ENRAPTURED BY THE ALL-INCLUSIVE MYSTIC SPECIFICITY

ENRAPTURED BY THE ALL-INCLUSIVE MYSTIC SPECIFICITY

 

Enraptured by the all-inclusive mystic specificity

of terrestrial things.

Appalled by the inhumanity of the way

humans can so easily inflict

what they fear the most

upon each other

as if there were some strange alien duty

in their reptilian cruelty

some small nugget of the meteor that struck the earth

back in the Permian

that we’ve retained like an R-complex

savagely jealous of the rest of the brain.

I can get along without matter

as does most of the universe

and Asia

but mind and form are a different issue.

When water thinks deeply

about what it might be

it’s always a sea

with a small stream of consciousness running into it like me.

It’s a way of picturing the inconceivable for a moment

when time wants to be seen

walking in a world of forms

it effaces like the meaning of dreams.

A provisional scaffolding of smoke

to climb up on and paint

the miraculous birth of water

before it became a saint.

I’ve sat around the old fires

of summer ghosts on a distant hillside

and listened to the stories they tell

of how wild and free words were

to name things in the garden as they liked

until God discovered his voice.

And flowers and stars

were no longer mystic gestures

of existential glee

that expressed themselves spontaneously

as if the gene-pool of the fireflies

were always dreaming up

new myths to explain to the constellations

how they came to arise

over the event horizons

of our cosmic windowsills

after so many years of longing

but a choice they’re compelled to make

atom by atom

star by star

as if they were trying to say

something as enduring and meaningful

as an aqueduct flatlining like a waterclock without a pulse

to speak of.

The sun doesn’t tell the wildflowers where to grow.

You can’t dispel the mystery of being here at all

with the things you think you know.

Let go.

Let go.

Let go.

There’s no freedom in a fist.

There’s no captive in an open hand.

There’s no way to get a grasp on space

without giving it your face.

You can look at life as if it were all absurd.

Credo ergo absurdum.

I believe because it’s absurd

according to St. Jerome.

Or you can venture further from home than that

and explore life as if there were nothing to understand

because you already do

or you wouldn’t be you

trying to give the word

to every new creation

as if the last thing you wrote

like hieroglyphics in quicksand

kept returning to where it began

like the pearls of wisdom

that come of all these

cosmic grains of the universe

that agitate the tongue of the absurd

into saying something crazy to the moon

she’s never heard before.

All things are ways of expression

but the muse doesn’t open her door

to the pimps of inspiration

who think she’s a whore.

And it’s a death worse than neglect

to turn your calling into a project

and build a palace of ice in the desert

to house your accomplishments

like snowflakes in a furnace.

Say what you must say

as if the words weren’t your own

but the natural eloquence of the lifestream

saying the moonlight in passing.

Like a man on a long dark road

in an unknown country

who talks to himself

as if he weren’t alone with everything

like a foreign language

that asks him his name

and he says it in a way

it can’t forget

that water is wave

fire is flame

air is wind

earth is dirt

body is flesh

mind is form

and the seven sisters of the Pleiades

going down over the rooftops

of the abandoned farm

and the roses that have kept on growing

and the hills that have learned

to keep things to themselves

and the gate that hangs by one hinge

like last year

now there’s nothing

to keep in or out

are all radically rooted

in what must disappear

in the now and here

of the mysterium tremendum

in order to become

you and I and us and them

looking for signs

of where we come from

to ratify our intellectual pursuits

though our original home

is the same long road

we’ve been walking for years

and it’s still thick as starmud on our boots.

 

PATRICK WHITE