That's the poem trying to say some of the things
that I was talking about at the beginning.
It comes from a book called Travels which is a hard poem--
hard book to read from because most of the poems
are biographical poems and they're too long.
But there's another poem that I want
to read from it that is not a long poem.
And it takes another aspect of the whole thing.
It's about a man named--
he was born Georg Edward Rumph.
And he was born about the same time as Ben Johnson.
He had an ordinary middle class German
upbringing at the end of the 16th century, which was
a pretty good education really.
Good Latin and rudimentary medieval sciences
but something.
And he went to Holland, the Dutch
were the imperialists at the time in his part of the world.
And he went to Holland and signed onto an expedition
as he thought.
But instead they in a sense kidnapped him and took him out
to the Dutch East Indies where the survival rate of Europeans
was about 13 months maximum generally.
If you didn't die of malaria you died of something else.
But he lived to be quite old.
He stayed there for the rest of his life.
He got out of uniform, and he became--
he moved from the island of Java to the island of Ambon.
And he lived there for the rest of his life.
He married a woman who was part Chinese part
indigenous from there.
And he had a daughter.
And he wrote the first six books of a Flora of the Indies
in the beginning of the 17th century.
And the first six books of an Encyclopedia of the Indies
in Latin and illustrated them.
And both of them were lost, one at sea and one in the fire.
So he rewrote them in Dutch and illustrated them again.
And fortunately, the Viceroy saw them
and realized how remarkable they were and sent them
to Holland to be printed.
And he is-- you know botanists are as jealous of each other
in my experience as--
you know horticulturalists are always very impatient.
Gardeners are very impatient with botanists.
They say they don't know anything about it they just
stay with it with their herbarium collections
and we know what it looks like when
it's growing for God's sake.
But he was respected by other botanists
that many of the names that he gave
things are still there and things are named for him still.
And one reason is that many medicinal species.
He listened to everybody and he tried out
herbal remedies for things.
And when he thought they were good he wrote about them.
He wrote beautifully.
He wrote like Montaigne I mean just wonderful prose.
I mean, the little essay on the hermit crab
is one that I used to have practically by heart
because it's been wonderfully translated by a man named
Beakman that I met at University of Massachusetts.
But his name, he called his name Rufus.
Well, he lost everything in his life.
He lost those what he had written for the first time.
He lost his wife and his daughter.
And finally, in his latter years he went blind.
And the poem is called "The blind seer of Ambon."
I always knew that I came from another language.
And now even when I can no longer see,
I continue to arrive at words but the leaves and the shells
were already here and my fingers finding
them echo the untold light and depth.
I was betrayed into my true calling
and denied in my advancement.
I may have seemed somewhat strange caring in my own time
for living things with no value that we know.
Language is wash over the one wave at a time.
When the houses fell in the earthquake,
I lost my wife and my daughter.
It all roared and stood still falling where
they were in the daylight.
I named for my wife a flower as though I could name a flower.
My wife dark and luminous and not there.
I lost the drawings of the flowers in fire.
I lost the studies of the flowers
my first six books in the sea.
And I saw that the flowers themselves were gone.
They were indeed gone.
I saw that my wife was gone and I
saw that my daughter was gone.
Afterward, my eyes themselves were gone.
One day I was looking at infinite small creatures
on the bright sand.
And the next day this hearing after music.
So this is the way I see now.
I take a shell in my hand new to itself and to me.
I feel the thinness, the warmth, and the cold.
I listen to the water, which is the story welling up.
I remember the colors in their lives.
Everything takes me by surprise.
It is all awake in the darkness.