo Teju Cole’s recommendation to read Robert Bly’s translations compiled in a volume called Half-Finished Heaven. Absolutely spectacular. Not at all the sort of poetry collection to purchase and put on a shelf, this is what you read and re-read until you have memorized. Some of my notes are below — you’ll need to track down the book for the full poems.
Transtromer’s poetry is full of delighful contradiction. Not either-or choices, but opposing dreams that are completely true. As he describes, like “a biblical saying never set down: ‘Come unto me, for I am as full of contradictions as you.’”
The music is a house of glass standing on a slope; rocks are flying, rocks are rolling. The rocks roll straight through the house but every pane of glass is still whole.
We look almost happy out in the sun, while we bleed to death from wounds we don’t know about.
Transtromer’s work can be beautiful and scathing — he is not afraid of dreams or reality: “We do not surrender. But want peace.”
The people who run death’s errands for him don’t shy from daylight. They rule from glass offices. They mill about in the bright sun. They lean forward over a desk, and throw a look to the side.
He celebrates humanity and critiques it simultaneously. Contradiction is the crowning achievement.
Teju Cole wrote a beautiful essay in the New Yorker about the collection:
“The satisfaction, the pleasure, the comfort one takes in these poems comes from the way they seem to have preexisted us. Or perhaps, to put it another way, the magic lies in their ability to present aspects of our selves long buried under manners, culture, and language. The poems remember us and, if we are perfectly still, give us a chance to catch sight of ourselves.”
Absolutely, “the poems remember us.” This is what great poetry is — not that we find the poems, but that the poems find us, sniff us out. We are discovered as much as we discover.
Walk in the tracks of the badger. Growing hard to see, nearly dark. Stones lie about on the moss. One of those stones is precious. It can change everything. It can make the darkness shine. It’s the light switch for the whole country. Everything depends on it. Look at it … touch it …
Give the excerpts below a read, and please do look up Half-Finished Heaven. Then do create a response — what is the music of your dreams?
Let me know in the comments if you would like to be added as an author.
Thanks!!
David
Allegro
After a black day, I play Haydn, and feel a little warmth in my hands. The keys are ready. Kind hammers fall. The sound is spirited, green, and full of silence. The sound says that freedom exists and someone pays no taxes to Caesar.
I shove my hands in my haydnpockets and act like a man who is calm about it all.
I raise my haydnflag. The signal is: “We do not surrender. But want peace.”
The music is a house of glass standing on a slope; rocks are flying, rocks are rolling. The rocks roll straight through the house but every pane of glass is still whole.
Lamento
He put the pen down. It lies there without moving. It lies there without moving in empty space. He put the pen down. So much that can neither be written nor kept inside!
A Winter Night
A more serious storm is moving over us all. It puts its lips to our soul and blows to make a sound. We’re afraid the storm will blow everything inside us away.
The Half-Finished Heaven
Cowardice breaks off on its path. Anguish breaks off on its path. The vulture breaks off in its flight. The eager light runs into the open, even the ghosts take a drink. And our paintings see the air, red beasts of the ice-age studios. Everything starts to look around.
We go out in the sun by hundreds. Every person is a half-open door leading to a room for everyone. The endless field under us. Water glitters between the trees. The lake is a window into the earth.
Open and Closed Space
A boy runs along with an invisible string that goes right up into the sky. There his wild dream of the future flies like a kite, bigger than his town.
From an African Diary
The one who has arrived has a long way to go. Perhaps a migratory flock of handshakes would help. Perhaps letting the truth escape from books would help. We have to go farther. The student studies all night, studies and studies so he can be free. When the examination is over, he turns into a stair-rung for the next man. A hard road. The one who has arrived has a long way to go.
Morning Bird Songs
Fantastic to feel how my poem is growing while I myself am shrinking. It’s getting bigger, it’s taking my place, it’s pressing against me. It has shoved me out of the nest. The poem is finished.
After a Death
It is still beautiful to hear the heart beat but often the shadow seems more real than the body.
The samurai looks insignificant beside his armor of black dragon scales.
Out in the Open
II
A letter from America drove me out again, started me walking through the luminous June night in the empty suburban streets among newborn districts without memories, cool as blueprints.
Letter in my pocket. Half-mad, lost walking, it is a kind of prayer. Over there evil and good actually have faces. For the most part with us it’s a fight between roots, numbers, shades of light.
The people who run death’s errands for him don’t shy from daylight. They rule from glass offices. They mill about in the bright sun. They lean forward over a desk, and throw a look to the side.
