Friday, April 18, 2008

Where Moss Redeems the Stone

Prologue

On Christmas day of 2007, I left Israel, intending to write on my departing flight a lengthy and pithy essay entitled Where Moss Redeems the Stone. It was meant to serve me as a summary of my preceding year, an analysis of that year... and a chronicle of the infinite lessons I learnt in having lived it. __ As I recall, on the flight I wrote a fairly mediocre love-poem made up of a great idea and a few excellent lines... that just didn't hold together very well. I am going to attempt now to improvise a draft of this exercise.


















lindt christmas tree chocolate packaging 2, .leila


You & Art
William Stafford


You exact errors make a music
that nobody hears.
Your straying feet find the great dance,
walking alone.
And you live in a world where stumbling
always leads home.

Year after year fits over your face-
When there was youth, your talent
was youth;
later, you find your way by touch
where moss redeems the stone;

and you discover where music begins
before it makes any sound,
far in the mountains where canyons go
still as the always-falling, ever-new flakes of snow.


* * *

  1. The secrets of the universe have been purified, that implicit truth distilled further into a flask. The liquid in the flask is crystallized into a powder. The powder is spread out and stamped thin into sheets of paper. On it are printed the words of prayers. When you blow on the sheet you can still see the stardust of distant galaxies rise off.

  2. Love is... massive. Magnificent. I have never encountered anything larger. Anything more powerful. I had not known my heart could dilate so much. I had not known I was soo human. It is a force to be chary of. To be reverent towards. But there is no reason to fear it. It is not our enemy, merely our pinnacle.

  3. Once you have failed at everything, the future seems less heavy. The plates have fallen and smashed. There is no need to continue to hold up heavy weights. Atlas has shrugged and gone home. The world is free to follow its own orbit. There is no need to push against gravity. I walk and kick some ceramics with my steps. I like the crunching of them. Like snow. I smile, seeing my dreams grow smaller and smaller beneath me. Once I was too high, it was stardust I kicked when I walked; now, this powdered glass. These little jagged shards. I am happy to be on earth again.

  4. None can withstand the operation of Thy decree; none can divert the course of Thine appointment.
    __________Baha'u'llah

  5. The rock is inert. It relies on the kicks of men for movement and the urine of animals for heat. And yet, even there, on that insipid fossil... (the petrified fishbones of a creature that had jumped too far. too high, and had suffered the bank's muddy consequence), there is life waiting to redeem it. A thin, green film of it. Almost imperceptible at first, the layer breathes itself into existence. Feeds on the cold and crestfallen rock. Grows its emerald-jeweled fingers around the nugget of nonentity. And then, there, even there! in that pit of nothing, that dejected, dispirited, humbled, humiliated cave of earthen existence, you can hear the minute lungs of life breathing. Hope is eternal.

  6. I am not blameless. I am not to be blamed. Nor am I cause, nor am I effect. I am not stimulus, nor am I stimulated. I am not the moon, nor the night-waves. It is impossible to divide life up into: Me's and God's. into Fate's and Freewill's. It is simply never to be distinguished precisely which were my errors, and which were my most earnest attempts. This is actually the most disturbing realization for me. If I cannot distinguish, if I cannot find the cracks in the structure... then, how'll I know it won't come down again? Here is the truth that resolved this conundrum:

  7. Our entire existence is made out of sand. Our homes are constructed on shifting sands. Futures fold and fall and sink and dissolve never to be known again. Simultaneously, out of nowhere arise dreams and hopes- and when I put my ear to the ground I hear the voice of soo many sirens singing to me.
    ____I awoke one morning, a few weeks ago. I shook the sand from out my hair, washed my face in the salt-water. Stood with my feet in the water and listened to pure nothingness (somewhere a bird whistled). I sighed, turned, and walked back towards one spot or another. I began shoveling a new doorway. a new mantle place. In memory of old books I shaped new ones. In memory of old loves... I left vacant spaces to be filled.
    ____and when the sea comes in again and licks my home from out my hands? I'll build again.

  8. Faith is not something that you believe in when you're happy and blame when you're not. Someone wonderful once taught me: the lens! the lens Q! It's the lens through which you see _e v e r y t h i n g!

  9. Humility is not to be worse than anybody else. Nor is it to be better. Nor is it to pretend you do not have the qualities you do. Nor is it to deny your talents. Nor is it to droop at the neck when complimented. It means, simply: to stand besides, not up, not down, just besides. Comrades. Contemporaries. Friends. Lovers. Always equal. Always hands-held. Always battling. All losses are mine. All victories are mine. I have no need to demonstrate myself. I have no need to prove. I have no need to dominate. I have no need to be right. I have need only to be: a friend and solace to the hearts and souls of men, everywhere.

  10. When things get bad, not 'hard', not 'difficult', bad... pull the plug Q. It's ok. You're not perfect. It's ok to make mistakes. It's ok to walk away, and breathe, and reconsider. It is priceless to know this.


* * *

I could go on forever. Actually, it was meant to be an essay... but I couldn't decide how to start. Maybe I'll keep adding to the list in time. We'll see. I wanted to end on this note:

  1. I drowse between pencil pines, the stars
    rise through me as in sleep I climb
    in the warmth of other arms to meet
    __myself. Horizons stream
    away, all fences down, all frontiers
    open. I am free to cross
    five oceans even. At dust these broken
    __hills break free of time

    and place, four generations pass
    where wheel-tracks dent a slope. We share
    our lives with ghosts, the future strikes
    __clear through us, we are here
    and gone where crumbling paddocks dream
    their first green world ploughed under: feather,
    fur, beaked skull, old bush ways opening
    __upwards into air.

    (from: The Gift, Another Life, by David Malouf)


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