Here, Where Clover Whitens

Shortly, about the epic art of remembering to forget and other natural happenings

Entering an art exhibition is, for me, comparable to the thrill of a sanctuary—yes, exactly that, because as for now, I have not yet forged an appropriate term. It is a tingling you will remember forever, and still feel its sanctity later, like greeting artists you once met only through a screen, knowing that what you are about to experience has nothing, absolutely nothing, to compare with. And how does one call all that?

Perhaps this is where the epic begins and refuses ever to end. And where are we in that calm, impersonal, objective description of our world, of our life as it unfolds with all its complications? To reflect on prose I am so near; Descriptions of nature are the delight of epic prose: a page, a page and a half describing dusk or a walk along the river. That could be an entire painting, and that would be it, nothing more needed to close that epic on canvas.

Instinctively, in choosing the materials, the colours and sizing of the canvas, in the course of our sentences, in the choice of words, we forget all we know about epic and contain emotions. Unlike office workers working on the information boards, we care, after all, for a vague plaque of presentiments and impressions of our own.

What am I getting at? I am getting at the fact that we must be sustained—held in some condition of reciprocity—by a receiver of a letter or even more readers who perceive something beyond the content that can be said in three minutes of an internet reel. They perceived something more. And it is on this that our impudence rests: that we exist, that we sometimes brazenly take the floor. This suits us—both in a written expression, as in real life—to act upon those unnamed areas of our own and our readers’ or viewers’ reception, to work by offering them intimations, moods, a longing for something.

Perhaps this is also what poetry is about.

Have you ever watched Jules and Jim, a very intimate film by François Truffaut?
There is a scene where they are sitting at a table. Suddenly, the girl stands up and walks away—the camera follows her in a pan. Ostensibly, theoretically, it is just ordinary film information about stage movement. And yet, there is a chance that for a long time you will not be able to forget that shot. It affects you in some way.

There are many outstanding artists in whom there is nothing of this—of that indefinable quality which even a hundred professors cannot name, cannot explain how it works, how it moves us, what chemical processes it causes that make a person remember, experience.

Being forgotten is also pleasant. And you yourself know this perfectly well—at least in theory. Johann Sebastian Bach was rediscovered by a French composer. He bought herrings, or something of the sort, at a market stall, wrapped in the sheet music of some unknown fellow called Bach. Only a hundred years after his death did he begin to live and exist. A similar thing applied to Caravaggio, who for centuries was little more than a footnote—however violent character, minor realist, mostly troublemaker, whose paintings hung in churches, unnamed or misattributed. It was only in the 20th century that art historians pieced him back together, so to speak. And Johannes Vermeer, who, when he died, supposedly only left debts? A handful of paintings, many attributed to others, mostly in private rooms. For nearly two hundred years, no one knew his name! Artemisia Gentileschi painted with force, clarity, even defiance—yet history filed her away under other men’s names. Her work survived; her authorship did not. Only recently has she been returned to “herself”.

To be forgotten is an entirely natural, normal function of memory.

We don’t need to try to forget much, and much we forget anyway.

I really like the poem, just about that, The To-be-forgotten, by Thomas Hardy:

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I

I heard a small sad sound,

And stood awhile among the tombs around:

“Wherefore, old friends,” said I, “are you distrest,

Now, screened from life’s unrest?”

II

—”O not at being here;

But that our future second death is near;

When, with the living, memory of us numbs,

And blank oblivion comes!

III

“These, our sped ancestry,

Lie here embraced by deeper death than we;

Nor shape nor thought of theirs can you descry

With keenest backward eye.

IV

“They count as quite forgot;

They are as men who have existed not;

Theirs is a loss past loss of fitful breath;

It is the second death.

V

“We here, as yet, each day

Are blest with dear recall; as yet, can say

We hold in some soul loved continuance

Of shape and voice and glance.

VI

“But what has been will be —

First memory, then oblivion’s swallowing sea;

Like men foregone, shall we merge into those

Whose story no one knows.

VII

“For which of us could hope

To show in life that world-awakening scope

Granted the few whose memory none lets die,

But all men magnify?

VIII

“We were but Fortune’s sport;

Things true, things lovely, things of good report

We neither shunned nor sought ... We see our bourne,

And seeing it we mourn.”

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Or in other cases, do we only remember how we should forget?

We never know when we will watch or read something we cannot quite erase from our memories. For me, these are surely impressive in content and style books I have chosen and read in the last three months, let’s say, but I deliberately keep them undisclosed, as they serve me as a direct inspiration for what I am working on elsewhere.

So, here just to end with another poem (from my most recent trip to a book shop), a poem that wants to stay, so let’s keep it there, here, below:

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Because I liked you better—

from More Poems by A. E. Housman:

Because I liked you better
Than suits a man to say,
It irked you, and I promised
To throw the thought away.

To put the world between us
We parted, stiff and dry;
“Good-bye,” said you, “forget me.”
“I will, no fear,” said I.

If here, where clover whitens
The dead man’s knoll, you pass,
And no tall flower to meet you
Starts in the trefoiled grass,

Halt by the headstone naming
The heart no longer stirred,
And say the lad that loved you
Was one that kept his word.

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Crista Uwase, Inzora y’Ukwezi, 2020