after Rainer Maria Rilke.
Frequently, I admonish myself with Roland Barthes final unfinished essay title, “One Always Fails to Speak of the Things One Loves” – this is the real grief of the elegy, the things you failed to say, or the words that took on meaning only after the Loss. The absence of the ‘addressee’ or the ‘subject’ is what gives the elegy its weight. Elegy is, most simply, love for the absent, thus love is its perquisite, this love doesn’t necessarily change, it survives. The change is the relation to the loved, it is the separation, the loss. In this way, the writing of an elegy is always self-reflective, although its subject appears to be the ‘lost love’, its true subject is the feeling and response of the writer, the articulation of this loss. Remembrance becomes recognition of what we now lack in the present. If one strains to try to locate the ‘subject’ or ‘lost love’ in the elegy you will find it is both everywhere and nowhere, absence is like the wind, unchangeable, fugitive; always seeking a wider expanse or a tighter crevice. The English Romantic poet, Samuel Taylor Coleridge positions the elegy as “presenting everything as lost and gone, or absent and future” – it is the inclusion of ‘future’ that I find interesting, and where I would position the elegy’s most prescient contemporary function: the mourning of the future. The inclusion of ‘future’ also posits that what you can ‘lose’ to then turn into elegy needn’t be real, tangible, or known, that there can be an elegy for a failed dream. In this way, the elegy seems completely rooted to the human being’s experience of the world, a combined unease and need for transformation. Our ability to cognitively recognise what we lack places us in the awareness of absence, an awareness that is not shared by the natural world, an awareness that is unique to us.
I am turning over what an elegy can be because its poetic form is quite rigorous. The narrative scope of the more recently developed traditional elegy form is a lament for a subject’s death that then forms a consolation. But the elegy also comes with a slew of tight poetic forms, the English Romantic elegiac stanza is a quatrain with an ABAB rhyme scheme in iambic meter. However, in classical literature the elegy was not denoted by subject but purely by form, an elegiac couplet alternating between dactylic hexameter and dactylic pentameter, it was only later that the elegy became associated with grieving for the dead. Although the elegy seems to arrive with many conditions, these conditions have created variety within the genre – just naming a work an ‘elegy’ places it. For example, Rilke’s Duino Elegies do not lament a subject, in the original German they loosely adhere to the classical form of an elegy, and yet they also exemplify Coleridge’s definition of ‘lost and gone’, ‘absent and future’ – they are within the bounds of what can be described as an ‘elegiac mood’. Rilke laments the human condition, what is absent is immortality. Rilke’s lament of transience intensifies the experience of mortality, his lament is attention and ultimately praise.
“Between the hammers our heart
endures, just as the tongue does
between the teeth
and, despite that,
still is able to praise.” (Ninth Elegy)
Elegy is a wide and versatile genre; all literary forms, the novel, the poem, the essay, can be elegies. The elegy’s only requirement is absence; the loss of the loved, in this way elegy is everywhere. We live in a melancholic age, an age defined by what is ‘lost and gone’ or ‘absent and future’. The elegiac mood is pervasive, it surrounds us. But despite the seeming need for the elegy in our contemporary time it remains a semi archaic genre, to be an Elegist today seems like an act of deliberate anachronism (for me it is a deliberate act). I feel strongly that the word, and the form, ‘elegy’ opens the latch to the inexpressible. And that the inexpressible is the font from which language rises from; language is a form of absence, absence is what, in writing, I am filling but never reaching. Many years ago, I read somewhere that ‘memory was the past tense of desire’. Recently, I have thought about this phrase a lot, asking myself if ‘writing is the present tense of memory’ or if ‘longing is the future of desire’., as in, what it elapses into.
The elegy is a site of craving, a craving of both love and loss and the edge between them, a supple pain and a piercing pleasure, elegy is a gesture of contradiction. The elegy is an unfinished axis, the artist Agnes Denes describes this reciprocal distance as: “We can move inward into inner space and out into the universe…The world seems to begin at the surface of our skin; there is a world beyond it and a world within, and the distance is about the same.” The elegy is this combined distance of from and under our skin, its measurement is always changing, closeness to the world is closeness to the self. ,I and yet there remains always a barrier, the skin, in the same way distance from the world is distance from the self. Yet, there remains always a barrier, the skin.. T To return to Rilke’s Duino Elegies here is a uniquely human ‘contradiction’ in the Second Elegy where the dilemma of lovers is described as an analogous action to drinking:
“When you lift yourselves up
to each other’s mouth and your lips join, drink against drink:
oh how strangely each drinker seeps away from his action.”
