by Nils Peterson
Since I last posted, I fell, broke my hip, and am now in a post-op facility trying to put my life back together. I mention this because the poem I discuss today is exactly what I need as part of my medicine for this and life beyond. Tomas Transtromer prescribes a simple but hard medicine. My piece also contains a quotation from his “Schubertiana” a wonderful poem on music and politics. If you love either or both, you should read it. My piece is also a meditation on home. I hadn’t thought about the Odyssey until this moment, but maybe something of it is here too.
Task: to be where I am.
Even when I’m in this solemn and absurd
role: I am still the place
where creation works on itself. —Tomas Transtromer
I have before me a copy of Truth Barriers, a collection of poems by Tomas Transtromer translated by Robert Bly. I was surprised the other day to open it and find it signed by both men. Robert, in his neat, small hand said “another Swede! – ‘Even the grass whispers Amnesty,’” and from Tomas, “Dear Nils, try to feel at home!” Both obscure, and both lovely, and both somehow true. (I just realized that all my life I’ve been trying to feel at home.) I been trying to feel at home with my Swedishness even to the point of fantasizing what my life would have been like if after a couple of years being jobless at the start of the great depression, my parents had decided to go back to Sweden as some of their friends did. What would it have been like to live there during WWII? Where would my father have found a job? He was a machinist. I imagine him working for Saab, or Skania Vobis, or Volvo. So likely we would have lived in a city rather than the farm country one of my mother’s family.
Also, I’ve been listening to a lot of music performed by Swedes having become a fan of The Real Group, that marvelous gathering of 4 or 5 singers (depending on the time frame) with impeccable harmony. They sing both in Swedish and English as do the marvelous Swedish quartet The Ringmasters And yes, I’ve bought into the learn a language app, Babbel, and am trying, painfully to learn Swedish. (I’ve pretty much given this up.) So, yes, Tomas, I am trying to feel at home.
When I first went to Sweden as an adult, as I stepped off of the ferry from Copenhagen to Malmo and stepped on Swedish soil, something in me broke open and tears came as I felt, yes, this is my homeland, my home.
Also, Tomas is trying to help me feel at home in another way. Here is the whole of his poem “Guard Duty” from the book. It was a favorite years ago, forgotten, but now it comes back when I need it. He is doing his necessary military service, is on guard duty, bored, at first he begins to fantasize, remembering a time with a woman, and then brings himself back to the now which is the home for all of us.
Guard Duty Tomas Transtromer, trans. Robert Bly
I’m ordered to a big hump of stones
as if I were an aristocratic corpse from the Iron Age.
The rest are still back in the tent sleeping,
stretched out like spokes in a wheel.
In the tent the stove is boss: it is a big snake
that swallows a ball of fire and hisses.
But it is silent out here in the spring night
among chill stones waiting for the dawn.
Out here in the cold I start to fly
like a shaman, straight to her body–
some places pale from her swimming suit.
The sun shone right on us. The moss was hot.
I brush along the side of warm moments,
but I can’t stay there long.
I’m whistled back through space–
I crawl among the stones. Back to here and now.
Task: to be where I am.
Even when I’m in this solemn and absurd
role: I am still the place
where creation works on itself.
Dawn comes, the sparse tree trunks
take on color now, the frostbitten
forest flowers form a silent search party
after something that has disappeared in the dark.
But to be where I am . . . and to wait.
I am full of anxiety, obstinate, confused.
Things not yet happened are already here!
I feel that. They’re just out there:
a murmuring mass outside the barrier.
They can only slip in one by one.
They want to slip in. Why? They do
one by one. I am the turnstile.
Task: to be where I am.
Even when I’m in this solemn and absurd
role: I am still the place
where creation works on itself.
As I said, this was my motto for a number of years, but I’d forgotten it and need to remember it again. Here’s a bit of a memory of meeting Tomas and his wife, Monika.
Tuesday. I’m to introduce Transtromer and Naomi asks if I’d like to have dinner with them. “Sure,” I say, but arrive late and he and his wife Monika and Naomi are about done with their fish. So I order chowder and bread which seems quick and we talk of music and daughters and translators and poems and I say – You look a lot like a Swedish John Updike, and saying it I can feel my tongue begin to roll like an old Swedish sailor’s walk. When Naomi goes to make final arrangements, I take Tomas and Monika, who has light green eyes, for a stroll around the campus to work off dinner and wine, and spring has come even to the concrete walkways and we feel like good friends, young and strong, in our late 20’s, say, like old pictures of one’s parents having fun. At the church Tomas reads: “How much we have to take on trust, every minute we live in order not to drop through the earth!” and speaks of a music “not for men – who despise themselves inside for not being murderers….”
Then when I say good night to the Transtromers, Monika says “You are vairy Sveedish too” and, maybe even for real, invites me to their summer sea home, and I, pleased, smile my most Swedish smile.
So, in my imagination, I’m off for a summer visit to one of the islands off the coast of Stockholm, trying to feel at home with Tomas and Monika.
Years later – Tomas is gone after the Nobel Prize for Literature. I see his face this morning looking like a Swedish John Updike, miss him. and miss Monika’s light green eyes, but again:
Task: to be where I am.
Even when I’m in this solemn and absurd
role: I am still the place
where creation works on itself.
And I try to feel at home.
(And, yes, Robert’s gone too.)