Courage Consists In Remaining

By Jack Joseph Smith

The line is as Nancy is: "Courage consists in remaining inside oneself, next to nature, which holds no account of our disasters." By Jean-Luc Godard; from his film "Pierrot LeFou" I quake when I feel you breathing Leave me, leave me I quake when I hear you speaking Leave me, leave me You rustle all the wind out of my heart When you wish me to be gone You make a river flow in tears instead of ideas When from you, you wish me to be gone for myself I went to your window sill Instead of the hopeful sheen of any summer star The night laid me blinded against black marble Naked, I could not hold my fist any higher than, my eyes: While you, fallen on your little bargain basement bed in an immense dreary shyness with nowhere to go but power held my world so still... that the warm breeze suggested only a planet I might very well fall from For a moment... I hated myself for hating you for letting our presence be seperately alone in one room But no fates, no destany, no wish could ever turn - any possibility in me - toward the action of your lonely bidding My words were one place; my heart another: My guts had sunken; my mind filled with the unreal fog that has no feeling for what a person is: What I again had to find was time But you had none either With a mother closely dying by your side on tomorrow's nursing shift And thus no longer could we borrow from one another What must be done said to create So I lay down beside you for the future like a frozen child waiting to be tested And blessed you for having no anger in your love: when the feeling in my blood had begun to run sincere.

Original Scan

Page 86

AI Interpretation

GPT

A long poem of intimate crisis framed by a Godard quotation, in which the speaker lies beside a lover whose mother is dying, navigating rejection, helplessness, and the slow return of sincere feeling against the backdrop of a shared room and a borrowed future.

The poem sustains its tension between cinematic philosophy and domestic pain, making courage a matter of staying present when everything in the relationship has gone still.

Claude

A love poem set against a Godard epigraph from 'Pierrot LeFou' - 'Courage consists in remaining inside / oneself, next to nature, which holds no account of our disasters' - a line the speaker says 'is as Nancy is'. The refrain 'Leave me, leave me' alternates with his own undoing: 'I quake when I feel you breathing', 'You rustle all the wind out of my heart', 'You make a river flow in tears instead of ideas'. On her 'little bargain basement bed', with 'a mother closely dying / by your side on tomorrow's nursing shift', neither of them 'could we borrow from one another', so he lies down 'for the future / like a frozen child waiting to be tested' and blesses her 'for having no anger in your love'.

The poem tests the cinematic maxim about staying inside oneself against a night where remaining is not stoicism but exposure. Every abstract noun the speaker reaches for - 'no fates, no destany, no wish' - is re-grounded in the body: 'My guts had sunken', a fist he 'could not hold ... any higher than, / my eyes', a mind 'filled with the unreal fog / that has no feeling for what a person is'. Nature's indifference from the epigraph is mirrored in her 'immense dreary shyness with nowhere to go but power', which 'held my world so still... that the warm breeze / suggested only a planet I might very well fall from'. The 'nursing shift' makes her exhaustion concrete: she is caring for a dying mother and has no time to give, which is why 'you had none either'. The closing benediction is surrender dressed as grace, arriving 'when / the feeling in my blood had begun to run sincere'. Source spellings 'seperately' and 'destany' are preserved.