Not for the proud man apart
From the raging moon I write
On these spindrift pages
Nor for the towering dead
With their nightingales and psalms
But for the lovers, their arms
Round the griefs of the ages,
Who pay no praise or wages
Nor heed my craft or art
~Dylan Thomas
In the film Il Postino, the village postman gives the girl he loves a poem he passes off as his own, though it has been written by Pablo Neruda, living in exile in the small Italian community. When Neruda berates the postman, the young man replies: “Just because you wrote the poem, that doesn’t mean it belongs to you. Poetry belongs to those who need it.”
Patent attorneys may be scandalised by such a laissez-faire interpretation of copyright laws. But by his response, the postman reveals that he might have a greater insight into the nature and ownership of poetry than the poet himself.
Who does ‘own’ poetry? The person who creates it? Or those who make it a part of the living air, a common legacy with which to give utterance to voiceless longings? To whom does the fragrance of the rose belong? The flower, or the passing traveller enraptured by its scent?
As a struggling writer in Buenos Aires, Borges would enter workingmen’s bars and slip unsigned copies of his writings into the pockets of jackets hanging by the door. Nor would he hang about outside, to see what fate befell his clandestine literary offerings.
Borges had realised what too few writers do. That what a writer writes lives, if at all, not on a page, but on the sheet of silence that is another’s mind. If this is true of poets and writers, who must deal with the clumsy pen-and-ink limitations of their craft, how much more so for those who express what cannot be said yet cannot be left unsaid, the wordless lyricists whom the world calls spiritual masters?
“Please go from here. Go away and don’t listen to me,” J Krishnamurti would exhort the disciples who flocked to hear him speak. Like Borges, or the fictive Italian postman, Krishnamurti knew that what he had to say had no meaning—unless others took it away from him and made it into their own, each according to their individual needs.
Kierkegaard would have approved wholeheartedly. For the Danish philosopher, truth was subjectivity. To the extent you absorbed, or internalised, someone else’s teachings, you expropriated what was taught, taking from it what you needed.
Could this lead to a perverse solipsism, based on a deliberate misunderstanding of another’s words, as happened in the case of the Nazi takeover of Nietzschean philosophy?
It could, certainly. But the Nazi who was true to himself—in the Kierkegaardian sense, if such an impossibility were possible—could not hold Nietzche, or even Hitler, responsible for his Nazism, no more than the true Buddhist would hold Buddha responsible for his Buddhism.
There is of course a cosmological world of difference between Nazism and Buddhism, or any spiritual discipline. Fascism is premised on the principle of an idolised Fuhrer demanding obedience. Spiritualism, including the verbalised variety called poetry, is premised on the universality of autonomy.
He who claims to follow me does not follow me, said the Zen master, for a follower presumes a followed, and both are illusory. By the same token, that which says it is the Tao is not the Tao. The Italian postman might add the postscript: This poem does not belong to the poet, or to me, but to all the countless lovers, through all the ages, who ever have need of it.
What of the poetry of pure consciousness that lies behind the words of a Christ, a Nanak, a Mahavir, a Mohammed? Can that unwritable poetry, which begins where words end, belong only to them and their followers, or to all who choose to make it their own?
The village postman wouldn’t bother to reply to that. He’d knock and leave on the doorstep for us to discover, postcards from the edge, with no address of sender or recipient, both of whom are one, and everyone.
Jug Suraiya
Writer, columnist and author of several books
jugsuraiya@gmail.com