John Ashbery

… De toute façon le soir
A tendance à modifier les choses. Moins la couleur,
La qualité d’une poignée de main, une haleine douteuse,
Qu’une impatience générale à voir les comptes faits,
Les fleurs disposées loin de tout regard.
…

Some things we do take up a lot more time
And are considered a fruitful, natural thing to do.
I am coming out of one way to behave
Into a plowed cornfield. On my left, gulls,
On an inland vacation. They seem to mind the way I write.
Or, to take another example : last month
I vowed to write more. What is writing ?
Well, in my case, it’s getting down on paper
Not thoughts, exactly, but ideas, maybe :
Ideas about thoughts. Thoughts is too grand a word.
Ideas is better, though not precisely what I mean.
Someday I’ll explain. Not today though.
I feel as though someone had made me a vest
Which I was wearing out of doors into the countryside
Out of loyalty to the person, although
There is no one to see, except me
With my inner vision of what I look like.
The wearing is both a duty and a pleasure
Because it absorbs me, absorbs me too much.
One horse stands out irregularly against
The land over there. And am I receiving
The vision ? Is it mine, or do I already owe it
For other visions, unnoticed and unrecorded
On the great, relaxed curve of time,
All the forgotten springs, dropped pebbles,
Songs once heard that then passed out of light
Into everyday oblivion ? He moves away slowly,
Looks up and pumps the sky, a lingering
Question. Him too we can sacrifice
To the end of progress, for we must, we must be moving on.

All right. The problem is that there is no new problem. It must awaken from the sleep of being part of some other, old problem, and by that time its new problematical existence will have already begun, carrying it forward into situations with which it cannot cope, since no one recognizes it and it does not even recognize itself yet, or know what it is. It is like the beginning of a beautiful day, with all the birds singing in the trees, reading their joy and excitement into its record as it progresses, and yet the progress of any day, good or bad, brings with it all kinds of difficulties that should have been foreseen but never are, so that it finally seems as though they are what stifles it, in the majesty of a sunset or merely in gradual dullness that gets dimmer and dimmer until it finally sinks into flat, sour darkness. Why is this ? Because not one-tenth or even one one-hundredth of the ravishing possibilities the birds sing about at dawn could ever be realized in the course of a single day, no matter how crammed with fortunate events it might turn out to be. And this brings on inevitable reproaches, unmerited of course, for we are all like children sulking because they cannot have the moon ; and very soon the unreasonableness of these demands is forgotten and overwhelmed in a wave of melancholy of which it is the sole cause. Finally we know only that we are unhappy but we cannot tell why. We forget that it is our own childishness that is to blame.

Impatient as we were for all of them to join us,
The land had not yet risen into view : gulls had swept the gray steel towers away
So that it profited less to go searching, away over the humming earth
Than to stay in immediate relation to these other things – boxes, store parts, whatever you wanted to call them --
Whose installedness was the price of further revolutions, so you knew this combat was the last.
And still the relationship waxed, billowed like scenery on the breeze.

They are the same aren’t they,
The presumed landscape and the dream of home
Because the people are all homesick today or desperately sleeping,
Trying to remember how those rectangular shapes
Became so extraneous and so near
To create a foreground of quiet knowledge
In which youth had grown old, chanting and singing wise hymns that
Will sign for old age
And so lift up the past to be persuaded, and be put down again.

The warning is nothing more than an aspirate « h » ;
The problem is sketched completely, like fireworks mounted on poles :
Complexion of evening, the accurate voices of the others.
During Coca-Cola lessons it becomes patent
Of noise on the left, and we had so skipped a stage that
The great wave of the past, compounded in derision,
Submerged idea and non-dreamer alike
In falsetto starlight like « purity »
Of design that had been the first danger sign
To wash the sticky, icky stuff down the drain – pfui !

How does it feel to be outside and inside at the same time,
The delicious feeling of the air contradicting and secretly abetting
The interior warmth ? But the land curdles the dismay in which it’s written
Bearing to a final point of folly and doom
The wisdom of these generations.
Look at what you’ve done to the landscape --
The ice cube, the olive --
There is a perfect tri-city mesh of things
Extending all the way along the river on both sides
With the end left for thoughts on construction
That are always turning to alps and thresholds
Above the tide of others, feeding a European moss rose without glory.

We shall very soon have the pleasure of recording
A period of unanimous tergiversation in this respect
And to make that pleasure the greater, it is worth while
At the risk of tedious iteration, to put first upon record a final protest :
Rather decaying art, genius, inspiration to hold to
An impossible « calque » of reality, than
« The new school of the trivial, rising up on the field of battle,
Something of sludge and leaf-mold, » and life
Goes trickling out through the holes, like water through a sieve,
All in one direction.

You who were directionless, and thought it would solve everything if you found one,
What do you make of this ? Just because a thing is immortal
Is that any reason to worship it ? Death, after all, is immortal.
But you have gone into your houses and shut the doors, meaning
There can be no further discussion.
And the river pursues its lonely course
With the sky and the trees cast up from the landscape
For green brings unhappiness – le vert Porte malheur. « The chartreuse mountain on the absinthe plain
Makes the strong man’s tears tumble down like rain. »

All this came to pass eons ago.
Your program worked out perfectly. You even avoided
The monotony of perfection by leaving in certain flaws :
A backward way of becoming, a forced handshake,
An absent-minded smile, though in fact nothing was left to chance.
Each detail was startlingly clear, as though seen through a magnifying glass,
Or would have been to an ideal observer, namely yourself --
For only you could watch yourself so patiently from afar
The way God watches a sinner on the path to redemption,
Sometimes disappearing into valleys, but always on the way,
For it all builds up into something, meaningless or meaningful
As architecture, because planned and then abandoned when completed,
To live afterwards, in sunlight and shadow, a certain amount of years.
Who cares about what was there before ? There is no going back,
For standing still means death, and life is moving on,
Moving on towards death. But sometimes standing still is also life.

