Pablo Neruda’s poem embraces the suffering endured by human beings because they choose to differentiate themselves so keenly and resolutely from one another. The I/thou relationship so fraught with misunderstanding, isolates the self, weighting the ‘I’ with the unbearable burden of being.
Yet ‘all of us are dust and sand.’ We have lost our way because we are so sure that we have a way. My way. Your way. Separation instils anger and we become territorial and spiritually precious. You did this, to me.
Here Neruda communicates a more fluid, compassionate world, where the walls between this ‘thing’ and that become liberatingly confused and irrelevant. We are here, he suggests, for such a very short time, yet ego and pride seek to sever our connection with the world we live in. We armour ourselves with words. Results: Warfare, self righteousness and hurt.
Yet Neruda’s vision is one of seamless union. ‘The skin of the earth.’ A gentle forgetfulness of difference, and celebratory conjoining of all the spirits who make up this world. ‘What am I not called.’ Imagine!
Too Many Names
Mondays are meshed with Tuesdays
and the week with the whole year.
Time cannot be cut
with your weary scissors,
and all the names of the day
are washed out by the waters of night.
No one can claim the name of Pedro,
nobody is Rosa or Maria,
all of us are dust or sand,
all of us are rain under rain.
They have spoken to me of Venezuelas,
of Chiles and of Paraguays;
I have no idea what they are saying.
I know only the skin of the earth
and I know it is without a name.
When I lived amongst the roots
they pleased me more than flowers did,
and when I spoke to a stone
it rang like a bell.
It is so long, the spring
which goes on all winter.
Time lost its shoes.
A year is four centuries.
When I sleep every night,
what am I called or not called?
And when I wake, who am I
if I was not while I slept?
This means to say that scarcely
have we landed into life
than we come as if new-born;
let us not fill our mouths
with so many faltering names,
with so many sad formallities,
with so many pompous letters,
with so much of yours and mine,
with so much of signing of papers.
I have a mind to confuse things,
unite them, bring them to birth,
mix them up, undress them,
until the light of the world
has the oneness of the ocean,
a generous, vast wholeness,
a crepitant fragrance.