Between Dishonour and Desire
The clouded sky of most of the daylight hours has given way at last to
breaks of blue, and - another day's work over - I sit by the window
that overlooks the hills beyond where trees begin that turning of
colour which so marks the downward part of an English Autumn - and my
very being is moved as there plays within this room Bach's so numinous
Aria Ich habe genug.
Thus does beauty live, again, and somewhere, here: as if I reaching out
can almost touch its very being as one might reach to touch one's
nearby gentle loving lover. But: there is instead only that ache, that
sighing, that knowing of a loneliness, clinging - kept small,
undepressing, by only memories of so many times, pastly shared, which
in their dwelling bring some solace, as out beyond such a presencing of
beauty here we still in our, in this, moment feel so many people of
this world subsumed in folly, lostness: hubris hiding compassion, a
personal love hiding somewhere between dishonour and desire.
Yet, and yet - we have to hope; to cling to such a wistful dream of
ours as the early mist of yesterday's sun-full morning clung to the
meadow fields of the Farm as I alone walked among the trees, by hedges,
while the light of Dawn broke to reveal a clear sky which sucked away
that mist from dewy ground, mist-fully rising only feet, only a few
feet, above where the tops of the still growing grass, now only
sparsely flowered, gave way to the still cold air seeping up toward the
horizon of my dreaming brightening so slowly warming sky.
Thus are there tears as one man's so small being seeks a Cosmos where
belief knows, learns, cares and yet still so honourably desires. But
this is not, yet, that death where one might so easily so peacefully
pass to that which awaits, beyond - for there seems, feels, so much
more living still to do; so many more spaces of causal Time to so
drearily fill with ordinary life until we again can be taken away by
such sublime perfection of another numinous moment such as this...
DW Myatt