1928–2024
The Wanderer Is Home
by Christopher Sawyer-Lauçanno
Nathaniel Tarn, eminent as a poet, translator, essayist, anthropologist and amazing raconteur has arrived at a new home. In his magnificent book of poems Lyrics for the Bride of God, he wrote: “I no longer wander.” It must be something of a shock for him. It most definitely is for me.
He certainly spent his life wandering, and excavating and discovering. I first met him through his wife Janet Rodney—a fine poet and artist, herself—who proceeded Tarn in death earlier this year. I was in my 20s; Tarn was already in his early 40s. He seemed totally formidable. His international upbringing—France, Belgium, UK—and his significant accomplishments as anthropologist, translator and poet made me feel shy. That didn’t last too long; he opened up and soon we were chatting about the Maya. That conversation never ended, and despite his death, though now one-sided, will keep going on. So much to remember. So much to reread and rediscover.
Educated at top schools in Europe and the United States, among them Cambridge University, Ecole des Hautes Etudes, University of Paris, Yale, Chicago, he once told me that among his most profound teachers had been the Highland Maya of Guatemala where he did his early field work. “They taught me that the environment was itself sacred. Over the years I came to see how important that concept was. Without the Earth, we have nothing.” The shift in this outlook is noticeable within his various volumes of poetry where the interweaving of ethnopoetics gives way more and more to ecopoetics. They were not mutually exclusive: “Culture—even life itself—is totally dependent on the environment remaining as it is,” he once said. He was talking about the Maya specifically but the implications were for the entire planet.
In the late 80s my wife Patricia Pruitt, Janet, Nathaniel and I all found ourselves together at Naropa for a month or so. It was splendid to sit outside at a Boulder café and talk and gossip and share often somewhat profound ideas about art and life. Nathaniel could hold court, and he knew it but was always quick to make conversation, inquire about what Patricia or I were up to, furthering ideas and talk. His interests were as mighty as his intelligence.
Two superb poets—Joseph Donahue and Patrick Pritchet—responded to Nathaniel’s death through poems. The have allowed us to print these as their way of saying “fare thee well.” Thank you, Joseph and Patrick.
Patrick Pritchett
TARN (the lives of the minutes)
That may have been the day
I bought Gondwana at The Strand
and then had lunch with Julia Bloch
at this cute place near NYU.
Or else it was the day I found myself
on the surface of the moon
not exactly Gondwana land
so beloved of Olson and Nathaniel’s
excavations, the bright ancient
lithos still in motion and on
the moon the intolerable glare
the beauty of this hard universe
trepanning a hole in my skull
all the confusion set loose
I watched as it curled
into weightlessness
and the drift of its ignition
grew grey, then white;
a fine ash sailing into
another dimension to inaugurate
new words for poetry.
Only they are older than dirt
they are stones from small mountain
pools carved out by glaciers
and I am still here
in my room on the moon,
high up in the Lake District
waiting for you to join me. You also can “climb the great
white peak/of singular color”
you also can murmur the fragile
lives of the minutes
as one by one they depart
they go. We let them speed by us
so – they were only just minutes.
Their secret is that they do not need us.
Without us they start their sacred venture:
to testify a moment before the lunar flame.
To dissolve in zero’s puny glory.
Joseph Donahue
dream—from Solar Flares
We’re looking up
at the bottom of a huge
copper basin suspended overhead,
curved, shallow depth,
a circular copper sky,
but there’s some
crud, mold, tarnish,
greenish schmutz,
as if the basin had
just been excavated in
the desert we were
in, then hoisted
overhead by
archeologists for
whom this basin had
great significance.
Unclear what desert
this was, what the antiquity
under consideration.
Were we in western
Turkey or Sicily or
on the edge of Egypt?
Or was this the southwest?
Or amid the Maya?
Perhaps the latter
because Tarn was there,
Mayan culture
his expertise.
In the shade of the basin
we looked up at the
lowest point of
its curve,
the southern pole
of a mottled copper planet.
The mottle seeming more like
the craters and seas
of the moon when
they call it a red moon,
but, in fact, whenever
you’ve seen a red moon
the moon’s always
copper-colored.
Tarn was deeply attentive
to the patches of dark
in the almost orange shine,
orange with a cloud of
inky purple deep inside
the hammered metal
from who knows how
many millennia ago.
Tarn is somber, as if
the basin’s scuff marks,
scratches, ancient stains
and accumulated crud
were a message to
our moment, this Antarctica
of blotchy copper touched with
green, here and there.
Only Tarn could
truly read it,
could grasp and
translate what
was meant, what was
possibly about to be.
This was the ultimate
glyph for which he’d long
prepared, deciphering,
keeping up with scholars,
as if the basin held a lake,
“The lake inside the sun.”
He was surprised,
as were we all, there
on this excavation cite,
though who could say
we weren’t in northern Iran
or at the center of Australia,
which, after all, seems
itself like a basin hung
on the bottom of the world?
But Tarn was exhilarated.
He’d recently found
a new way to think,
at the age of 93, he
was flooded with
intellectual energy and
new modes of interpretation.
He said: “We have to
clean this basin.
This will require
a new way of thinking
both rigorous and effortless.
We must study this basin of the world,
or basin of the sun,
this surface of a never
before seen moon,
whatever celestial body
this is, though it may be
this is the basin holding
the world and the sun
up on the other side of us,
of where we are now,
where we’ve travelled,
deep into a desert, a desert
once the floor of the sea,
or a desert about to be
a sunken continent.
Perhaps this basin holds
all sunken continents
and the further oceans
below them. Of course,
it could just be a coppery
plum petal still floating
to the ground. Much
is yet to be known.
I know a good deal,
enough to know much
is unknown about
how we got here
and where we’re going.
Such may be what will be
communicated by
this excavated basin.
Remember: only the
underside as of yet is visible.”
We must bring to bear,
Tarn told me, a new kind of
“Anthropological light.”
Only by means of
an “Anthropological light”
can what’s revealed
here truly be so. Only by an
“Anthropological light.”
“By that I mean,” Tarn said,
“a new way of thinking
about very old yet
heretofore
unseen things like
a dug-up basin,
or a petal or a shell
or a tectonic plate
seen from beneath
and only so, understood
in an iridescent burst
of ‘Anthropological light.’
True, it could just be
the base of a copper skull,
a skull that holds the sun,
and so, the lake inside
the sun, that’s what
thought is, true thought,
in the new way of thinking
I’ve just thought of,” Tarn said.
“I feel my mind filling with
an ‘Anthropological light.’”
***