Past, Present

One is not a number.

Pieri din mintea mea!
Revino-mi în inimă!

The eyes did not fail.
They believed, even from a distance.
It was the heart that was unfaithful,
fluttering like a tattered banner in the wind.
To be lost in the soul of the sea ,
or bound by your green vision.
Why lament?
My heart has fallen like a star.
Then it was fire. Now it is stone.
---b

There was time when there were many of us, and we lived side by side. And we understood that Man, too, was a political animal . But more than this: our thought was the thought of the land. We roamed there freely, sometimes without a thought or care in the world, like clouds in the blue yonder.

Late thoughts were in our blood, stirring, darkly. At other times the grey would inherit the black and become silent, like the starless night. We mourned the loss of love, quietly, like a blue flame, and at other times danced, inspired by the the starlit heavens.

Like the ages of Man, dark, bronze, silver, gold...we grow in lightness. How many lives go into makiing a life? But time passes, the ancestors no longer visible and I, the last in the line, am without an inheritance. Memory fades, words fail me. Fire turns to stone. We look in dark mirrors and ask Who knows who I am?

For nomads the notion of past and future is perhaps subservient to the experience of elsewhere. Something that has gone, or is awaited, is hidden elsewhere in another place. For both hunters and hunted hiding well is the precondition for survival. Life depends upon finding cover. Everything hides. What has vanished has gone into hiding. An absence - as after the departure of the dead - is felt as a loss but not as an abandonment. The dead are hiding elsewhere.

One is not a number amongst numbers. Didn't your Anselm say as much? One is not a number. It is a way of being, of being -then, as it is now- together, alone.

Pieri din mintea mea!
Revino-mi în inimă!


(Quotations: Roxana, Bellow, J.Berger, Bulleh Shah..dark, bronze, silver, gold)