On air Sunday 10-03-19 from 21h until 23h
“It’s a bit like a paradise of hell”
Back for a second show In Limbo, at Night.
This show is loosely based on the In Limbo Music That Matters list 2018, that you can find on Daphné’s page, and is complemented with some older and newer tunes (there is no clock in Limbo, only time). To cheer up your dark nights. Or darken your cheerful ones.
Ms. Tippett:
You speak of Tomas Tranströmer, Swedish poet who’s one of your “ports of refuge.” Can you say a little bit about him — just, this person?
Mr. Cole:
I’m going to go back to a word I used earlier, which is how much help we need. We sometimes think of culture as something we go out there and consume. And this especially happens around clever people, smart people — “Have you read this? Did you check out that review? Do you know this poet? What about this other poet?” Blah blah blah. And we have these checkmarks — “I read 50 books last year” — and everybody wants to be smart and keep up. I find that I’m less and less interested in that, and more and more interested in what can help me and what can jolt me awake. Very often, what can jolt me awake is stuff that is written not for noonday but for the middle of the night. And that has to do with — again, with the concentration of energies in it.
Tomas Tranströmer, the Swedish poet, who died — … he seemed to have unusual access to this membrane between this world and some other world that, … , is also in this one. Tranströmer, in his poetry, keeps slipping into that space.
In any case, I just found his work precisely the kind of thing I wanted to read in the silence of the middle of the night and feel myself escaping my body in a way that I become pure spirit, in a way.
©Hiroshi Sugimoto, North Pacific Ocean, Ohkurosaki, 2013 / Courtesy of Pace Gallery/Hiroshi Sugimoto
Ms. Tippett:
But I think it’s refreshing to name this. You paraphrased Baldwin by saying, “Anybody who’s conscious — to be conscious is to be enraged.”
Mr. Cole:
In a state of rage.
Ms. Tippett:
In a state of rage; and also, I think, to be conscious is to be confused, right now.
Mr. Cole:
Absolutely — to be conscious is to be in a state of…rage; strength on behalf of the weakened. …
Ms. Tippett:
There’s us, needing help.
Mr. Cole:
Right, but also, to be in a state of quiet sorrow and knowing that there are things we cannot solve. And maybe that moment of contemplation, that moment of quiet sorrow, is the anteroom to what the solution, someday, could be.
There’s a beautiful Inuit word, “qarrtsiluni.” It means “sitting together in the dark, waiting for something to happen.”
from: On Being with Krista Tippett – Teju Cole. Sitting Together in the Dark. 28. 02. 19. Listen to full interview here