Column | Give yourself with your time

Little you get as spinning as about time. Or maybe the word is not spiny. You feel the man on one of the works of Teun Hocks, busy with something elusive, the man who is in pajamas, butterfly network in hand, on a rope that is held in the dark sky by a small barn owl, which he thought he was catching in that net. Something like that.

But what time is it, what you think about? There are so many. The past tense, the lost time, the time that you remain, the lived time, the unnaved hours. The time of the clock that penetrates the time of experience all the time.

Years ago a friend wrote in a letter how he got the feeling that time was starting to penetrate. He was 68, perhaps, with a bit of luck, he still had about twelve years to write what he still wanted – hu, how short, how frightening he thought that idea. He has been dead for a long time, died at the age of 70. We never know about anything, with all our talk.

In the (very nice!) Last, for the time being last I hurry to say, bundle of Willem Jan Otten, September Sea, Is a sentence that has been concerned with me for a while: « Remaining, time can never be. » Huh? But if I just don’t know how many or few years, then that is …?

The sentence is in a poem that is part of a diptych over a heart that is constantly faltering and bonst, the ‘explodes’ at the slightest or the least, even with such a peaceful sound as that of the morning boat that arrives and gives his low horn stick while the owner of the heart is in a dune pan.

Because there is further stents and stopping the heart in that bundle, you immediately read it as a real heart, that exploding, which suffers from ‘rehearsal panic’. But that is not necessary, many actually have such a heart.

The rule with the remaining time is in the second poem, which starts: « Never, failure heart, it is too late to realize/ that there has never been/ be knocked on the way to the last knock after a knock. » There you are already having it. Why not? That heart is banging until it no longer pounds. Exactly as my deceased friend feared. As we all fear.

This poet contradicts that.

I recently read that bundle with a few people who also want to penetrate a little further into poems that immediately appeal, but do not immediately reveal themselves. So we poured our head, heart open, the waves of the poem – there is a lot of sea in this collection, and here, where after that knock after knock, it is said that the waves of ‘your North Sea’ are not added and that ‘your poems procession’ did not lead to here.

And slowly but surely we started to understand something. There is no line somewhere, we are surrounded by time. We are by time.

The owner of the failure heart, or perhaps he is just a failure heart, is now compared to a ‘feather under the hammer’, and you imagine it: how such a feather of course crows and is not crushed. Like that feather, the poet seems to say, like a wave of the North Sea, so you have to live, in Time: ‘So give up, go on’. Why is that such a reassuring image now?

Being a loveling feather, a wave of the North Sea. Nowhere to be seen.

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