Of Silence and Song. Dan Beachy-Quick
your own words out on it, moment that belongs to none, to no one, instant when othermost and selfmost are one. There the Medusa’s head shrinks, unable to see across the distance that keeps separate I from you because there is no distance.
A point is that which has no part.
A pivot is a principle given a heart.
I want to say our heart though I know the grammar is absurd.
This is why I walk like I do. Looking down. Talking to myself. Breathing in the pollen and the air. Much can be seen on the ground that belongs in the air. See: the shadow of the shadow-dark crow? I think I must train my eyes to see at their edges until I learn to see as poetry requires—with my breath—
| thin shadows | of the broad-leaf | |
| grass the thin | dark shadows of | |
| these bent green | leaves of grass |
Nobody speaks. Even being nobody doesn’t save you from yourself—nobody might survive, but you cannot survive yourself. Even nobody can be swallowed whole.
Every night, Iris walks into our room saying Mommy or Daddy and sounding wide awake. I stand up. Kristy moves to my side of the bed. And Iris climbs in the warm empty spot where nobody is.
I take my pillows to Iris’s room and sleep in her small bed.
A lion. An elephant. A dog. A lamb. An alligator, or crocodile. A dragon with shiny wings. A bear so large it sits on the floor, forlorn, its paws resting in its lap. Sometimes a zebra. Bestiary of the bed. Or a stable, and I sleep among the animals.
Caedmon left the mead-hall when asked by others to sing because he said he could not do so. He felt shame and he left. He went to sleep with the animals in the stable and there he dreamed a dream.
There is a certain color in the cheeks that cannot be hidden when you feel the shame in having no song but only silence.
When he there at a suitable time set his limbs at rest and fell asleep, then some man stood by him in his dream and hailed and greeted him and addressed him by his name: ‘Caedmon, sing me something.’ Then he answered and said: ‘I do not know how to sing and for that reason I went out from this feast and went hither, because I did not know how to sing at all.’ Again he said, he who was speaking with him: ‘Nevertheless, you must sing.’ Then he said: ‘What must I sing?’ Said he: ‘Sing to me of the first Creation.’
“Now we must praise,” Caedmon woke up singing.
But what I think about far more than the man in the dream, that angel or daemon who bestows the gift of song where none is known, more than the song itself which knows the imperative hidden inside song is praise, is the warmth of the animals, their bodies, and the scent of their fur in the straw. I think about their breathing which is its own praise, and needs no song to sing it, and as I drop the animals crowding the bed onto the floor so I can fall asleep, I wonder what song I’ve been asked to sing, I wonder why in the dark night I’ve left my own bed to go to the stable lit by the dimmest light, I wonder what dreams will come, and who in them will appear asking me to sing despite my protest that I have no song, none at all, that I’m nobody who has a song. I wonder what in the morning I’ll say.
Who’s making lunches? Who’s dropping off the kids? Who’s picking them up?
Is that a song. Is that a song of creation.
In the late fourth century a chasm opened in the flat plane between the Palatine and the Capitoline in Rome. “For a long time the chasm remained thus, refusing to close at all or even to be filled, although the Romans brought and cast into it masses of earth and stones and all sorts of other material.”
Some forms of emptiness can only be filled by emptiness, but how to do this work is a mystery.
Emily Dickinson:
To fill a Gap
Insert the Thing that caused it—
Block it up
With Other—and ’twill yawn the more—
You cannot solder an Abyss
With Air
Air can mean the element we breathe; it can also mean a feeling or sense, a song, or absence of anything, or nothing. Most of these meanings are archaic. They are buried inside the word.
When the gap opens by itself it’s hard to know what caused it. Nothing seems to have been removed. Masses of earth and stones and all sorts of material only deepen the abyss.
Abyss, from the Greek, ἄβυσσος: “with no bottom, bottomless.”
In this sense a sheet of paper is an abyss.
Also: “unfathomed, boundless, the great deep, the infinite void.”
“In the midst of their uncertainty an oracle was given them to the effect that the aperture could in no wise be closed unless they threw into the chasm their best possession and that which was the chief source of their strength; in this way the prodigy would cease.” The obscurity of the oracle proved paralyzing until a young patrician, Marcus Curtius, came forward, saying,
Why, Romans, do we blame the obscurity of the oracle rather than our own ignorance? We are this thing sought and debated. For nothing lifeless is to be accounted better than that which has life, nor shall that which is uncomprehending, speechless, and senseless be preferred to that which has comprehension and sense and the adornment of speech. . . . For, if I may speak somewhat boldly, man is naught else but a god with a mortal body, and a god naught else than a man without a body and therefore immortal; and we are not far removed from divine power.
So saying, he put on his armor, mounted his horse, and rode into the chasm which closed behind him, neither hero nor gap ever to be seen again.
Iris is scared of the dark. She has dreams in the dark and she’s scared of the dark and of those dreams, who in the dark might arrive and tell her to sing. The carpet beneath her bed is a dark green and in the night looks black and deep.
One by one I drop the animals into the gap, but none of them is living, and the gap won’t close. I know the sacrifice isn’t right. But every time I step into the abyss my foot meets solid ground, and I walk out of the room, down the stairs, to the kitchen where the coffee has turned itself on, and where I spend an hour, before the family wakes, Iris in my own bed, reading Dio Cassius’s Roman History.
I guess I mean to say that the oracle is dark to me. The hole won’t let me in. The command is loud, but hard to obey.
The song must begin in ignorance. Nobody knows the song.
Socrates on the day he is to die running his hand through Phaedo’s golden hair.
How to imagine it so fully as to feel it. The boy’s hair in my hand; or, the man’s hand worrying though my hair. What do I want to feel.
He’s talking about the immortality of the soul.
He says that all his life he’s had a repeating dream. In it a voice speaks and tells him to make music. Thinking philosophy the best of all music, he spoke to men and listened to their answers, making of ignorance found a truer melody, one maybe only the gods could hear.
But now, in these days leading up to his