If You Forget Me by Pablo Neruda

Having been presented with this poem by someone in a prickly context, which is noteworthy only to the extent that I am sure it was her intention that I read it, I did so with interest first, disappointment second, and thirdly and finally with total disgust.

In fact I found the poem to be so profoundly and utterly offensive for so many reasons, that I told the lady who posted it (“the poster”), that if I ever met the poet face to face, I certainly would not forget to slap the shit out of him.

“That may be difficult”, she responded. “Pablo Neruda died some time ago.”

Oh. So it’s by Pablo Neruda. THE Pablo Neruda? The Pablo Neruda who is regarded as one of the greatest poets of the 20th Century?

For perhaps a millisecond, I admit that I edged mentally towards considering working backwards from a completely revised opinion of the poem in which I lauded its qualities and the man for his contribution to literature.

But before I had even given myself time to contemplate doing so, I shook my head in disgust, concluding only that I had never before appreciated that Neruda was such a complete and total dickhead of a writer.

The poem is truly terrible.

It would not be very “me” to pretend otherwise – simply because others have claimed to admire it or because of the standing in the literary world of its author.

Though technically sound, if not at all spectacular, “If You Forget Me” in fact creates a very apposite summation of everything which is wrong with today’s world.

And - to an extent – why the poster may be in the very situation she is in, in the first place.

The ingredients of the poem are functional. Perhaps tellingly - it has a certain efficiency to it.

Yet the sentiment which it espouses is in fact very shallow indeed – so shallow, that it undoes completely any poetic merit in its execution.

This idea – that if someone stops loving you, you immediately forget them, almost by way of vengeance....

This might lend itself well to a Facebook meme – the memeification of our lives – in an era which has badly confused reductive self-categorisation with self-empowerment.

I can see why it might have a certain type of literary Hipster appeal to those who love to pose instead of loving – out of fear of what they might actually feel if they start, and how they will cope with the mess of any ensuing emotional unrest.

But whatever happened to authenticity?

Truth is beauty – is it not?

That is not what love is like at all. In fact the only person who would subscribe to such a rudimentary, transactional notion of love is someone who has never really been in love because they have always been too afraid to be.

Of course I have read and read about game theory, anti-psychiatry and every other field of study in the past century which began to characterise the fundamental essence of the relationship as a transaction; “If you do X, I will do Y.”

But if that really is what love has morphed into over the past few decades, during The Century of the Self – as the story of human life disappeared into its own backside in a storm of pouty selfies, Instagram pics and trashy catchphrases mistaking self-promotion for self-expression, you can rule me out.

Because that conception of love barely seems to be worth our time.

The whole mystique around love arises precisely because of the eternal quality it has and the fact that love does have an otherworldly tendency to linger and haunt us wherever we tread after we have lost the person we love.

That is the characteristic of love which enables it to completely transcend and cut through the mundane transactions of our lives (such as work, the mortgage and winter bills), and afford our lives some deeper meaning.

Neruda’s poem instead places love as the single biggest transaction of life – one which is centred on some sort of ruthless self-interest.

In “If You Forget Me”, love can be turned off like a switch – at our own whim – once there is no longer anything to be gained from the bargain.

Can it really??? That is certainly news to me.

I note from the very many glowing and unthinking reviews of the poem by so called lovers of literature that it is a popular “love poem”.

Strange.

Because it is probably the most anti-romantic, and anti-spiritual poem about love I have ever read – and nobody else seems to have noticed why.

I have perused some references here and there to Chile, and to Communism, which suggest something deeper below the shallow puddle of piss which Neruda wants us to be believe love to be.

Something even approaching a threat of sorts.

Yet if the basic self-interested and selfish formulation at the heart of the poem (which is reducible to saying “If you forget me, I will forget you”) is this "threat", it is only the regressive and powerless threat of a child. Perhaps Neruda unwittingly reveals more about the nature of the Latin man in the poem than he intends to.

It is misleading also.

Aside from the key characteristics of love being its raw power, (which is unlikely to break so easily), its permanence (think of the long longstanding grief a wife can feel about the death of a husband), and its supernatural quality (far from being something which could be so easily defined as a simple transaction - love is often in many ways a highly unlikely event which is characterised by and born from a series of extreme coincidences and psychic connections – for example, my girlfriend and I were very recently trying to arrange a weekend away, and when I texted her my suggestion about where we could go, and which hotel we could stay in, she was looking at exactly the same hotel), Neruda misses something very fundamental in his own conception of love.

It is not always symmetrical.

Love is often, unfortunately in some cases and tragically in others, unrequited.

And of course those in love often find that when their lover does X, they want to do Y for them. But that is because they love that person, and NOT because they feel their lover has paid for Y, by doing X.

A Nobel Prize Winner he may have been, but Neruda was never particularly bright.

Had I been given the opportunity to take part in a debate with him about why I think “If You Forget Me” is such a bad poem, I would undoubtedly have crucified him.

He may forever be seen as a hero of Latin literature by the type of people who calculate before living (and before loving).

But this Latin writer will take the wisdom of one Alfred Lord Tennyson over “If You Forget Me” any day of the week. Tennyson said “It is better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all.”

Call me old fashioned, but I would have to agree.

There are those of a certain type of psychological disposition who may at reading this be tempted to begin to ask Google for counter-arguments for my criticism of “If You Forget Me”. But that would be an ultimately empty, and shallow guilty pleasure to indulge and a very childlike form of revenge - almost Neruda-esque one might say....

Meh. I have a better idea.

Try to meet someone you love. And tell them you love them.