The cross-hatching technique which allowed our ancestors to exchange certain genetic traits for others, in order to provide their offspring with a way of life at once more variegated and more secure than their own, has just about run out of steam and has left us wondering, once more, what there is about this plush solitude that makes us think we will ever get out, or even want to. The ebony hands of the clock always seem to mark the same hour. That is why it always seems the same, though it is or course changing constantly, subtly, as though fed by an underground stream. If only we could go out in back as when we were kids, and smoke and fool around and just stay out of the way, for a little while. But that’s just it — don’t you see ? We are « Out in back. » No one has ever used the front door. We have always lived in this place without a name, without shame, a place for grownups to talk and laugh, having a good time. When we were children it seemed that adulthood would be like climbing a tree, that there would he a view from there, breathtaking because slightly more elusive. But now we can see only down, first down through the branches and further down the surprisingly steep grass patch that slopes away from the base of the tree. It certainly is a different view, but not the one we expected.
What did they want us to do ? Stand around this way, monitoring every breath, checking each impulse for the return address, wandering constantly about evil until necessarily we fall into a state of torpor that is probably the worst sin of all ? To what purpose did they cross-hatch so effectively, so that the luminous surface that was underneath is transformed into another, also luminous but so shifting and so alive with suggestiveness that it is like quicksand, to take a step there would be to fall through the fragile net of uncertainties into the bog of certainty, otherwise known as the Slough of Despond ?
Probably they meant for us to enjoy the things they enjoyed, like late summer evenings, and hoped that we’d find others and thank them for providing us with the wherewithal to find and enjoy them. Singing the way they did, in the old time, we can sometimes see through the tissues and tracings the genetic process has laid down between us and them. The tendrils can suggest a hand ; or a specific color — the yellow of the tulip, for instance — will flash for a moment in such a way that after it has been withdrawn we can be sure that there was no imagining, no auto-suggestion here, but at the same time it becomes as useless as all subtracted memories. It has brought certainty without heat or light. Yet still in the old time, in the faraway summer evenings, they must have had a word for this, or known that we would someday need one, and wished to help. Then it is that a kind of purring occurs, like the wind sneaking around the baseboards of a room : not the infamous « still, small voice » but an ancillary speech that is parallel to the slithering of our own doubt-fleshed imaginings, a visible soundtrack of the way we sound as we move from encouragement to despair to exasperation and back again, with a gesture sometimes that is like an aborted movement outward toward some cape or promontory from which the view would extend in two directions — backward and forward — but that is only a polite hope in the same vein as all the others, crumpled and put away, and almost not to be distinguished from any of them, except that it knows we know, and in the context of not knowing is a fluidity that flashes like silver, that seems to say a film has been exposed and an image will, most certainly will, not like the last time, come to consider itself within the frame.
It must be an old photograph of you, out in the yard, looking almost afraid in the crisp, raking light that afternoons in the city held in those days, unappeased, not accepting anything from anybody. So what else is new ? I’ll tell you what is : you are accepting this now from the invisible, unknown sender, and the light that was intended, you thought, only to rake or glance is now directed full in your face, as it in fact, always was, but you were squinting so hard, fearful of accepting it, that you didn’t know this. Whether it warms or burns is another matter, which we will not go into here. The point is that you are accepting it and holding on to it like love from someone you always thought you couldn’t stand, and whom you now recognize as a brother, an equal. Someone whose face is the same as yours in the photograph but who is someone else, all of whose thoughts and feelings are directed at you, falling like a gentle slab of light that will ultimately loosen and dissolve the crusted suspicion, the timely self-hatred, the efficient cold directness, the horrible good manners, the sensible resolves and the senseless nights spent waiting in utter abandon, that have grown up to be you in the tree with no view ; and place you firmly in the good-natured circle of your ancestors’ games and entertainments.

Lorsque nous sommes dans nos trente ans les choses ordinaires - un caillou, un verre d’eau - prennent un lustre très expressif. On veut en savoir davantage à leur sujet et, à notre tour, on se retrouve vécu par ces choses. Les jeunes pourraient ne pas envier ce genre de situation, et peut-être à juste titre, seulement voilà, s’intercalant entre les pages de souffrance et les pages d’indifférence à cette souffrance, il existe maintenant un espace prismatique que l’on ne peut pas voir, que l’on ne peut que sentir, qui est comme la conséquence d’une angulaire ayant dû perdurer depuis des temps immémoriaux et qui, seulement aujourd’hui arrive à faire éprouver sa présence à travers les brumes de l’acceptation impuissante de tout le reste, tout ce reste projeté dans le morne espace de nos jours. On en est conscients comme on le serait d’un champ ouvert de possibilités narratives. Mais pas dans le sens édifiant des contes du passé auxquels nous sommes malgré tout liés, plutôt dans le sens d’histoires qui ne nous parlent que de nous-mêmes, et tant et si bien que l’on se rend compte alors qu’entre moi s’est peu à peu réduit, s’est même maintenant évanoui dans la lumière de la pure spéculation. Col relevé, vous voilà plus léger que l’air. Le faisceau de nerfs réceptifs bourdonne bien de nouveau, il a été au fond à peine endommagé : il reçoit de l’extérieur des émanations couleur du temps et il renvoie des messages très denses, très précisément formulés. Il y a de la place pour se mouvoir, c’est tout ce qui importe. La douleur qui drainait le sang de vos joues lorsque vous étiez jeune, et qui vous avait transformé en une sorte de spectre livide avant l’heure, cette souffrance s’est muée en une source d’énergie peuplant ce nouveau monde de perceptions émerveillées.