This article is based on this dutch article of Martijn Benders
Maybe I’m Also One of Those Quail
In Gedichten om te Lezen in het Donker, my father died live on page 104 while I was composing a poem. I was sitting on my bed in Galicia when the police called; they had found my father on the street. We had to rush back by car because my sister had already passed away and my mother was demented. Since then, every time I reach page 104, my father dies again. This way, he lives forever on page 104, precisely where he knew to die.
So, I have no choice but to compose a thick bundle each time. You might think this a convenient excuse, but you’d be mistaken: the man molded his own fate, and I am nothing more than the obedient chisel of his eternal resurrection, each stanza an incantation that impatiently raises him from the pavement of a bygone street. “Oh no, not again,” I can almost hear him say, as he hits his head once more on page 104 against the margins of my pen. But what can I do? Choose another page?
I imagine him walking around among the letters with his hands in his pockets, occasionally pointing with a dissatisfied expression at a metaphor he disapproves of. He always had an opinion about my work. “A poem without a ringing cone,” he once said, “is a soup without a meatball.” That was his philosophy, and now I hear it constantly from that page. Sometimes I even imagine him shifting the words, like how the bees used to move their hives in the Bible stories he always cited—whenever he wanted to tell me something I didn’t understand.
I read two stories yesterday by the masterful writer Garshin:
Here in translation by Hans Boland. This writer cannot be praised enough. The first story, Four Days, was already masterful, but the second one, The Artists, struck me like a sledgehammer. It is essentially about a man who is too sensitive for the art world and the nonsense it sells. It is an almost perfect parable.
Maybe I’m also one of those quail, who ostentatiously deaf lets his father die on page 104 repeatedly because he is no match for the world of poetry. Every time the printers let the pages of my collections slip through their ink-heavy fingers, I know death awaits again on page 104.
So yes, every time a new collection rolls off the presses, I feel that choking sense of inevitability. The curtain falls once more for my father, but he, the true hero of this poetic tragicomedy, plays his role without complaint. And I? I remain ostentatiously deaf to the applause that might not even be intended for me.
Oh, let me turn to music instead. Yesterday, I made the back cover of my album: these 22 songs are all ready, but, as always, everything still needs a final mastering. Ah, music… at least no page 104.
