The Marginalian
The Marginalian

If You Forget Me: Pablo Neruda’s Staggering (Un)breakup Poem

By Maria Popova

If You Forget Me: Pablo Neruda’s Staggering (Un)breakup Poem

Love is a fire that takes two to keep burning, but one to extinguish — if the hearth of either heart is too damp with doubt, both wake up one day to find their hands cupping ashes. And yet when two people have loved each other and parted, the fire is forever embering between them, however great the distance in space, in time, in thought. The wind of a single word and the gust of the smallest gesture can rekindle it in a flash, often to the surprise of both. All true love is a smoking spell against forgetting.

That is the aspect of love I feel burning through “If You Forget Me” by Pablo Neruda (July 12, 1904–September 23, 1973) — a breakup poem and a poem of unbreaking, one that begins as an ode, twists into an ultimatum, and finally reveals itself to be a lamentation, a hymn of longing, a bittersweet acknowledgement that once a person has entered another’s heart, they always have a place in it, but also a recognition of how they ought to show up in order to honor that place.

That, at least, is how I receive this poem, at this particular point in my life — for, as the teenage Sylvia Plath wrote to her mother, “Once a poem is made available to the public, the right of interpretation belongs to the reader.” It is read here by two dear friends a generation apart — Karen Maldonado in Spanish and Rose Hanzlik in English, as translated by Donald Devenish Walsh in the bilingual pocket-sized collection of immensities Love Poems (public library). It is a poem that warrants as accompaniment nothing less than Bach’s transcendent Cello Suite No. 1, performed by none other than the great Spanish cellist Pablo Casals.

IF YOU FORGET ME
by Pablo Neruda

I want you to know
one thing.

You know how this is:
if I look
at the crystal moon, at the red branch
of the slow autumn at my window,
if I touch
near the fire
the impalpable ash
or the wrinkled body of the log,
everything carries me to you,
as if everything that exists,
aromas, light, metals,
were little boats that sail
toward those isles of yours that wait for me.

Well, now,
if little by little you stop loving me
I shall stop loving you little by little.

If suddenly you forget me
do not look for me,
for I shall already have forgotten you.

If you think it long and mad,
the wind of banners
that passes through my life,
and you decide
to leave me at the shore
of the heart where I have roots,
remember
that on that day,
at that hour,
I shall lift my arms
and my roots will set off
to seek another land.

But
if each day,
each hour,
you feel that you are destined for me
with implacable sweetness,
if each day a flower
climbs up to your lips to seek me,
ah my love, ah my own,
in me all that fire is repeated,
in me nothing is extinguished or forgotten,
my love feeds on your love, beloved,
and as long as you live it will be in your arms
without leaving mine.

SI TÚ ME OLVIDAS
Pablo Neruda

Quiero que sepas
una cosa.

Tú sabes cómo es esto:
si miro
la luna de cristal, la rama roja
del lento otoño en mi ventana,
si toco
junto al fuego
la impalpable ceniza
o el arrugado cuerpo de la leña,
todo me lleva a ti,
como si todo lo que existe,
aromas, luz, metales,
fueran pequeños barcos que navegan
hacia las islas tuyas que me aguardan.

Ahora bien,
si poco a poco dejas de quererme
dejaré de quererte poco a poco.

Si de pronto
me olvidas
no me busques,
que ya te habré olvidado.

Si consideras largo y loco
el viento de banderas
que pasa por mi vida
y te decides
a dejarme a la orilla
del corazón en que tengo raíces,
piensa
que en ese día,
a esa hora
levantaré los brazos
y saldrán mis raíces
a buscar otra tierra.

Pero
si cada día,
cada hora
sientes que a mí estás destinada
con dulzura implacable.
Si cada día sube
una flor a tus labios a buscarme,
ay amor mío, ay mía,
en mí todo ese fuego se repite,
en mí nada se apaga ni se olvida,
mi amor se nutre de tu amor, amada,
y mientras vivas estará en tus brazos
sin salir de los míos.

For a kindred counterpart from a very different kind of poet, savor David Whyte’s “The Truelove,” then revisit Neruda’s love letter to language, his ode to silence, and his moving Nobel Prize acceptance speech.

BP

Chasing Fog: The Science and Spirituality of Nature’s Grounded Cloud

By Maria Popova

Chasing Fog: The Science and Spirituality of Nature’s Grounded Cloud

One day not long after I moved to New York, I looked up from my writing desk at a shared studio space on the Brooklyn waterfront and saw the Manhattan Bridge halved, only the Brooklyn side remaining, the rest vanished into a sea of fog that had erased Manhattan.

A sight with the strangeness of a dream, piercing the reality of the late-autumn morning.

