Adélia Prado's "Lamentation to Move Jonathan" (translated by Jessica Goudeau)

Thoughts on more-ness and all-ness.

Lamentation to Move Jonathan

Are diamonds indestructible?
My love is more.
Is the sea immense?
My love is greater,
more beautiful unadorned
than a field of flowers.
Sadder than death,
more despondent
than a wave beating the cliff,
tougher than the rock.
My love loves and knows nothing more than that it loves.


first published in Image Journal (Issue 91)

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I first encountered Adélia Prado’s work through Christian Wiman’s work. In his remarkable new book, Zero at the Bone: Fifty Entries Against Despair, he writes about Prado’s poem, “Love Song,” which is too stunning to simply excerpt, so, well, here it is:

First came cancer of the liver, then came the man
leaping from bed to floor and crawling around
on all fours, shouting: "Leave me alone, all of you,
just leave me be," such was his pain without remission.
Then came death and, in that zero hour, the shirt missing a button.
I'll sew it on, I promise,
but wait, let me cry first.
"Ah," said Martha and Mary, "if You had been here,
our brother would not have died." "Wait," said Jesus,
"let me cry first."
So it's okay to cry? I can cry too?
If they asked me now about life's joy,
I would only have the memory of a tiny flower.
Or maybe more, I'm very sad today:
what I say, I unsay. But God's Word
is the truth. That's why this song has the name it has.

Here, Prado is riffing on that famous, oft-quoted line from the Bible: Jesus wept. And I love her riff, the way that she turns that famous line into something almost familiar: “let me cry first,” the way such a thing echoes common speech — hold up, give me a second, a minute, maybe more. We might say that this moment, in both the Bible and Prado’s poem, humanizes Jesus, but I think the more apt thing to say is that it expands Jesus, expands him into a figure willing to grieve, to admit his grief, to invite others into it, big and sorrowful thing room it is. We say that word — humanizes — so often now, but it feels trite, almost reductive, in a world where to be human feels — for many — like being treated as less rather than more. Rather than anything at all.

I love, too, how Prado continues to give space to that moment of grief, that notion of crying, again and again. How she asks for permission, and gives permission to herself:

So it's okay to cry? I can cry too?

Cry. Joy. Flower. Sad. Truth. Song. The final words of Prado’s poem above are echoed throughout today’s poem — Prado’s “Lamentation to Move Jonathan.” Notice how she describes love, her love:

• Indestructible

• Immense

• Beautiful

• Sad

• Despondent

And not just those words. No. Perhaps more importantly, there are these: more, greater, tougher.

As you learn more about Prado, you feel a real sense of the gorgeous mystery and more-ness that pervades her poetry. In an interview with Prado for BOMB, Ellen Doré Watson — Prado’s translator — writes this about Prado in her introduction:

A decade after she burst on the poetry scene at 40 as a “discovery” of Carlos Drummond de Andrade, it was not just the literary folk who were still trying to figure out this remarkable poet from the backwaters of Minas Gerais. Psychiatrists in droves made the pilgrimage to Divinópolis to delve into the psyche of this devout Catholic who wrote startlingly pungent poems of and from the body; they were politely served coffee and sent back to the city.

In that same interview, Prado says this — which I’ve held close:

The biggest suffering—putting aside physical suffering—is the death of the ego. The struggle to accept life, to embrace the mystery that things are as they are instead of as we want them to be.

I feel quite raw as I write this. I am on a train, heading back from where I was born after checking in on my father, who just had heart surgery. He is not just getting old; he is already old, and a thing like heart surgery is no small thing — not for him, not for anyone. And though he has come out of it fine, and healthy — a blessing — I feel a little blistered along the edges, and the day’s sunlight streaming in through the windows of the train’s cafe car, where I am sitting now, where I always sit when I am on trains, feels sharp and almost too bright, as if it could finish the job of stripping my skin all the way off.

And always on trains I feel the immensity of something that I would call love. Love of world; love of my place in it. I think it is the frictionlessness of it all, the way a train glides without apparent effort through landscape after landscape, the rowhouses of Baltimore giving way to Havre de Grace, that place where the Susquehanna widens into the bay and where once, I remember, the light that shone on the river and the light that reflected off of it became one melting thing so golden and beautiful I didn’t know where the water ended and the sky began. I have sat on trains and window-gazed in the midst of love and in love’s aftermath; I have looked at myself in the window’s mirror, trying to cry, and I have looked away while crying, and through it all I have, simply and not so simply, felt. And today, beginning this essay, I am feeling the great, heart-widening and heart-breaking swell of caretaking, and the train is gliding frictionless along its track, and the world is this immense thing so far from being even remotely understandable, and that, for now, is part of the shape of my heart, which is shapeless and boundless at once.

And it has been in that state that I’ve been reading Wiman’s work, and Prado’s poems. “To be conscious,” Wiman writes, “is to be conscious of suffering.”

Later, in the middle of a paragraph I circled manaically with my pen, Wiman writes:

And if you are not lonely under this dividing and indifferent blue, if you do not feel, even amid your moments of happiness, some absolute inwardness that is absolute otherness, then, friend, you are either preternaturally enlightened or completely unconscious.

About fifty pages later, he connects that thought — painful and miraculous one it is — to poetry:

Now I see that loneliness is general. Poetry merely gives form to this fact and makes it available — and therefore bearable.

That ever-widening of the experience of being alive and aware in the world — that’s what I notice in Prado’s work, and in Prado’s poem today. How can love, you might ask, be diamond-like and immense and beautiful and yet how, even amidst such things, can it still be sadder than death? How, as Prado writes, can love be both “a wave beating the cliff” and that same “rock” it throws itself against, time after time, day after day, for all of time, for all days? I think the answer is that it is because such love is human. I think the answer is that it is because we are who we are.

