… I go looking for a good poem. A poem with rain in it. Here’s one, by B. Nurkse. A very good one.

The Simulacra

They were driving into the mountains, suddenly married,
sometimes touching each other’s cheek with a fingernail
gingerly: the radio played ecstatic static: certain roads
marked with blue enamel numbers led to cloud banks,
or basalt screes, or dim hotels with padlocked verandas.
Sometimes they quarreled, sometimes they grew old,
the wind was constant in their eyes, it was their own wind,
they made it. Small towns flew past, Rodez, Albi,
limestone quarries, pear orchards, children racing
after hoops, wobbling when their shadows wavered,
infants crying for fine rain, old women on stoops
darning gray veils — and who were we, watching?
Doubles, ghosts, the ones who would tell of the field
where they pulled over, bluish tinge of the elms, steepness
of the other’s eyes, glowworm hidden in its own glint,
how the rain was twilight and now is darkness.

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This shows the best of what a lyric poem can do, a poem concentrated in a few beautifully written lines of implication conveying truth. This is a dreamy spin into mountains, or merely into a dream, or memory. All of its images involve vagueness, disintegration: screes, clouds, shadows, veils, twilight, tinge, hiddenness, padlockedness, dimness. A flickering scene seen while sleeping, or seen at the cinema, or knitted (darned) from fragments of one’s past, or fragments of one’s fantasies.

the wind was constant in their eyes, it was their own wind,
they made it

Just married – suddenly, passionately, acutely married, they begin with a fragile but sharp clarity, those fingernails against each other’s cheeks. Driving their passionate lives forward into the heights of feeling and understanding, they hear the ecstatic radio… But it’s not music – it’s just sound, just static; and already the idea of unclarity and paralysis appears. The rest of the poem will play this out, this idea of life as at best twilight, life as having nothing to do with true light, illumination, invigoration.

More later. Must do a few errands before the rain and the darkness.

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They’ve put their own static, their own barriers to clarity, in front of their own eyes: they made the raveling wind. Something in them made a world always halfway there, always speeding past in images unable to accumulate meaning. See how these great lines amass enigmas:

certain roads
marked with blue enamel numbers led to cloud banks,
or basalt screes, or dim hotels with padlocked verandas.

All these gorgeous surreal dead-ends! The way from the word certain he has us in uncertainty, each magical turn in the road a journey into clouds (the road’s hard numbering is just a directional come-on), or onto volcanic shards, or (an image out of Nabokov) toward the locked porches of shadowy inns. The liquidity of all the Ls in these lines lulls the scene to sleep: blue, enamel, led, cloud, basalt, hotels, padlocked. Lala land.

We’re not getting anywhere, in other words. We set out, suddenly married, bolt upright, ready for Event, and then before you know it life with its inchoate windy strangeness intervenes and things erode into screes before our eyes.

infants crying for fine rain, old women on stoops
darning gray veils — and who were we, watching?
Doubles, ghosts, the ones who would tell of the field
where they pulled over, bluish tinge of the elms, steepness
of the other’s eyes, glowworm hidden in its own glint,
how the rain was twilight and now is darkness.

Crying for milk, that is – for the O thou lord of life, send my roots rain sustenance that will set them up for Life; but the old women know better, and darn gray veils to keep us from our own failure. To pull off of this mountain road and try instead truly to encounter the “steepness” that is another person’s unreachable mystery is to re-tell the old tale of a whole life lived in partial darkness (twilight) and then resolving into darkness itself.

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Update: Rereading Erich Heller’s little book on Kafka (UD took all of Heller’s courses at Northwestern University when she was a college kid), UD finds this passage:

Deeply problematical though Kafka’s love [for Felice Bauer] was, it was not more so than his attitude toward his writing; and this is why the true executor of his “will” – the will that decreed the destruction of his manuscripts – would have had to be a magician, the producer of a sequence of mythical scenes where Kafka’s works, after being burned, would rise again from the ashes purified, in unheard-of beauty and perfection, consisting of nothing but “sheer light, sheer freedom, sheer power, no shadow, no barrier.” Another absolutist in the history of German literature once described in this way his highest poetic aspiration; to attain to it, Schiller said, he would gladly spend all the spiritual strength of his nature even if the effort “were to consume me entirely.” And Kafka, after completing his story “A Country Doctor” in September 1917, confided to his diary that writing such stories could still give him “passing satisfaction,” but happiness he would know only if he succeeded in “raising the world into the pure, the true, the immutable.”