This dilemma is reiterated again in the Fourth Elegy:
“Aren’t lovers
always arriving at each other’s boundaries?”
This is the emotional human emotional conflict, the clink of a boundary and the near existential want to cross it. Here, we know the elegy to be, the uncrossable boundary between each other. The desire to cross, the positive action, is always met by our inability to do so, this negative is the creation of absence. I want to argue that absence is only ever used to describe an empty site we are aware of, for something to be absent it must be noticed as so – all other absences tend to be unnoticed necessities, fixtures and components of the world that oscillates around us. Absence is most often a question of failed need, and less frequently but no less felt, impeded desire or in all its varieties, rejection. Desire, such a key constituent of our contemporary world, most often produces the absence we linger on, the absence that produces feeling and thus often art. Absence of our needs creates a more politicised response, the most totemic question of need of our times, will we have a future? This question hollows an absence the scale of which has not been felt since the majority of the world’s population felt that their existence could be ended in an instant by an invisible omnipotent power. (On some days one can still feel the severity of this power imbalance even in our ‘enlightened’ times.) Thwarted or rejected desire’s production of subjective fear and bittersweet absence elicits a more self-reflective and contemplative response and is more typically the subject of the elegy. Still, I want to highlight the urgency of the absence of need and the consequent elegy it would, in my mind, produce. Throughout the genre’s history elegies have been sites for radical personal and political thought. When I began to consider how the elegy might be written and read today it constantly occurred to me that earlier periods use of the genre was frequently focused on the singular, the individual. I wonder if in our lives loss surrounds us too pervasively for us to singularise either its experience or its subject. That we experience loss as an increasingly pressurised atmosphere which we remain busy constantly acclimatising to, unable to carve out time to describe what motivates our renewed detachment and adaption. Are we quick to evolve, slow to transform?
Agnes Denes’s scale doesn’t assume a feeling or intensity attached to either proximity or distance; they both have extremities. I would almost argue that this axis is most felt when you can feel the distance changing. I find this reciprocal interesting because I feel I mostly lived in disagreement with it, I have for much of my life felt that distance from the world offered me closeness to myself, that distance offered me singularity. I now feel that singularity can only be felt in movement or flux, that you cannot contain and cultivate set feelings or self-assertations in the way I desired; they are always in relationship with either their antithetical feeling, or they are an axis towards something outside of oneself. It took me years to realise I could not singularise myself out of the world, that I could not divide an ocean. Slowly I have stepped away from this, reaffirming that silent and unwilled changes are often the changes with the most uncomfortably beautiful texture and that the tension of this transformation came from my knowing of its this necesnecessity. sary transformation is the felt tension between past and future.The unavoidable and uncomfortable necessity of transformation is
Leaving a museum, on a day when London feels sticky like it’s under glass and every gulping swallow feels like the condensation that trickles down a bathroom mirror. A boy is filling his kippah with water from a plastic bottle, he then in a quick and precise motion, lifts it and flips it onto his head, the water rushes down his forehead and nape. This feels like an elegy. This is an elegy. What this elegy conjures is hard to articulate, it frightens me, Rilke describes this fear in the Duino Elegies as, “more ancient terrors” that plunge into us “at the shock of that feeling” (3rd). What are the more ancient terrors that we share, and what ancient terror can still find a ripple of itself in our removed existence, a re-iteration enough to once again rise to the surface, to pull out the thorn and realise you made the wound.
