Of Silence and Song. Dan Beachy-Quick
numbers
secrets
Thou still unravished bride of quietness,
Thou foster-child of silence and slow time
Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard
Are sweeter
spirit ditties of no tone
Thou, silent form, dost tease us out of thought
As doth eternity
Darkling I listen
Fled is that music
a silent deep-disguised plot
To steal away
and leave my sense
Unhaunted quite of all but—nothingness?
Where are the songs of Spring? Ay, where are they?
Keats feels eternity’s silence. Some quality heaven and the gods keep to themselves. How is it we come to value most those qualities we are incapable of grasping? The figures on the urn, and only later, the ashes within it. To speak the words, “Thou still unravished bride of quietness” ravishes the bride away from her quietness, shatters the silence of her eternal life. The awful irony the poet lives in: to write immortal work requires the shattering of that silence where immortality might exist.
I want to say you cannot trespass into death, but I guess you can.
Orpheus.
Keats.
But trespass is reciprocal. What you trespass into also trespasses into you. From eternity, a little eternity. From death, a little death.
Keats writes to his friend Charles Brown: “I have an habitual feeling of my real life having past, and that I am leading a posthumous existence.” He’ll live another seven weeks, but he wouldn’t call it living. He’s already in eternity. Not heaven. He doesn’t believe in heaven. But he can hear that great silence that makes his fevered breath all the louder in his ears, silence that will unthread the Gordian knot of self into nothing, drawn into the silence the odes tried to, but could not, shatter. Drawn into the silence that mocks what’s known.
Or I think about it another way. You can’t ravish the bride of quietness. You can’t break apart her silence with your song. It’s the song that gets shattered by the silence it breaks. It’s immortality that wrecks the immortal work.
Mostly, it’s unthinkable.
Percy Bysshe Shelley dies with Keats’s third book open in his breast pocket. The pages of Lamia as rippled as a wave, last marker of the sea that drowned him.
The God, dove-footed, glided silently
Round bush and tree, soft-brushing, in his speed,
The taller grasses and full-flowering weed
Shelley’s body washes ashore after more than a week in the sea. Some accounts have much of his flesh eaten away or missing and much of what remains putrid with rot.
Louis Édouard Fournier paints the funeral scene. Shelley’s body dark on the dark wood just lit so there is no flame to see, only a lifting shroud of gray smoke. Three men stand close: Edward Trelawny, Leigh Hunt, and Lord Byron. A crowd in the background too dark to distinguish. A woman kneels near the edge. Maybe Mary, his wife.
The painting is somber, moving, but it’s a lie.
Trelawny brought to the beach some portable furnace, some oil, some wine, some salt. He collected wood. He writes: “The heat from the sun and the fire was so intense that the atmosphere was tremulous and wavy. The corpse fell open and the heart was laid bare. The frontal bone of the skull, where it had been struck with the mattock, fell off; and, as the back of the head rested on the red-hot bottom bars of the furnace, the brains literally seethed, bubbled, and boiled as in a cauldron, for a very long time.” Hunt stayed in his carriage. Byron watched from out in the ocean; he’d gone swimming in the sea. Somehow the heart didn’t burn, and Mary and Hunt fought over who should keep the miraculous relic. But as the critic Daisy Hay is quick to point out, it was likely not the poet’s heart, but his liver.
I don’t know why it’s on my mind. Byron alive and afloat in the very element that killed his friend. Hunt in the vehicle that, having brought him, will also take him away. Something about the distance each man has from the moment even as it’s occurring, and how the painting lies about that distance—or if it doesn’t exactly lie, allows us to discover some trick of honesty, which is to say, the painted men hide within themselves the distances to which they fled, and though we can’t see it on the canvas itself, contained within Hunt and Byron both is some silent gap undisclosed in which the truth of the event resides, invisible right there in what you see.
A student asks, “What is it to seek beauty? What is it to try and live a life that’s good?”
“That’s a question,” is my answer.
The class is silent.
I think I have a point to make.
Why does the flower seek the sun? It wants to eat the thing that gives it life. The daisies think they can swallow the star. But then a bee lands in their sunlit open mouths and the field lives and honey fills the hive.
We’re studying John Keats.
I thought I had a point to make, but now I see I don’t know exactly what a point is. What it is to have a point.
A point has no part.
Some purpose belongs to nothingness. Beauty is just one thing among many that obliterate consideration. One might even say consideration also obliterates itself.
Imagine a flower.
I do.
Its petals bloom by folding inward, like arms reaching into a mouth, not another’s mouth, but the mouth that is your own. The petals bend into the dark pollen of their own being and it does not look like blooming until the petals reach so far through themselves they invert and blossom in reverse.
Maybe I’m not speaking in the right dimension.
Maybe the stars are bees whose buzz brightens them in this other dimension. Maybe the flowers are invisible. Maybe you need to be made of light to see them, like the bees. I mean, like the stars.
Or imagine in the fact of someone’s face the dark pupils of her eyes, of just one eye, and magnify that darkness so that it’s as large as the sky.
So many ways to imagine flowers and the night.
So many ways to make open and closed the unopenable, uncloseable thing. These images of the mind not mine. This pure intent. This virtue-crime.
A euphemism is to use an auspicious word in place of an inauspicious one. For death we say passed away or went to sleep. Often we say these words to children who, being closer to those fears we presume ourselves immune from, hear what we mean in what we don’t say. They hear the unspoken word. That’s why they’re so afraid to go to bed.
The verb in the Greek from which the word derives is εὐφημέω. In the dictionary I keep in the no-space of my smartphone the definition goes: “Avoid all unlucky words, during sacred rites: hence, as the surest mode of avoiding them, keep a religious silence.” The italics aren’t mine; I don’t know whose they are. In the imperative, it means