Tonight, I sat on the grey sofa with a freshly-shorn Radu and listened to Damien Rice with the teens. During Rice’s more cinematic pieces, the teens kept quiet, listening, toying with Radu’s bone. I let myself drift through the rooms and places in which some of those songs first met me. We all drifted a bit. This tandem drifting continued until the youngest noticed the prevalence of cellos, those angles of bows and elbows bent over the wooden curves. “They sort of just wait and hide inside the song and come out when the music curves,” she said very seriously, “—- when it gets sadder.”
Cellos have an extraordinary capacity to take the violin’s lament and deepen it. I said this (or something similar) to the teen, only to find my own mind turning to something I’d read earlier this week.
It behooves mortals
To speak with restraint of the gods.
If, between day and night,
One time a truth should appear to you,
In a triple metamorphosis transcribe it;
Though always unexpressed, as it is,
O innocent, so it must remain.
— Friedrich Hölderlin
In this passage (which Maurice Blanchot used as an epigraph to The Work of Fire), Hölderlin seems to suggest that the “always unexpressed” remains “innocent” by virtue of never having existed in the world. Never having been subject to its economies of purity and profanation. And I mention it because I find myself resisting this idea of purity associated with the ideal, the never-incarnate, the utterly absent.
Isn’t poetry borne from courting a loosening of binds and divisions? Doesn’t the poem sit down quietly and pluck the tiny pins from its bun in order to feel the world more closely— in the midst of hair falling, in the mist of that half-finished self where language becomes porous?
The Rilkean in me prefers to be rung by a thing, open to its music.
To be rung by. To be wrung. . . .
The poems opens as would a letter to the “quiet friend” named in the first two words. There, at the beginning, he tells us to “feel” how our breath, our “breathing,” creates space around us. “More space,” he says of that interior motion that resembles silence to those who might share a room with us.
Human breath tends to be muted, heard only in the sharp inhalations and exhalations of fear, panic, or excitement. Most of the time, we breath inconspicuously, inaudibly.
Rilke addresses the reader directly, asking them how it feels to be rung by emotion. “Move back and forth into the change,” he says, “What is it like, such intensity of pain?” What is the shape and the detail of this ringing?
“If the drink is bitter, turn yourself to wine,” Rilke said. (“I make wine from your tears,” sang INXS.) In the darkness that cannot be bound, “in this uncontainable night,” a night so vast that it cannot be held within a single person, subject, or body. There, where the night is too big to hold:
be the mystery at the crossroads of your senses,
the meaning discovered there.
The "crossroads” of our senses call for a certain imaginary that permits recognition. While reviewing stills from a home movie made by my father before he and my mother fled Ceausescu’s Romania, I recognized a pattern. This strange combination of boxes and lines on a blanket covered my mother’s legs in Bran, as she sat beneath a tree, using her foot to move a sleeping baby’s stroller back and forth.
That sleeping baby— clueless of what was to come in the years without parents— was me. When glancing at the black and white image, the mind misses the pattern in the colored blanket that sits on the chair as I type. The mind almost misses this connection at the crossroads of the senses…
Poetry is the bell that wrings us. And this demands nothing less than our complete attention. There is music in the waiting, and music in the despair of finding wounds one cannot suture. It is always too late, somehow. And yet, the cello suite teaches us how to phrase such things, as William Bronk notes in the poem below, where feeling is among the things we might never have dared on our own.
