Song: I’m hiding my nightingale by Can
& Margareta Juvan
Painting: Landscape from a Dream by Paul
Nash
Sixteen years ago, a field of blues, mountain and hills by the horizon.
Green-ribbon-in-the-hair people zigzagged through the streets — for any reason,
I’d come to see them as if they were flying horses…in the moonlight. First or
last Tuesday of February, still summer.
Never-ending misanthrope cars filling the avenues with sweat, stain, a
cold smoke. The red asphalt. People, objects, signs. A flame.
Literature…sketching the ground like crystals of time on paper, in life.
Inalienable, at that point, to any need for reaching-a-climax as I hastened to
University. My first year, very first month. Magical. All of those
topographies. Violets and violins…ao luar.
That day, in special, I didn’t come on time. Twenty minutes late I hit
the classroom, discreetly. The whole environment seemed to step into me.
Professor Jo was there — resplendent, as per usual; voracious, ebullient.
I took a seat. About forty of us. There. A strange, variegated
togetherness to behold. Some could glimpse the eloquence of those phrases, thoughts,
ideas — so hers. Most simply opted out — also embraced.
When I could finally engage in her flow of words, voilà:
little-night fantasies streams unrelenting desires outbursts thoughts
wild-sculptures flowering thirsty waterfalls of…sigh!
“Beyond, literature is beyond,” responded she to one of us. “Pervades
everything, it’s everywhere. As to permit both angels and demons of experience,
and their missing clouds, to be transformed into texture. Yes, texture.
Inviting you in. To touch, hum-and-sway, moan, swirl, yearn. For the most
unimaginable reveries. Can you feel it? This dream within a dream
within a dream? Listen to the dissonance…towns of words being echoed
or fading out. If you close your eyes, can’t you envision Penelope as she
weaves a shroud to be dissolved into patchworks of…windmills, words, music,
movement? You wouldn’t put poetry in a box as if it weren’t also rhythm, also
color, and texture. You wouldn’t penetrate as deafly as deeply its realm unless
you were willing to transcend the prefatory layer of limitations and routines.
Not only to intellectually ‘understand’ it but to touch poetry, to touch
literature you must fling open the curtains of your senses to let in not a
single but every gasp of art.”
What is it? Nudging people towards… She’s offering
light.
[Words gifts wonders reveries. Shells of expressions. Once they exist —
the dreamers of words — we long for being with them. Tacitly desperately
intensely. But not exactly in a rush.]
I often went to talk with her. After class, during, before, in
imagination, here and there on the phone, drinking lines upon cups of coffee,
all immersed in time. “In contrast to a dream a reverie cannot be
recounted,” borrowing she from Bachelard and we both smiled. Yes, it
must be written, with emotion and taste. Those myriad discoveries,
incandescence(s) — relished, coursing, missed. “Each form, every gasp
of art.” Utter bemused slogs through aspirations, inspirations, searching
perhaps for a trace of what was once promised. Essential natures for
coexisting, a mere window, one wonders. Still a one, there it was.
Anyways. Interesting is the image imagined by the looking glass. The
zigzag motion, the breath of a river-discourse in its organic flow(ing). “To
what end is art?” asked me last dawn, as I slept, one of my dearest
(birdie-)students. Felipe, an artist himself. In front of me, right away, a
constellation of thoughts: revisiting Emerson and Thoreau; wondering of how
bees can be so perfect at honeying; ah, this Violette, her écriture,
her beau…voir; bringing back into heart a desire of holding hands with
the ocean, and then I am, here, musing over a key Word and how inescapably
intense it has been to feel it for. Dreaming in the most pleasant of ways, skin
on skin, soul to soul, [like] a free nightingale. How
is it possible?
Here things are. Again. [Like] a river, the Nowness. Basking, myself, in
a mélange of reminiscences and a drop of honey…it hovers above my own
being. Words whispered from distant lands, close to the eye of my mind. A dream
a dream, a reverie. And then, various paintings strewn about. Colors of a dance
a taste an open-air imagery, a market made of…fruits?
As I leap forward, the hot bedroom looks at me; it grins. The [unsent]
letters written over decades, the simplest of [uncommunicated] emotions.
Memoirs to be drawn, bonsoirs unworded,
unsaid — all of this reclaims something I cannot discern, for it is…such an
in-bed exhilaration, I wonder?
To my right, the pillow still dreams of a poem read right before a
dulcet one-upon-a-time sleep, that perfect intonation. An enigma, pure
evanescence. To my left, this domain of painting with music as a world of
perception is to reveal the first commitment of a soul, (with)in intensity
grandeur bewilderment, pervading replenishing lighting up. Every gasp of…life.
The alarm clock beeps again. And again. And again. Everything at issue.
Pages of inadequacy, allotments of it. [Estrangement, silence.] Diaphanous
[wonder]lands, life itself, literature, this flame, alas!, my
classes, frantic streets in the morning, what's time, what's more… Time.
To re-present, take a shower, and just shoulder anew some fleeting bonjours…
Comments
Post a Comment