It must be the week for poetry, music, romance...and this post is inspired by one poetic soul who reads my musings here and sends me beautiful songs! I had forgotten how I loved the song by Leonard Cohen because I had it only as an LP and sadly, that sold for 50 cents at my garage sale (have not yet replaced it on CD!)and then...one thing leads to another and next thing I was delving into poetry and a newly-published collection of 16th century Shakespearean-style sonnets by Paul Monk-"Sonnets to a Promiscuous Beauty"- which I promptly ordered as I know Paul Monk (funny how unMonk-like he is, yet a deep and profound thinker!) in his guise as Managing Director of AUSTHINK...and there the connection comes back to me and work and innovation and...you know how the mind meanders and mine does that extra-ordinarily well!
But this is NOT about work, its about my other passion...PASSION, and the stuff that stirs the soul. The soul, consciousness and its evolution. According to research by Professor of Archealogy, Steven Mithen, the human responsiveness to rhythm and music runs very deep. It is more deeply-rooted in our psyches than language itself, because it is traceable to the mode of communication which preceded language and which still shapes the way our hominid brains work. He calls this pre-linguistic mode of communication by the acronym hmmmmm, because it is holistic, manipulative, multi-modal, musical and mimetic. (refer The Singing Neanderthals: The Origins of Music, Language, Body and Mind and The Prehistory of the Mind: The Cognitive Origins of Art, Religion and Science by Stephen Mithen)
All this is a very complicated, but nonetheless facscinating and illuminating, way for explaining why at a conscious level, I cannot understand or explain why I burst into tears when I hear beautiful music, or read a poem that through the sheer rhythm of the words chosen, touches the universal hmmmmmmmmmmm within me......(no co-incidence I'm sure that mantras and chakras use similar sounds to access the deepest consciousness)
Thus it is tonight...tears flowing for no particular reason...just the amygdala and hippocampus in my limbic brain responding and embracing every ounce of primal energy contained in this beautiful art.
And seeing I am having the weepies, why not pass it around and end with a poem by one of my favourites, Nobel Laureate, Pablo Neruda.
Tonight I can write
I can write the saddest poem of all tonight.
Write, for instance: "The night is full of stars,
and the stars, blue, shiver in the distance."
The night wind whirls in the sky and sings.
I can write the saddest poem of all tonight.
I loved her, and sometimes she loved me too.
On nights like this, I held her in my arms.
I kissed her so many times under the infinite sky.
She loved me, sometimes I loved her.
How could I not have loved her large, still eyes?
I can write the saddest poem of all tonight.
To think I don't have her. To feel that I've lost her.
To hear the immense night, more immense without her.
And the poem falls to the soul as dew to grass.
What does it matter that my love couldn't keep her.
The night is full of stars and she is not with me.
That's all. Far away, someone sings. Far away.
My soul is lost without her.
As if to bring her near, my eyes search for her.
My heart searches for her and she is not with me.
The same night that whitens the same trees.
We, we who were, we are the same no longer.
I no longer love her, true, but how much I loved her.
My voice searched the wind to touch her ear.
Someone else's. She will be someone else's. As she once
belonged to my kisses.
Her voice, her light body. Her infinite eyes.
I no longer love her, true, but perhaps I love her.
Love is so short and oblivion so long.
Because on nights like this I held her in my arms,
my soul is lost without her.
Although this may be the last pain she causes me,
and this may be the last poem I write for her.
No comments:
Post a Comment