You sense something, like a thread, a cord along which Cambrian, Jurassic, Tertiary, earlier centuries send their messages to future times which do not yet have names,
to countries, kingdoms which do not yet have names.
To peoples who speak languages which do not yet have names.
You are on your way there, sperm, chromosomes, tiny egoistical gene.
I believe that you are a message – then I am the commentary of that message, its translation into flesh and blood – take, eat – only I do not know what it means.
If anything at all.
But does the fact that it means anything or nothing itself mean anything?
Let us think of the sea. And that there is something greater than all questions.
Something that reaches over all borders.
Water, foam, stones, sand.
Wind.
Sometimes warm, sometimes cold.
3
We do not often think that we, too, are written
and that in that which we write there is actually less of ourselves than of others.
Ancestors, genes, heard, seen and read.
We are variations on a theme which first resounded in some primal fluid, the theme life, life.
It would be easy to believe that in us this theme is heard most clearly, most perfectly and most beautifully.
But it is hard for me to believe it.
Too much have I watched birds, identified plants and planted trees and read in nature books strange tales of insects, spiders, cephalopods and birds.
I recall the bowerbird, which builds a cabin for its wedding festivities and dyes it with berry-juices.
I recall the spider, which places a spot of glue on the end of a thread and uses it, like the gaucho his bola, to catch its prey.
I recall the termite and the ant, which in their hollow, subterranean nests grow mushrooms for their nourishment.
I recall something of the language of the dolphin and the bee, the beaver’s dam-building, the elephant which touches the skull of a dead elephant with its trunk.
And many, many others, and when I think also of what we have done to all of them,
when I think of safaris, whale hunters, birds dying of oil pollution and poisoned rivers
it is difficult, almost impossible for me to believe that we are the most beautiful voice in the world’s music.
Yes, perhaps the Kalevala, perhaps the song of Gilgamesh,
perhaps Mozart, perhaps Norbert Wiener,
perhaps gloves from Muhu or the song of the Chukchi.
But there are so few of them, there are in the world impossibly few people
who are able to make anything really beautiful, and there are ever fewer of them.
I fear that most of us are a badly played tune, a rattling, a rumbling, noise which is gradually extinguishing the great music of life.
We are a part of life that smashes the whole, teeth that gnaw the breast, a hand that breaks the fingers of another hand.
For teeth cannot bite themselves, fingers cannot break themselves.
One can destroy oneself only when there is still something.
The universe cannot destroy itself.
An accidental phrase, an accidental comfort,
4
But then: is the noise merely a noise, or does it conceal something more?
Do we not play (or is there not played on us) a completely different music, cosmic and divine?
For dust has its own dust, and dust’s dust its own: in moving from great to small we meet, in turn, order and chaos, and finally arrive at atoms and even smaller particles, in which all is once again, in its own way, regular.
Perhaps the music of the spheres lives yet in the music of the electrons and elementary particles – for it exists also in us, in our bodies.
But we do not have much in common with our atoms – we live on the outer surfaces of our bodies, without reaching the depths, we are like slicks of oil on the water’s surface.
And the atoms within us are unconscious that we are we (if we are!), that they are part of a person, a knife, a daffodil or a stone in a field.
But in their world there is no life or death, either; they do not notice how inanimate material becomes animate, or vice versa.
We live so much higher than ourselves, we live above our own heads.
We are like wind and clouds, like a folk tale or like the gods in heaven.
We may live by the light of our own words and myths, in our own philosophies and castles in the air.
Until they come to fetch us and we fall down into this dusty middle world. (Perhaps there is no dust in heaven, and that makes heaven heaven.)
And we do not understand, either here or there, whether we are noise or music, and if music, then what kind of music.
Or what folk tale, what dream, what existence – questions that do not receive an answer even as we fall for the last time, as our own dust mixes with other dust, but we ourselves? We ourselves?
*
To fight for the rights and freedoms of the body,
for arms and legs, mouths and eyes, lungs and livers,
for brains, inner ears and outer ears,
for sex glands and sweat glands, nails and hair,
whom we mercilessly exploit,
whom we force to work for our own good, day and night,
whom we do not allow to live their own lives,
choose their partners or beget offspring according to their own wishes.
We subordinate the limbs to the brain and force the brain
instead of interesting thoughts, to think about food and sex,
to imagine stupid fancies, to dwell on our
feelings of inferiority, hypochondria and jealousy
and to govern the other parts of the body. Even in sleep
it is not free of our worries or complexes.
And like a Viking prince, who was buried with
his horses, his women and his servants,
we force our own enslaved parts of the body
to die with us. Only our nails and hair
can, for a few days, grow freely but they, too,
hardly know what to do
with this sudden and brief freedom.
