Here are a few words about the just-named Literature Nobel recipient, Tomas Transtromer.

Two ideas about human beings recur in his poetry:

One, we are mentally and physically fragile beings, for whom existence itself is an immense, constant struggle. Just surviving in the world – the obdurate, difficult, indifferent world – is an incredible struggle. Periodically, we lose ourselves. Our very identities – so contingent, so frail – actually vanish, and in those long moments of not even knowing who we are and where we are, we discover our true underlying condition, our non-being (our being-toward-death, if you like) amid the baffles and brazens of personality. A certain discipline toward, a certain respect for, reality involves accepting, and thinking about those amnesiac moments as they disclose metaphysical truths, not just about our defensive, patched-up social being, but about the nothingness that preceded, and will succeed, us.

The Name is one among many Transtromer poems that make the point. I found it quoted here, in a review essay by Bill Coyle.

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In an unpublished essay titled Come as You Are, Eve Sedgwick quotes the following passage – strikingly similar to the Transtromer poem – from The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying. She remarks that its description of amnesia “filled me with a comical sense of recognition.”

Imagine a person who suddenly wakes up in a hospital after a road accident to find she is suffering from total amnesia. Outwardly, everything is intact: she has the same face and form, her senses and mind are there, but she doesn’t have any idea or any trace of a memory of who she really is. In exactly the same way, we cannot remember our true identity, our original nature. Frantically, and in real dread, we cast around and improvise another identity, one we clutch onto with all the desperation of someone falling continually into an abyss. This false and ignorantly assumed identity is “ego.”

So ego, then, is the absence of true knowledge of who we really are, together with its result: a doomed clutching on, at all costs, to a cobbled together and makeshift image of ourselves, an inevitably chameleon charlatan self that keeps changing us and has to, to keep alive the fiction of its existence. In Tibetan ego is called dak dzin, which means “grasping at a self.” . . . . The fact that we need to grasp at all and go on and on grasping shows that in the depths of our being we know that the self does not inherently exist. From this secret, unnerving knowledge spring all our fundamental insecurities and fear. (116-17)

It’s a more radical idea than Transtromer’s, which at least has us returning – amid the indifferent grinding on of the nearby car lights – to a sense of I – I – I. And of course for the Buddhist this sense of self-loss isn’t “hell” — it’s simply the reality that “the self does not inherently exist.” For Buddhists, the choice isn’t between feeling you’ve been reduced to a panicky animal – “a cat in a sack” – and feeling fully and comfortably affirmed as a rosy rounded ego. But despite these differences, both writers evoke the basic fact of our shaky, constantly-needing-to-be-elaborated, selfhood…

The second idea predominant in Transtromer’s work is related to the first one. Contingent and slippery we may be, but one capacious and reliable thing we do have is interiority. Our consciousness, our memory, our imagination, enables our movement – such as it is – through the world. A cultivation of those vast inner spaces which are all ours can make existence easier. Here’s part of “Romanesque Arches”:

and inside each of them vault opened behind vault endlessly.

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Here’s another evocation of our precious vaults.

The Indoors is Endless

It’s spring in 1827, Beethoven
hoists his death-mask and sails off.

The gentle downward slope gets steeper
and imperceptibly becomes an abyss.

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Heavy breathing, staggering, rowing against the current: There’s the first idea, the immense difficulty of life — all aspects of life. But then, imagining a long-dead relative imagining him, the poet says that “all the surface action turns inwards… the future opens” to the present. Erik – the long-dead relative – uses his vast vault of imagination (“the indoors is endless”) to see the living poet walking today around Washington DC, where life isn’t difficult – where “only / every second column bears weight.”

Yet even here, in the white weightless contemporary city, “the dream of the poor turns to ash,” and the same abyss that threatens Erik, with his “bullet through the soul,” threatens his descendant.