Thank you, once again, CWDH for your gift of poetry. You’d enjoy this book, I think. For a taxonomist, to name a thing is to bring it into the known world, to define it, delineate what it is and what it isn’t. Naming and the skillful usage of words is similarly the province of the poet, artfully delineating what an idea is and what it isn’t. Naming makes a thing real, to a human.
Yet there is the counterargument: The opposite of natural is the artificial; that which is man-made. Nature has no bounds, no definitive lines. In naming a thing one brings it out of the undefined world of nature and into the realm of limited human understanding. It makes the natural reality artificial, symbolic, understandable by people. That’s what Jordan did so prolifically.
In return for the gift of your poem, I’ll make one in return. It isn’t my poetry, but borrowed from Jorge Luis Borges. Its really better this way… Hopefully all will enjoy it.
The Other Tiger
A tiger comes to mind.
The twilight here
Exalts the vast and busy Library
And seems to set the bookshelves back in gloom;
Innocent, ruthless, bloodstained, sleek,
It wanders through the forest and its day
Printing a track along the muddy banks
Of sluggish streams whose names it does not know
(In its world there are no names or past
Or a time to come, only the vivid now)
And makes its way across wild distances
Sniffing the braided labyrinth of smells
And the wind picking the smell of dawn
And tantalizing scent of grazing deer;
Among the bamboo’s slanting stripes I glimpse
The tigers stripes and sense the bony frame
Under the splendid, quivering cover of skin.
Curving oceans and the planet’s wastes keep us
Apart in vain; from here in a house far off
In South America I dream of you,
Track you, O tiger of the Ganges’ banks.
It strikes me now as evening fills my soul
That the tiger addressed in my poem
Is a shadowy beast, a tiger of symbols
And scraps picked up at random out of books,
A string of labored tropes that have no life,
And not the fated tiger, the deadly jewel
That under sun or stars or changing moon
Goes on in Bengal or Sumatra fulfilling
Its rounds of love and indolence and death.
To the tiger of symbols I hold opposed
The one that’s real, the one whose blood runs hot
As it cuts down a herd of buffaloes,
And that today, this August third, nineteen
Fifty-nine, throws its shadow on the grass;
But by the act of giving it a name,
By trying to fix the limits of its world,
It becomes a fiction, not a living beast,
Not a tiger out roaming the wilds of earth.
We’ll hunt a third tiger now, but like
The others this one too will be a form
Of what I dream, a structure of words, and not
The flesh and bone tiger that beyond all myths
Paces the earth. I know these things quite well,
Yet nonetheless some force keeps driving me
In this vague, unreasonable, and ancient quest,
And I go on pursuing through the hours
Another tiger, the beast not found in verse.
Jorge Luis Borges
(trans. Norman Thomas di Giovanni)
But this is a post about Christmas gifts… so (belatedly) MCTAATAAGN
Its the thought that counts, right?