Witnessing mourning being performed without its intention is painful, it cuts an edge of fear in you when you perceive it, it causes a self-reflexivity; you feel yourself in a singular moment suddenly multiplied. In these moments I realise my inability to understand the ancient terror Rilke speaks of rising within us, my privileged existence keeps me away from truly felt futility. I spend £11 on lychees and feel heart-fear-breaking towards a child cooling himself. I keep myself away from grief by intellectualising it. I fear loss of self far more than I fear my surroundings. If my feelings leave me, in words or shivers or tears, how can they remain my own? The boy dowsing himself on a hot day is a thought on containers, how we use empty space or absence; you break an egg and use the two hollow halves to separate the yolk from the whites, passing the yellow from one to the other, this action is elegy, or I want it to be. To remember the rain in Kyoto I sit on the floor of my shower, this way the water rings on my back with the same sound as the heavy droplets hitting a clear plastic umbrella, “My words rained over you, stroking you” poet Paul Neruda writes. These are the precisely folded edges of aloneness, I identify so strongly with a littered red coke can on the empty old Giardinetti railway, by telling myself that the red coke can aches in the same chiaroscuro I do. We are both poured out. If I can recreate the opening condition of my memories of Kyoto, by making the rain fall again, if I can assuage my loneliness by convincing myself that a discarded coke can yearns for compassionate company in the same way I do, am I less alone or more? Is my elegy arriving at consolation?
My £11 lychees are arranged in a blue china tray next to me whilst I write at the kitchen table, next to the pond of lychees is pile of cherries and next to that red heap is a Basho anthology bent and weighted open on the page that stores my favourite of his haiku:
“New Year –
feeling broody
from late autumn.”
Is it the autumn of the past or future we are brooding for? Unquestionably, it is both. In his self-elegy, In the Presence of Absence, Mahmoud Darwish writes, “I elegize and I am the elegized.” This bears the same contradiction as Barthes unfinished essay title, “One Always Fails to Speak of the Things One Loves”, to elegize is to be elegy, to speak of the things one loves is to fail to speak of the things one loves, because we love them. To long for autumn is to long for both your past and future autumns. To long for late autumn is surely even more acute.
The elegy shows us that in the same was we are compelled to cling to life, we are compelled to cling to love, that we can know of the necessity of departure, and that the necessity of departure is equal to the new emptiness it leaves us with. Elegy is the only place where I feel able to say, I wish I could forget myself; like the cricket who turns sorrow into sound.Leaving a museum, on a day when London feels sticky like it’s under glass and every gulping swallow feels like the condensation that trickles down a bathroom mirror. A boy is filling his kippah with water from a plastic bottle, he then in a quick and precise motion lifts it and flips it onto his head, the water rushes down his forehead and nape. This feels like an elegy. This is an elegy. What this elegy conjures is hard to articulate, it frightens me.
Witnessing mourning being performed without its intention is painful, it cuts an edge of fear in you when you perceive it, it causes a self-reflexivity; you feel yourself in a singular moment suddenly multiplied. In these moments I acutely perceive my inability to understand truly felt futility, my privileged existence continues to keep its terror away from my self-perception. I spend £11 on lychees and feel heart-fear-breaking towards a child cooling himself. I keep myself away from grief by intellectualising it. I keep my ‘self’ in concealment, to assuage and contain my fear of loss of self. If my feelings leave me, in words or shivers or tears, how can they remain my own? The boy dowsing himself on a hot day is a narrative of a container, how we use empty space or absence; you break an egg and use the two hollow halves to separate the yolk from the whites, passing the yellow from one to the other, this action is elegy, or I want it to be. To remember the rain in Kyoto I sit on the floor of my shower, this way the water rings on my back with the same sound as the heavy droplets hitting the dome of a clear plastic umbrella, “My words rained over you, stroking you” poet Paul Neruda writes. This is a precisely folded edge of aloneness. Or a littered red coke can on the empty old Roman Giardinetti railway appears in Caravaggesque chiaroscuro. There is no one else in the carriage, no one waiting on the platform.
My £11 lychees are arranged in a blue china tray next to me whilst I write at the kitchen table, next to the pond of lychees is pile of cherries and next to that red heap is a Basho anthology bent and weighted open on the page that stores my favourite of his haiku:
“New Year –
feeling broody
from late autumn.”
Is it the autumn of the past or future we are brooding for? Unquestionably, it is both. In his self-elegy, In the Presence of Absence, Mahmoud Darwish writes, “I elegize and I am the elegized.” This bears the same contradiction as Barthes unfinished essay title, “One Always Fails to Speak of the Things One Loves”, to elegize is to be elegy, to speak of the things one loves is to fail to speak of the things one loves, purely because we love them. To long for autumn is to long for both your past and future autumns. To long for late autumn is surely even more acute.
