Comfort is relief, not relief

That poems may be emotional things, but should not be comforting, said Gerrit Kouwenaar in a documentary fragment that Lieke Marsman showed in Summer guests. “For comfort you go to the pastor.” Lieke Marsman rightly did not agree with this.

What exactly is comfort? Sometimes you hear unhappy people say that there is no comfort, that there is nothing that can relieve their grief: death, the misfortune, the despair of something that is about to happen or has already happened cannot be taken away.

But that’s not what consolation aims for either. Troost usually wants to soften, which by the way not everyone is waiting for.

I often think of a sentence from the work of Willem Brakman, in which it is said of such a characteristically idiosyncratic Brakman character that a certain event marked him “a man who carried on a great loss and did not want to be comforted by it” . Perhaps he feared that comfort would lessen the drama. If the sharp edges of his suffering were buffed, something would disappear from himself, the engine of his resistance to existence.

An undesirable side of comfort can be that the accident is trivialized, with sentences such as: ‘you will find another one’, ‘you should make the best of it’. Death Eaters who belittle the extraordinary in what happens to someone.

It is precisely that which is always special that poetry aims to capture. Think of Rutger Kopland’s line in his poem ‘On the longing for a cigarette’: „No one understands this desire but me”. That is of course not true, but at the same time it is about a very personal desire that cannot be understood by anyone else. And it is precisely this specificity that makes it possible for someone else to see their own feelings or sensations that had not yet found expression in the poem as well. That is why a poem cannot be summarized.

But that’s all poetry. Consolation, I think, is enlightenment. Enlightening is different from lifting.

In the years when I had to say goodbye to an expectation of how life would go, I didn’t quite see how to live the years to come. At that time I read a poem by Kouwenaar, ‘The last days of summer’. It is about leaving a house where one has spent the summer and which must now be left behind. The first lines are: „Slower the wasps, scarcer the horseflies / greenflies grayer, angels no, nothing / that heavens here, everything burns lower”.

Splendid lines, by their irresistible sound and rhythm, but also by what they evoke: the summer, with all that comes with it of life and expectation, is over, there is no angel, no hope to be seen, everything now burns at a very low dude, me too. The image did not soften anything at all, it rather sharpened the vague but intense feelings and that was exactly what gave comfort, if you want to call it that. Relief. Because as soon as I read it, I knew that was what I was feeling.

‘The comfort of form’, that was often talked about in the early eighties. It is comforting that a form has been found, a temporary order in what is a chaos of impressions and feelings, of the world as it is and yourself in it. Such small orders are poems.

Such a small arrangement can illuminate in all senses of the word. Even if it says something so uncomfortably so as: “You have to unsubscribe here”.