I’m undertaking a 1000-day reinvention project, blogging here daily to track my progress. In Friday Flash, I share an epiphany or aha moment from the past week.
In The Spirit of Hope, philosopher Byung-Chul Han quotes Austrian poet Ingeborg Bachmann, who wrote in the shadow of Nazism after World War II:
I actually do believe in something, and I call it ‘a day will come’. And one day it will come – well, most likely it will not come because it has always been destroyed for us. For so many thousand years, it has always been destroyed. It will not come, and yet I believe in it because if I don’t believe in it, I cannot go on writing either. [Han’s emphasis added]
Bachmann wrote the poem Bohemia Lies by the Sea (1964) about a famous mistake Shakespeare made in The Winter’s Tale where he places Bohemia on a coast. Bohemia is actually a landlocked region in what is now the Czech Republic.
As I read about this poem in Han’s book I wondered to myself, “Does Bohemia touch the ocean?” I only knew what and where Bohemia was because my ex-husband was 100% Bohemian and I have three children who are, hence, 50% Bohemian, though I’m not sure they would even label themselves as such. Even before I married, Bohemia was a land of dreams to me: the word Bohemian can mean a wanderer or someone who lives cheaply and beautifully on the margins of society. This arises from another past mistake where in the 19th century, Romani people — wrongly believed to have come from Bohemia — were called Bohémiens.
Bohemia, then, is a kind of impossible geography, a dreamland, especially when placed on the sea. It is at once a real place, a people, an artistic way of living, and even a state of longing.
Bachman says of the poem:
‘Bohemia Lies by the Sea’ is for me the one poem by which I shall always stand. It is directed at all human beings because it is the land of their hope which they shall never reach, and yet hope they must because otherwise they could not live…. . It is a utopia, that is, a land that does not exist because Bohemia, obviously, does not lie by the sea, as, after all, we know very well. But it lies by the sea after all…. . That means it is something incommensurable…. . And for me someone who does not hope, and who does not live, and who does not love, and who does not hope to get to this land, is not a human being. [Again, quoted by Han and his emphasis added]
Despair and hope
I have reached places of total despair in my life, and one of the most profound was during and after my divorce, when I had to leave Bohemia by the sea, if Bohemia by the sea represents the place I dreamt of and worked towards for decades, a land of happiness and love. It felt at the time that through the divorce it was permanently cut off from me.
And yet it was not cut off from me, because I could still seek the place where I was loved and could love, where I had a home and made a home with those I loved, even as some people I loved became estranged from me, and some of them, like my beloved grandparents and aunts who stood ready to help me travel to and live in Bohemia by the sea, passed away.
Han writes that hope is in dialectical relationship with despair:
The deeper the despair, the more intense the hope. That is the dialectic of hope. The negativity of despair deepens hope. The higher hope soars, the deeper its roots… . Amid deep despair, absolute hope makes action possible again.
The “and yet” is what comes after despair, when it seems that all is lost and that all will be lost forever:
Absolute hope is a hopeless hope, or the hope of someone who is without hope, because it arises in the face of total hopelessness. We wrest it from the negativity of absolute despair. It is characterized by a resolute ‘and yet.’
Bachmann’s poem ends:
I still border on a word and on another land,
I border, like little else, on everything more and more,a Bohemian, a wandering minstrel, who has nothing, who
is held by nothing, gifted only at seeing, by a doubtful sea,
the land of my choice.
And in this, she describes who I became after my divorce: a wanderer who left Bohemia by the sea or perhaps never lived there at all, since it doesn’t exist. And yet I chose this land where I live now and I sing my stories and I know I will always live by a doubtful sea.