"Ostrich"

A Note on "Ostrich" from Tom Sleigh:

The Swedish poet Tomas Tranströmer wrote a beautifully compressed memoir called "Memories Look at Me". I’ve always loved the autonomy he gives to the Memories, as if the fact that he lived through what his Memories are looking at isn’t nearly so important, or interesting, as what the Memories themselves perceive as they peer back across the years at the Rememberer.

This dynamic of displaced feeling as it unfurls over time is part of what I experience whenever I think of the dead friend in the poem. Yes, he was a real person—someone who held strong views and who refused to back down when those views were challenged. That kind of conviction, which can sometimes seem mere stubbornness, was both an act of courage and self-sabotage. Though at the charge of self-sabotage, my friend, who is now a Memory, would shoot back, “I understand what you’re saying, Tom…but you’re kind of missing the point.”

And I probably was. For my friend enjoyed argument for its own sake. And even more than that, for him argument was a kind of sacrament—not so much a religious sacrament as a moral one. Another way to put it is the distinction that Seamus Heaney draws between two very different artistic temperaments: one is more interested in the profound sensuality that poems can attain—what Heaney characterized as “a kind of free love between the auditory imagination and the unharnessed intelligence”; the other characterized my friend, who wasn’t so much interested in how human beings are framed and tuned as he was in how life works upon our moral sense. And because moral judgement formed the basis of his writing, it wasn’t enough to write “a successful poem.” It also had to be true. And that’s where the arguing came in, the need to feel right, to vanquish all contradiction. And so by sticking his head in the sand, he could ignore all doubt and fear. This may sound like a judgement, but I don’t mean it to be so: it was simply his way of unlocking the word-hoard and working with and in it.

To which my friend would make scornful though not unaffectionate reply, “Where do you get this stuff? An ostrich, afraid? Don’t you know that an ostrich can kick so hard it can kill a lion with one blow?”