The Blind Date

What is life? What is life about? Thinking through a few poems.

What is life? What is life about? (—as we say to a man, What are you about?)

The Yoruba say that life is a market (“Awa n’oja ni l’aye”) and Rilke says, “Nearby is the country they call life. | You will know it by its seriousness.” I believe both statements share a notion.

As still holds in many parts of the southwest, the Yoruba market held on a particular day during the week or biweekly, at a particular spot. It opened in the morning and was done by evening (there were night markets, scanty compared to those that held during the day). People typically came from around the town where the market was situated, mostly on feet in those days (but also by boat, as with the Egba women who sold in Lagos), to sell their wares and to purchase things.

Coming to the same market regularly would familiarize a trader with another seller or with customers, but the market was filled with all kinds of people and one had to be careful about making too-intimate links with just about anybody who came. The story of the Beautiful “Complete” Gentleman who, unknown to the lady who followed him, actually borrowed his body-parts to come to the market in Amos Tutuola’s The Palmwine Drinkard (a story drawn directly from a Yoruba folktale) is a dramatic presentation of the point.

The market, in other words, is a place for business. Laughs and jeers and desire and disaster are inevitable in that environment, but they are sideshows, they are not the real stuff of the market. Or are they? One of the triggering events of the Owu War (1821), the war that kick-started the great long Yoruba wars of the nineteenth century, was a fight that broke up over alligator pepper and the drastic mistake of a guard who killed a pregnant woman while trying to settle it.

One cannot push an allegory too far. But if they mean anything by “We have come to trade on the earth” or “Life is a market,” the Yoruba are with Rilke: life is “known by its seriousness.” But also by its madness, or the look of madness, since every voice contributing to the chaotic music of a market has signification (to use Paul’s term). What looks mad is not mad at all.

The idea that life is mad but not mad at all—I bring that to my reading of “I Hear that the Axe has Flowered.”

I hear that the axe has flowered,
I hear that the place can’t be named, 

I hear that the bread which looks at him
heals the hanged man,
the bread baked for him by his wife,

I hear that they call life
our only refuge.

The first two stanzas of this poem by the Jewish-Romanian poet Paul Celan have an air of hearsay about them; of the wonderful and the incredible. The first line is a fusion of two passages in the Old Testament. One is II Kings 6 (1—7); the other is Numbers 17. In the second passage, Korah and a group of Levites question the priesthood status of Aaron and get killed. After the incident, to show the difference between Aaron and his house and the other tribes of Israel, God asks all twelve tribes to submit a rod. Each with its tribal name inscribed upon it.

Of all the rods, only Aaron’s budded: “And it came to pass, that on the morrow Moses went into the tabernacle of witness; and, behold, the rod of Aaron for the house of Levi was budded, and brought forth buds, and bloomed blossoms, and yielded almonds.”

The passage from II Kings tells the story of an axe-head that drops in a river as a young man cut a tree. The axe-head was borrowed, so the young man cries to Prophet Elisha for help.

“And the man of God said, Where fell it? And he shewed him the place. And he cut down a stick, and cast it in thither; and the iron did swim.”

These two stories give us the first line: “I hear that the axe has flowered.” The second line may also have relation to “the place” in the verse I quoted above, but it is a different place. The place the young man points out to Elisha is a spot in water; the place that Celan refers to has a name.

“And yet, the ways we miss our lives are life.” — Randall Jarrell

But even as he draws from both passages, the lines confound the sources. If the place where the axe-head dropped can’t be named, how come we know that it has flowered? Of course the poem is not interested in answers—Celan is a poet whose work confounds, and yet it confounds most convincingly, because the texture of his language has a conviction that we are denied in our reading of him.

Still—with the first couplet, we are dealing with hearsay (“I hear”) that has a quality of the strange. The same applies to the next line: a bread that looks, that heals, and yet this bread is baked by a woman. And who is the hanged man?

The last two lines are different. A change, subtle, takes place inside them. They are wonderfully stark, or—striking in their starkness. The first five lines are about things, other people: the axe, the place, the bread, the hanged man and his wife. But now we are in close country—

I hear that they call life
our only refuge.

Can we throw out the first five lines and take just these two? Are they not related by the fact that they are the poem? Is Celan saying that the flowering axe is life and the place that can’t be named is life and the healing bread and the woman and her husband and the cross or the gallows are life, and that that is our refuge? That the incredible, the faltering of memory or the fear that deadens memory (why can’t the place be named?), love (however obliquely rendered here) and the inability of love to keep the lover and the beloved from suffering (why does the bread not keep the man from being hanged?), the tremendous power of simple duties (like baking bread for a loved one)—this is what life is about, and it is by being about these things that it gives us refuge? Or is Celan wondering how life, so silly and so unbelievable, can be our only refuge?

What does he mean by refuge? The Psalms were of course on his mind. Psalm 9 (9): “The Lord will be a refuge for the oppressed, | A refuge in times of trouble.” 48 (3): “God is known in her [Zion’s] palaces for a refuge.” 46 (1): “God is our refuge and strength, | A very present help in trouble.” 71 (1): “I am as a wonder unto many; | But thou art my strong refuge.”

