on earth, the terrible things and the beautiful things continue to happen beside each other.

...'on the moon in the darkness, nothing/ on earth in the darkness/ sometimes rain swells/ like applause.' - Jeffrey Morgan

dear little voice,

they say that in his swimming pool up on the rock of Capri, the emperor Claudius would repeat a Greek phrase he remembered from a tragedy by Euripides. ‘there is no human dominion,’ he would recite. ‘above me I see only seabirds.’

they say that President Azaña, dying in Andorra, turned his face to the members of his close circle and mumbled: ‘what was that country called? You know, that country that once existed? that country I was president of? I don’t remember any more . . . I don’t remember…”

Laura Makabresku

there is a moment in Phillip Larkin’s poem Faith Healing, where he writes:

"in everyone there sleeps   
a sense of life lived according to love.
to some it means the difference they could make   
by loving others, but across most it sweeps
as all they might have done had they been loved.   
that nothing cures."

i am thinking now about a life according to love, and what its work means. i am wondering about this work especially amid all of our very unserious and very human beliefs about how very much at-the-centre-of-it-all we are.

i am thinking about how often we are afraid to love what we will lose. as though there is anything else to love.

and i am thinking about this great hazard that occurs so very quietly, as if it were nothing at all: this waiting to receive love before we can give it, which is a lot like waiting for a bird to fly through a closed window. the most you will be met with is an echo.

and you are testifying that it is your window in the centre of all things. as though it has dominion.

Men feed birds in the Yamuna river in New Delhi on November 23, 2012, Tsering Topigal.

and i am thinking about how this kind of thinking soothes and strengthens that sleeping longing inside of us: this longing for all of the things we might have done, had we been loved at all. as though we are the only little voice waiting for permission. and from whom?

from ourselves, perhaps. you are, after all, the only one who can open the window. you are the only one who can whistle for the bird. who can sing.

but real love, little voice, is self-forgetting.

it is what Claudius realised in the rock-pools of Capri. it is what Azâna came to understand on his death bed. above us are only sea-birds.

above us are only sea-birds.

Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being (trans. Michael Henry Heim)

the brilliant philosopher Elie Wiesel observed that perhaps we keep the window closed because we simply cannot move across the room at all: we are paralysed between the sheer scale and number of the world’s tragedies and the smallness of our own little voice coming to meet them:

“We are careless. Somehow life has been cheapened in our own eyes. The sanctity of life, the sacred dimension of every minute of human existence, is gone. The main problem is that there are so many situations that demand our attention. There are so many tragedies that need our involvement. Where do you begin?”

- Elie Wiesel

no wonder we are so love-hungry ourselves.

but it is an important question.

Ross Bleckner, Bird.

let us consider, little voice, what Adrienne Riche wrote of Love:

“an honourable human relationship — that is, one in which two people have the right to use the word ‘love’ — is a process, delicate, violent, often terrifying to both persons involved, a process of refining the truths they can tell each other,”

if you are reading this it is because you have the courage to love the world in all of the brevity of its atomic shimmer. despite your crowded eyes, despite your crowded heart.

do you have an honourable relationship with the world in front of you?

and why not: does it not greet you each day, rubbing its eyes in raw affection, worshipping nothing, and yet showing up each day anyway simply to conspire to give you a life?

do you not love it in that delicate, violent, often terrifying way?

what are the truths the world whispers to you? what do you meet them with in return?

this is an exchange that requires constant refining.

