This place is a clearing.
As in every myth tale
The clearing is the place
Where the hero comes to find
There is more of life to learn.
And he wanted to be here then,
When she was singing,
And sweet words flowed
Straight from her heart
To the tip of her pen.
His longing to say I love your words
And the grief of not being here,
The sadness of missing the songs
Made him fear even looking.
Made him wish he had stayed.
But he was off performing
Or being brave
Or involved in some other
Foolish human endeavor
As we are all inclined to do.
Is it so narcissistic a world
He inhabits with his moods
That he would deny himself
The pleasures of a visit
Or a look, or a listen?
Most of his life is this:
That his ego and fear
Are allied in a war that
Makes his heart sit in a box
And his pleasures run away.
But tentatively, passively
He returns to the clearing.
And sees that the learning
Is always here.
And weeping is today’s lesson.
The listening apparatus
Is silent –
Ahead of sound –
Your eyes gush
Like awakened
Blake.
From: kolkata, west bengal, India
About me: What would I be saying If I said, ‘The sky is true’? Would the dream pass more slowly If I lowered my voice, bassooned my vowels? No end to wonder, I find, And the evening mist is still. I talk in allegory when I speak to myself. I walk up the hill – my spirits rise. The process ‘saying’ again Is always about itself, about something Other than its content Its statement and assertion. I reach with every word For the truth of what I find— I miss and then I say something else. The reader, myself included, Gets only the altered after-saying. Where is the sky in all this--? The measure wavers – the link is broken – Disturbed, a trial of what is, Wanders, palpitates, grows worn In its youth— Like a design by William Morris Or brothel in Joyce’s arcane language.
How correct you are! Everywhere except the line where a 'world' created out of mirror-ponds is hinted. The myth says that there was this Greek lad who fell in love with his own image, tried to embrace it and drowned...but the myth is utterly wrong. He did not fall for his own image, 'cause he never knew that it is his own image! He just thought it is an other and he immediately fell in love with a beautiful boy, not with his own self.
That he drowned and died is another story altogether. I don't know much about the boy. But I know about boys who wander for a glimpse of a voice like a mirror-pond.
How do you know about his fears? Are you intuitive or is the boy predictable? Predictable and plain like a 'hero'? Let us not consider him to be a hero; only then can he acquire a depth, a depth of a pond which can harbor a dead lad embracing an illusory image of someone which he was not. Do you know of other boys and men who met similar watery death lured by a voice? Of course you know about the sirens and the sailors ...Is he afraid? How dare he shows his face then? Since you left no options for an anonymous sneaking in, he shouldn't have ventured in broad nightlight. Whatever women might say, he isn't a vampire, sucking them high and dry. He is afraid of nightlight.
How right you are...the boy is not only afraid of his pleasures running away, he is also scared that he will run away from them...'coz pleasures are volatile, such things evaporate...as youth is fast evaporating...the boy is afraid of things which evaporate, like water without depth. Water deep enough to harbor evaporates less...
These days, as he goes on performing, performing that he is not performing at all, as sirens sing in his phone and he is afraid 'cause they are all saying those words...he is scared. Why does he fear these words? 'Cause they are ephemeral? No. 'Cause they are true. What he looks through those words is a truth of a slaughterhouse of his self and not a place where one can sleep without fear of being reduced to an object of..., where - suspended in a fluid - he can sleep while he can grow again, finish the growth which has been halted years ago.
He isn't young anymore...those days one dared to dream, 'cause then life was a bouquet of possibilities...nowadays, life has become a process of exclusion. Not much days are left, not many things can happen.
So when he is not only in control of what happens about him, but neither able to comprehend...zombeing through life's pavements, when God is a dead cat and anything is possible...when he can lay his hand on a gun and get struck by the sun and he can kill a man or a old woman...when killing has no epic meanings and actions are preceded by thoughts but only later followed by meanings irreversible...he is more thoroughly scared; but nocturnally he unleashes his words in the world and unleashes himself to the words of the world.
Words. Only words, only voices. Not speech, not voices in the phone meant for him, but words which travel...blissfully ignorant where they will land up and snuggle in. Words dangerous. Words beautiful. Words nocturnal. Not speaking, but writing or voices which writes.
It's not his choice if he will return to the clearing or not. He has to return to a clearing...to unlearn, to be surprised; to be overwhelmed by the lightness of his presence in a place where he at last means as light as nothing, where no one will watch him again...and where words cross the borders of the great burden of becoming a promise or a contract or a clause or a debt...
I don't know much about the boy you wrote about; but I know about boys who wander for a glimpse of a voice...your writings has a timbre of such a voice...
Isn't that unnerving?