Something must come of this, and it turns out to be a melody. A chorus. The deepest notes in a chorus. But no dirge. We do not talk about going away. We do not talk at all, we are sonorous and towering choruses.
At once I feel that I am one with them. The smooth side is now outside me. I am not astonished, it is exactly as it should be. This is where one must enter and join in the chorus. Man belongs to the choir, but enters through his own perplexity.
* * *
—
OUR GREAT CHOIR moves outwards.
The senses simultaneously acute and numb. The song that is outside man. Tremendous, and soundless. Rocks that rise on end, and are given breath and the faculty of song for the small space of time when they are allowed to take part. I myself am given the faculty of song and can take part in the chorus. It will never happen again. Perhaps it is a warning, but one does not think about that. It is important to take part until the breaking point.
As if hewn into the stone it is also laid down that this must soon rupture and disintegrate.
* * *
—
IN CHORUS WE SING of the stone. Of the rock in the quagmire. Of endless, mute aeons. Of the unfailing strength of the rock, which is on the point of erupting all the time. We sing of the waiting of the rock, and again of endless aeons. I raise my voice with them, and sing of man’s brief and pitiful confusion, of man’s pitiful life. The rock takes part too, singing sonorously the song of sorrow about man’s brief span.
* * *
—
NO – ONE IS FORCED TO THINK mutely from within the mighty choir – it is not quite true about man’s pitiful life. Man’s life is not always pitiful. It can be as manifold as the glitter in a waterfall. It is the song of the rock that leads one astray.
The choir takes no notice of such matters. Rocks that have risen up and flexed themselves into towers merely proceed. A choir of mountain sides. We sing on, we sing of those which lean to the dangerous side, yet stand. Stand leaning and collecting shadows. We include rocks we have never seen. We include everything about rock and stone and quagmires, and yet it feels as if we are thin membranes, ready to rupture. We sing of each other. We sing of great mouths in stone.
* * *
—
THIS UNIMAGINABLE CHOIR of stone mouths and battlements – can it hold out?
Don’t think. A choir like this does not think.
One gives oneself up to it as if prompted by deep desire, letting the song of the rock become one’s own, whether there is sense in it or not. One takes part while there is still time, while everything is dizzily precious and time is short.
Don’t think. The tops of the towers each have their own wind, they are bent each in its own path, criss-crossing like scissors. One knows one does not see it, yet sees it. One is naked and one is nothing, but may take part in the chorus, while the rock opens its heavy stone chambers.
As I sing I nervously expect the song to die away after a while. The old wish: Say something, mouth, has been granted a jarring fulfilment.
But it is the hour.
No no.
It is the hour. It suddenly grows dark as if a wall were falling.
Straight above.
Transfixed, I watch the battlements. Cracked asunder at the summit. Liberated. An avalanche is falling from the liberated summit.
No, it is no falling wall, it is the twilight from the dark cloud which is sinking slowly downwards. The twilight that came with the sudden downpour. Now it is moving in. A cloud hanging low with rain from the summits of rock.
Moving in.
Chorus and wildness. Seconds and swaying slopes. The tension. The burning walls of rock. Nothing. Then the downpour came, cooling and quenching.
The bold spectacle may not be driven further. Unbroken threads of water are already striking with their wet, deliberate force. What dwelt in the rock will be driven inwards. The rain pours down the smooth walls, cooling, quenching and flowing. The chorus is silent, as all stone is silent.
The tumult of the scissoring battlements is over. There is only one leaning wall here – and under it stands a man, naked and alone, shivering in the rain, awakened yet again.
No use listening for choirs in the tops of the towers when it is pouring like this.
Wet is wet, and the smell of wet. No seducing vapor. Naked in the rain and the wet. The stone has returned to its stone.
The Heart Lies Naked Beside the Highway in the Dark
THE MOON HAS REACHED its narrowest phase; its light is no longer of use. Thick darkness surrounds the house. A long dark evening will stride ahead – stride into an even thicker pall. Downwards and downwards, thicker and thicker.
If there is a heart here, it is lonely. The heart grows lonely; that is how it was created. It grows finally into its true self.
Lonely. It is far to its neighbor, and there it is a stranger. So it has even further to go.
The house grows lonely too. Its daytime character is of no importance now. Now there are other laws and other highways, other waterways. If there were lighted window panes within reach up to today, this is no longer true. The lighted panes have vanished and are of no consequence.
Is there no order here?
Increasingly so.
Where light gleamed, and then was extinguished, there everything was in order. The panes vanished and the eyelids closed peacefully. Quiet ticking, and then sleep. Lamp after lamp now signify sleep upon sleep. Order reigns according to its own rules.
