🇬🇧 Deceased poet as a garden phenomenon

🇬🇧 Deceased poet as a garden phenomenon

668.   I could be cheeky and render the master himself, who in turn was cheeky in paraphrasing old Heraclitus: “Nobody can go out twice into the same garden. This applies also to churchyards.” *) 

669.   Here we are at the very intersection of language and nature in its reduced form, where the poet and the garden both grow except on different timescales.

670.   The plant remains fixed, while the eye of the poet moves, his body moves. Herein lies a reciprocity between the slow growth and the movable; between the silent and the thinking.

671.   The poet says that a conversation arises out of this reciprocity, precisely because the garden is in a continuous correspondence with nature, while the poet himself is in correspondence with other languages and poets. A conversation is never alone.

672.   Throughout life, the garden is in constant growth with its poet, who trims and grows with it, but later declines and passes away.

673.   This takes us to the second sentence of the paraphrase: the churchyard where the poet is buried in a severely reduced and to free nature hyper-polemical restricted form of garden, in which only few conversations can be held.

674.   I could be cheeky again and put up a sign, a cross, a stick in my garden with the epitaph of the poet. But that would probably only lead to trouble with the family, the authorities, with the municipality, maybe even with the truth.

675.   I could plant a bush in his memory. A spindle for example. Discrete, of course. Only a few would ever know. But one would understand that he is here, growing underfoot, standing up here, in conversation, fully blossomed as his own language phenomenon.

676.   Thus, the conversation may continue. Imperceptibly, behind our backs. At any time. Never alone. Per Højholt † 2004. Stand in peace.


*) Per Højholt (1928-2004), Haven som sproglig foreteelse, in Stenvaskeriet, 1994.

Last Updated on 3 måneder ago by Jacob Gammelgaard