Valériane Leblond, Haid o ddrudwy: a swirl of birds (a murmuration of starlings)

in this way, a love for the world demands the same responsibility as a love for a human being.

and love is not a passive play thing. it is not a simple entertainment.

it is a delicate human science, and it involves serious anthropocenic implications.

this is because in truelove, we are re-made. we forget ourselves. we are no longer unadulterably alone— because there is something else there too, someone coming to meet us.

and that always implies an ethical obligation:

“To love is to mesh so rawly with another storm of thoughts your identity blurs with theirs. Which is no reason to shy away! But falling in love marks a phase change in the ethical landscape. Whereas before you at least cared about them in an abstract or probabilistic way, afterward that empathy is hardwired, absolute, and immediate”
- William Gillis,
Scarce or Abundant: Nothing About Love Should Be Casual.

in times of inarticulate violence, the task of our smallest acts in even the slightest of circumstances is of creating an honourable relationship with the world.

you can create, little voice, a measure of tenderness and grace that announces itself to the complications of the moment, and insists radically on space for love and imagination in this brief spasm of our mortal lives.

in other words: consider what you ache for that is stolen from others, and give it to your neighbour.

these acts become stepping stones in a slow pilgrimage.

“Let love / be the light that shows again / the blossom to the root.”

Eavan Boland, New Collected Poems; “Tree of Life”

Coen Robben: Fire reflected on birds in smoke. From a fire at Moerdijk, Netherlands.

make do, little voice. forget the window. walk backward out of the room you have made of your love-hunger and move outside, into the world of where you are. the love is here. but the ache you have planted has become too heavy. you cannot bring it along with you. give yourself to love as you would give yourself to the wind: as if it is always there, even if you feel you might never see it. as if it the only thing enough to make you look up at the sheer branches  of the late October trees, the few that survived the rain and the frost, torn with late afternoon sun and unravelling at the sudden rush of the world. and, mostly: ask how you can better hear it, and what it might teach you: how to inhabit all of this blood, body, and breath, and all of the love in you that would not vanish, even if you vanished, as much as the breath in you would vanish, except for into the wind.

to do this, there are three steps:

1. discover what makes you kinder.

2. discover what opens you up.

3. go where they go.

Eric Kogan.

tenderness is always timely. it cannot come too late.

contrary to popular scientific belief, it is easy to turn to stone. it takes genuine strength to insist on being gentle and kind:

“The grounds for hope are in the shadows, in the people who are inventing the world while no one looks, who themselves don’t know yet whether they will have any effect.”
- Rebecca Solnit, Hope in the Dark

and in the words of Wiesel, again:

I believe in dialogue. I believe if people talk, and they talk sincerely, with the same respect that one owes to a close friend or to God, something will come out of that, something good. I would call it presence. I would like my students to be presence whenever people need a human presence. I urge very little upon my students, but that is one thing I do. To people I love, I wish I could say, “I will suffer in your place.” But I cannot. Nobody can. Nobody should. I can be present, though. And when you suffer, you need a presence.

If there is a governing precept in my life, it is that: If somebody needs me, I must be there.

when was the last time you read a fairy tale, little voice?

have you noticed that hidden in the furry brows of these stories is almost always a lesson about power?

rarely, in these tales, is power— brutish and domineering— the path to survival. instead, those little voices who have the least of it come together, most often, to simply be kind to one another: birds are set free, strangers go to great lengths to reunite one another with those they love, burrows are dug for injured creatures.

“Survival often depends on a specific focus: a relationship, a belief, or a hope balanced on the edge of possibility. Or something more ephemeral: the way the sun passes through the hard, seemingly impenetrable glass of a window and warms the blanket, or how the wind, invisible but for its wake, is so loud one can hear it through the insulated walls of a house.”

— The Sound of a Wild Snail Eating, Elisabeth Tova Bailey

how amazing it is. to be here.

i hope the mystery never fails us.

look up, little voice.

above you, you will see only sea-birds.

love,

ars poetica.

---

little voice: it is my belief that Poetry is a human birthright. my work will always be completely free, and takes considerable Time and Love to give to you several days a week. if it has brought you Joy, consider buying me a book so that I may continue to tuck Words in your pocket.

“On earth, the terrible things and the beautiful things continue to happen beside each other. On the moon in the darkness, nothing. On earth in the darkness, sometimes rain swells like applause.”

— Jeffrey Morgan, from “All Night No Sleep Now This” published in BOAAT (via pigmenting)