Baron Wormser: “Gilgamesh Hector Roland” | On Zbigniew Herbert

   

Editor’s Note: Kim Dana Kupperman, editor of The Best American Essays, has selected two of Baron Wormser’s pieces first published in Vox Populi, “The Dark Sky. Politics and Its Discontents” and “The Weight” as Notable essays for 2024. Congratulations, Baron!

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One of the pleasures of reading poetry is the solace of companionship. One has the steady opportunity to commune with the spirit of the poet. Of course the spirit varies. How much spirit-charge a poem has depends on how much the poet is able to create something inviolably real and fresh. These days, by and large, poets rely on the voice of the declarative self, on whatever aids some variety of form provides, and on whatever mannerisms the era favors, which is to say that the poem is often more a matter of socialization than art. That is understandable given that the ardor and artifice that go into the art make for an arduous combination. 

    Beyond the art, about which one can talk endlessly and still not get to the bottom of, the poet’s spirit beckons. The spirit is not an identity. Spirits don’t have identities. They have presences that are at once solid and gossamer-like, pronounced and subtle. A poem is a mystery that is elucidated that still remains a mystery. In that regard the poet’s spirit is puissant, since the poet is the maker, but humble in realizing how much is beyond the poet’s control – the muse factor, the unknown, the evanescence that the poet is trying to lay hands on, the slippery terrain of emotion, sensibility, and intuition. When one reflects on the diversity of poet spirits – Langston Hughes, Emily Dickinson, and Paul Verlaine walk into a bar – one simultaneously recoils and rushes forward. 

   As far as rushing forward while warily recoiling, no one quite does it for me as much as the great Polish poet Zbigniew Herbert. He has been and remains a revelation. He is, however, a curious sort of solace. The appellation “classical” is often pinned on Herbert, meaning he takes a long view of human affairs and is formal in the sense that line by line he chisels his words into the thin, mutable air of poetry – another seeming impossibility but one that great poetry achieves. Herbert refused to bow to the idol of communism and was aware – how could he not be? – of the enormous toll that idol exacted, not only in corpses but in betrayals and ruinous compromises. Again, line by line, Herbert insisted on the freedom of the poet in a society that mocked freedom. One can feel his mind moving from line to line in his taut, without-punctuation way, always sizing up whatever manias he has in his sights but downplaying the circumstances of those manias. The circumstances are, after all, just another citation in the annals of historical folly. Yet they are something more than that. The nub of feeling, however abraded, remains. So does surprise about our being here in such a remarkable physical world. And so does a tart sense of humor: if only we had the strength to acknowledge our weaknesses, how different we might be as creatures. 

   Herbert’s immortal creation Mr. Cogito is, as creations go, on par with the great characters that novelists have created, though, as suits someone writing in the second half of the twentieth century, Herbert created a character who is a cross between Kafka and Dickens, a metaphysical Everyman and a droll caricature. Mr. Cogito lurches between bafflement and awareness. As his name indicates, his ability to think defines him yet mocks him. Since thinking is a very finite endeavor that contradiction makes sense and, indeed, Herbert thrives on that contradiction. It is something like poetic oxygen to him. Every step forward is a step backward. Consequently, the opium of progress, something that modern believers of all stripes take for granted, has no place in Herbert’s world view. All the slogans about the new and improved are bad jokes that raise false hopes and unwonted confidence. 

   Where then is the mere individual in this maze of error? Bemused, terror-stricken, enlightened, short-changed, dumbfounded? “All of the above” would be a fair answer since Herbert’s poems have a koan- like quality, an encounter with that which resists summary, hence the need for the poem to act out a particular quest, however inadvertent the quest may be. A representative poem in that regard would be “Mr. Cogito Seeks Advice,” since Mr. Cogito, as a pilgrim of sorts, is ever in need of advice. Despite “So many books dictionaries / obese encyclopedias” Mr. Cogito’s “soul / refuses the consolation / of knowledge.” In keeping with Herbert’s aesthetic, an enormous dilemma is presented in a terse yet glancing fashion. The reader notes that what is at stake is Mr. Cogito’s soul, not an entity held in high regard in modern times. 

