poetry pocket: keeping quiet, pablo neruda.

now we will count to twelve and we will all keep still for once on the face of the earth.

this coming week, little voice, in anticipation of monday’s letter to you, we will be thinking about silence and its possibilities for gestures of mutuality and understanding.

in a 1966 interview entitled the lamb and the pine cone, Neruda’s own little voice reveals a strange and powerful childhood memory that forever shaped his creative experience:

“One time, investigating in the backyard of our house in Temuco the tiny objects and minuscule beings of my world, I came upon a hole in one of the boards of the fence. I looked through the hole and saw a landscape like that behind our house, uncared for, and wild. I moved back a few steps, because I sensed vaguely that something was about to happen. All of a sudden a hand appeared — a tiny hand of a boy about my own age. By the time I came close again, the hand was gone, and in its place there was a marvelous white sheep.

The sheep’s wool was faded. Its wheels had escaped. All of this only made it more authentic. I had never seen such a wonderful sheep. I looked back through the hole, but the boy had disappeared. I went into the house and brought out a treasure of my own: a pinecone, opened, full of odor and resin, which I adored. I set it down in the same spot and went off with the sheep.”

he never saw the hand nor the boy it belonged to again. he lost the lamb toy several years later in a fire.

but the little hand through the fence reached out forever, instilling in Neruda the deep-seated heart of his Art: a pulsating gesture of mutuality and understanding.

Art and Language, it seems, simply seek to touch without contact:

“To feel the intimacy of brothers is a marvelous thing in life. To feel the love of people whom we love is a fire that feeds our life. But to feel the affection that comes from those whom we do not know, from those unknown to us, who are watching over our sleep and solitude, over our dangers and our weaknesses — that is something still greater and more beautiful because it widens out the boundaries of our being, and unites all living things.

That exchange brought home to me for the first time a precious idea: that all of humanity is somehow together…

It won’t surprise you then that I attempted to give something resiny, earthlike, and fragrant in exchange for human brotherhood. Just as I once left the pinecone by the fence, I have since left my words on the door of so many people who were unknown to me, people in prison, or hunted, or alone.

This exchange of gifts — mysterious — settled deep inside me like a sedimentary deposit.”

“Why do trees hide the splendour of their roots?” “Do unshed tears wait in little lakes?” you can see Neruda’s Book of Questions, beautifully illustrated by Paloma Valdivia, here.

Neruda, Keeping Quiet.

you can also read Neruda’s sensuous, honey-soaked love sonnets here.

love,

ars poetica.