But a lonely heart is not safe in the house. It has only itself, perhaps not even that. In the approaching night this cannot be counted on.
Do we not own our hearts in the end?
We know very little about it. That is one of the many uncertainties in life.
Tonight nothing is certain. That is why you have not shut your eyes.
I must have certainty.
The reply comes: Can’t you see that your heart is lying naked on the highway, exhibiting itself there of its own accord? You know it well, but you try to hide your knowledge.
Since one is a little tired one has to answer: it is true.
It is true that my heart lies naked on or beside the highway when it is dark. It is not the first evening it has happened. It is waiting for someone. It goes out and lies down at the roadside, trembling with boldness. At night it can do things like that. Nobody else is embarrassed by it and nobody will feel he has to ask questions.
In the darkness when everything is unknown.
How it will end is the tension of each night. There is no way of stopping this.
In the daytime this is the crossroads of the world. At night the thoroughfares are innumerable; they are nothing and everything. It is no use thinking that the four thoroughfares start here, as if one lay at the dead centre of the highways, at the point of departure. No, I have halted here and bared my heart because I could come no further. I was really in the house all the time.
Naked beside the unknown road at night.
Why naked? Why that word exactly?
Because it feels like that. Clothes are not very important in the dark.
Defenseless?
That too. The feeling, at any rate.
But with a blind need to be there. To face what is coming towards me along the road. And stand defenseless just when one should defend oneself. Is that logical?
Nobody has said that one can defend oneself. One is simply naked in the darkness. One has to take that risk, to lie stripped beside the highway where the traffic is heavy.
The highway goes straight forward through the darkness, but it is no use asking about anything. And you will not be given any information. You will be expected to show courage and say nothing.
You really wanted to say in wild defiance: Just you come!
You will not say it. One weaves such fantasies, knowing
one will never dare, never bring oneself to do it.
* * *
—
NOBODY CALLED and nobody came.
My heart is in its chamber, lying beside the road and lying in the house beside the road at the same time. The one does not preclude the other. My heart is thudding against the walls. Is it certain that nothing will happen tonight?
I don’t know.
In any case this is one night more at the roadside.
And what was that?
A thudding against the wall.
My heart pauses slightly, in its great tension. It was the soft thudding of wood against wood outside. The gentle thud of a boat butting the wall in a wind. Can this be true?
Is there suddenly a sea out there? And a moored boat butting the wall of the house?
Butting the wall of the house in a storm. What storm? Moored to the wall and running into the wall, in a storm.
There’s no boat outside. Not even water enough for a boat, it’s a garden out there.
Garden?
How does one know what may be outside on a night like this? There may be an endless ocean. There may be a quay for the boat. In that case a shallow little boat could be lying waiting.
The nightlight is burning, one sees everything on the other side of the wall: the boat running into the posts in the wind; the boat that is tied to the ring and sometimes does not reach the post at all, but the wall. One has heard a good deal of that kind of thudding, and hears at once that this sound is a thousand miles removed from it.
Tied to the ring in the wall of my house. Where there has never been water and never any boat or ring. Now the boat is thudding against the wall in a storm.
Very well. One does not ask questions, one simply notes the fact. That’s how it is beside the highway.
But the heart suddenly feels that it is getting more cramped. This is happening beside the unknown highway – so, land or sea, does it matter? Not in the least. The sea goes up on land at night so that the boat can be tied to the ring. The worn heart senses clearly that the boat is tied close by.
* * *
—
COME TO THAT, there may be moorings all round the house. Mooring is a pleasant word. Who dares draw himself to his full height and deny that the sea goes up on land and moors the boat to the ring during the dark nights? Who dares deny that such a storm exists? Who dares sneer and say that it is a good friend knocking?
One is out beside the great thoroughfare, where everything is possible. The assertions line up. One cannot bring oneself to utter them, but lets them live.
* * *
—
CANNOT BRING ONESELF to utter it aloud. My heart has already begun beating again. What is not true is true – so the heart must hastily start doing something, must start expanding as fast as possible.
Expanding inside where it is too cramped already. It is thudding heavily.
But it is still mine.
Spoken somewhere by chance, with a somewhat indefinite purpose. Spoken in defiance.
It is different tonight.
That’s what it is. Of course there are other things outside, but it is mine all the same.
It is larger, but it is mine all the same and will remain mine in the future.
This is rank defiance, and it becomes more cramped around my heart that must go on beating. My heart, that has always wanted to expand, is forced instead to feel more cramped than ever when it beats. At the same time wood is thudding against wood outside, and the ring is rattling in the wall.
There are no limits out there. One can imagine distant shores. Great thoroughfares, and harbors in the unknown. Chillingly unknown.
