Excerpts from Amos Oz's The Same Sea
A Shadow
Vague rumors abound, and half-testimonies too, concerning a gigantic,
almost human creature, that roams alone in the Tibetan mountains.
Single and free. Footprints have been photographed in the snow
once or twice in inaccessible places where even the most intrepid
mountainer would hardly dare venture. Almost certainly
it is nothing but a local legend. Like the Loch Ness monster
or the ancient Cyclops. His mother, who sat embroidering
almost to the hour of her death, his sad, withdrawn father
who sits night after night at his computer looking for loopholes
in the tax laws, everyone in fact, is condemned to wait
for their own death locked in a seperate cage. You too, with your travelling,
your obsession to go further and further away and hoard more
and more experiences, are carting your own cage around with you
to the outer edge of the zoo. Everyone has their own captivity. The bars
separate everyone from everyone else. If that solitary snowman really exists,
without sex or partner, without birth or progeny or death,
roaming these mountains for a thousand years,
light and naked, how it must laugh as it moves among the cages.
Through us both
Before excuse me is this seat taken,
before the color of your eyes, before can I get you a drink,
before I’m Rico I’m Dita, before the fleeting touch
of a hand on a shoulder, it passed through us both
like a door opening a crack in your sleep.
Oz’s first poem got me thinking about the real inability to ever KNOW someone else’s human experience, even those who are closest to us. His image of a barred cage seperating us all is quite rigid. I would like to think—maybe hope—that the barriers that seperate us are not cages, but like water bubbles that can overlap to some extent, and are distinguishable only by their molecular dissimilarity which is, however unchangable, bearable. I find it intersting that these two poems were placed side-by-side in his book, the first suggesting the lonliness that can be life and the second revealing that despite that lonliness we will forever search for that sense of conncetion in other people.
1 year ago