Of Silence and Song - Softcover

Beachy-Quick, Dan

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1571313621 ISBN 13: 9781571313621

Verlag: Milkweed Editions, 2017

Inhaltsangabe

Midway through the journey of his life, Dan Beachy-Quick found himself without a path, unsure how to live well. Of Silence and Song follows him through the forest of his experience, on a classical search for meaning in the world and in his particular, quiet life.

In essays, fragments, marginalia, images, travel writing, and poetry, Beachy-Quick traces relationships and the identities through which he sees the world. As father and husband. As teacher and student. As citizen and scholar. And as poet and reader, wondering at the potential and limits of literature, and guided by his studies in ancient Greek.

Of Silence and Song finds its inferno—and its paradise—in moments both historically vast and nakedly intimate. Our world’s disappearing bees, James Eagan Holmes, Columbine, and the persistent, unforgivable crime of slavery—these are the circles of hell Beachy-Quick wanders, but cannot escape. And yet he encounters redemption in the art of Marcel Duchamp, the pressed flowers in Emily Dickinson’s Bible, and long walks with his youngest daughter, Iris. “The litany in hell is weeping, weeping,” he writes, “but there are other litanies.”

Curious, earnest, and masterful, Of Silence and Song is an unforgettable exploration of the human soul.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Dan Beachy-Quick is the author of six collections of poems; two previous works of nonfiction; and a novel, among other projects. He is a contributing editor for the journals A Public Spaceand West Branch. His work has won the Colorado Book Award, and has been a finalist for the William Carlos Williams Prize and the PEN/USA Literary Award in Poetry. He is currently a Guggenheim Fellow and a Creative Fellow of the Woodberry Poetry Room at Harvard University. He lives in Fort Collins, Colorado.

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1.

On our walk my youngest daughter asked me, “What are the songs you don’t know.”
“That’s a hard question,” I said.
“Tell me the songs you don’t know.”

[sb]

Silence was the best description.

[sb]

On the same walk we found a bird lying dead on the ground. It had a long, dark, slightly curved beak. Streaks of white not quite white on the head, a color I might call dry wheat. “Not a woodpecker,” I said. Iris said, “Nope, not a woodpecker.” Not the right markings. The shafts of the feathers had no bright colors. I couldn’t identify the bird. A plover? A snipe?

Later I asked Iris if the dead bird scared her.

“No,” she said. “It gave me an idea.”

* * *

? 2.

I had thought for years how best to begin.

[sb]

Maybe just a blank page.

[sb]

Some way of showing the precedent silence. But then I doubted so simple a gesture could make it felt: that silence. I worried the gesture would seem obvious. But then I remembered what’s most obvious is what I’m most interested in.

What the obvious hides in itself. Not as a secret. Like a breath being held.

Like a child believes in the dark and so doubts God, but every morning reverses the conclusions. Like doubt or faith when they begin in us by acting like one another. Only later do they act opposed.

The trouble is not that what is pure is complicated past our understanding. What’s quiet is just too simple to be understood. One method might be to liken that silence to the inner life once you learn to accept that the “inner life” is just another myth.

Socrates asks: Can a man know and also not know what he knows.

Know thyself. The imperative acts so simple, but then you try to follow the command for your whole life, as one might follow an echo back to a source, but the source is just a cave, and the shadows living there are quiet. And all along you thought you’d find yourself there. That you lived there. That you’d come home, source somehow of yourself. But it isn’t true.

In Greek, ἀληθείᾳ, the word for truth, might best be translated: “that which makes itself obvious.” There are other best ways to define it.

“The stone the builders cast out has become the cornerstone.” In Psalm 118:22 I found a comfort and a clue. I’d like to say that I repeated this verse to myself ceaselessly, but that would be a lie. I didn’t even know it mattered to me until I happened upon the words as a child happens upon a forgotten toy and remembers suddenly the life that had been in it. Mostly this experience happens to children when they become adults. I just found the words in the box. But the box was my head.

I needed to find the cast-out stone. That’s how to begin. I thought of the names of my daughters: Iris. Hana. Before they were born, before I had any inkling of their existence, they each were such a stone. But not now. Too many years have passed. My love for them isn’t silent. They do not fill me with silence. And what is silent in them is theirs alone. A rock cast away from me. Something I can’t pick up.

