Shadow of ourselves

I guess there's a part of us that wants to stay in the shadows but another that wants something, someone, to bear witness to our tattered lives. And what could be easier: one step to the side and the world passes you by! Ole!

A friend asks: what do you really feel? Crumbs! Q would have said: steady on old chap. The old world still understands the value of masks and hypocrisy and superficiality..a lightness out of profundity...Reminds me of Walter Ong once asking a Red Man how he would describe himself.

"Well, about six feet tall...'

"No, no, your personality"

"That is not for me to say; others may tell you"

And so it is. What is this desire to chart the soul, to lay bare its trials and tribulations? Augustine would rightly ask: God, what am I?Who is to say! We are, eventually, what we scrawl down in our words and deeds. One is reminded, again, of the Red Man's love of secrecy. We live now in an age of confession, a world where globalizers want to "open up" different regions, and scientists think they can name everything. Roll up, roll up...the day the world floated away and pleasure dissolved memory into a series of fragmentary moments. Like a note from Chopin, on the verge of disappearing. Flattened out, one world, the shiny surfaces are the only reality in this fake universalism, this false infinity.

But perhaps not. For no matter what happens the shadows remain, and the world is still the world, this tent of scattered stars, full of longing, full of hope or remorse. We still wake up and are amazed by all that has been given to us. And even if they convince us-the scientists and the mullahs-that this world is nothing but ashes still we can know that all is not lost.

And yet the world is different from what it seems to be

and we are other than how we see ourselves in our ravings.

So, there is nothing to tell, and if there is one must tell it slant. Let us not seek reality or purity (perhaps that only exists in certain human voices); but instead let us return to the world which is nothing but a blue and red flame, light that mingles with shadows in early November mornings.

Faith is in you wherever you look

At a dewdrop or a floating leaf

And know that they are because they have to be .

Even if you close your eyes and dream up things

The world will remain as it has always been

And the leaf will be carried by the waters of the river

You have faith also when you hurt your foot

Against a sharp rock and you know

That rocks are here to hurt our feet.

See the long shadow that is cast by the tree?

We and the flowers throw shadows on the earth.

What has no shadow has no strength to live.

---Czeslaw Milosz