The elegy shows us that in the same ways we are compelled to cling to life, we are compelled to cling to love, that we can know of the necessity of departure, and that the necessity of departure is equal to the new emptiness it leaves us with. Elegy is the only place where I feel able to say, I wish I could forget myself; like the cricket who turns sorrow into sound.
The elegy is essentially the counterweight between past and future; it is a description of how we experience the emotionalised present. It is the feeling between holding the past and attempting to grasp the future. When German Romantic poet Friedrich Holderlin asks and answers, “Is there measure on earth? There is/ None.” He is articulating the measureless emotional present. This question is found in one of Holderlin’s last poems In Lovely Blue, a poem whose authenticity remains ambiguous as it was transcribed by his biographer during the last throws his Holderlin’s life, in the deepest night of his madness. The telescoped and telescopic, the infinite and infinitesimal, these are feelings of the ‘present’ that seem to carve themselves out of absence, all our measurements remain attempts at a description that never retains a whole, and thus is unable to exclude absence. Measure, the attempt to fix down of something in the present doesn’t remain ‘on earth’ for Holderlin, but then the enjambed “None” appears to me as much a measure as a thousand millimetre does. Or rather None appears the necessary beginning of every attempted measurement, I would like to phrase this as, from you there is no measure on earth, I remain: None.
The diary of the Japanese poet Izumi Shikibu written in 1002-1003 AD, memorialises a period of time after her lover dies, but in the shadow of this loss she falls in love with another man. The diary begins with Shikibu receiving a branch of orange blossoms from her soon to be new lover. This gift of the blossom branch is a direct recognition of her bereavement as it recalls an ‘old’ poem, “The scent of tachibana (orange) flower which awaits for May/ Recalls the perfumed sleeves of him who is no longer here.” The referenced poem is doubtlessly beautiful, but there is a prior image in the diary’s opening lines that I find even more evocative; this gesture: “then, breaking off this branch of tachibana flowers,”. The splintering snap of a branch being broken off has a particular melancholy when played in the mind, it rings like a glass and never finds silence. I can’t break the branch away fully in my mind, I can only hear the snap-sound nip the air. Not only is the first snap strangely irreconcilable, but the stringy pull to fully dislocate the branch and then sever it completely tends to have a pathetic violence to it. With the first snap you feel the branch will become yours, but it still must be taken.
Shikibu’s broken branch, for me is the representation of an elegy, it recalls, who is no longer here, but it also breaks with that grief. The flowers perfume is the ‘memories’ and this holding of the past in an exterior and weightless substance seems to make those memories more felt and yet further away. The potency of memory seems to be when it ‘leaves’ us, when it crystalizes in the perfume of a flower.
The best definition of mourning I have found is one of the most obvious; Freud’s from his essay Mourning and Melancholia, “he knows whom he has lost but not what he has lost in him”. The expression, ‘what he has lost in him’ seems a key to the elegy form, it is an attempt to locate an interior absence, to precisely name ‘what you have lost’. The proposition that what you have lost could be replaced by the scent of an orange blossom branch, on the outset seems absurd, (but wouldn’t any replacement be absurd?) What you have lost is not a tangible object, but your ability to identify with the world, you are mourning your ability to love. Can we love absence? And if we could, would we still mourn? This mourning is changed by a relation, and the orange blossom branch is perfect example of the in-between of loss and love. The site where the unfurling of loss seeps into the spinning of new love is akin to noticing the perfume that surrounds us and re-identify with the world. The world holds our sensuous memory just as we hold our emotional memory. Even when these two sites seem distant, I believe this interchange always happens, between loss and love, that this transition is what gives these feelings texture. Our heart rises – beats – falls. The inexpressible can feel understood, if we are able to remember a scent and momentarily forget he who is no longer here.
A contemporary of Shikibu, Ono no Komachi, also utilises the act of sending a branch or flower:
Sent in a letter attached to a rice stalk with an empty seed husk
How sad that I hope
to see you even now,
after my life has emptied itself
like this stalk of grain
into the autumn wind.
