THE GARDEN
THE GARDEN
Time is present here, always. Ingenuity is eclipsed by beauty. What is most exquisite has already fallen. The innocent with corrosive curiosity erode their divinity. Remember? The sun was intimate, charismatic and playful. It enjoyed hide and seek, and cat’s cradle. It was always riddling. Shadow was the cowl silence wore, and its sandals rustled, but sunlight bandied about in goading gangs, dappling, glinting and sparkling.
We have no senses to dream without memories from that garden. We wake from a dream crying and remember when time and music had not grown ashamed and still gamboled naked. This certainly is the foundation of our dissolution. Here where light raveled itself into memory.
The soul of plants is the least differentiated from the integral tide. Matter is more distant from creation’s conception than plants. Chronologically, they precede matter for their soul is a requisite for its emergence from void. Their biography recapitulates the embryology of existence; they posit time as space. We do no less, but creatures posit duration through desire. We are separated from the actual epiphany. Plants are congruent with ecstasy that we experience as joy but with them is continuously transparent, not revelation, but form.
We would think it proper to compare the life of plants to our deepest slumber, but because their life is not internal the closer comparison is those crystalline dreams that we follow into such piercing clarity that awakening seems an exhausted tangle. Plants’ lives are the seed embodied.
The plant as it exists is the inability of the seed to contain the entire universe; it is residue, as we are, but a plant is secured only by astrological nuance, by this I mean the subtle forces that abandon forms that initiate their own awareness.
If we walk through the garden we may awake in the soul of plants and audit the seed in the universal dream. Here we find poetical syntax or mathematics in their musical form, current rather than mnemonic designs. Here it is simple to know that matter materializes, that all things coalesce from the charged immaterial. If existence begins, it is an anomaly, actually, impossible. If you view existence as presently having all that’s needed to exist, you will add creation to that and look to see it happening continuously.
To suddenly see again as we did before named things, to tremble at the lip of creation, the first moment born undying and precarious. Flowers are forced into such procrustean beds by their names, and colors are traduced by the the ones we have freighted them with. We would name the heart to death if only it will stay with us as we have become stingy. Memory has no substance except color, shadows slide over the light. Colors are beings of light. Certainly, within us their names descend from hierarchies of angels. Seraphian, Elohai, Gabriel and Michael, how they would call us out: Michael, rest peaceful within my presence. This seems a closer fit for sky blue.
Angels were among us in the garden, before color raveled so deeply into form that we forgot it as an attribute rather than spirit speaking light.
Beauty is immediate possession by what moves through a form. The garden is readily beautiful to us. How did they seize or acquiesce into rose, fern, orchid and quaking aspen? The cypress stands at the fence-line, a procession of torches guarding the hearth. This form must have been seized, how disquieted green is, first legions against the dark, grabbing what comes to hand and forcing itself through to light. Green is the first eye, the first hand, the first awakened.
The Quaking Aspen, by the sparkling brook, the first ear to the water’s song of eternity weaving through time. I think a maiden, her cool, white limbs, and say it is this form that best hears the brook, she is the ear fitted to receive this song, its anatomy and interpretation. Listening, we can know her as she knows herself, fragile, a line drawn infinitesimally thin, a moving surface, a supple tension between states, but mostly fragile, an instant, lime green and never jaded. Winter, she is only a scratch in the silence, an abstraction, we imagine her into spring and pale white against the white snow, she hears us while deaf to the inchoate wind.
The fern repeats itself and unspools from itself to itself nearly approaching the solipsism to initiate ego. In them most fully green harbors itself as sufficient value, refusing elaboration beyond the initial crystalline stamped on their fronds.
The morphology of plants is so overt that it has been over-interpreted into an obscuring simplicity. The roots are given seniority and confused with origin and nourishment. A more transparent vocabulary would describe the tree’s crown as nourishing the soil with its roots in the heavens as sung by poets. Such a language approaches silence, pure listening, which is the language spoken by a plant’s form. If we tarry near a tree we can listen to silence, and in the crown see the fruiting galaxy. Here about us now is the angelic chorus in its descending octaves, gravity’s basso profundo, the alto, tenor, soprano of light that forms the periodic table. Here in the garden physics still yearns to return to music. Here time still waits for language first to be conjured from water, the lithe thigh of light. The Greeks will build a temple to spellbind the crystalline dream, but this already after we have been doomed to wrest memory from the sweat of our brow. Memory: we will build a lyre when the river nymphs have left, a sundial as the sun becomes distant, and patience sieving through us, a water clock, a candle, an hourglass, a pendulum and will despair in the deaf silence.
If for no other reason than immersion in their exterior inner eye disarming us, plants can dilate the perishing vestments of motion in form. It is fortunate to rest with plants at the trembling instant of clairvoyance. Given to us the gleam we were in our father’s eye, and the apple of our mother’s eye, that moment when they were perfectly at rest in the universe, mercifully impossible to express except as it was done, repelling words and chaffing, gleams in the starry green sky, seed in the sweet fruit.
