Of Silence and Song. Dan Beachy-Quick
seen, every word of these sentences has been used without having given meaning to certain signs.
This past summer Voyager 1 left the solar system. It is beyond the reach of the sun’s gravity, and what light it now gives is no brighter than any other star Voyager can see. Like a mystic who has wandered away from his wealth, it has entered into desert places to feel nothing so deeply a new influence might be found. This space is called the heliopause. Voyager is the only made-thing that has crossed the limit. It can send no word back about its experience. Such a strange, sad poem.
Existing wherein it cannot speak.
Wittgenstein: “Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.”
It doesn’t feel like poetry, but it is the only strictly correct method.
Paul Antschel, Paul Aurel, Paul Ancel, A. Pavel.
So he signed his earliest work before deciding on Paul Celan. In anagram a kind of diaspora. Hope that one permutation will be right and one will arrive in the name that is one’s own.
But mostly a name is a form of exile.
“Todesfuge” ends “dein aschenes Haar Sulamith.”
(Thy ashen hair Shulamith.)
“Return, return, O Shulamite; return, return that we may look upon thee.”
Jewish mystic tradition equates the beloved in the Song of Songs with the Shekinah, the divine presence of God on earth, thought of as a bride. She dwelled in the Temple. Descending as pure grace that lights up the smoke or sits on a cushion.
When the Romans destroyed the Temple the Shekinah stayed on earth. She wanders even now in the dust.
Many prayers call her back home. Prayer that might begin with those words by which the Shekinah is sometimes symbolized: Moon Queen Apple Orchard Bride. Empty vessel with no light of her own but the earthshine of this nearness. Mystics say she is married to Beauty. I don’t know. To sanctify oneself they recommend waking up at midnight and weeping, weeping.
The hope is to return her name to its proper place, but this name wanders the world; nor does it ease the pain of the problem to think that a name can say itself to itself and so become its own place, a kind of portable altar.
A name is not a home.
The mystics say repentance begins by denying oneself the sleep the body needs and the mind desires. Prayer occurs in the absence of oblivion. So it seems. And I didn’t even know that absence and oblivion were different. At night I dream about the bride in my arms even as the bride sleeps dreaming beside me, oblivious of me as I am of her.
I didn’t know I had to make my own absence.
O Shulamith of the dust-covered orchard purple hair, exhume the grave they dug in the air. O Sulamith of the ashen hair, end your wandering through the dust in the clouds, and return.
Paul Celan, A. Pavel, Paul Ancel, Paul Aurel, Paul Antschel. All the light comes in under the crack of a door.
Blank page called a day.
God.
Marcel Proust and Montaigne both claim to have bad memories, but In Search of Lost Time and the Essays are made mostly of memory, and nowhere does it seem to be at fault. But it’s hard to find the failure in a mind that isn’t your own, and so I try to believe them when they say it to me. I think I have a bad memory, too. Others don’t believe me. But when I look through my mind something is always missing or awry, like those dreams of searching for something but you don’t know what it is you’re looking for—and those dreams too of being sought by something, but you don’t know by what.
Memories of dreams. What could be stranger?
Underground in a chamber I’m lying down on a stone table and hooded figures stand around me. I can’t see their faces or their mouths but a voice speaks and says that I learned a word I should not know and now I have to die. A kind of sacrifice. Wake up at the point of the knife.
How much life we do not exactly live.
Only now do I understand the dream wasn’t about the precocity of mind seeking to learn what it should not know—in kabbalah there are questions one shouldn’t ask before the age of forty—but of the need to forget what I do.
If I could have forgotten that word my life would have been saved.
That word? I don’t know. I didn’t wake up knowing it.
And suddenly the memory appeared. That taste was the taste of the little piece of madeleine which on Sunday mornings at Combray (because that day I did not go out before it was time for Mass), when I went to say good morning to her in her bedroom, my aunt Léonie would give me after dipping it in her infusion of tea or lime blossom. . . . But, when nothing subsists of an old past, after the death of people, after the destruction of things, alone, frailer but more enduring, more immaterial, more persistent, more faithful, smell and taste still remain for a long time, like souls, remembering, waiting, hoping, upon the ruins of all the rest, bearing without giving way, on their almost impalpable droplet, the immense edifice of memory.
Memory pretends to be about our own life, having been made, supposedly, by our living it. But each memory has its own life. Like some wandering underworld, we gather into ourselves the shades, and of those souls whose ardent desire is only to exist again, we find ourselves subject to their demands for sacrifice. Just a crumb, just a bite, just a sip of wine; just the scent of a rose enduring past its prime; just light on an oak leaf; just a touch; just a glimpse of another’s skin . . . such desire we feel and seek to satisfy not for our own pleasure, but to bring life back to the horde within us who have no bodies but our own.
Such acts used to be known as sacrifices of aversion.
We think we’re hungry because we do not hear those voices within us begging their offering, threatening us with sickness or death if we do not comply. Mostly we’re deaf to their demands even as we obey them. Repast at morning, noon, and evening. Sustenance not simply of the body, but maintenance of the undergloom. Life that feeds the afterlife.
Throughout Homer the battle-weary heroes pray for the boon of sleep. Nightly oblivion comes to wash away the blood and dust the morning will wake them to again. Dreams of wives and children, dreams of home, offer sweet escape. Often, for lesser reasons, I feel the same. Grateful that the night will remove me from the day. But the night is its own experience, and instead of oblivion we find ourselves occupied by strange visions that, rather than removing us from memory, give us more to remember.
Does the bee dream of its toil or of its dance. Or are those the same dream. The worker bee.
For nine days’ time I was borne by savage winds over the fish-filled sea; but on the tenth we set foot on the land of the Lotus-eaters, who eat a flowery food. There we went on shore and drew water, and without further ado my comrades took their meal by the swift ships. But when we had tasted food and drink, I sent out some of my comrades to go and learn who the men were, who here ate bread upon the earth; two men I chose, sending with them a third as herald. They departed at once and mingled with the Lotus-eaters; nor did the Lotus-eaters think of killing my comrades, but gave them the lotus to eat. And whoever of them ate the honey-sweet fruit of the lotus no longer wished to bring back word or return home, but there they wished to remain among the Lotus-eaters, feeding on the lotus, and to forget their homecoming. I myself brought back these men, weeping, to the ships under compulsion, and dragged them beneath the benches and bound them fast in hollow ships; and I bade the rest of my trusty comrades to embark with speed on the swift ships, for fear that perchance anyone else should eat the lotus