   Mr. Cogito “wanders at night” and comes to “the small town of Braclaw.” There he seeks a rabbi but the rabbi isn’t there. Rather, “he had a beautiful death / say the Hasidim / very beautiful / as if he passed / from one corner / to another corner / all black / he had in his hand / a flaming Torah.” I have put in periods when quoting but there are no periods in Herbert’s poem because there are no endings. All is one, though in a brisk, relentless fashion not a mystical one. As for Mr. Cogito, “my heart hurts rabbi / I have many troubles.” The ending of the poem asks a devastating question but there is no question mark: “perhaps rabbi Nachman / could give me advice / but how can I find him / among so many ashes.” In “perhaps” and “could” we have cautionary qualifiers. Nothing is sure in modern times that have atomized the repose of certainty. 

   The lines probe but what are they probing? I would say the vast darkness of human wrongdoing, what created those “ashes” and is ever busy creating new ashes. I need not cite contemporary instances since one gist of Herbert’s outlook is that human nature is what it is. Don’t bring great expectations to the table but, as the same time, don’t discount human decency and tenacity. Herbert never rolled up his tent in the name of despair, though he certainly knew what despair was. Rather, one feels that Herbert is the student who insists on asking the teacher a question that begins with “but,” even as the student understands how little the teacher wants to hear that troubling word. Herbert has refutation in his bones, a positive quality since it seeks to speak truth. The poems are not quibbles. They possess a gravity and, as more than one commentator has remarked, a dignity that is unusual in the self-regarding annals of modern times. Moral intention, to say nothing of spiritual rapture, refuses to die, though the rabbi has been murdered. 

   A few of Herbert’s poems stand as credos of a sort, poems like “The Envoy of Mr. Cogito” and “Report from the Besieged City.” When I first encountered these poems, I felt grateful in a way that has been uncommon in my life of reading poems. Many poems have spoken to me in ways that have helped me to keep up my own soul, but Herbert has been someone special, someone with an uncommon degree of courage. I don’t mean just that he was someone who defied the authorities because many noble women and men have defied the authorities and paid with their lives. And, really, defiance isn’t quite the right word, though he clearly had no use for the authorities. Defiance can be a stance and his poems are too shrewdly kinetic to attain any stance. I mean, rather, that he believed in the importance of poetry as a means of confrontation, much as Dante finds himself in a confrontation of sorts at the beginning of his epic poem, a confrontation with himself but with the world into which he was born and in which he variously believed. Dante is lost (the common English translation for “smarrita”) and in his straying, his weakness is palpable. Herbert saw many people who became lost, who refused to admit their weakness or, worse, made their weakness into a strength. All that vaunting on the part of fascism and communism was in the service of being absolutely right, absolutely found, absolutely inhuman. The virtue of Mr. Cogito is how lost he is, which is to say human.

   Herbert seems to me to be an epic poet in that, over a number of books, he engaged the crux, not just of modern times, but of human reality. He cites epic heroes in “The Envoy of Mr. Cogito” – “Gilgamesh Hector Roland.” For someone such as myself who has lived my life in the United States (where Herbert actually resided for a time), Herbert’s reserve remains very European. Yet life anywhere gives us plenty of examples of folly (some buffonish and some bloody) to ponder. I wrote a chapbook that featured a figure I named “Carthage” (a homage to Herbert’s historicism) who was based on George W. Bush and Mr. Cogito. Perhaps the hardest challenge for me has been to continue to write in a world that is hell-bent on meaninglessness. I’ve kept writing because I think of the last words of “The Envoy of Mr. Cogito” – “Be faithful Go.” I suppose that says it all. 

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Author’s Note: The poems from which I have quoted can be found in Mr. Cogito, The Ecco Press, 1993, translated by John and Bogdana Carpenter.

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Baron Wormser founded the Frost Place Conference on Poetry and Teaching and also the Frost Place Seminar. His recent books include The History Hotel (CavanKerry Press, 2023).

Copyright 2024 Baron Wormser