I thought of my wife, Kristy. But her silence is the prism that breaks white light into the rainbow.

I thought of a dream I had after I fell in love with Kristy and decided I must become a poet. In the dream I wandered down a dark road through a kept field. The grass all mown. I thought it was a cemetery but there weren’t any stones. A tree by a bend in the pitch-black asphalt, so black I knew it had been raining. That’s when I saw the rainbow. It kept still in the sky as I neared it. The closer I got the more intensely I could see the colors, and in the spectrum I saw lightning flashing like a sensation between synapses. So I imagined it. Going closer I could see the rainbow had no breadth, no depth; it was thinner than a razor. That’s when I saw the letter floating in the colors. Just one letter. It flashed, made of electricity. “It is the letter aleph,” I thought to myself. Then the lightning in the letter struck my hand and the pain woke me up. It wasn’t until years later, when I finally began to study Hebrew, that I realized I’d recognized the letter before I could have known it.

I gave Hebrew up. It took too much time away from writing poetry.

Fifteen years passed.

Now I’m studying Ancient Greek. Every hour I spend in declensions and conjugations deepens my sense of my own ignorance. It’s a kind of revelation, I guess. I’m not the student I thought I was.

To mark silence ( ) or * seemed like options for a while.

But the open-close parentheses began to seem like hands closing in prayer, or like hands circling a mouth that is unseen but open and about to yell out.

The asterisk―despite being that mark in Proto-Indo-European linguistics that marks the existence of an ur-word whose primary meaning undergirds and supports every iteration through time of every related word but whose proof etched in mud or in wax or on papyrus has never once been found―just felt like a notation that meant either to look up at the night sky at the grand silence of the stars, or to look at the bottom of the page for a note to help explain what might have been unclear in the text above. Usually, an allusion.

But what I want to point to isn’t in any direction because it’s in every direction.

Ubiquitous. Obvious.

Unavailable by the means at hand.

All.

* * *

? 3.

I want to ask a question about silence.

[sb]

The answer is in the disappearance of the question.

* * *

? Riddles, Labyrinths

Asclepiades of Tragilus, a fourth-century poet, records the Sphinx’s riddle: “There is on earth a two-footed and four-footed creature with a single voice, and three-footed, changing its form alone of all creatures that move in earth, sky, or sea. When it walks on the most legs, then the strength of its limbs is weakest.” It’s likely he took the riddle from other authors who have slipped back into anonymity―by which I mean, I guess, that they fell back into time. I have to remind myself those poets had thumbprints like labyrinths unique to themselves, just as I have my own. But it is the riddle, whose answer for each of us is the same, that gets to have an identity more or less permanent.

The Sphinx seized and devoured young and old, large and small. A scholiast, writing about Euripides, notes: “But also the handsomest and loveliest of all, the dear son of blameless Creon, noble Haemon.” How blameless Creon is any reader of ancient tragedy can decide for herself. No one seems very blameless. We sense in the riddle some compulsion to answer, though we know it might be wiser to keep quiet. The words seem to contain a secret just as we ourselves seem to contain one. Mostly we fear what we want―that the answer will let the secret out, and somehow, as if by magic, we’ll be released by letting go of the answer we had contained.

The riddle seems immune to mortality, and though to answer wrong is to face death in the form of the Sphinx’s punishment, to answer correctly admits to the same fact: a man begins weak and gains strength only to become weak again. The riddle is deathless, even when the answer is death. Nor does answering correctly release you from the Sphinx’s crisis. It just presses in the air an invisible button called pause.

Words that, for many years, felt to me they admitted intellectual failure, have changed their nature: I don’t know. Now they seem to me words of spiritual honesty.

When I read Oedipus Rex I say to myself a silent prayer that this time Oedipus, brash man of brilliant mind, might reach the gates of...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Milkweed Editions
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2017
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 1571313621
• ISBN 13: 9781571313621
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 352
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: Buchbär; info@buchbaer.de; ; Weberstr. 67; Osnabrück; 49084; Deutschland