Love-and-Death Page 9
The blade is destructive and can inflict death, yet it blazes with the light of new
life. In "Woman's Song" (C.P. p.27) it becomes "the knife of day":
The knife of day is bright
to cut the thread that binds you
within the flesh of night.
In "Woman to Child" it is the same "flesh" that is "the link that joins you to the
night". The life-giver of'-Women's Song" would "weave and sing" "spells and
songs" to keep back the birth or the awakening of the child, knowing as she
does that "there's a death and a maiden/ who wait for you alone"." Both love
and death have claims that cannot be paid off:
so move in me my darling,
whose debt I cannot pay.
Pain and the dark must claim you,
and passion and the day.
It is as if at birth a debt is contracted and claims are made by both love and
death. They both "wait", they both attend upon every moment of life. Death
is, perhaps, the more mysterious. Maurice Blanchot writing of death, says that
there is:
a possibility of dying authentically, on good terms with death, and also a
danger of dying badly, as if inadvertently, an inessential, false death - a
danger so great that all of life could depend upon this legitimate relation
to death....Death must exist for me not only at the very last moment
but as soon as I begin to live and in life's intimacy and profundity.
Death would thus be part of existence, it would draw life from mine
deep within. It would be made of me and, perhaps, for me, as a child is
the child of its mother.9
In the "kind flesh" it is possible to be "on good terms with death" seeing it as
something to be well achieved. In "The City Asleep" (C.P. p.49) the lover is
reminded of death at the "untouched quick of life":
kind brother of flesh, we must descend through stone
towards the buried water, speechless, blind.
We are the white grave-worms of the grave.
We are the eyeless beginning of the world.
Oh, blind, kind flesh, we are the drinking seed
that aches and swells towards its flower in love.
9 Maurice Blanchot, The Space of Literature, (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press 1982) pp.121,125.
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