Les Voix Humaines

Has there not been an endless span of time before Man appeared - a time when he was not yet a thing to be thought of?---Q:76:1

There are many things I cannot remember now. Many words have I forgotten. Sweet paradisal soundings, language of the birds; the voice from those distant lands, a turn of phrase, a startling expression..all this remains only vaguely familiar.

After the rain cleared the sunshine burst through with a radiant brilliance and brightness, as if the light had been waiting to clarify the world at that very moment. Suddenly the earth became weightless. And silent. A few birds glided on, making their way through their invisible tracks, ancient pathways that we've forgotten, and the breeze rustled through green leaves so that all was a play of shadows and light, sound and solitude. I looked up to note the clouds rolling eastwards, as if down a stream, or as if they were being drawn towards some unknown centre by a great magnetic force.

I thought of Brecht's poem. I stood there for an age, like a stone statue that sees the world passing him by but cannot say a thing. When I looked up again the clouds had disappeared.

Listening to this sublime music , guarded, reticent, reluctant to cede anything to the Will...like folded wings, a self engrossed in its own thoughts, centred on its own being, and yet here too there is the aspiration to speak with a human voice. Sometimes we feel like being human, just human, the way a cloud's a cloud. Nothing more, nothing less. Do clouds, too, dream of breaking free, of finding a language like ours?

---(First written, Sunday, July 1st, 2007, around 11 a.m.)

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A poem, courtesy of a companero, from across the seas, the wide blue yonder..

In a Dark Time
by T. Roethke

In a dark time, the eye begins to see,
I meet my shadow in the deepening shade;
I hear my echo in the echoing wood--
A lord of nature weeping to a tree,
I live between the heron and the wren,
Beasts of the hill and serpents of the den.

What's madness but nobility of soul
At odds with circumstance? The day's on fire!
I know the purity of pure despair,
My shadow pinned against a sweating wall,
That place among the rocks--is it a cave,
Or winding path? The edge is what I have.

A steady storm of correspondences!
A night flowing with birds, a ragged moon,
And in broad day the midnight come again!
A man goes far to find out what he is--

Death of the self in a long, tearless night,
All natural shapes blazing unnatural light.

Dark,dark my light, and darker my desire.
My soul, like some heat-maddened summer fly,
Keeps buzzing at the sill. Which I is I?
A fallen man, I climb out of my fear
The mind enters itself, and God the mind,
And one is One, free in the tearing wind.

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You don’t know how hard it’s been,

to find you a gift.

Nothing fits.

Why bring gold to the seam, water to the sea?

Every idea of mine seemed like hauling spice to the East.

So I got you a mirror.

Look at you.

Think of me.

---Rumi

We want to hoard things, like Pharoah who imagines that the things he keeps close to him in the grave will find a translucent beauty in another world. There, the true name of everything will be known and cherished, will shine through with a dazzling clarity, as it would on a blue morning: a comb, a ring, a mirror...

Moments from yesterday and from centuries ago

-a sword blow, the painting of eyelashes before a mirror

of polished metal, a lethal musket shot, a caravel

staving its hull against a reef

- they dwell in us,

waiting for a fulfillment.

We want to hoard words, scour a text, sift out the inessential, so as to fix our identity, all the time imagining they can give us solace, hoping that there must be a meaning there somewhere. But more than this, we want the word to open up to other vistas, so that it (and we) are bound and free. And what can convey such a strange desire, except the human voice and the memory of it? Words reach us from distant shores, like the light from the stars-frail, sad, wistful, as if they are on the verge of disappearing. Comb, ring, mirror, words..it is the giving of them that he remembers.

We think of poor Pharoah and what it would be like to live like that, of how we would like to keep those words that have been given to us, and then awake and see the face that spoke them.