PRD at Babylonstoren in the Drakenstein Valley, South Africa, December 2017
"Say not the struggle naught availeth"—Arthur Hugh Clough (1855)
The limits of your language are those of your world.
So Wittgenstein asserted, “who had not dreamt of you,”
connard. “What is conceivable can happen too.”*
Extend your petty range to some other song,
or several, whose words take you to the first step
of an ascent rising to a tour d'horizon.
Here's the refrain: « À chaque jour suffit sa peine. »†
With nothing ventured, nothing's bound to gain.
It seemed nothing, too, was worth doing nowadays.
I'd contemplated, striving to advance, my ways,
but naught availing—like a trembling glue-trapped mouse,
caught in a horror show once seeming its own house.
Art, though, I surmised, evades such traps with rhyme
and meter. If it’s untrue, dive in! The glue’s fine!
* Quoted words from Empson, “This Last Pain,” in Collected Poems of William Empson (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1949), 33. “The idea of the poem is that human nature can conceive divine states which it cannot attain,” he says in a note. “A watched pot never boils, and if it boiled would sing” (98). Wittgenstein’s observation is cited in Nicholas Ostler’s Empires of the Word: A Language History of the World (New York: HarperCollins, 2005), 13.
† “Sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof” (Matthew 6:34).
Comentários