*
This autumn’s great big yellow chrysanthemum,
it does not flower; it is Flowering itself,
which in it receives the form of a flower, which is a flower.
Just as the girl whom we meet on Vanemuine hill
is Meeting in the form of the girl,
just as the moon is Shining as moon
and I myself am
Coming Home from School with Child
as Jaan and Lemmit. Only I do not know
what/who expresses itself in language, in this language
which has two heads. If you turn it round,
it begins to spawn Ideas and Gods,
splits us and our everyday affairs
into a playground for the heavenly host,
shadows on the cave wall, which for some reason believe
that the subject must be more real than the predicate
or the other way round. Although I have known
what is real: the stones which the boys threw
at the old saucepan in the yard. And the grapevines
around the veranda. Sometimes the spring sky. Sometimes dreams.
*
Birch tops like brushes
paint the dark darker, the light lighter;
paint dark on darkness,
light on light.
The light remains the thinner:
the tattered shirt of the tattered year.
The gleam of bare skin – it is neither
darkness nor light,
this nor that.
I do not know what it is.
I do not know what I know and do not know.
I do not even know what the sparse
black brushes of the birch branches
wri
te, paint on the dark clouds,
of themselves, of their present,
which has gone, which exists
no longer even as I see it,
when the light from between those branches
has reached my eyes and mind.
For we see only a lost world,
only what is no longer.
*
The beginning of the year is like a white sheet of paper. There has been a snowstorm during the night. I go out to beat the carpets. It is midday, but my footprints are the first outside the house. Perhaps something has happened, but nothing has yet reached us.
Like the sound of an axe-blow from the other side of the river.
Like the light of a new star from somewhere that is called ‘above’. Although the sky is on every side: above, below, beside, behind and in front.
Here, too, as I have thought and spoken. And think and speak now, too. In the snowy sky. On the snowy ground. As life stands still like a clock that one has forgotten to wind.
The children are still sleeping after New Year’s Eve.
The sheet of paper is still white. Silence is still silence.
The cloud is consoling to watch. Always.
*
Politics and politicians are gradually becoming streamlined, and in their streamlining uniform
like the newest cars, so similar that one has to look at what is written on the back to be certain which is a Toyota, which a Fiat, which a Ford, which a Renault.
Their wind resistance is always decreasing; headlights, windscreen wipers, aerials, door handles, principles and thoughts are concealed by the bodywork, which sinks, closer to the ground,
consumes less petrol per 100 kilometres, weighs less and can, at the speed limit and without leaving traces or memories, race through the community, whose resistance and turbulence have been thoroughly examined on the test circuit.
*
I ended up in literature because it seems, perhaps, closest to my proper place. But what is that proper place? It is that for which I seek, and do not find, a name. In fact, it may be that I do not seek it any longer, but seek instead the possibility of explaining to others that that place, that pigeonhole, does not really exist. It would be to compose poetry without being a poet; to write without being a writer; to philosophise without being a philosopher; to serve Christ without being a Christian; to serve Buddha without being a Buddhist; to express oneself without oneself being anyone.
Nouns are like ice and snow; in them is death and eternity, which are almost the same. Cold, icy, marmoreal eternity. Beauty, with a Capital Letter. Classical sculpture, which is now being destroyed, not by Christians and Muslims, but by the city air, that same city air which once made people free. I sometimes dream of a language in which there are no nouns, only verbs. A thought that may occur more easily to someone who knows the Finno-Ugrian languages, in which even negation is a verb. Like a remainder of an earlier living, changing and flowing world that gradually congeals, freezes into nouns, fossils, ice, theories, principles, and to which you try, more and more desperately and more and more resignedly, to speak of its own youth, of light, which is a flowing and a surging, and of life, which is light.
Behind the window, snow is falling, although it will soon be May; on the slope there are snowdrifts, and on a patch of ground that has been cleared of snow, numb with cold, robins and hedge-sparrows peck at oatflakes. At the same time terribly close and terribly distant. The gaze of the robin’s black eye will reach me perhaps only when I, never mind the robin, no longer exist. Perhaps my gaze will also reach him, but it is not certain. For the present, I shall try to speak in words. To speak of life, which cannot be contained in words, which cannot be explained or understood, which can only be lived, and perhaps also protected, like this robin, which is watching me, head tilted, from the top of the little pine, from a couple of decades of light years, or life years – life is the light of men – away.
