First I want to read a couple of poems about art.
The first one is called "Hector's Return."
And it has to do, in part, with the fact that, for me,
art very often is concerned with maintaining
an image, a fragile image, of the human
in the face of all the forces that
wipe out images of the human, all
the forces of forgetfulness.
And it seems to me the best art--
say, Homeric art-- is capable of doing absolute--
being absolutely honest about the forces
on the side of destruction while somehow
being able to lift out of the world of time
some permanent image.
And a poem is based on Hector and the Iliad,
an Iliad which is a poem about death and destruction
and violence and which somehow has lasted
because, for some reason, Homer has
been able to lift that subject out of the merely temporal.
It also has to do a little with Nietzsche's idea
of the eternal return.
He says, "The way in which you can test whether you can really
affirm your life is whether you can will it or will
to live it moment by moment forever, again and again,
with no changes."
If you can will your-- that kind of eternal return,
then you're really affirming your life.
And no-- very few people can do that.
But in art, you do that in an indirect way.
That is, you read a text which causes you a lot of anguish
if you get involved in it and yet you will to repeat
the anguish year after year.
So I'll read this poem now, "Hector's Return."
I'm almost ready to read this poem.
[LAUGHTER]
"Hector's Return"-- "By now, he's died so often
and been dragged in the dirt so many times, it's easy.
He'd have it no other way and chooses,
with open eyes, to be deluded by his will to live and press
the attack on the ships, to forget what he knew
at the opening, that Troy must burn, abandoned by its gods,
his wife and son doomed to be slaves,
his name lost among strangers.
It hurts me to see his mistaken hope.
So I'm glad that the man I left last year,
as ashes cooling on a funeral pyre,
has risen long enough to fight Achilles once again and fall.
A poem that shows the generations of men
as frail as the generations of leaves, that
makes my solid city flutter in the wind like Troy
and thin to shadows, is unreal as my grandmother's village
in Lithuania burned down in the war.
There is the farm she lived on, here paved over
for a mall years back--
is the same poem that's watered roses in Priam's gardens
so they bloom still.
I turn the page and the trampled leaves
float up again to the branches and turn green.
And it seems, for a moment, the time
is too weak a god to worship, another illusion I
can put my hand through, not the last word, as I supposed.
We assume grandmother's muttering
at the end about waves and crossings
to be her dream of some longed-for, fabled after-world,
not guessing she was a girl again, crossing the sea to us,
eager to rejoin the long line on Ellis Island."