(no subject)

Been reading around in Strand & Simic's Another Republic anthology (1976). It's a poetry anthology but includes selections from Invisible Cities and Cronopios and Famas and is therefore awesome. Among the poets I wasn't familiar with Vasko Popa is standing out and then some. Among other surprises, a couple of his poems bizarrely connect with old Livejournal entries of mine. One of these was March 26 '06:

"Let me not seem to have lived in vain...Let me not seem to have lived in vain," were dying Brahe's words to Kepler.

(Galileo refused to send Kepler a telescope.)

Kepler, on his own deathbed, a story goes, pointed continually at his own head, then up at the stars...up at the stars, then his own head.

Tell me if you ever run across anything more moving than that.

Galileo wanted the glory to himself, whether or not he deserved it (in 2006-me's post, anyway). Brahe wanted the glory he did deserve to emerge. For Kepler, my Kepler, the glory wasn't created in the knowledge of others, but in his own. The night was both outside and in, just as he was both inside and out, and whatever he discovered was a tightening of that bond. Whatever he failed to discover was no great matter, since so much was shared already. Facing death, Galileo and Brahe desperately sought to survive in others' memory. Kepler died inside what was inside him, which may have made for an infinite regression of dying Keplers, but also an infinite expansion of worlds still there undied in. More importantly and accurately, the contents were the same. More importantly and accurately, he pointed back and forth.

Perhaps a mysticism of the body, as Pessoa's shepherd talks about elsewhere in the collection.

Surely this is Popa thinking of Kepler's "last words" (let them not be Brahe's!):

The Stargazer's Legacy, tr. Simic

His words were left after him
More beautiful than the world
No one dares to look at them long

They wait around time's turnings
Greater than men
Who can pronounce them

They lie on the mute earth
Heavier than bones of life
Death wasn't able
To carry off as dowry

No one can lift them
No one can drop them

The falling stars tuck their heads
In the shadow of his words

(no subject)

The second Popa-shock came from this one:

The Tale of a Tale, tr. Charles Simic

Once upon a time there was a tale

It came to the end
Before its beginning
And began
After its end

Its heroes entered it
After their death
And left it
Before their birth

Its heroes spoke
Of an earth of a heaven
They spoke a lot

Only they didn't say
What even they didn't know
That they were heroes in a tale

In a tale coming to the end
Before its beginning
And beginning
After its end.

Ridiculously close to Little, Big, and closer still to how Crowley speaks about it, isn't it? Oddly similar to the relationship this Novalis poem, tr. Bly, I posted a while back bears to The Solitudes:

When geometric diagrams and digits
Are no longer the keys to living things,
When people who go about singing or kissing
Know deeper things than the great scholars,
When society is returned once more
To unimprisoned life, and to the universe,
And when light and darkness mate
Once more and make something entirely transparent,
And people see in poems and fairy tales
The true history of the world,
Then our entire twisted nature will turn
And run when a single secret word is spoken.

Combine these Popa poems, and it may mean Crowley saw what I saw in Kepler. And perhaps it's also more or less what I saw in Crowley (wasn't Kepler's pointing the self-consciously littlest biggest thing possible? I'll have to reread the meadow scene soon). And if Popa saw all this too, I think I'd like to see more Popa. We could point back and forth among heads.

And (a tale for another day) I think coming from The Selfish Gene is the best way in which one can start to understand Little, Big--and perhaps, with Another Republic, it was one of John Crowley's starting points writing it.