Transcript

I’m Major Jackson and this is The Slowdown.

Putting away the dishes one morning, first light blazing up the kitchen, I said to the fork, I love you, fork. Then, I said it again to the spoons, and then to the Slowdown mug, and to every item lifted from the dishwasher.

My walk that morning brought forth the world in technicolor, piercing green trees, a blue sky screeching loud as a free jazz concert, a jogger’s passing smile, soft, otherworldly. The earth hummed and throbbed. At a stoplight, I was suddenly filled with an inexplicable joy.

My day of explosive happiness was counterintuitive. My inner world was actually gray; a family member has been battling cancer, another a victim of hurricanes, and then there was myself, ever negotiating the psychic demands of being present in a world where kindness feels in short supply.

But, as the speaker in today’s poem acknowledges, living is tough work, but live we must. We must live extravagantly with purpose and meaning.

On Living
by Nâzim Hikmet, translated by Randy Blasing and Mutlu Konuk

I

Living is no laughing matter:
      you must live with great seriousness
             like a squirrel, for example—
   I mean without looking for something beyond and above living, 
             I mean living must be your whole occupation. 
Living is no laughing matter:
      you must take it seriously,
      so much so and to such a degree
   that, for example, your hands tied behind your back,
                                      your back to the wall,
   or else in a laboratory 
      in your white coat and safety glasses,
      you can die for people—
   even for people whose faces you’ve never seen,
   even though you know living
      is the most real, the most beautiful thing.
I mean, you must take living so seriously
   that even at seventy, for example, you’ll plant olive trees—
   and not for your children, either, 
   but because although you fear death you don’t believe it,
   because living, I mean, weighs heavier.

II

Let’s say we’re seriously ill, need surgery—
which is to say we might not get up
                      from the white table.
Even though it’s impossible not to feel sad
                      about going a little too soon, 
we’ll still laugh at the jokes being told, 
we’ll look out the window to see if it’s raining,
or still wait anxiously 
               for the latest newscast. . .
Let’s say we’re at the front—
      for something worth fighting for, say.
There, in the first offensive, on that very day,
      we might fall on our face, dead. 
We’ll know this with a curious anger,
      but we’ll still worry ourselves to death
      about the outcome of the war, which could last years.
Let’s say we’re in prison
and close to fifty,
and we have eighteen more years, say,
                     before the iron doors will open.
We’ll still live with the outside,
with its people and animals, struggle and wind—
                           I  mean with the outside beyond the walls.
I mean, however and wherever we are,
        we must live as if we will never die.

III

This earth will grow cold, 
a star among stars
              and one of the smallest,
a gilded mote on blue velvet—
               I mean this, our great earth.
This earth will grow cold one day,
not like a block of ice
or a dead cloud even
but like an empty walnut it will roll along
              in pitch-black space . . .
You must grieve for this right now
—you have to feel this sorrow now—
for the world must be loved this much
                          if you’re going to say “I lived”. . .

“On Living” by Nazim Hikmet from translated by Randy Blasing and Mutlu Konuk © THE POEMS OF NAZIM HIKMET © 2002 Randy Blasing and Mutlu Konuk. Used by permission of Persea Books.