Life is a whisper. We attenuate
the loud silence of the grave
with our unbecoming noise,
the noise of our unbecoming,
the noise we make to obstruct
the descent into the howling void
where raw truth shreds cherished illusions,
the lies that are the tales we tell,
the story of individual existence.
We do this with polite requests for a cup of tea,
or an interested enquiry into another's well-being,
conversing as if attending an appointment at the doctor
or dentist, making small talk in the waiting room
before words of great consequence that cannot be unsaid
pull us abruptly into another place and time.
We loiter in the anteroom of the apocalypse
waiting to receive our diagnosis of doom.
We live lives unbegun, mend the fraying fabric
of their fiction with thread unspun,
stitch the sky, darn the atom, weave space and time,
celebrating being before we become, with songs unsung,
and aimlessly promenade among the driftwood of life
lying around us like the bones of extinct mega-fauna,
while offering each other bouquets of wind.
We are the bullet before the gun
fired in wars premature and unwon,
pointless as the sunset before the sun
blindly seeking self-hood
in the shadow of the cogito,
and a voice says "begin,"
a voice from the beginning
says "begin, my friend," and doesn't stop,
but our ears are already plugged shut with clay,
our eyes closed shut and coin blind to day
in this facsimile of death we live,
this performance that precedes life,
comes before it, this hesitation of the hand
at the empty hour glass before it's turned,
this empty space we fill with bogus reckoning
before the Earth's axis turns
and siphons sunlight through its eastern eye.
"Begin, my friend," the voice says,
"for you cannot, you may be sure, take your song,
which drives all things out of mind,
with you to the other world."*
We are the West, where daylight goes to die,
and we regard the widening world
from the sepulchre we raised at its western edge
where we would gather its ashes
into a funereal urn
to smother it in its own ending.
Our logic shouts from the battlements
of proud impregnable error,
a fortification that we have raised,
piling one mistake on top of another
to build our unassailable certainty,
boasting of imaginary conquests.
One day it will shrug off its irrelevance
and accept a more solemn verdict
as it goes from its trial
to the place of execution.
It should have whispered.
It should not have called attention to itself,
but that was beyond any understanding it could mediate.
Time is nothing more than this: immediate consequence.
Every animal knows. No ancestors wait for you in eternity
to congratulate you for passing some test.
Life is not an initiation into their secret society.
This is not the interval in which ego finds expression.
Worlds find their end in the offices and hours of our vanity,
the thread we gather in the labyrinth
in the hope and expectation of escape.
You are the same as the sparrow and the crow here,
that starve and freeze, or thrive,
and find in every season its essence
with no need for metaphysics,
no need to hide and deny the world,
preferring instead a monologue of lies
broadcast beneath the invariable fluorescence
of the unending and artificial light of a false sky.
They live without doubt, that inevitable corollary
of knowledge that can be expressed in speech.
There is nothing to fear
that has not already been faced,
no need to wait to live.
Live now. See and hear and be.
All you are is this life,
not the lies you've been told about it.
Live now. Begin.
*From "Theocritus: Idyl I - a version from the Greek" from "The Desert Music and Other Poems" (1954) by William Carlos Williams, as used by Steve Reich in "The Desert Music" (1983)
