Sunday 25 November 2012

The most real, the most beautiful thing: Nazim Hikmet at Occupy Wall Street


It was such a pleasure to see Nazim Hikmet's pivotal poem On Living in the third issue of tidal, which was published by Occupy Theory in September 2012. Nazim Hikmet was a landmark 20th century poet; his quality as an artist, his gentleness as a person, and his integrity as a revolutionary, which led him to spend a large part of his life in prison and in exile, are evident in his ability to articulate the hardest of experiences in the most meditative of ways. It is this beauty and warmth of his work that I always found incredibly touching; and On Living, written in 1948, is a perfect choice for a contemporary movement like Occupy; I am pasting below the first part of the poem from the tidal issue, which is available  here (p. 30).


                        Living is no laughing matter:  
                              you must live with great seriousness 
                                     like a squirrel, for example
                              I mean without looking for something beyond and above living, 
                                     I mean living must be your whole occupation.
                        Living is no laughing matter:
                              you must take it seriously, 
                              so much so and to such a degree 
                              that, for example, your hands tied behind your back, 
                                                 your back to the wall, 
                              or else in a laboratory 
                                    in your white coat and safety glasses, 
                                    you can die for people
                                    even for people whose faces you've never seen, 
                                    even though you know living 
                                    is the most real, the most beautiful thing. 
                              I mean, you must take living so seriously 
                                    that even at seventy, for example, you'll plant olive trees
                                    and not for your children, either, 
                                    but because although you fear death you don't believe it, 
                                    because living, I mean, weighs heavier.


David Loewenstein, Occupy the Wish, 2012 Occuprint

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