Unlike the illusion to meaning with Shikibu’s orange blossom branch Ono no Komachi’s visual metaphor of the emptied seed husk lacks a certain referential subtlety. The rice stalk enacts a different longing, it is a stand in for absence, it shows what it has lost – its seeds – whereas the orange blossom branch fills the space (with perfume) of absence it is it being sent into. But empty seed husk is also elegy. Ono no Komachi is deeply concerned with forgetfulness, and thus the elegiac process, throughout her poetry. It seems loss is the greatest stimuli for her brush, her yearning seems so preoccupied with leaving. But one senses that this is not the repercussion of an intensely melancholy spirit but instead an acceptance of the need for severance; an investment in transience, listening intently to her ‘one-sided love’ for the world. Ono no Komachi’s poetry gives me a desire for sorrow and feeds the thought that unrequitedness can be rewarding in its nuanced devastation, an unrequited love is a love at the height of its possible subjectivity. I recollect how the poet Paul Celan describes the act of writing poetry in his Meridian Speech as going “into your own unique place of no escape. And to set(ting) yourself free.” Ono no Komachi sets herself free from the threat of abandonment byut writing it into unquenchable poetry, we call all her poems of loss, love poems. My own ‘unique place of no escape’ seems not to be loss but rather love, I want to ask, can we love absence? or more urgently I want to ask myself, why do I love loss?
In London this spring I noticed a tree that I passed every day, a cherry tree with light whitish-pink flowers, this cherry tree was what we call a ‘weeping’ tree. Weeping trees are caused by a mutation that causes what is called a ‘weeping habit’. But the tree I saw everyday seemed to be trying to change its habits, its weeping boughs trying to rise at their endings, like it had forgotten how to cry. This fissure displayed in the tree struck a chord with me, ‘Wweeping trees’ are already anthropomorphised, but this tree seemed even more human for trying to resist its subjectification. By bending ourselves into a new feeling are we setting ourselves free or snapping into a place of no escape? The bending cherry bough reminded me of Ono no Komachi who so elegantly turns bitterness into ascent, she offers us the thought, or rather the question, that sometimes a place of no escape is freeing.
I want to ask, again, is my elegy reaching consolation? The obstacle to my own consolation is that I value lament more than I value consolation. Consolation also requires that I identify and accept the subject of my lament and I resist this thanks to both my ingrained cynicism and a predilection for overt romanticism. I resist knowing why or who to maintain a deluded sense of profundity or even to prolong the lament as if its length has some corelation to my life’s significance. This mode is a performed naivety, the meaning and depth of an elegy comes from its relationship to its subject, not its avoidance and withdrawal from it.
The Russian poet Anna Akhmatova has a short fragment that references her contemporary Marina Tsvetaeva:
“Two? But there by the Eastern wall
In thickets of strong raspberry
Is a dark, fresh branch of elderberry…
This is a letter from Marina.”
This fragment reference’s one of Marina Tsvetaeva’s own poems, The Elderberry. These two women fascinate me, they were writing at the same time and within the same social circle, but only met a handful of times, and yet they loved each other and similarly couldn’t have been more different from each other. Marina was in exile in Europe, Anna resolutely vowed to stay with her Russia all her life. Marina is pungent; a seamstress who could unwittingly sew her own skin into her skirts, Anna is desolate and regal, a glacial Russian Mnemosyne.
Marina Tsvetaeva’s The Elderberry ends with the lines:
“Elder, between you and me.
A disease of the age — elderberry,
You, I might name…”
Anna Akhmatova left very few biographical notes or letters, after her son’s arrest, she burnt her entire archive, Marina Tsvetaeva chose a different death to the destruction of her life’s work; the destruction of her own life. She committed suicide on 31st of August 1941. Both poets passed through tragedies that where common of their time, Stalinist Russia. Writing after Tsvetaeva’s death Akhmatova elucidates the difference between them; if Tsvetaeva had remained alive and Akhmatova died, Tsevtaeva would have turned their relationship in “fragrant legend”. Whilst Akhmatova reflects that, “I want to remember those Two Days simply and “without legend”.”
Tsvetaeva has left diaries, letters and essays, but despite her larger body of biographical material she remains just as unenterable as Akhmatova. Tsvetaeva’s loud density has the same effect as Akhmatova’s silent sparsity. Of the two women I am drawn much closer to Akhmatova, I had written to a friend that I aspired to her demeanour: “The kind of woman I dream of becoming; an imposing silence that shivers at its edges, the kind of silence that has need of being needed, the kind of silence that desires listening, like the collision of the wind and the needles of a pine tree, a silvered sorrow.”
