“Time is a river that washes me away, but I am a river,” wrote Borges. “Time is the fire that consumes me, but I am the fire.”
Most of us are not Borges. Most of us sink into confusion as time passes, burning with the urgency to live while waiting to begin living, wandering through the labyrinth of life with a wandering existence, wishing that time would go differently as the religion of production turns every moment into a suppressed laugh in the veins of our passing.
And every time, our time is set between our times – the time in which we live together, we are born into it with no other way in the story than the body and mind and the family we are born into. In his epic essay on Shakespeare, James Baldwin countered the common lament of every age: “It is said that his time was easier than ours, but I doubt it—no time is easier when one lives in it.” A century before him—a century of upheaval and revolution—Emerson unleashed a great indignation: “This time, like all times, is very good, if only we know what to do with it.”
Not knowing what to do with the time given, not knowing how to seize time in our personal and political life, is simply an act of forgetting how time seizes us. Pablo Neruda (July 12, 1904–September 23, 1973) casts a spell against forgetting in the fourth canto of his long poem “Morning,”:
You will miss this intense canyon
when the fragrance rises,
and occasionally the bird wears
in water and languor: winter clothing.You will remember those gifts from the world:
fragrant, golden clay,
herbs, wild roots,
witchcraft thorns like swords.You will remember the bouquet you brought,
a bunch of shade and still water,
a bouquet like a stone covered with foam.And that time was exactly the same and every time:
We go where nothing is expected
and find everything waiting there.
If time is the central problem of human existence and poetry is our most accurate technique for dissecting the painful wonder of life, then time is the main subject of poetry. Neruda knew this – time is the current subterranean movement beneath his vast and varied work, the subterranean space where all his dramatic love poems and meditations on inner life grow. He respected the stones in the way he had “touched time,” he respected the moment of how “it would be appropriate to meet the river of time that carries us,” he respected the “springs of time that do not burn,” he longed for “perfect time like the sea,” and he made that sea with his poems.
In his poem “The Enigmas,” composed during World War II, he writes:
You once asked me what a crustacean spin is
between its golden claws
and I answer: the sea knows.Wondering what sea squirt is waiting for in its transparent metal?
What are you waiting for?I'll tell you: it's waiting for time just like you.
A decade later, in one of his “Elemental Odes,” Neruda laid out his clear instructions on how to capture time:
Listen and learn.
Time
it is split in half
in two rivers:
one
it flows backwards, it eats
life was already alive;
another one
go ahead with you
revealing
your health.
In one second
they may be combined.
Now.
This is the time,
a sudden descent
that washes away the past.
It's now.
It's in your hands.
racing, skating,
falling like a waterfall.
But it's yours.
Help it grow
with love, with strength,
with a stone and run away,
with noise
justice,
with clean letters,
a very bright metal
from your heart,
to walk
in full daylight
without fear
truth, goodness, justice,
song friends,
time flows
it will have a shape
and sound
guitar,
and if you want
bowing to the past,
singing source of
clear time
it will reveal the rest of your life.
Time is happiness.
A couple of three poems about trusting time, then revisiting Kahlil Gibran about how to befriend time.