In one of her poems, Prado writes:

My compassion is too large
to be my own.
He who invented hearts
loves this poor wretch with mine.

I adore this. The compassion that is “too large” echoes the love that is “more,” the love that is “greater.” Prado allows herself the grace to admit that if love is what it is, which is love, which is insert-massive-sound-effect, then it must be massive, totalizing; it must be something that allows for the wide-open all-ness of being. This isn’t always joyful, though, is it? It isn’t always pure happiness, is it? To admit a love so totalizing is to admit, some days, that you don’t deserve such a feeling. It is also to admit, perhaps, that some days you don’t quite know what to do with it, or how to find yourself in it. If love is what it is, which is beyond largeness, beyond immensity, then, yes, it can be sad; it can be despairing; it can be tough; it can be joyful. It can be — and is — so much. So much so, that it “knows nothing more than that it loves,” which is a kind of knowing everything by knowing one thing.

In Wiman’s book, he writes:

Perhaps the very need to perceive some overarching meaning to one’s life is simply one more compulsion for control, and not a sign of spiritual health but of pathology, the same need to control that has decimated nature, volatilized every racial and gender relation, and locked God into holy books and human institutions.

What I love about today’s poem — and Prado’s work in general — is that, as it progresses, it resists definition, which is another way of resisting meaning, which is, to take on Wiman’s point above, another way of resisting control. As the poem moves down the page, Prado’s love becomes more. It resists the simple yes or no answer that she tries to provoke out of it, and, instead of becoming smaller, reduced, and controlled, her love becomes multitudinous.

This is not just a beautiful thematic offering from Prado; it is also conveyed through a beautiful and fun move in the craft of writing, or in the craft of anything — this impulse to, rather than adhere to some conventional structure that grows and detracts, that climaxes and then resolves, instead ask what if what I create just becomes more? Donald Barthelme does this in his short story, “The School,” which is an exercise in a kind of playful boundlessness, these events that become greater and more outlandish as the story progresses. And Prado does the same in this poem — asking, as she does, what if my love just becomes more? By the end of the poem, the answer — if you can call it that — is, simply and succinctly and maybe not even simply, that her “love loves.”

What’s funny about today’s culture is that the only thing — often — that is allowed to be as unchecked and as uncontrolled as Prado’s love in this poem is our idea of progress, particularly technological progress. So much of our society operates under the belief that the exponential upward curve of progress is something that will benefit all of us, rather than just the select few whom it monetarily advances into the stratosphere, while the rest of us deal with the vast and wild consequences. Our culture offers the forgiveness and even imagination of an uncontrolled definition to something like progress, but not something like love. Or personhood. No. We so often reduce the complex more-ness of being a relatively aware and attentive self in the world into algorithmic data points that reduce us even more, lowering our gaze to the screens we place in front of the world, and keeping our gazes fixed there, despite the love that remains — immense and tough and beautiful — in our hearts.

Prado’s poem offers an imaginative gloss of that simplified, progress-model of more-ness. It’s not just that love is more or greater. It’s also that love is sadder. But it’s not just that. It’s also that love is so much more than just more. That it is so much greater than just greater. That it is so much sadder than sadder. And so much tougher than tougher. In other words, love is unexplainable through any other word than itself, which is why love loves.

This idea, which might seem like a reduction — a word reaching for definition but then returning to itself — feels wildly expansive to me. It is definition itself that, so often, feels reductive. Think of how often we ask kids, when they are little, what they want to be when they are older, as if they could be defined, at such a young age, by one singular purpose, a purpose related to labor. Think of how often we ask adults the same. Think of how often we ask the newly-married when they are having kids. Or how often we are quick to define someone’s feelings as invalid or unjustified, especially when they are delivered in a way that doesn’t fit with our own sense of ease, or our own idea of how a feeling should be delivered. Our judgment, in such moments, is a kind of definition. We are, so often, shaping the world rather than allowing it to be. We are, so often, controlling the intrinsic expansion of a life — which is a kind of self expression — into our own funnel of what or how a life should be. We imagine, sometimes, in the wrong ways, thinking more about who we could be than who we are.

I think of how, in an essay by John McPhee, he quotes a professor and conservationist, Oliver Houck:

The greatest arrogance was the stealing of the sun. The second-greatest arrogance is running rivers backward. The third-greatest arrogance is trying to hold the Mississippi in place.

Why strive in service of such arrogance when our love — all of our love — resembles the love of Prado’s poem today? When it resembles more-ness and greatness and sadness and toughness? When it is beauty and desolation and water and all that water washes against? When it is — here I am, spreading my arms wide — all of this and more?

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Some notes:

1. The magazine Mizna has curated this page, Toward a Free Palestine, filled with resources to support those in Palestine, as well as works by Palestinian artists. And, as I have mentioned in past newsletters, the ad hoc coalition Writers Against the War on Gaza has been a powerful resource that has, in these days, reminded me of all the various potentials for solidarity in this moment. You can follow them on Instagram here. I also recently donated to this fundraiser, in support of the Gaza Sunbirds — a para-cycling team that is reallocated their resources to offer on-the-ground aid in Gaza. Maybe consider donating if you have the means.

2. If you’ve read any of the recent newsletters, you’ve perhaps noticed that I am offering a subscription option. This is functioning as a kind of “tip jar.” If you would like to offer your monetary support as a form of generosity, please consider becoming a paid subscriber below. There is no difference in what you receive as a free or paid subscriber; to choose the latter is simply an option to exercise your generosity if you feel willing. I am grateful for you either way. Thanks for your readership.