YOUNGER THAN THE STARS

Younger than the stars; older than the night, a sapient prodigy of darkness and light, I am amazed that more people are not amazed by being here at all; are not astounded by their mere presence in a world arrayed by their awareness. What a waste of wonder. Look anywhere you want: the dust that wears a crown, the bee, the black benediction of a solar eclipse, the boat-tailed grackle in the lilac tree; all these forms and events that are the sum of your seeing into what you call you, each of them, and therefore you, when looked into without the patinas of knowing clouding your eyes like cataracts and college educations, as deep as the universe, the sea at the bottom of every tear. Walking on the bottom, at those depths and intensities, there is a chill to the wonder that awes the familiar and the rote out of the heart and leaves it shrineless in its eternal beginning. No dragons of mystic terror guard the gateless way. Your breathing is the hinge. Reality, as most would have it, is merely a consensus of refugees in the spirit’s lost and found. Hosts of water and earth at a feast of fire and light; who’s not be invited who doesn’t want to stay home among his chipped crockery and thrive on the denial? Wonder is the pearl of the moon within that is spun around every particle of dust that is saturated by the intelligence of the sea like flesh. Lightning, the roots of the family tree, our lives are elations of fire in a mouth of fire, water teething its way into a bell of water with a pulse that is a tide among stars. Let your eyes hang like water at the end of a blade of stargrass, and do not be impressed with yourself like an exemption among bacteria, because you ride them now like a flying carpet. Your oldest features are under your knees. Let your eyes for once open you. Let your sorrows change the sheets like clearing skies in the guest-rooms of your funeral pyre. Realize you must be more than space and time for them to unfold their dimensions like wings within your boundlessness. How could you perish; how could you have ever begun, if the lenses in the telescope you scan the heavens with to discern your effusive beginnings are the sidereal devotions of your own eyes washed up like a sail on these shoreless oceans of light? Not how we are here, but that we are here at all. No wisdom that wasn’t first a fool, and no fool that doesn’t make a mask of his enlightenment to amuse the children. Why mourn like a current of water six feet beneath the surface of the river that you are separate and alone, the vapour of a funeral ribbon in the wind, when union flows into union, mingles and merges with union all around you so that you can exist to lament your delusion. No more than you can separate sound from the pigeon of air that carries it, or light from the anvil of space that bends it, every ray continuous with its source, the hive and the honey already in the cone of the flower, you’re always alone together with everything, every face you see, a blossom on your own bough. Take me. I am the man in the marble that was chipped away, the dust that was blown off like genetically deranged pollen. It would not be hard to vindicate my extinction. But the upshot of it all? I learned to root on the moon among the outtakes of the stars. And in the last fifty years I have never been less than astounded and grateful. Why live like the understudy behind the curtains of your next breath, waiting for a star to fall so you might prove you know your lines and how to act someone else’s emotions out on stage, when you’re already the fruit behind the blossom that turns the next page? In every shattered goblet, the wine of the world; over every continent of the broken mirror, all the stars of the inimitable, boundless, countless nights that feed on the flame of your awareness.

PATRICK WHITE