een verborgen hoofdstuk (the faraway nearby)

Ik luister graag naar literaire podcasts. Een van mijn favorieten heet Bookworm en wordt gepresenteerd door Michael Silverblatt. Onlangs luisterde ik naar de aflevering waarin Rebecca Solnit te gast was. Ik pakte het boek waarover werd gesproken erbij (The Faraway Nearby) en besefte dat ik een deel van het boek nog niet gelezen heb.

Dat zit zo: onderaan iedere bladzijde staat een aparte zin gedrukt, die zinnen maken deel uit van een apart hoofdstuk/verhaal. Het is onderdeel van The Faraway Nearby, toch ook niet, het staat los, de zinnen zijn zelfs afgerasterd: wellicht een hoofdstuk dat niet in het geheel paste. Ik las The Faraway Nearby afgelopen zomer op Vlieland. Ik las het uit, stopte het in mijn tas om thuis die regels onderaan te lezen. Maar eenmaal thuis zette ik het boek bijna direct in mijn boekenkast; ik was de zinnen vergeten.

Vandaag heb ik alle zinnen naast elkaar gezet, het zijn 3162 woorden in totaal: het is een onzichtbaar hoofdstuk. Het gaat over nachtvlinders die de tranen van slapende vogels drinken, over Cupid en Psyche, over Rainer Maria Rilke, en heel veel meer. Enkele van mijn favoriete passages:

‘Moths drink the tears of sleeping birds. This is the title of a short scientific report from 2006, and the moths are a species on the island of Madagascar named Hemiceratoides hieroglyphica, but the title is a sentence, and the sentence reads like a ballad of one line or a history compressed down to its barest essentials.’ (p. 3-6)

‘Moths drink the tears of sleeping birds. The sentence can run away with you until you have forgotten science and the lack of sorrow in the tears of birds — in this case magpie robins and Newtonia birds — and remembered your own tears and pictured an asymmetrical relationship in which one sleeps and one is awake, one surrenders and one acquires. One is being and the other doing. The moth is alert, at work, stealing tears and flying through the night, because there is also night in this sentence, and wings of two kinds. As though the two characters were day and night itself, or as if the drinker fed on the dreamer the way the moon reflects the light of the unseen sun. That moths drink the tears of sleeping birds is a template for many things; it is a container of the familiar made strange, of sorrow turned into sustenance, of the myriad stories the natural world provides that are as uncannily resonant as any myth. The ancient Greeks used the words psyche for breath, for life, for the vital essence of life, for the soul, and sometimes for butterflies that were the emblem of the soul, though I wonder if a moth could also be a soul and if the Greek word encompasses them too.’ (p. 10-28)

‘Moths drink the tears. The word for teardrinkers is lachryphagous, and for the eaters of human flesh it is anthropophagous, and the rest of us feed on sorrow all the time. It is the essence of many of the most beautiful ballads and pop songs, and why sorrow and heartbreak are so delicious might have to do with the emotions it stirs in us, the empathy for others’ suffering, and the small comfort of not being alone with our own. With a sad song we feel a delicate grief, as though we mourn for three minutes a loss we can’t remember but taste again, sorrow like salt tears, and then close it up like a letter in the final notes. Sadness the blue like dusk, the reminder that all things are ephemeral, and that because there is time there is change and that another name for change, if you look back toward what is vanishing in the distance, is loss. But sadness is also beautiful, maybe because it rings so true and goes so deep, because it is about the distances in our lives, the things we lose, the abyss between what the lover and the beloved want and imagine and understand that may widen to become unabridgeable at any moment, the distance between the hope and the outset and the eventual outcome, the journeys we have to travel, including the last one out of being and on past becoming into the unimaginable: the moth flown into the pure dark. Or the flame. Australia’s endangered golden sun moth lives a long time underground, feeding on the roots of wallaby grass, and then metamorphoses into a diurnal moth without a mouth that has a few days to live and reproduce on stored energy. Other moths and butterflies also live brief lives without eating. And other moths drink the tears of sleeping birds.’ (p. 102-125)