We walk this path, distant but together, like shadows: our steps leave no mark on the wet sand, no-one is there to notice our shimmering shapes.
Silent we drink the light, our ethereal bodies need no other food; once, we were flesh and blood, perhaps, or is that a dream too?
Soon it will be dark, somewhere the star will rest, or shine over other wandering souls.
I remember the first months in the city, I was puzzled by people wearing black, as if in mourning. Months and years passed. Slowly, I wore darker clothes, without knowing why. Not only during the grey season, all the time.
Did I forget Spring would come, clearer skies? Did I ignore the cheerful chorus of the winged friends?
No, like so many others, as if in a dream, I became untouchable, a silent ghost, sometime observed in the deserted streets, wrapped in darkness.
Subdued, we wonder: is this a new dawn, the beginning of our futures?
Or is it merely our memory, our longing, for how beautiful it was, long ago,
Before we arrived…
“Will they be waiting for us?
It doesn’t look so far, just a few steps, not a big deal,
not as if we had to go on a boat, as some have to.
And there is no island, just a circle of stones…”
Indeed, there are several gates to enter Paradise.
We will live another sunset, another night, another dawn. The world is old, but we are still young, and we are learning, to deserve this world, to protect our children, to fight greed and its evils. The beauty around us will teach us respect, for Earth and her Creator.
At long last, then, we may be admitted, among the other creatures who share Earth with us, forever and ever.
So wild the sound,
so fast the torrent,
does she live here,
hidden from us,
the beautiful fairy,
guardian of the waterfall.
Now is the time. We must face the test, and tell the Truth. The Truth we remember.
Then it’s out of our hands. We must pray our memory does not fail us.
We will stand between the boulders, small creatures we are, bowed in awe. The Ancient may look down on us, or not. We will not know.
For, if we pass, we’ll only know the other side. If we fail it will be the end. To dust and to ashes.
The people Marcel loves are people in motion. Like Albertine – always speeding off somewhere on a bike, on a train, in a car, on a horse or flown out of the window; like Marcel’s mother, perpetually on her way up the stairs to kiss him good night; like his grand mother, striding up and down the garden every evening for her constitutional even when it’s pouring rain; or like his friend Robert de Saint-Loup, whom we first glimpse scampering along the top of the banquette in a restaurant to fetch a coat for Marcel, who sits huddled and shivering at the table. Marcel is the still centre of all this kinetic activity, he is like the flying arrow in Zeno’s second paradox, which is shot from the bow but never arrives at its target because it does not move. Why does Zeno’s arrow not move? Because (this is Aristotle’s explanation) the motion of the arrow would be a series of instants, and at each instant the arrow fills that entire space of that instant, and this (Zeno would say) is a description of stillness. So if you add all the instants of stillness together you still get still. No one would deny that Proust’s novel streams with time, and with arrows shooting in all directions. But you could also think of the whole novel in your mind as one big stopped instant, since it takes Marcel the entire three thousand pages of the story to get around to the point of beginning to write it. On the last page he shoots his arrow but he does Zeno one better, he shoots it backwards, since you have just finished reading the novel he is proposing to write. It gives me a bit of a headache to think about Zeno and his paradoxes for very long, although I enjoy his deadpan delivery. Here is a shot of Zeno-antidote from that devoted Proust scholar, the filmmaker Chris Marker (Sans Soleil): “That is how history advances, plugging its memory as one plugs one’s ears… [but] a moment stopped would burn like a flame of film blocked before the furnace of the projector.”
From: The Albertine Workout, Copyright ©2014 Anne Carson, New Directions Poetry Pamphlet #13
Image source: The arrow
This calm landscape makes waiting a sweet pleasure: the stillness of the air, the lambs’s voices, the sharp green in the trees. Here you said once you would come back, so I wait here, every year, at the same spot, near the water, looking at the sky’s reflection.
Nothing has changed, the sheep, the trees, the soft grey of the houses. Well, only me, getting older, otherwise, your absence is the same, year after year.
It’s lonely up here, one doesn’t meet humans too often, mostly the locals are ravens and rabbits and moles, and the occasional eagle. But I like it, this is my place, where I dream, and remember. There are sweet memories, and also dark and stormy ones.
Yes, there is a storm coming this way now. I love it, the low clouds, a drop of rain here and there, I can feel the strong winds already, snaking through my empty eye sockets, resonating in my skull. “The Old One”, used to call me the villagers, when there was still a village nearby, long ago.
Nowadays the Old One merely enjoys the peace, and the storm.