Indoors it thuds against its narrow walls. My heart is too large for its chamber. It is getting feverish in there.
Is this a hand of iron gripping it?
Don’t let’s talk about that.
The space has suddenly grown larger, not from generosity, but from surprise, and from strenuous expansion in order to find room for all the half forgotten things suddenly remembered and scraped together, in the desire to include them. Suddenly it all comes alive and streams to the heart. Life streams to the heart bearing things that scarcely have names, that have now become important.
For unknown reasons?
No.
The heart is at the roadside; there is no other place to be. It is late, and one must go out naked.
This is not unexpected; preparations were made long ago. Yet it has come too quickly and too soon.
The prow of the boat is butting into the wall, butting into the house, and time is no more than a narrow line at what seems to be the point of exit. Outside the rainstorm has begun. The lonely boat, the rain and the storm; it is hurled against the wall and he who must go out naked discards garment after garment and hears it all as a stern, many-colored song about the brief time and the brief time. The boat is slung about in the rushing and roaring in the brief time. The boat that did not exist, on the ocean that did not exist, and the rushing and roaring around the brief time. This song cannot last, but is lasting now, since the post is tied to the house, and the house is tied to the post, and the ring is inexorably tied to the heart in wind and rain and storm.
The heart is tied in the space which is steadily becoming more cramped because everything is trying to enter it in desperation. From the thoroughfares back in the twilight, from all its ages, from all its defeats and joys, and its shame. Continually in from the thoroughfares, which were always so many, and the wind and the rain over and over again, all of it rushing and roaring through my heart like a song.
Who will shake off what tries to force its way in, and deny it, saying: Here is no flood and no sea-storm, here is no ocean with unknown fairways, here no boat is being made ready for a journey, for night is night and it will be day tomorrow? No, it is too late to sing thus. It is all resolved; the ring is fastened to the wall, the boat is tugging at the ring, late to sing thus.
* * *
—
THE FIRST IRON GRIP is imminent. The iron hand is exerting its grip. Iron is iron, but it is too late to sing thus, when the hand is raised to grip, when the heart is lying at the roadside and is too large and too cramped. Too late the heart understands that it is now, and the dark river is flowing, and the iron hand is exerting its grip.
* * *
—
THE WIND AND THE BOAT are tugging at each other. The wide way of the wind is free; it comes from the unknown, goes to the unknown. Free.
The boat jerks at the rope. The shocked house is a part of the shocked heart, and the thoroughfare to it lay open; the boat is butting impatiently into the door-frame. The house is only a resting place beside the highway. What can the heart do? It is innocent.
Desperate excuses.
The heart is not innocent. How can it be? It is feverish, not innocent. It has shared a man’s life. Anything but innocent.
But it is all that streams back, demanding room. The heart cannot deny it room; it must receive it, must expand. It cannot shut it out, nothing is closed tonight, it is fantasy that such and such can be shut out. On the contrary, it must remain open to everything that wishes to come in. No one will ask for permission, never has anything so wretched been done that it cannot come and demand room. Receive, expand. Incredible how much one thought had been buried.
Is that coming too?
Yes.
And that too?
Yes.
Like that all the time.
Room must be found, but the walls cannot expand more than they have already. The heart withers in weariness. No more must come.
It speaks like an innocent heart.
It speaks to the storm and the darkness and to that which is nameless and that which cannot be named. Speaks unavailingly of its futile excuses. The iron hands are about to seize it.
The wind has brought heavier rain. Outside a wild rushing and roaring mounts up, inside there is an equally wild rushing and roaring from all these things. Meanwhile the boat thuds, reminding one that it is there, but the rhythm is slower now than it was at first – for the sake of understanding.
And a breathing space between the iron hands, merely for the sake of understanding.
* * *
—
THE WIND BLOWS the downpour forward, as is right and proper on earth. At first it has a calming effect. One can imagine the rain pounding into the empty boat, soaking and blackening the thwarts. Blackening them in the darkness, as if it must be doubly dark. But the wind has blown forward twisted memories too – while it tosses the boat, while the thwarts blacken. Memories fly in frightened flocks.
The pelting rain is streaming down, striking the floorboards. The rope hardens at its mooring.
Familiar and homely. A little breathing space.
If only the heart could shut itself off. It may not do so, and becomes crammed with memories, heavy with images, saving itself by clinging to straws, like the mooring rope and the slight, familiar smell of the mooring rope in rain. The reassuring smell of the commonplace.
A breathing space between iron hands. Soon they will be here. One must cling to the most ordinary things. Nothing is going to happen, do you notice the smell of the mooring rope soaked with rain? Blessedly ordinary.
As calm and normal,
as when ropes are smelling in rain.
The Hills Reply Page 11