If We’re Not Supposed to Dance, Why All This Music?

Early 2000 letter

I’m writing to you!

Thank you for being—although sometimes it happens that I think it might have been better if all this were a little different.

I had a dream. I set my alarm half an hour earlier, just to see what I might dream about at dawn, so that a moment later I could go back to sleep, still remembering it. So I dreamed that I came somewhere beneath your skyscraper, and all the buildings were research stations, tightly covered with something that looked like panes of glass collecting sunlight and turning it into energy. I didn’t decide to look for the entrance to your building—honestly, I only wanted to look at your skyscraper. Next to the buildings, there were swings, so I was hanging there somewhere, reading this poem:

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To be alive: not just the carcass

But the spark.

That’s crudely put, but...

If we’re not supposed to dance, Why all this music?*

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Today, I somehow felt that something was missing inside me, although I was outwardly oddly optimistic.

How aware am I of the insignificance of our being, of our existence? Take Japan: maybe the most technologically developed country, functioning wonderfully. And it was actually a step away from disappearing from the face of the earth. You watch ski jumping—magnificent, taking place somewhere now in beautiful mountains. But what are these mountains? The result of a catastrophe of the Earth’s crust, right? I assure you—mountains were formed by the collision of tectonic plates. So this pathetic, elevated, heavenly beauty is the result—embarrassing to say—of the brutality of this celestial body, this planet, as battered as everything else. On the Sun, there are explosions all the time. I read somewhere that one such explosion on the Sun is like five hundred million Hiroshima bombs. Five hundred million—not fifty, not a thousand! So what is there to talk about, what wisdom to dispense, what to lecture others on?

I am only a little Being—and what can such a Being do? What can she be that others cannot? Why do good things happen to her when she doesn’t deserve them yet?

It is such an enormous privilege to know you in a way no one else knows you. To see a little more…

And perhaps you’d like to attend a sung-poetry concert featuring texts by Herbert soon? Maybe it’s worth it, at least…

I’ve started reading a supposedly good book, The Catcher in the Rye. Very little “happens” in a traditional sense. What matters is how H. thinks. As for the books I have from you, I probably won’t read them. You understand—very soon I have The Miser, The Tao of Pooh, etc.

I am really happy…

Tomorrow I’ll try to do tomorrow what I did today—I’ll see what I dream. It’s good that memory exists—very good—without it, one couldn’t create dreams.

It’s so nice to be able to write.

This was written to you by that little Being whose life has become interesting.

So for now—be!

A treasure is what we guard.
What we lose is something entirely different.

T. Alienne
the little being who remembers
very
well….

Photo by Marah Bashir on Unsplash

*To Be Alive by Gregory Orr

The Prayer of the Traveler Mr. Cogito

by Z. Herbert

Lord
I thank you for creating the world beautiful and various

and for allowing me in Your fathomless goodness to visit places which
were not the sites of my daily torments

- that at night in Tarquinia I lay in the square by the well and a gunmetal
pendulum rang out from the tower Your wrath or forgiveness

and that a little donkey on the island Corkyra sang to me from the
unfathomable bellows of its lungs the melancholy of the landscape

and that in the ugly city of Manchester I discovered kindhearted and
sensible people

nature repeated its wise tautologies: the forest was a forest the sea the
sea a cliff a cliff

stars revolved and it was as it ought to be - Iovis omnia plena


- forgive me - that I thought only of myself while the lives of others
cruel and inexorable turned around me like the great astrological clock of
St Pierre in Beauvais

that I was lazy distracted too timid in labyrinths and caves

and forgive me also that I did not fight like Lord Byron for the happiness
of oppressed peoples and studied only the rising moon and museums

- I thank you that works created for Your greater glory yielded to me
particles of their mystery and that with great presumption I thought that
Duccio Vaan Eyck and Bellini painted for me also

and also that the Acropolis which I never fully understood patiently
revealed to me its mutilated body

- I ask You to reward the gray old woman who unbidden brought me
fruit from her garden on the sunburned native island of the son of Laertes

and Miss Helen of the foggy island of Mull in the Hebrides for offering
Greek hospitality and asking me to leave a lamp lit at night in the window
facing Holy Iona so that the lights of earth would greet each other

and also all those who gave me directions and said kato kyrie kato

and take under Your protection Mama from Spoleto Spiridion from
Paxos the good student from Berlin who saved me from oppression and
then when met unexpectedly in Arizona drove me to the Grand Canyon
which is like a hundred thousand cathedrals standing on their heads

- Lord let me not think of my moist-eyed gray deluded persecutors
when the sun sets on the truly indescribable Ionian Sea

let me understand other people other languages other sufferings
and above all let me be humble that is to say one who longs for the
source

I thank You Lord for creating the world beautiful and various and if this
is Your seduction I am seduced for good and past all forgiveness.