flamenco emails, leaving portland 7

            3. Leaving Portland

 

 

 

wenn einer fortgeht , muss er den Hu

mit den Muscheln, die er sommer u''ber

gesammelt hat , ins Meer werfen

und fahren mit wehendem Haar,

 .............

............

Herz, Anker ud Kreuz,

und fahren mit wehenden Haar

Dann wird er wiederkommen.

Wann?

Fag nicht

 

 

when you leave,

you must throw your hat

full of shells collected in Summer

into the sea,

and leave flapping your hairs in the wind.

........

...........

then  

is it when?

you will to come back ,

don't ask about it.  

 

 

A couple of 2 days before I left Portland , these lines of a poem

flashed across my mind lingering on. These were a part of it 

titled 'Lieder von einer Insel' of  Bachmann. a German poet. 

It was in the evening after sunset  when I was sensing Autumn

creeping closer to me sitting slantly on the red-bricked stairs

of Pioneer Square ,empty and calm. Nobody except me

was there. Just before the moment they were puffing up

with the upper part of their their  bodies naked. Out of sight

were children and their mothers jumping with pigeons

 

Then what invoked the lines of the poem  kept deep in me?  

Perhaps or not, the circle-shaped square, empty and calm, 

at a glance resembling an amphitheatre in the old city state of Greece

 might be the cause of it. Just prior to the moment did I feel my heart 

beating quick, thinking of the Aire performance  to be held

the day after tomorrow. Sitting alone there I was picturing in my head

myself on the stage as a special guest to introduce Morning Dew ,

a Korean pop song .What is more, my mind even grew restless

at the very message below from Lau which I had read just before:

 

<Hi, Gohk! We will have a rehearsal

on Friday, September 14 in the afternoon

so that you can meet the singer and work with her on Morning Dew. 

Abrazos! Lau>

 

Sitting alone on a stair of the Pioneer Square I felt heart-rended 

to see square void and quiet ! Strangely enough, Before the 

sudden voidness of the square I was driven to get conscious of

a state of my mind in advance that  I  would be expected

to be in soon or later. As you know, In a few days after the day 

of the Aire performance , I would have to leave Portland. Probably

it was at the square's voidness deep silence of the moment 

that the lines of the poem quoted above occurred to me.

But I didnt know exactly why. Anyway it must be the silence

and voidness around the space that awakened me to a sense

of  what I have to do soon after the performance:

to leave Portland !  

 

You, Gohk! Wake up and return to what you are.

What you believe now you are is not you in real,

but an illusion.

It's just a shadow of what you wish to be. 

'You are not a duke well known to the world,

 nor a hero of sturdy build .'

 Haven't you heard about the broad-shouldered

American Indian youths running the prairie,

with two eyes stable in horizontal balance,

 and with strong skin hardened

by the harsh atmosphere of the wilderness ? 

 Hey,You are not such a brave warrior.

 You are just a nameless traveller

 pursuing a dream to write small poetic proses

 which at most you could be good at. And nothing more.

 Then how would such a  humble man have a desire

heart to heart to come still closer to a bailaora in this city !

Free yourself from such a daydream.

Throw it into the Willamette

with the pebbles of reminiscence in summer

 in the pocket of the mind !

 

Leaving Portland, I was thinking of the poem of Bachmann.

And I got it lingering on in the mouth. So did I, at the moment

when I was boarding a Greyhound bound for Atlanta

5 or 6 days distant from the departure by bus,

And I even mummered  two lines ,below,of the poem to myself

at the moment of, not only passing through the Steel Bridge

across the Willamette river, but also  running along the road ,

with the city left behind ,

 

'Take off and throw away into the river

 your hat full of shells collected in summer,

 and leave with your hairs fluttering.'.

 

Passing by the signpost naming Spocane  area ,

Greyhound was gaining in speed .Forests and river began

to get more and more obscure in the distance 

just like a couple of small clods of painting pigment. 

About the time when the bus was running into an expanse

of plains with great rocks and sand field here and there , 

it began to get dark. The scenery out through the window

of the running bus came to be buried into the darkness.

Befor long, so did blackberries on the bank of the Willamette,

Lau's bright smiles ,and the fascinating stage of 'Aire '

flickering in my mind eyes one after another.

 

Greyhound stopped for a short time in the bus station of Billing ,

North Dacoda and began to gain in speed  under the cover of

deeper darkness. It was silent in the bus. Half or so of the seats 

were left vacant and  the passengers seemed to keep their mouths

shut. Not a sound in the exception of the soft engine noise.

I felt rather comfortable at the engine sound as if listening to an

unaccompanied Cello sonata. To me the sound was never  noisy .

It even called back to my mind the intoxicating things of Portland

in the summer-the aroma coffee ,brilliant sound of guitar,

Lau dancing solea on the stage,etc.

