#yoel hoffmann

This book was loaned to me back in February or March or so of 2020, before we knew what was ahead, by @neobrogrippa. 

I’ve kept it in my purse, with every intention to return it one day. Since I still have it, I thought to look at it again.

Earlier in the year, when I asked for it, I was wanting to get more comfortable with the thought of death. I’ve always imagined that, should anyone speak at my funeral, it ought to be a poet. Someone who can obscure the truth, but not lie, and make it seem...okay, to everyone who remains. 

So below, I will include a few of my favorite from this book. I recommend giving it a look. It’s well written, with information on many of the writers, and further explanation about why certain imagery is used in the poem. 

My four and forty years bloom in the last verse of a chain poem --Wakyu, Haiku Poet

I look now at the very moment Even the Buddha is dumbfounded. All turns with a swing. I land on the plain of nothingness. --Tetto Giko, Zen Monk

Inhale, Exhale Forward, Back Living, Dying: Arrows, let flown each to each Meet midway and slice The void in aimless flight-- Thus I return to the source. --Gesshu Soko, Zen Monk

Suzuki Shosan

Died on the twenty-fifth day of the sixth month, 1655 at the age of seventy-seven.

In 1620 he abandoned the way of the warrior and became a monk. He hated sectarianism and felt repulsed by an institutional framework. He thus never joined any one monastery, but chose instead to wander from one monastery to another, speaking to people and writing on Buddhist doctrine in a simple style that was understood by all. He often criticized organized religion and warned believers about the pursuit of honor and riches. Buddhism, he wrote, is not an abstract doctrine, but a way of life … A person may choose whatever sect and manner of praying that suits him, provided he stays in the way with all of his heart. As befit a man of samurai status, Shosan emphasized that the most important thing is to “look straight at death. To know death -- that is the entire doctrine.”

In the spring of 1655 Shosan became ill. When told that his illness was a grave one, he stated that it meant nothing, since he had already died more than thirty years before (when he became a monk?). As his condition became critical his followers gathered around his deathbed. One of them asked him to say “his final words.” Shosan looked sharply at the monk and scolded him: “What are you saying? You only show that you don’t understand what I’ve been saying for more than thirty years. Like this, I simply die.”

Tetsugen Doko

Died on the twenty-second day of the third month, 1682 at the age of fifty-three.

In 1682 there was a famine in Japan. Tetsugen used his entire fortune, which had been dedicated to the printing of Buddhist texts, to distribute food to the hungry. “To feed the poor we must sell the temples and holy writings,” he said. It is said that in giving aid to the starving he knew no fatigue, and that through contact with them “fleas stuck to his gown.” His efforts saved about ten thousand peoples.

7

When Bernhard opens his eyes and sees a strange ceiling, he remembers Paula’s death. Because of the daylight it seems to him for a moment that Paula is where she ought to be. But when he sees her in his mind’s eye (he thinks “Earth fills her mouth”), his heart is fit to break. He looks at his face in the mirror and thinks; “Everything happens but once. And this moment too (Paula dead and Bernhard, in his pajamas, on Prophets Street) will not come again.” He tries to picture to himself a world without Bernhard, but always finds himself hiding near the edge of the picture. Visions of the world, Bernhard thinks, are only visions in my mind.

***

70

He imagines to himself that he is once again in the house on Strauss Street. The baby that was not born to Paula is born from his own stomach, and he gives the baby to Paula and Paula places it, naked as it was born, on her stomach, flesh to flesh. The baby has a tiny soul and his lemon tree smell fills the house (but the baby cries and Bernhard doesn’t know what to do). His  imaginings take shape as though they were really in this world. But the visions that are only in his mind are feebler. He pines for Paula’s old age (i.e., for the life that would have been if she hadn’t died). She seems to be by his side. Trivial things occur (as when she says “Nicht so”* when he is having difficulty opening an umbrella). He thinks all kinds of thoughts (his thoughts and those thoughts he thinks about his thoughts). And since he has lost one thing, he loathes every thing (nothing else is Paula). He thinks: “If I were an imaginary person, the pain I feel wouldn’t be so strong.”

*Not that way (German)

***

96

In March Mahatma Gandhi commits himself to a fast. Sergei Rachmaninoff weakens and dies. And, at the same time as King Boris of Bulgaria (the eldest son of the great prince of Bulgaria, Ferdinand the First and his wife, Maria-Louisa, of the house of Bourbon-Parma) meets with Hitler (Schicklgruber), Eva Braun shows Giovanna Queen of Bulgaria (the daughter of Vittorio Emanuelle the Third, King of Italy) some crystal vases. “And this one,” she says, “is especially fine.” Outside, rain mixed with hail is falling.

***

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