A dead-accurate desire

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A dead-accurate desire

Dusk is a situation in which one thing can change into another. At daybreak the day comes alive; at dusk the day dies. By using the Dutch term in both connotations Van de W turns this transitional phase into a territory where life is possible. People live because they are transitory. And dusk in this line becomes a tender gesture. The poetic persona lounges in the dusk like a caress against the skin of his beloved. Eros is fed by intimations of death, of living a transitory life.

I have used the word pugnacious to characterize Van de W’s melancholy more closely. The choice of this term is partly inspired by the poetry he wrote earlier in his career. Pugnacious, militant was a positive qualification for those people in the sixties and seventies who wee active in political parties or trade unions. Hans van de Waarsenburg published his first collection of poems in 1965. His writings at this time were politically engaged. The war in Vietnam is present in his poems, the destruction of human beings by industry in the twentieth century, the exploitation, the destruction of our environment. Some of this can still be heard in South Wall. This collection contains two cycles about the potato, ‘Divine Spud’. The first cycle evokes in lyrical terms the discovery of potato chips, against the background of the Great War and the heydays of the Roman Catholic Church. The second cycle refers to the potato as the staple food of the poor, evoking images, which resemble Vincent van Gogh’s ‘Potato Eaters’. This picture is contrasted with the potato on the tables of the rich. Van de Waarsenburg calls this paradoxically ‘an insult full of bitter regret’.
Hans van de Waarsenburg remains true to himself. His melancholy is comparable to that of Hans Tentije, whose first collection Alles is er (It is all there, 1975) contained poems full of commitment about shocking political events and the working conditions of miners. In his work, too, references to social and political situations have become less prominent. This development in the work of both poets may be related to their awareness that political alternatives coloured by utopian expectations are no longer possible. But they preserve their utopian dreams in melancholy.
To describe Hans van de Waarsenburg’s poetry as ‘pugnacious melancholy’ does not refer specifically to political commitment. It rather refers to a total commitment of which political commitment is only one, historically defined form. It brings out the poet’s efforts to preserve the most insignificant and vulnerable even against reason, to recognise their value. Although all must pass it should not be lost: this is probably the best description of Hans van de Waarsenburg’s commitment to writing. It is borne out in the title poem of South Wall. It describes someone returning to the ‘South Wall’, the place where he lived in the days of his youth. The memories are so strong, the images are so compact, that past and present are intertwined. The man is not just the man reminiscing, he is that boy again in the paradise of his youth. The boy comes alive again with the return to the scene of his younger years. The images do not suggest an idyll. Stories of paradises are invented to express the problem of Sin. Anxiety and a longing to escape have been written into these images. Van de W does not just preserve life as it used to be in this cycle, but he also preserves the dreams, desires and expectations in this way. It is a fact of life that people have vain and fleeting ideas of their destiny. To keep these ideas from oblivion is the commitment in Hans van de Waarsenburg’s poetry.
This commitment is implicitly a fundamental quality of all true poetry. Beschrijvingen van het meer (Descriptions of the Lake, 2000) opens with a long cycle. The writer does not merely describe an expanse of water, but also the mainsprings of poetry and what it adds to life. Once more there is a reference to what Walter Benjamin has called ‘the weak Messianic force’, a ‘hidden heliotropism’ in all that has been swept away:
Describing the lake
The shot is at the heart of the
Poem, dead-accurate desire.
Describing the lake
The decoy duck honks.

The end of this cycle also reminds us of one of Benjamin’s theses. The ninth of these characterises history in figure of an angel by Paul Klee: ‘His eyes are wide open, his mouth is open and his wings are spread. This is what the angel of history must look like. He has turned his face to the past. Where we see a chain of events, he sees a single catastrophe piling ruin on ruin and throwing them in his way. He could pause, raise the dead and reassemble what has been destroyed. But there is storm blowing from Paradise which catches in his wings, and which is so strong that the angel can no longer close them (…) We call this storm progress.’ Hans van de Waarsenburg expresses this Messianic desire for healing in the last stanza. Not to close one’s eyes to death and mutilation turns out to be a condition for that accurate yearning which is the strength of his poetry:
Describing the lake
Blood is wiped off, wounds are
Healed and fringes repaired.
Describing the lake
Equals scraggy carcass.

The poems of this writer will never seem loud again.

Translation: Peter Boreas, 2002

AuthorHans Groenewegen
2018-08-21T17:23:12+00:00 October 7th, 2006|Categories: Essays, Literature, Blesok no. 50|0 Comments