Another Russian poet, Osip Mandelstam wrote to Akhmatova, “Sometimes I get the impression of flight from your poems…Make sure that it is always there.” The impression of flight and the sustenance of memory seem like aspects of the written word that would be magnetised opposites and yet Akhmatova fuses them into a resonant alloy. Flight towards memory is the anachronistic action of the poet who records their own time, it is a ‘fragrant past without legend’.
“Is a dark, fresh branch of elderberry…This is a letter from Marina.”; are words I think of frequently. As a letter writer, I consider what ‘fresh branch’ is a letter from me? I would like to think a hawthorn, flowering between the break of spring and just after the ending of winter. A flowering branch that enacts an observed silence.
There is a German word, briefgeheimnis, that means ‘letter secret’ or ‘secrecy of letters’ – even these English counter parts reveal too much of theirfor their substance. In her diaries the artist Eva Hesse describes the difficulty of painting as, “like writing memoirs, without a previous life” this description feels so pertinent to the ‘secrecy of letters’, or to the difficulty and ease of writing letters, letters are all past and future, the only documentation of the present is their physical form. Marina Tsvetaeva is one of my favourite letter writers, in the sense that so many of her letters deal with what the letter form is. In a letter to fellow Russian poet Boris Pasternak she writes, “Boris, this is not a real letter. The real ones are never committed to paper.”
Letters have an uncanny temporal weight, they are documents so often concerned with the extractions, selections, and sublimations of one’s surroundings and experiences, but they are also questions and promises. The postal interlude adds to the unfixedness of their activation, even the choice to date, or not date a letter is significant. In a letter to Rilke, Tsvetaeva dates her letter two days in the future so that it appeared as if she had written it the same day it arrived, closing the distance between them. When you compose a letter you write a life into existence, both lived and unlived. The elegy has the same mechanism, you are writing, remembering, something both lived and unlived by you, the life of another. To return to Hesse’s claim of painting, “like writing memoirs, without a previous life”, I wonder if ‘previous life’ is a gentle way of articulating a life that has passed. Previous life pushes the deceased only a little out of our periphery as it suggested there is also a future life just outside of our opposite periphery.
In spring I watch the willows closely, their slender branches when bare and tussled in winter are beautiful, but what I wait for, what I anticipate are the shoots of young leaves that seem to appear all at once. Young willow leaves are a tender see-through yellowish, like a gauze. The leaves only remain in this gauze for a few days, like a mist that gets burned into an opaque lining. The young leaves always strike me as reminiscent of a fleet of candles, much like the sea of tealights you find in a church at a devotional candle kiosk. My love of the young willow leaves comes from my profound fondness for devotion candles, a fondness that stems from a childhood preoccupation that then became a stunted obsession in adulthood. I know why I love to light devotion candles, but also cannot tell you why I love to light devotional candles. It remains an impulse struggle to be critical with, an indulgence. Although indulgence seems unfair, almost every lighting of a devotional candle is an intensified moment to myself, it releases something; something that I have only secreted in this specific act since I was a child. It affirms a feeling that I was never taught to speak of. The devotional candle, like the translucent young leaves, is also the production of something ephemeral, the average tealight burns for 3 hours. The fact that the candle will diminish and then extinguish doesn’t seem to negatively affect the act of lighting it, if anything it helps the Lighter to harness something more innate, a feeling that they cannot give permanence too. The candles’ failure to hold your prayer permanently gives your prayer greater concentration, it needn’t burn brighter or longer, but more secretly and fervently, it must go out without anyone noticing. The devotional candle is another elegy, like the orange blossom branch, it is accompanied by words, or prayer, it mourns but also fulfils an action that steps out of mourning; dying itself, it silently furnishes a new beginning, its smoke spooling down its silver balcony like the waterfall of a cloud.
Celan’s dictum of go “into your own unique place of no escape. And to set yourself free” once read becomes unavoidable. But its dynamic I think sets up what I really want to mean when I suggest that we, in our time, live within elegy. Elegy is a unique place of no escape, but how to set ourselves’ free? What I am asking for is not a grand action, it is often as small as leaving a cathedral and letting the candle you lit go out, without you.
I have not answered the question of why we must elegise today. And how could I? Elegy is not committed to paper; real elegy is lived.
Inez Madeleine 
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