Blue sky is as true as black space, at least to our instincts, the meteor no truer than birds. Why not calculate the impalpable with as much fervent attention as the birds soaring in the blue, those very birds that weighing stony dust has proven were struck down by a meteor from black space? What collaborator restless in joy forced wings and songs out of the dinosaur? What light gestates in matter that forces such suppleness upon it? The rose is red, the peach is sweet, with this they refute. Vacuum is provocation, not dominion. As form is a symptom of weight, gravity is attraction, and the children are beauty.
Once upon a time a small cactus crystallized in the stony sands of the Atacama. Rain never fell to explain its inspiration. Fog and starlight coalesced that’s all we have, except for the cactus, a small breastplate no more, that by emptiest space encompassed, echoes most purely the ringing dome.
Which oracle can I least refuse? The mango tells me to not to spin or toil, nothing is vanity, and everything is given. Lay with Eve, wide hipped, gifts drop into your hand if only you fill your mouth so full of sweetness you leave no room for words. It’s a golden age, each day, and the sun exhausted is replenished through the night. The peach tells me much the same, but slightly reticent, yielding so explosively, it warns me to enjoy my ripeness. All these constellations. The apple is terse as frost, speaks in tart bites, and says not only measure for measure, but by its starry crèche for its litter of seeds, says that form must forbid itself early surrender to the chorus in wintry skies. The mulberry, jelly on my tongue, these roe festoons. I think the silk worm knows these trees as pure imagination, on its leaves it spins the kimono for the Milky Way.
Across the deep the voices of the sirens thin to less than a note. How does the ear still know this fraction is music, but intoxicated the sailor steers his course? Out of nothing we can recall, a memory is summoned. What could have called it? The flower pollinated by the night moth dresses in the moon’s bridal veils. Shut the lights tonight and leave some small part of the world quiet so threads of starlight may trail again through space and sow their message; because the moon thinned to less than love has tailored you its suitors, souls may be summoned with memories so fined only a powdering of grief can cling.
The song is coarse lees, finer is the love it dredges.
A river runs through Eden because flowing water takes us from time into eternity. Eden was in the present day Sahara. We know this through mourning. Aspen grew along the river and leaves turned golden and floated to the sea. Storks and cranes fixed moments in the way they still do today, by their tense stillness galvanizing attentive pause around them. The sky had grand cloud processions and its blues ripened through the scales that befall gems. Our heroes are slender dancing forms, dancing like reflections. They have come here from the jungle because color has emerged in dreams. They have come from the shadows, and everything in this place suits this temporizing and limning that they feel as the nearness of love. They seek conditions for that love. As they walk, they break into dance.
Here, they see trees differently because they can see them entirely, while in the jungle their crowns were lost in the canopy. They are discovering the sun. They also will discover the moon, and this as trees whispered its call when the moon pulled evening winds through the leaves. The word for moon was curried from these vespers when love could threaten heartbreak. Because they empathized with bole, trunk, limbs and boughs and after the jungle experienced along with trees the sun wrenching them flailing from the ground, they saw leaves as plumage and trees as brooding over shade out of which the moon-egg would rise to hatch the night.
For these first pilgrims it was like living in the sky. Birds in numbers we can’t imagine today, birds born endlessly from a culminating acuity. We can name the animals, but we don’t know them. Back then they saw them completely; they hadn’t before, and felt orphaned and ostracized by this new distant vision they had. They had to regain them. Each of their unanimous forms had escaped. How they wished to land again, because they lived in reflection, looking down at the world from the blue sky. They see themselves in light, curious, startled, a pause in ripples.
Separation and longing stir a nascent language.
Language was overheard. Things told of their solidity. Since there was little, if any volition to language, since the state that initiated it was a siege they retreated from, since it entered through a gap, what they scavenged from it were mementoes. They were quiet with the peace of those things still whole, and so could hear the music that sieved through these secure beings. They sang. They sang constantly. They sang as they walked, swam, rested, gathered fruit, dug for roots. They lived inside song. If only it might reside in them and restore them. Meanwhile, they could no longer see without it. Once something has sung to you, you can never believe it again if it is silent. The names were necessarily long and musical, only reluctantly and barely veiling the music itself. They were the story of creation and its embrace.
At the first resolution of song into a name, they began building instruments to retain what lay beneath the words. We know there are no weapons to be found that can possibly match what this intelligence could create, and so we know that in the bequeathed is where they flourished. We probably would have mistaken these instruments for spider webs, hardly material. They were for harvesting an ambient chorus into their ears.
They sang their world from the air that dazzled them, and the echoes formed them.
We find them together. They are carrying light musical instruments, far simpler than any necessary today because they are so close to music that they endeavor to hold only the single note that is empty enough to house all the music that rushes in to fill it. How piercingly sensitive their ear to anticipate that emptiness; they could hear notes naming themselves as they passed through the membrane into the waiting space where they could be heard. For Alwarefare that note was Lilawarbelme. On this day of their exile when music poured in to the space longing had opened to it, he heard Eden singing to him in her.
They walked together and everything chose to create them.
