The Hölderliniae 3 & 17
It cannot be stressed enough that we live between worlds, between the past governed by an eternal religious order and a future when reason will fulfill its role as a social bond that doesn’t keep on undermining itself. The present is an ever-expanding distance between the two, an interminable durée “lived in the winging blue between the clouds.” And so we have recourse to the Romantics the way they did the Greeks, only instead of finding a perfected state apparatus, philosophy, higher ideals, etc., we just learn how to yearn again. Nathaniel Tarn’s new book of poems The Hölderliniae is a self-conscious commune with the great poets’ poet, with his life and work. Through an intermingling of storytelling and exegesis, Tarn, mixing Hölderlin’s verse with his own, sketches out a schema wherein the reader can learn to “recognize the long known meeting place between yourself and the attempted tasks that must be done.”
—Andrew Christopher Green
THE HÖLDERLINIAE 3.
An insufficiency of language. An excess of language.
The long years studying a language I do not use. The
subjects of discussion are of no interest. I am / I am not.
He: going back to mother -- again, again. I, attempting
to explain huge spider on the curtain as I wake shortly
after birth -- from out the crib. Explaining to her: that is
I cannot. That He cannot desist from path, from choice.
His, His. That He loves her but cannot walk away from that:
His work. She paralyzes him. That perhaps He,
well ... He does not love her.
The He’s surveyed. The He’s investigated. Time and
again they come to check him out. He continues. He
finds seniors who understand him, who wish, in the
beginning at least and last, to help him: to publish him.
He debases himself before them: “The Greats depress me
and exalt me by turn” / “Schlägt mich nieder und erhebt
mich wechselsweise.” His letters to them grovel. He is
speaking to gods but gods do never answer -- at any rate
in language that He can understand. This not a time for
poets. “This not a place for the work of poets” / “nicht
empfänglich für die Gesänge der Dichterkunst.”
Perhaps this never will be. How can our poets work in this
no time, no space, no listening, no understanding? Here too:
I am/I am not. Studenthood was not too painful. Results were
granted. Feathers placed in my hair, my hat. Badges pinned
on my breast: papers attesting to the passage of that time.
Even submitted, for my final paper, a sheaf of poems: Ho?
And the taught eventually taught. It was impossible to find
anything less to live on. And He was teaching younger kids;
trying to bring them into the realm of reason, philosophy if
need be. I am/I am not. It is a hideous waiting period before
ambition -- before that desperate attempt to clothe the self
into some fair achievement: something the world would pay
attention to, read, publish, send out to multitudes of lands,
countries, a world is made of around bright shores of ocean,
encompass the wide world in short -- no single boundary.
Gods would now look down to him at last, smiling, smiling:
Yes, you made it. Came, Conquered. You are the sins of the
almighty gods.
And He writes out the story. He accumulates those stories that
go into the story -- because, because, there is but just one story.
He waits for her. He practices with “hers.” With plural “her.”
He is dissatisfied: He will not stay with them; He will not keep
them; He will not take them to His heart. They sadden at the
loss of such a person. He who was said “to walk Apollo-like
through space” / “als schritte Apollo durch den Saal,” rooms,
gardens: He who seemed to walk and breathe in Hall just like
a god of poetry. And still the Greats went certain to uncertain:
looked down on him: holding their smiles in check. Keeping
them tight. Preserving them. Aber I am/Aber I am not. I own
no single language.
For the day when He would spring forth and the sky turned to
abundance of all Blues, Blue which would never fade. Blue
which no cloud effaced. Blue of His mighty rivers. Blue of His
blood running in those veins He thought He might cut into -- Oh,
one day, perhaps with hers. Together in full time would break,
would in the end break down the solitude, that loss, that: Never
will we see our life again. And if the Blue did not arrive, did not
materialize. Jetzt. Did not now sacrifice His throat under the altar.
Schwarze Sünde, directed by Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet, 1989.
Schwarze Sünde, directed by Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet, 1989.
THE HÖLDERLINIAE 17.
For him the rivers carried life backward and forward. He
loved them dearly as the demigods, brothers and sisters to
other demigods: the poets. True that the rivers begin high
in some deserted alps or towering mountains and true that
they work downward as they move toward sea. But in the
poetry, you cannot ever trust, cannot ever be sure, a stream
for him also does not carry back whatever loads it met on
the sea’s other side. In fine, a river also is the human mind
working in recollection back from ocean into the poet’s life.
The mind is full of stops, full of remembered latitudes and
longitudes of life where the mind’s body dwelt for short or
longer times and, in the recollections, the mind works back
to every kind of source; to every stop along the long, long
way until it rests awhile, looks at deep ocean it has ended in
and can prepare to face a final door, open the door and sink
below the waves, the ships, the islands ...
Thus I must take you from Rhine and Danube, far from yr.
native Swabia, to a wider world where sundry rivers run
that stopped me in my tracks. I take you to the Thames; the
Seine; the Po; the Tiber; Petersburg’s Neva and then across
old continents over to Ganges; Brahmaputra; an Irrawaddy
and a vast Mekong -- drawing at least three countries into
their final sea -- then to a Yangtze and a Yellow River; the
Baram, the Kinabatangan and the Rajang (Borneo); then
down to the Australian Murray and the Darling. And, after
this, across to Nile, mother of Egypt, and to Zambezi at
Victoria; thus the gigantic falls right there in Africa and
tropical Brazil (the Xingu and the Amazon, the Paraná) up
through volcano country to the Usumacinta, path of the
Maya into my own country, with Mississippi and Missouri
and the American-Canadian huge array of falls around, aha!
Niagara. Nor does the count stop here. No, not far off, after
my own demise, mankind will sail along the boundless seas
of space, finding the Lord alone knows -- should there be a
Lord -- how many rivers, among his countless planets and
the deep stars gone wild beyond all calculation. Did you not
sometimes stop to consider this when looking up at your
sky full of stars still pure, unglazed by so much human light?
To think of it, the stars also have courses up in the oceanic
heavens from which they shine like distant ships carrying
gods backward down to their dwellings -- then humans joy
in their kindness, their tenderness to them while they suffer
the pains of any era and mankind’s lack of culture; wisdom;
lack of the means to move with satisfaction into other ways,
other dimensions, with hearts at rest.
Schwarze Sünde, directed by Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet, 1989.
Schwarze Sünde, directed by Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet, 1989.
The Hölderliniae by Nathaniel Tarn
is published by New Directions and available April 6, 2021.
Andrew Christopher Green is a writer and artist based in Düsseldorf.