Celan is turning against the Lord—the “only,” so sharply and painfully placed, is an indictment. After the holocaust, for a man who had gone through the holocaust, the refuge of Yahweh was no refuge (see his poem “Tenebrae”); to have ended the poem as the Psalmist would have ended it, that would push the incredible to incredulity for Celan: an axe that flowers we can believe, and the mind can wrap itself around a bread with miraculous power, but a God who guards and protects, who solaces, who shields from evil, that is beyond belief.

Celan is discarding a life (a way of life) and suggesting that even that—turning against your god, or God, against a person you love, turning against all that you knew and had—this, too, is life.

The thought is not original to me. I have lifted the means of the phrase from Randall Jarrell, from his poem “A Girl in a Library.” It is the first poem in his Selected Poems, in a section called “Lives.” A girl is asleep in a library. A woman reading Eugene Onegin looks up from her book with questions for the girl (“But what is she dreaming of, fat thing?”) and a man—the poet—answers.

In answer to the woman’s question, the poet says, “She isn’t dreaming. | She purrs or laps or runs, all in her sleep; | Believes, awake, that she is beautiful; | She never dreams.”

                      The sunrise-colored clouds 
Around man’s head—that inconceivable enchantment
From which, at sunset, we come back to life
To find our graves dug, families dead, selves dying:
Of all this, Tanya, she is innocent.
For nineteen years she’s faced reality:
They look alike already.

“They look alike already”? Life and reality? Life as reality? What is reality and what is life? What does Jarrell mean?

One thing I know: Tanya does not yet know life, because she has not yet known dreaming—and dreaming is more like loving and losing, like having possession of and then being dispossessed. We are in a state of dreamless sleep all our lives (we are as dead); “we come back to life” when we “find our graves dug, families dead, selves dying”—it is in the turn, in leaning into the facts until they hurt, it is that hurt that is life, at least here in this poem. It is then that we realize that we have been asleep, and worse, we have not been dreaming—to really dream, we would have to live house and wife and mother and child and follow, whatever it is we consider worthy of following: to forsake all and follow, that is dreaming.

But we never do it, we are scared silly for—the irony—our lives?

                                      Poor senseless Life:
When, in the last light sleep of dawn, the messenger
Comes with his message, you will not awake.
He’ll give his feathery whistle, shake you hard,
You’ll look with wide eyes at the dewy yard
And dream, with calm slow factuality:
“Today’s Commencement. My bachelor’s degree
In Home Ec., my doctorate of philosophy
In Phys. Ed.
			[Tanya, they won’t even scan.]
Are waiting for me. . . .”
			Oh, Tatyana,
The Angel comes: better to squawk like a chicken
Than to say with truth, “But I’m a good girl,”
And Meet his Challenge with a last firm strange
Uncomprehending smile; and—then, then!—see
The blind date that has stood you up: your life.
(For all this, if it isn’t, perhaps, life,
Has yet, at least, a language of its own
Different from the books’; worse than the books’.)
And yet, the ways we miss our lives are life.
		. . . .

Death (is it death) comes for Tanya and she “will not awake” from that sleep in the library, or wherever else it meets her. She will think, O, my degrees, I have degrees to take, dreaming this time, but negatively. Negative dreaming, because she is looking at the possible from an impossible world. She thinks she is still the girl studying for a degree. She thinks they (those who call life our only refuge?) “are waiting for me.” But these “they” are not going to bother to so much as “scan” the room to know if she is there or not. They are trapped in the dreamless sleep of the world and cannot take the time to “dream” about a Tanya.

What do you do when disaster comes for you? Jarrell says how we respond is what gives us the truth, and the truth is how we start to live. When Pilate asked what truth is, Christ could have told him what Goethe said, “Simply wait. | Soon, you too will be quiet.” You will come to see the futility of the question, for the truth—the truth that ignites our lives or that numbs us when it is past using—is not reached by questioning; we come to it after what Celan called “an encounter.” We are either visited by Joy or Sorrow; we fall in love or are heartbroken. But it is not enough for drastic things to happen. Many fools suffer catastrophes and learn nothing. A catastrophe is not an encounter—until the one who goes through it allows it to go through him and is quiet enough to hear or still enough to regard and behold. It is in the way that we respond to grief or joy that we reveals the truth, the needed truth, to us; and as I have said, only then can we begin to live.

But we never do it, we are scared silly for—the irony—our lives?

So Jarrell says to Tanya, don’t say: How could this have happened to me? I am a good girl? I did my best? I worked my butt off? Don’t moan or complain. “Meet his Challenge with a last firm strange | Uncomprehending smile”: in that “strange” is something more like “grace.” There is a grace needed to come to the clear meat of gold in such situations; grace is needed to answer rightly.

“[A]nd—then, then!—[you] see | the blind date that has stood you up: your life.” (My italics.)

Your own life has kept you from living. We love our lives and therefore lose it. But to lose it willingly (dreamingly) is to have it. To go safe is to have it all go to waste. To live riskily, to live as if I were dreaming, that makes all the difference. Tanya realizes it now, as you shall; as I am.

—And yet, the ways we miss our lives, are life. 🔷

I am glad to share that I have been selected as a 2025—2026 National Book Critics Circle Emerging Critics Fellow. It was truly gratifying to get the email. Read about the other fellows here.

I am open to editing manuscripts: prose and poetry. Send an email: ogunyemiernest@gmail.com.

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