AVERNO
5.
After the first winter, the field began to grow again.
But there were no more orderly furrows.
The smell of the wheat persisted, a kind of random aroma
intermixed with various weeds, for which
no human use has been as yet devised.
It was puzzling—no one knew
where the farmer had gone.
Some people thought he died.
Someone said he had a daughter in New Zealand,
that he went there to raise
grandchildren instead of wheat.
Nature, it turns out, isn’t like us;
it doesn’t have a warehouse of memory.
The field doesn’t become afraid of matches,
of young girls. It doesn’t remember
furrows either. It gets killed off, it gets burned,
and a year later it’s alive again
as though nothing unusual has occurred.
The farmer stares out the window.
Maybe in New Zealand, maybe somewhere else.
And he thinks: my life is over.
His life expressed itself in that field;
he doesn’t believe anymore in making anything
out of earth. The earth, he thinks,
has overpowered me.
He remembers the day the field burned,
not, he thinks, by accident.
Something deep within him said: I can live with this,
I can fight it after awhile.
The terrible moment was the spring after his work was erased,
when he understood that the earth
didn’t know how to mourn, that it would change instead.
And then go on existing without him.
OMENS
I rode to meet you: dreams
like living beings swarmed around me
and the moon on my right side
followed me, burning.
I rode back: everything changed.
My soul in love was sad
and the moon on my left side
trailed me without hope.
To such endless impressions
we poets give ourselves absolutely,
making, in silence, omen of mere event,
until the world reflects the deepest needs of the soul.
after Alexander Pushkin
AVERNO. I think about how human lives are intertwined with the processes of nature: so intimately that they become blurred. For someone who cultivates the land, what is born in that land is also a part of him, his work, the way his life is expressed. The furrows the farmer leaves in the earth when sowing are like the lines of writing; the human marks his work imprints on what would otherwise be an inhuman surface. But there is a difference. And it is here that bewilderment (and perhaps our grief) sets in: the earth does not remember as we remember. It does not mourn what is lost. There is no memory of the universe. After burning, the field quickly recovers (in this case at least) and the human marks are erased. The following spring, it is ready to grow again, if not with wheat, then at least with "weeds," which only seem less valuable to humans because they do not know what to do with them, but which are as much life as any other vegetation. After a few months, the field no longer remembers the furrows, the farmer, or his work, and continues to exist perfectly without him. A vague scent of wheat still hovers, a vestige of what once was. The farmer's melancholy is twofold: due to the loss of his work, but also due to the understanding of its dispensable and ephemeral nature. Being human also means dedicating oneself to useless works, which can be undone in an instant and leave no trace.
However, there are more luminous lines in this poem. Deep within us, we know that we are also living earth, and that therefore, within us, there is a capacity for a certain forgetting and renewal, the capacity—perhaps slower, probably more imperfect—to create new life after the fire.
Leaving the poem, I wonder about the human marks that are not so easily erased, those that will continue to persist for centuries or even millennia, some of them irreversible: islands of plastic, the extinction of animal and plant species, the pollution of rivers, new deserts, devastated landscapes. Perhaps all of these are nothing more than renewed attempts to etch into the earth a human trace so profound that it will finally become indelible, albeit in the negative form of destruction.
OMENS. In this poem, the theme of leaving a mark in nature is also present, although in this case it is an intangible, subjective footprint that does not materially alter the environment. It is the vision and meaning of the landscape that is transformed here, following the changes in the mood of the beholder. When traveling to a romantic encounter, everything is filled with foreboding, fantasies, and ardor, and the moon is transfigured in accordance with that inner state: it too seems to burn. But after a failed encounter, when one returns immersed in an atmosphere of sadness, the moon takes on a similar sad quality and seems to follow us reluctantly. Even though it is the "same" moon from a material point of view, the moon we see is different.
We project our longings and sorrows, our own needs and affections, onto the things we perceive, as if these couldn’t remain contained within us and had to overflow to the outside, tinting and coloring what we see. So, in the end, we breathe and exist in landscapes that are a web of threads, both material and intangible/emotional. Poets and artists dedicate their lives to these silent transfigurations of perception. And probably many of us have experienced, upon leaving the cinema or finishing a book, that when we look around, the world is no longer the same. At least for a few minutes, everything has metamorphosed slightly: it is now enchanted.
