While looking for something completely different, I came across JC Bloem’s poem ‘November’ (‘always November, always rain’) containing those lines that I always find so terrible: “And in the room, where left / Daily life is done ,/ Shining from the dreary streets/ An uncolored afternoon light.” That abysmal gloom, especially because of that word ‘resigned’ and the claim that daily life is ‘done’. Sure. We would rather be dead, is that what Bloem wants to say here?
We often hear that poetry expresses the ‘unspeakable’. Sometimes that seems like a rather ridiculous pretension.
I don’t know exactly why Bloem often annoys me so much with his melancholy. The poetry is full of rain that makes people despondent – ’Rain rain/ Allerwegen’ – I generally agree with that.
Recently I heard a rain song in the car, ‘It’s raining today’ by Scott Walker: “It’s raining today/ And I’m just about to forget the train window girl/ That wonderful day we met.” The intense melancholy of a young adult with a broken love. Just like with Bloem, there is something of a resigned tone in it, but here I could hear it without annoyance. In fact, it immediately evoked something inexpressible, a feeling from long ago, the dullness of ‘it’s over’, but also a mixture of wallowing in a beautiful sadness and actually having it and feeling it deeply.
Music very easily evokes something inexpressible, but the music itself, regardless of the text used, is not made of words, so there is no obligation to say something that could be summarized in words. Choreographer Hans van Manen always says: “Dance expresses dance, nothing else.” That’s powerful, but not entirely true. He probably means something like Wittgenstein in his famous maxim, about what dance expresses inexpressibly, “darüber muss man schweigen.” Watch the dance, listen to the music, experience it and shut up.
I thought about everything that cannot be expressed when I stood in front of a work of art by Anselm Kiefer in Museum Voorlinden. It expressed something equally unspeakable, and at the same time the despair for that unspeakable. It is called Für Paul Celan, Gespräch mit Baumrinden and it is a huge job, of course. Dark and gray, with lead and paint, and it looks like birch bark is curling out of the canvas. Words from the poet Paul Celan are painted on the canvas: “Gespräch mit Baumrinden/ schäl dich komm schäl mich / aus meinem Wort” – Conversation with tree bark/ Peel you come peel me/ from my word. If ‘peeling’ is the right word here. “Are you peeling?” The poem is not in Ton Naaijkens’ Celan translation.
It’s crushing work. Its expressive power is enormous – but what does it say? We see that bark-likeness bursting out from the dark lead into space. The words seem to express a deep longing, a longing to be freed from the unspeakable, from the words that conceal the fact that it is about something that cannot be said.
Yet they say something, especially in combination with that enormous canvas. Something that makes a big impression. Perhaps it is the despairing question of what remains after the liberation of language: lead, birch bark. Bursting out silently. That is there, but is that a liberation?
Unsayability means what Hans van Manen meant: that there is no other way to say it than this. Through dance. Through music. Through paint.
And through words.