 

 In the darkness did come in and out of sight  the dim images of 

the downtown of Portland, which I visited twice, one in 1999 and

the other in 2001 ,but in either case Gohk happeed to leave Portland

at the end of the summer. The light of the sun was rich  in the city  

with the  pure blue sky high above, but the shadow of the city

was deep and dark. Bathtubes of Days Inn hotel in the downtown

 were ivory-white in contrast to the gloomy eyes of Mexican female 

part-time employees working for the hotel with no visa.

The applauses of spectators at  the Aire concert were bright

in happiness, compared with  the dark and unstable faces

of the drunken homeless standing in a line at a charity party 

held in Washington Park.

In a sense, the city seemed to be impressive in that it showed

a sharp contrast of light and the shadow in  the downtown.

 On reflection, when I was approaching Portland aboard the bus 

it was the exotic top of Amtrek station reminding a bell tower of 

the traditional Islamic church that caught my eyes  at the first time.

Then the sky above was brilliant with no indications of cloud.

As contrasted with it, the inside of Joyce hostel was dimly-lighted 

,the worn-out corridor gloomy , and the face of the counter

clerk face to face with me was ｅxpressionless. In addition,

standing By the Willamette I was deeply impressed by the sharp

contrast between the river enjoying the bright sunlights pouring

down on its surface and the dark image of the steel-built 

Hawthorn bridge over it .

In a sense, the city seemed to be impressive

in that the downtown showed a sharp contrast

of light and the shadow.

 

 With my head leaning against the window of the running bus,

I throw my eyes out on the lights of a remote city . 

At the moment ,the lines of Bachmann comes back again

to my mind: 

you have to throw your hat  

full of the shells you collected throughout the summer .

For what on earth is it  Portland

where I happened to spend summer twice? 

No more for the city.

Next time will the place be the Time Square of New York

which is familiar to me, or the Mediterranean sea side ?

No. the Vical lake in Siberia will be possibly the next point!

 

 But how can I forget  the pebbles of reminsinces collected

in the summer in Portland as below ? 

"you are inspiring!", the fascinating words

that Lau whispered ,

the remote, bitter cry of the cante,

light and shadow of the city. ?

the sea-blue eyes of a homeless youth

playing an impromptu melody by his guitar etc.

 

 

As for me, I love words themselves more than anything else.

I am apt so easily to lose myself  to poetic passages.

For example, such are these:

'......... the handkerchief of eternal nostalgia 

waving toward the deep blue sea',

' ......a walking shadow muttering to himself words 

with no verbal meaning',

 'the first grey of dawn', or 'the beauty of impermanence',

 '......autumn sunlights descending diagonally

between the boughs of trees by the forest path.'

 

 You know, I will never forget  the right moment

when a simple line was catching my eyes: 

'an art is ardent confession.'

It was Rouault's, a French painter. 

Once the line of the painter's came to be a  guide for my writing.

For it hit me at the moment I got stuck in a series of questions:

'Could I write a poetic prose?,

' how can I get a sort of  writing I would be satisfied with?',

or 'what style of writing could  I  be good at?'

It was really fortunate for me to meet this guide. 

Probably without  the simple and pure words as a guide,

I couldn't have a mind to do write this!'

 

And before making my second trip to Portland, last early spring ,

I kept in mind an advice of Rilke, a German poet, 

the rough meaning of whicch is below:

 

'in order to get a line of poem,

you should meet many people, 

many cities and many books.

More than anything else,

you could recall to your mind 

the nights of twinkling stars you met on the road.  

 

Until now I do  love the poet and a line of words

which I read somewhere in a book in Korean of his:

' the blue flame of the soul'. 

 

To me the writing is in a sense like the work of sculpture.

Sculptors cutting the raw material of marble have a burning desire

to have their dreams of images visualized into a form of art . 

For this they would often have to go on a long trip to an exotic land

and after returning home with the raw mass on their backs,

keep themselves isolated in their caves, solitary and bitter,

to be absorbed in wrestling with it  to visualize the images

in their minds into forms of art.

 

On the unfamiliar road of prairies of North Dacoda or Minesota,

my eyes are again turned to the night view outside.

The sky above the horizon side is coming down this way to me.

Greyhound is dashing more deeply into the darkness.

Averting my eyes a little upward, I see the numerous stars,

listening to them whisper secretly between them. All of a sudden

I am reminded of 'a night with stars twinkling', the painting of Van gogh.

'Wow!! unbelievable.' In spite of myself I muttered to myself.

The painting gives me a feeling of my soul souring into the cluster

of the stars there twinkling ,as if they were whispering to me

that at the end of  this journey with stars no more in sight,

be ready to greet the first grey dawn of writing coming near