An augury, a living metaphor, a revelation: Every moment of transition is a bridge receding from the firm ground of the known life it into the fog of the possible, promising and menacing in all its opacity. We can only see one step ahead, but the bridge reveals itself firm under our feet as we keep walking, advancing by “the next right thing,” parting the fog to touch the future.

Vanish by Maria Popova. (Available as a print.)

For all its mystical quality, fog has a materiality that embodies the metabolism of this rocky world. It is a conversation between the landscape, its bodies of water, and the wind. Fog forms when the atmosphere cools enough for water droplets to condense into a low-flying cloud. In fact, it is a species of stratus cloud that has landed — an endangered species: Throughout Europe, fog has declined by 50% since 1970 and coastal fog all around the world is vanishing due to climate change, parching ecosystems and leaving landscapes much more vulnerable to wildfires.

While it is still here, let it come — sudden as an owl or slow as daybreak, lasting just long for you to feel the breath of the Earth on your cheek, wet and primordial.

In Chasing Fog (public library), writer and photographer Laura Pashby composes a beguiling love letter to “the wonder and soothing balm of fog,” to “the irresistible romance of stepping into a cloud at ground level,” to what it teaches us about the visible and the invisible.

Laura Pashby: self-portrait in fog

A childhood like hers — spent under the sunless leaden skies of the Dartmoor’s wilderness margined with fog, a castle ruin as her playground, the desolate moor as her pool — shapes a person, shapes how she sees the half-seen world. She writes:

Fog is my muse: when I am in it, I see things differently. The known becomes unknown, the familiar unfamiliar. Fog disorientates, blurring the edges of everything — changing landscape, altering colour and softening light… A foggy morning is rich with mystery and magic, but also with possibility — the everyday feels otherworldly… Fog, like salt water, is completely other — it provides a shock, an escape, a release.

[…]

While fog may seem to hang heavy, it is often vital, not static: dipping, waving, seeping, drifting and flowing. Fog is unpredictable — it is not soft and benign like cotton wool. In his 1919 essay “Das Unheimliche,” Freud defined the uncanny as something that is both frightening yet familiar: the strangeness of the ordinary. This is exactly the effect that fog can have upon a landscape: when it quickly descends, it disorientates us, obscuring sight, changing familiar surroundings and making the known world seem odd and unsettling. It was this sensory experience that I felt compelled to explore first: the loss of sight as our vision is diminished by fog’s descent; the feeling of a veil being drawn.

Photograph by Laura Pashby

In a lovely instance of the unphotographable, Pashby paints an enchanting picture in words:

The fog flows up from the valley and slowly, slowly it fills the town. From my little loft-room study window, I watch it edge along the street like a whisper made visible, gently enveloping house after house, until it reaches mine. The huge beech tree in the garden opposite disappears completely, leaving only the echoing calls of its resident jackdaws — ghostly in the viscous air. The world beyond my open window fades to white. I want the fog to drift right in, curl cool tendrils around me and encircle me like smoke.

What emerges is the sense that fog is not only a phenomenon but an invitation — to draw the veil of the world and see it more closely, to see yourself unveiled and saturated with aliveness. (Anything you polish with attention will become a mirror.) Pashby writes:

By paying close attention to fog… I have tried (imperfectly, truthfully) to bear witness, looking for beauty in a darkening world, for abundance where there so often is none, for clarity through a misted lens.

[…]

If we listen, fog has much to teach us: about the landscape, the weatherscape and about who we are. We are all made of water — it passes through us and moves on, into the rain, into the river, into the ocean, into the fog. Each of us is fluid, mutable, magic, and we are not distinct from nature, we are nature. We are fog.

Photograph by Laura Pashby

Couple Chasing Fog with artist, poet, and philosopher Etel Adnan’s slender and splendid book Sea & Fog, then revisit the Cloud Appreciation Society’s delightful illustrated field guide to the science and wonder of clouds.

BP

How to Love the World More: Artist and Poet Rachel Hébert’s Breathtaking Catalogue of Gratitudes

By Maria Popova

Here we are, living these lives bright and perishable as a poppy, hard and shimmering as obsidian. We know that they are entirely improbable, that we bless that bright improbability with each flash of gratitude for it all, that if we pay attention closely and generously enough we are always repaid in gladness, that it is the handle of the door to the world. And yet over and over we choose to live in the cage of complaint, too preoccupied with how the will of life betrayed our wishes, the wanting monster always growling in the other corner of the cage.

Imagine parting the bars and stepping out. Imagine waking up with a rush of gladness at everything we were never promised but got anyway — trees and music, clouds and consciousness, the cobalt eye of the scallop, the golden fan of the gingko, the alabaster chandelier of the ghost pipe.

In our age of competitive prostration, this is a headstand hard to hold for long. But it is trainable. It is possible to become strong enough to be tender, it is.

Artist and poet Rachel Hébert offers a bright patch of training ground in The Book of Thanks: A Catalogue of Gratitudes — one of the most miraculous books I have ever encountered, trembling with tenacious tenderness for the bewilderment of being alive.

