![]() ![]() (In my case I'd love to say it was from reading ancient texts or at least Hemingway or it's more than likely from "The Sound of Music.") But it makes me think of Jewish writer and critic Walter Benjamin who fled Paris as the Nazis were ascending only to die in the Pyrenees as he was walking to Spain. This fleeing over mountains is buried deep somewhere. He spoke of the flight in his 1971 Nobel Prize acceptance speech and it gives instant, brilliant illumination to his mindset. In 1971 Neruda, fled to Argentina over the Andes as a political refugee and did not return for nearly a decade. A Chilean friend once told me his country had the mental energy of an archipelago, an island nation, mountains took the form of water in their physical separation of space. He hails from the longest, thinnest country in the world separated by mountains to the east, the largest ocean in the world to the west, and a desert to the north. Neruda is such a layered soul, always besuited. "I awoke" Neruda wrote, "And at times birds fled and migrated that had been sleeping in your soul." Ralph Waldo Emerson thought nature led us to an eternal stream of consciousness while sculptor Barbara Hepworth thought that in the contemplation of nature "our sense of mystery and our imagination is kept alive." It is only fitting that a love that includes everything expands beyond the corporal and the human to some Providence-granted beauty of nature. Erotic love excludes the love for others only in the sense of erotic fusion, full commitment in all aspects of life - but not in the sense of deep brotherly love. It is exclusive only in the sense that I can fuse myself fully and intensely with one person only. Erotic love is exclusive, but it loves in the other person all of mankind, all that is alive. Neruda lets it swim in conflicted complexity. While Fromm defined love in nice, almost mutually exclusive categories like brotherly love and motherly love, I've expanded on both of these loves, apart from Fromm but using his wisdom as guidance, read more in "Brotherly Love" and "What We Write About When We Write About Our Mothers". There in the highest blaze my solitude lengthens and flames, its arms turning like a drowning man's." Ebb tide in England. "Leaning into the afternoons I cast my sad nets toward your oceanic eyes. ![]() You undermine the horizon with your absence.Īnd you are sad, all at once, like a voyage. You arrive like the dew to the cupped flowers. What was sleeping above your soul will rise ![]() Like breath, like day, like dew, like wind. Or what about love's relaxed comfort? Pure perfection yet so poorly held for long, quickly gone once grasped. Is that part of love? So that you will hear meĪs the tracks of the gulls on the beaches. Like the longing for some indistinct thing that used to be or could be but isn't right now. In precious few poems, he delivers this bundle of everything at once, unconsciously perceptive, rocking from heel to toe in some universal pulse. Neruda's symbolic complexity - a woman's body is hills, earth, a man a weapon, our place of being a tunnel, a field - allows the Chilean poet to penetrate all aspects of love: sorrow, despair, joy, fatigue, silence. Like an arrow in my bow, a stone in my sling. To survive myself I forged you like a weapon, The birds fled from me,Īnd night swamped me with its crushing invasion. ![]() You look like a world, lying in surrender.Īnd makes the son leap from the depth of the earth. Which mistake would you rather make?" The body of a woman, white hills, white thighs, You can misperceive the breeze as a beast or the beast as a breeze. The swaying in the trees may just be a breeze or it could be a wild beast, coiled and ready to strike. "From an evolutionary perspective, it is far safer to automatically attribute agency to inanimate objects that behave like living things than it is to mistake a living thing for a seemingly inanimate object. In his study of metaphors in plain sight, James Geary shows how diverting and jumbling our senses allows a more expansive perception of the world. Transposing physical selves into some conceptual space of nature allows us to expand infinitely in metaphor. Pines, wind, sea, shore, rocks and shells. The way Mary Oliver imagined stones under the soil longing to be touched or Coleridge's childhood memory of a river otter, Neruda builds and folds the deeply complex emotions of love into the vast bosom of nature. "You keep only darkness, my distant female, from your regard sometimes the coast of dread emerges." Storm arriving in New Zealand. ![]()
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