Un Sospiro
Sometimes I lay in the backyard after noon and I look at the long grass beyond the fencing of the creek-water move silent under sunlight like the capricious woman shyly smiles. Sometimes I never look at it at all. Were I to go out at night, to look, surely with the wind it moves still, and yet the glancing presence of the sun breaking free from the moon onto the land I live would not reveal the movement of the long grass to me. And yet it still moves.
When I write for this blog, I do so quick and darkly, usually moved by the presence of something that I can’t define distinctly as me—something else is here. Some would call this thing a Muse. I could call it many things—the sun, the feeling of things in me, eyesight of happenstance, a flitting broken wing litten with iridescent catches of sun in felt colors of fur under movement. Were my eyes cameras, they would see the thing and capture it and put it down as it were—yet eyes could not be further from being cameras. A camera, when stared into the lens, stares back, without witnessing, with many rings and other techne of the ocular. Yet, I see the thing, and I move myself to capture the thing that moves, and I fail. The thing is not here—but could the words resemble the thing? I could only hope.
At night once two years ago I told my boss that two awful things had happened to me. The first, an advisor of sorts to me had died, leaving me in the wake. The second, a girl I had claimed to love deeply had moved away. He replied ‘well, I know which is worst of the two things.’ Then, I did not know which was worst. I had to ask.
I once thought of love as a storm in an unlikely place. Where, boy and girl, who go together into a place, are in on a conspiracy the likes of which would frighten the denizens of the place they go—to walk with a lover is to have a bomb concealed under your jacket. So I thought. How does no one see what I see? Where it is possible to see beauty—in fact beauty demands to be seen, and moves my eyes as a general does an infantryman, to their motive; and I say yes. But love is all things unseen between people—like gravity, it keeps the planets of the solar system in conformity. Without it, all is hell and noise adrift in gunfire and the disquieted wake. And this love, I asked, if it is not an object that I can herald and present, as a vain woman does an overpriced jewel entombed in the grip of a wedding band, then where is it? If it is not an object, I asked, could I not still find it somewhere, perhaps as one does on a poster-board that says so and so band is playing at so and so time at such and such place, where then all I would need to do is, like the Squirrel seeing signs of Winter and having scent of Acorns, be directed to the things that I need to survive the stygian retreat of Earth from the Sun, which is like the scornful woman spurned?
Alas, Love is not a fruit to be plucked, it is not a seed to be grown, it is not an event to be anticipated, it is not even a sense to be guided by. It is something as mysterious as the Psalms. Found when needed, it was all you ever needed, and it was laying there in wait for he who needed the time to seek it—its revelation was not there or that. Always was. Oh, youth and arrogance. Set my heart in stone so that only sun could crack me.
The pain of self improvement is that by the time you improve, the people you improved for are no longer there to bear witness to it, even though your failure to do good by them was the inspiration to become better. To put it another way, it’s a wound that never heals. Always open. Always bleeding. Is closure possible? Even if you were to find new friends, new lovers, it’s not quite the same. Perhaps we can frame things a different way, then.
For whom do we live for? What a question! I have found, after much searching, that I do not live for myself. I could not. I tried and everything died around me, like fertilizer put on grass meant to grow it, but instead by some trick of the chemicals, left an acidic burntrail across the yard. Self-serving is good for ice cream and little else.
No, goodness is for the community. We live and die by the mercy we show to one another. I only understood this after forcing myself to the edges. And yet, when we do good by others, and they do good by us, everyone wins. So one could say it’s a good social strategy, even, to be a good person—disregarding the deeper spiritual meaning of virtue, it can be quite the useful tool to climb the ladder of society. There are those we see do this—use virtue like a tool. We call them politicians. And yet, I wonder, when they go to sleep at night, how do they feel? When one takes off the mask and looks at oneself in the mirror, even if the background is the well-kept manor of wealth and prosperity, if the face, the eyes are spoiled, was it all worth it? Every fiber of my body shouts no!
Once I sat in class and looked a girl in her eyes, youthful and like the surface of the shallow sea—viridescent and playful. I was listening to a song, Un Sospiro, the sigh, and then it made me feel like a black stone shimmering at the heart of the sea. I listen to it now, and its beauty has only deepened and differentiated—I completely understand the feelings I had then, but now I would never feel them for a girl I didn’t knew. Yet those feelings return in other places—they returned just today, when I went out and saw the long grass rippling in the wind. I saw her eyes, six years later, in the face of the slender leaves of the land. In that moment, I wasn’t there. I wasn’t in the past either. I was somewhere else entirely. I was beyond time and place. I was finally found.