"The child, unnoticed, had already put out tendrils and sent down roots, and there had been time for that fragile-seed to place his tiny, unsteady feet on the muddy ground and to receive from it the indelible mark of the earth, that shifting backdrop to the vast ocean of air, of that clay, now dry, now wet, composed of vegetable and animal remains, of detritus left behind by everything and everyone, crushed and pulverised rocks, multiple, kaleidoscopic substances that passed through life and to life returned, just like the suns and the moons, times of flood and drought, cold weather and hot, wind and no wind, sorrows and joys, the living and the not. Only I knew, without knowing I did, that on the illegible pages of destiny and in the blind meanderings of chance it had been written that I would one day return to Azinhaga to finish being born." (Saramago, J, Small Memories)
I stopped in my tracks with the last line... return to finish being born. I think, maybe all of us never really finish that process. We get uprooted, we leave to a new place, we imagine the things that were around us, the landscape that was, the memories of the place, the house, the people. Sometimes, its an unfinished business. And Saramago says that of himself: the landscape is not his as he didn't grown up there. You are thrown into situations and the new place forces you to grow up and when you return to the place, its something else.
I want to go back and finish being born. Or maybe I don't. Do I have a choice? I now think that as we get older we reflect back on those now borrowed landscapes and think, there was a time I was being born and it was interrupted. But to what ends will this project achieve?
Maybe its in one of the poems Saramago has written that he refers to in this trip to finishing being born.
....
I wait motionless for the whole river to be bathed in blue and for the birds on the branches to explain to me why the poplars are so tall and their leaves so full of murmurings
Then, with the body of the boat and the river safely back in the human dimension, I continue on toward the golden pool surrounded by the raised sword of the bullrushes
There I will bury my pole two feet down in the living rocks
A great primordial silence will fall when hands join with hands
And then I will know everything.
(Protopoem)
Thanks translated Saramago, for how you enthrall with your words.
I stopped in my tracks with the last line... return to finish being born. I think, maybe all of us never really finish that process. We get uprooted, we leave to a new place, we imagine the things that were around us, the landscape that was, the memories of the place, the house, the people. Sometimes, its an unfinished business. And Saramago says that of himself: the landscape is not his as he didn't grown up there. You are thrown into situations and the new place forces you to grow up and when you return to the place, its something else.
I want to go back and finish being born. Or maybe I don't. Do I have a choice? I now think that as we get older we reflect back on those now borrowed landscapes and think, there was a time I was being born and it was interrupted. But to what ends will this project achieve?
Maybe its in one of the poems Saramago has written that he refers to in this trip to finishing being born.
....
I wait motionless for the whole river to be bathed in blue and for the birds on the branches to explain to me why the poplars are so tall and their leaves so full of murmurings
Then, with the body of the boat and the river safely back in the human dimension, I continue on toward the golden pool surrounded by the raised sword of the bullrushes
There I will bury my pole two feet down in the living rocks
A great primordial silence will fall when hands join with hands
And then I will know everything.
(Protopoem)
Thanks translated Saramago, for how you enthrall with your words.
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