Far off I found myself standing in front of one of the new buildings. Many windows flowed together there into a single window. In it the luminous night sky was caught, and the walking trees. It was a mirrorlike lake with no waves, turned on edge in the summer night. Violence seemed unreal for a few moments.
III.
Sun burning.
The plane comes in low throwing a shadow shaped like a giant cross that rushes over the ground. A man is sitting in the field poking at something. The shadow arrives. For a fraction of a second he is right in the center of the cross.
I have seen the cross hanging in the cool church vaults.
At times it resembles a split-second snapshot of something moving at tremendous speed.
Solitude
I have been walking a while on the frozen Swedish fields and I have seen no one. In other parts of the world people are born, live, and die in a constant human crush. To be visible all the time — to live in a swarm of eyes — surely that leaves its mark on the face. Features overlaid with clay. The low voices rise and fall as they divide up heaven, shadows, grains of sand. I have to be by myself ten minutes every morning, ten minutes every night, — and nothing to be done!
We all line up to ask each other for help. Millions. One.
The Scattered Congregation
I. We got ready and showed our home. The visitor thought: you live well. The slum must be inside you.
II. Inside the church, pillars and vaulting white as plaster, like the cast around the broken arm of faith.
III. Inside the church there’s a begging bowl that slowly lifts from the floor and floats along the pews.
IV. But the church bells have gone underground. They’re hanging in the sewage pipes. Whenever we take a step, they ring.
V. Nicodemus the sleepwalker is on his way to the Address. Who’s got the Address? Don’t know. But that’s where we’re going.
Sketch in October
The tugboat is freckly with rust. What’s it doing here, so far inland? It is a thick lamp, gone out in the cold. But the trees have wild colors: signals to the other shore as if somebody wants to be rescued.
On the way home, I notice inky mushrooms poking up through grass. They are fingers of someone asking for help, someone who has wept for himself a long time down there in the dark.
We belong to earth.
Further In
It’s the main highway leading in, the sun soon down.
Traffic backs up, creeps along, it’s a torpid glittering dragon.
I am a scale on that dragon.
The red sun all at once blazes in my windshield, pouring in, and makes me transparent.
Some writing shows up inside me — words written with invisible ink appearing when the paper is held over a fire.
I know that I have to go far away, straight through the city, out the other side, then step out and walk a long time in the woods.
Walk in the tracks of the badger. Growing hard to see, nearly dark. Stones lie about on the moss. One of those stones is precious. It can change everything. It can make the darkness shine. It’s the light switch for the whole country. Everything depends on it. Look at it … touch it …
December Evening, ’72
Here I come the invisible man, perhaps in the employ of some huge Memory that wants to live at this moment.
And I drive by the white church that’s locked up.
A saint made of wood is inside, smiling helplessly, as if someone had taken his glasses.
He’s alone.
Everything else is now, now, now.
Gravity pulling us toward work in the dark and the bed at night.
The war.
It’s all right to telephone the island that is a mirage. It’s all right to hear the gray voice. To thunder iron ore is honey. It’s all right to live by your own code.
a biblical saying never set down: “Come unto me, for I am as full of contradictions as you.”
Streets in Shanghai
TRANSLATED BY PATTY CRANE
1
The white butterfly in the park is being read by many. I love that cabbage-moth as if it were a fluttering corner of truth itself! At dawn the running crowds set our quiet planet in motion. Then the park fills with people. To each one, eight faces polished like jade, for all situations, to avoid making mistakes.
To each one, there’s also the invisible face reflecting “something you don’t talk about.”
Something that appears in tired moments and is as rank as a gulp of viper schnapps with its long scaly aftertaste.
The carp in the pond move continuously, swimming while they sleep, setting an example for the faithful: always in motion.
2
It’s midday. Laundry flutters in the gray sea-wind high over the cyclists who arrive in dense schools. Notice the labyrinths on each side!
I’m surrounded by written characters that I can’t interpret, I’m illiterate through and through.
But I’ve paid what I owe and have receipts for everything. I’ve accumulated so many illegible receipts. I’m an old tree with withered leaves that hang on and can’t fall to the ground. And a gust from the sea gets all these receipts rustling.
3
At dawn the trampling hordes set our quiet planet in motion. We’re all aboard the street, and it’s as crammed as the deck of a ferry. Where are we headed? Are there enough teacups? We should consider ourselves lucky to have made it aboard this street!
It’s a thousand years before the birth of claustrophobia.
Hovering behind each of us who walks here is a cross that wants to catch up with us, pass us, unite with us.
Something that wants to sneak up on us from behind, put its hands over our eyes and whisper “Guess who!”
We look almost happy out in the sun, while we bleed to death from wounds we don’t know about.
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