Spaces, Prayer for a Revolutionary Love
Prayer for a Revolutionary Love
That a woman not ask a man to leave
meaningful work to follow her.
That a man not ask a woman to leave
meaningful work to follow him.
That no one try to put Eros in bondage.
But that no one put a cudgel in the
hands of Eros.
That our loyalty to one another and our
loyalty to our work not be set in false conflict.
That our love for each other give us
love for each other’s work.
That our love for each other’s work
give us love for one another.
That our love for each other’s work
give us love for one another.
That our love for each other give us
love for each other’s work.
That our love for each other, if need
be, give way to absence. And the unknown.
That we endure absence, if need be,
without losing our love for each other,
without closing our doors to the
unknown.
Denise
Levertov
Excerpt from ‘End of the Affair’
She had said to me – they
were nearly the last words I heard from her before she came dripping into the
hall from her assignation – ‘You needn’t be so scared. Love doesn’t end. Just
because we don’t see each other…’ She had already made her decision, though I
didn’t know it till next day, when the telephone presented nothing but the
silent open mouth of somebody found dead. She said, ‘My dear, my dear, people
go on loving God, don’t they, all their lives without seeing Him?’
‘That’s not our kind of love.’
’I sometimes don’t believe there’s any other kind
Graham Greene
Sonnet (excerpt)
But love,
this love has not ended:
just as it
never had a birth,
it has no
death: it is like
A long river,
only changing
lands, changing lips.
Pablo Neruda
Because I dreamt of writing an entry like this, and because not enough credit
is given to it: here’s a tribute to spaces.
Spaces. We often dread the concept and the word. (as it is
performative!)
To hear “I need some space” is one of the most painful things one could
hear from a beloved, worse than if she asked for the universe. (A line
from Friends goes: “Well, maybe she can ask for time as well, and then
she can mix them up and she can have a continuum..”)
The dread of spaces is why we fill everything with noise: visual noise, perfume
music, (“just so there’s something there in the background”) everything
and anything just to hide the stink of absence.
But
without spaces, without absence, we can’t be entranced. We can’t crystallize.
In the
Salt Mines of Salzburg, if you throw a branch into the cave and fish it
out several months later, it would have salt crystals all over it. That’s
crystallization for you. And it can only unravel over time. And with
space. Indeed, as in a continuum.
"It’s our own love and
our own faith we are doubting when we question the time and distances it cannot
cross."
As I wrote before, (3 years
ago) on why I find it so difficult to write poetry: (and also why I write
long pieces..)
I must admit, I have been one of those who fear space and who have thought of
space as a negation. I guess that is why I work better in fiction than in
poetry. I am scared of being misunderstood and I have this crazy concept that if
you fill a space, readers would understand it better. I realize this is also
stems from a kind of mistrust on the reader. Because space is so dynamic, I do
not know what he or she would do with it. I have also equated the filling of
space to efficiency, the level of how many pages you reach directly
proportional to your grade in an academic system. I also think of all the
trees cut down for paper, and wonder if what is said in it is worth the
sacrifice of such a creature. I have hated all those poems who waste a page
with just a line or so, as if it were so profound.
But more that that, I have been paralyzed by the scary whiteness of a blank
sheet. There was one grafitti in a bathroom door that asked, “Bakit ba kayo
nagsusulat dito?” and another grafitti answered – “ Because the purpose of
a void is to be filled.” Perhaps it is why we have grafitti all over the place.
People desperate to make their mark against another person’s right to clarity
and cleanliness.
………..
But if there’s any kind of God, it would be in the spaces between us. Between
us lies the respect for the difference of another, and the capacity to feel a
fluid reality outside us which makes communication possible. The Buddhist and
mystics believed in a “luminous
emptiness,” a sacred space. Taoists believed life to hang between the precarious balance
between being and nothingness, inhaling and exhaling, the yin and yang.
Without space, without quietness, poets wouldn’t even have a chance to create.
Even God rested on the seventh day. Breathe is indeed life giving. Space,
quietness makes room for growth, learning, creativity.
………….
The unconscious is activated when looking at blank spaces. They serve as
a medium of projection. Crystal balls, computer screens or anything really can release this inner dynamism. By focusing on the space, one can
gain our deeper minds’ greater creativity as well as even extraordinary
perception wherein the mind can perceive a reality not of its own making.
The relegation of space as a mere background, or a nothingness that must be
fought is similar to society’s disrespect to the unconscious, to Eastern
thinking and to women. Losing the values related to it and their potential
capacities and insights, one sacrifices peaceful meditation for critical
thinking, nature for stone edifices, space for boxes.
Space is not something to conquer or
appropriate. In their craft, poet’s learn to curb this urge of owning the space
by violating it. They learn respect for the pauses. Very much like graceful
swimming, you learn to use the space around you to transport you. You do not
treat it like your enemy, but rather trust its buoyancy so you can float.
************************************************
Nowadays,
(and aside from the poems, this is the part I’ve dreamt of writing) I’d like to think I’ve become a
great believer in holy ghosts, absent presences, pregnant silences, palpable
voids.
The unsaid. (not just that, but the unheard!)
In the music of
Schumman, he builds up the entire sonata for a note, a key, which he doesn’t
play. This makes us hear that note all the more. Restraint is alluring.
The veil that we can’t see through is the essence of art. And the core of our
existence.
Space is a
relief. And a challenge. It hails us. We are tested and driven by it. And
sometimes, there’s nothing left to do but surrender to it. After all (and our
cells, which are 90% space, 10% nucleus prove this)
We are
spaces ourselves.
***********************************************************************************************************
In a field, I
am the absence of field
This is always the case
Wherever I am, I am what is missing
When I walk, I part the air
And always the air moves in to fill the spaces where my body’s been
Everyone has reasons for moving on,
I move on to make things whole.
-From the
Poem “Keeping Things Whole” By Mark Strand
Spaces
spaces
are
not gaps
you say
I have yet
to find a word
to describe
the creeping
emptiness
inside