*
I came from the town. I fetched some cucumber and flower seedlings from my neighbour; put the flowers into the larder to keep cool; planted the cucumbers and sowed some pepper seeds I had brought from the town in the greenhouse, watered them, cut the flourishing grass, nettles and dandelions from around the young apple trees; and then felt sweaty and tired, went down to the lake, took off my clothes and swam. The weather was hot, nearly 25°. I sat, naked, on a bench for a moment and listened to the nightingales. We have not had any for many years, but now, by the lake, where the great weeping willows and bird cherries grow, one had appeared, which, unperturbed by either me or the daylight, did nothing but warble, chuck and gurgle – clearly a great talent among its kind. Then my glance fell on the bird-cherry blossoms which covered the ground around the bench. This year there had not been the usual cold spell when the bird-cherry flowered. I thought about this, and suddenly there came to my mind something which I had noticed, but which was waiting somewhere on the borders of consciousness for further attention: earlier, when I had been speaking with the neighbour’s wife, there had been some bird-cherry blossom in her hair. Now that I had dealt with it, I began to feel better: one fact would leave me in peace, would no longer demand a reaction. We had met, I had nodded to it, clearly I was no longer of any use to it. The bird-cherry blossoms simply let me go. But they were not, and are not, definitely alone. Definitely, my mind is full of such impressions and notes awaiting and demanding attention. It is as if an alarm bell were constantly ringing somewhere, you are restless, without yourself knowing why; you have simply forgotten, perhaps deliberately, perhaps accidentally, the queue of unconscious things behind the doors of your consciousness.
*
Autumn comes closer. Everything drowns in yellow.
Golden rod and dahlia. For many months
you had lost your voice; now you begin to chime
more purely and more clearly. In a minor key.
And the yellow, the yellow is every day
fuller of bees, flies and remembrance
of childhood gardens in Tartu and Pärnu,
which were just as languid, luxuriant and damp
and full of the same stillness
in which grasshoppers play music with your soul
and the great hawk-moth, which you find
each morning under the well cover,
knocks each night at the window,
longing to come closer to the lamp
by whose light you sit and write
and think that in autumn borders begin to disappear
leaving moods and colours
leaving the yellow, the yellow…
*
I come up from the cellar: suddenly everything is full of light.
The light greets everything, greets the flower-vase and smiles at it, greets the teddy bear, me and the torch high on the shelf.
The light caresses the backs of all the books at once and shines on all the specks of dust at once, and the dust begins to dance.
The light reminds us, all us specks of dust, that redemption is the understanding that you are redeemed; understanding is the understanding that you have not understood.
Is not and is – between them runs the thinnest of thin lines: it has no thickness, no colour, no smell or weight.
Through it? But that is the same as if nothing happened. The spot of sunlight on the wall reaches the seam between two pieces of wallpaper and the cherry petal comes loose from the blossom and begins to fall, continues falling;
for us, in our time, it will never reach the ground, will never find redemption, will never decay.
But in its own time it reaches the floor, finds redemption and understanding.
Is there a third time, something outside past and future (it is not the present, the present is nothing but the border between them), which unites it and our own time, understanding, decay and redemption,
which for a moment wipes away the line between is not and is like the light whose smile set the dust in the room dancing?
*
A bird in the air. It is not its wings that bear its wings. Its wings are borne by the air. Words stand on wordlessness, logic on the absence of logic.
But sometimes we are, after all, closer to what exists. Before there is something that is like a blanket on top of one who sleeps. The body is unknown, but the blanket has its own folds, bumps and hollows.
We know someone is there beneath the blanket, but that ‘someone’ and that ‘knowing’ and that ‘we’ are even more under wraps than what is under the blanket. We are the blanket, not the sleeper.
We do not know whether he is alive or dead, although from time to time it looks as if he is breathing. And a blanket cannot breathe.
So it is not all the same, after all; all is not a game. But playing is allowed under the blanket, too – hide-and-seek, and make-believe that you are a badger in its sett or a fox in its lair.
I try to speak of this. Always. To think. Sleeping and waking. But my voice resounds as though from deep underwater, and nothing reaches the surface but bubbles.
Truth itself is also a bubble, which you build laboriously there beneath the waters surface, like a water spider, which builds itself a nest and drags air into it, bubble by bubble.
The nest looks like a little silver ball, like a globule of quicksilver, at once so heavy and so agile.
Truth is a bubble, part of the Truth which saves us from suffocating. Truth is that which breathes, and allows others to breathe.
*
In the room, a moth flies from east to west: here inside, too, east and west exist, in the room, in the matchbox and the eye of the needle.
A child throws an orange pip at the window. Bicycles – big and small – lie in each other’s embrace in the year’s last snow, the year’s last freedom,
Selected Poems Page 7