Radiating from the pages is an invitation, extended in paintings and poems, to open “the sunlit fort of your attention” and let the world rush in, in all its minute and majestic loveliness: stalactites and Spanish moss, spiderwebs and skylights, snow and the call of the snowy owl, the heart’s capacity for “an urgent, flashing, interrupting kind of love.”

What emerges is prayerful (“more cellos, touch, and rain, please”) and singing with praise (“roots gripping, canyon carved, spine woven of baleen a thousand years old”) — a manual for how to live in gratitude (“what is working wants your praise”) and a theological statement (“there is nothing you must do to belong”).

A taste:

What do we say to longing?

If you have sat in the chill
of early morning bleakness

and watched as the deep blue
sighed and blushed, touched

by the warm curve of dawn
and pinker than pink then

apricot soft and spreading its
glow, you know. You know.

How
— in this dim parade of brutality —
might all be well?

But if we trouble it with light,
train our sights on
the rebellious good,

and work
to make it
truer.

Beneath the face
of the water,
wonder.

In dark woods,
a gate.

In the chapter
called lostness,
a friend.

All the help
we could not
yet see.

It cannot be always comfortable.
So love the thousand knives as they enter
and see your shape still sitting.

See that you too belong to paws
of soft silent hungers, to thirst-tangled
roots, to silver-spun constellations.

Know you’re no sicker than the rest of us.
The big secret is this: No one else can brave you.
Messy, yes. And marvelous.

What is more than we see
in this world we’re pressed into,
its blistered barking noise?

For what we build, speak, and ruin —
our efforts, our angers.

For music.

For wings.

BP

Midnight Motorbike: A Lullaby of Wonder for the Sleepless, Inspired by the Whimsy of South India

By Maria Popova

Midnight Motorbike: A Lullaby of Wonder for the Sleepless, Inspired by the Whimsy of South India

You know that moment late into the night when the body, famished for rest, is kidnapped from the land of sleep by a mind aflame with rumination, paging through the ledger of regrets — the message you shouldn’t have sent, the hand you should have raised, the kindness you withheld — until the temperature of the self rises to an untenable degree. These are the 4A.M. reckonings James Baldwin wrote of, those plaintive inner cries for “reconciliation between oneself and all one’s pain and error.”

Such fevers of selfing are only ever cooled by turning the mind outward, worldward, wonderward. But the lullaby of unselfing doesn’t come to us easily — often, we need someone wiser, someone more awake to wonder, to whisk us into a chariot of perspective and gallop us out of ourselves, toward what Willa Cather knew to be the secret of happiness — being “dissolved into something complete and great,” which, “when it comes… comes as naturally as sleep.”

In Midnight Motorbike (public library), writer Maureen Shay Tajsar and artist Ishita Jain tell the story of a little girl too hot to sleep through the Indian night that “stretches its dark arms beyond the banyan tree grove and the red earth canyon, all the way to the big indigo ocean,” and her Amma, who whisks the child away on the back of her motorcycle in her shimmering sari to tour the bright variousness of the world — the snake eyes and bougainvillea flashing in the headlights, the wet kiss of the painted elephant, the dance of planets and comets across the starry sky, the enchanted loom at the silk shop, the old man braiding jasmine blossoms, the silent temples full of stone monkeys praying under golden crowns — until the tired girl is blanketed in wonder and drifts to sleep.

Pulsating beneath the story, told in lyrical words and vibrant illustrations textured with feeling, is the universal yearning for something that holds, a cradle of time we can rest into.

On our motorbike tonight, feet in the wind, we reach the edge of the world. There, Amma tells me, the belly of the moon will be waiting for us, just as it has been waiting all the rainy seasons of forever.

[…]

“Goodbye, day,” I breathe into the dark, and the moon holds us until tomorrow.

This elemental dialogue between loneliness and forever animated Tajsar’s own youth. She writes in the author’s note:

When I was nineteen, my mother moved to rural Tamil Nadu, South India, and I spent the next several years of summers with her, on her motorbike, zooming in and out of adventures. Every autumn when it was time to say goodbye, she wrapped me in a garland of jasmine and I started the hours-long, all-night taxi drive through banyan groves back to Chennai Airport and back to my university life in Ireland. During those melancholy rides, I was comforted by the busyness of the Tamil night that flashed by; somehow knowing that the night was full of activity and gathering made me feel less lonely. The dark swirled around me like a mother’s embrace, and I longed for the forever of it all, and was grateful for everything. And the moon was always there, hanging low over the Bay of Bengal, silently accompanying me on my journey.

Couple Midnight Motorbike with The Night Life of Trees — a whimsical portal into Indian folklore illustrated by indigenous artists — then revisit Maurice Sendak’s cure for insomnia.

BP

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