Postscript: Adam Zagajewski 1945 - 2021

Adam Zagajewski (Alamy)

I see in the Times that Adam Zagajewski died (“Adam Zagajewski, Poet of the Past’s Presence, Dies at 75”). Over the years, he contributed sixteen poems to The New Yorker. See, for example, “In the Valleys” (May 2, 2011), “Ordinary Life” (November 26, 2007), and “Karmelicka” (October 8, 2007). I know him best through his prose, particularly his memoir Another Beauty (2000). That book contains a wonderful meditation on blackbirds:

The blackbird’s song can’t be compared with art, with Bach’s arias; its sense eludes us completely, and if we listen too long, it may strike us as monotonous. For all this, though, it expresses us, it expresses human beings too. It’s a love song, and so it’s our song, the song of those who sleep and love, or loved once upon a time. What a pity that we sleep as they sing, that we aren’t there to hear it, that our ears are sunk in the pillows’ warm substance.

And to think that this frenzied concert, this extraordinary concert full of passion, provoking pity and envy, takes place each day at daybreak from March to June in every European city, London, Munich, Krakow, Arezzo, Stockholm. An unheard concert aimed straight at the sky, unreviewed, unattended, unrewarded, unpaid, with egoless artists.

The poor blackbirds sang most beautifully when no one could hear them except for policemen, milkmen (back when there were still milkmen), janitors scurrying to bureaus and offices, and of course insomniacs. Who knows, perhaps the inhabitants of those cities would be slightly different, a bit more generous, transformed somehow, if they’d heard this concert, which speaks to the human heart even though it’s intended in principle for the hearts of small songbirds alone.

When the concert had ended, as it always does, around sunrise, when daylight vanquishes the night’s intruders, silence fell, a moment of quiet, which then quickly filled with the following sound: the carefree, silly chattering of sparrows.

Reviewing Another Beauty in the May 9, 2002, New York Review of Books, Charles Simic quotes the above passage and says of the blackbirds,

The nothingness that troubles certain thinkers is not their concern. They agree to every kind of light, every kind of weather so that they may seize each moment and exist. They have no time to bother themselves with our ever-changing theories of reality; being in that moment is serious enough of a task for them. [“The Mystery of Presence”]

In the summer, red-winged blackbirds frequent a pond near where I live. Often when I see one, I think of Simic’s inspired line (“They agree to every kind of light, every kind of weather so that they may seize each moment and exist”), and remind myself to try to be more blackbird-like in my outlook.