Slivers Of A Singing Moon

‘………………………We do not need to look

For other names. It is Orpheus once for all

Whenever there is song. He comes and goes.

Isn’t it enough if sometimes he can dwell

With us a few days longer than a rose?’ The Sonnets to Orpheus, Part 1, 5, Rainer Maria Rilke

In the current time of loss and shrinkage of our humanity, the song of the eternal poet has been stalking my thoughts. What does he make of our intrusive silence I often wonder. I cannot think of a time in human memory when the playing of music in the public square has been so expressly and universally forbidden. I fear that, before too long, our ears will close to the strains of his lyre and one more protection against the brutish materialism to which our age seems disastrously prone will be surrendered without a whisper of protest.

I remember the last time I felt his presence. One October night, over a year ago, we sat in unexpected traffic on our way to a concert. With an anxiety unassuaged by any assurances, I sped into the arena upon arrival to find the indomitable star already well into his first song. Oblivious to the noise of a fast filling hall of chattering fans around him, it was clear to me that he was answering a different call. For a fleeting moment I could see the shadow of the summoner, carrying his instrument fashioned of willow branches. I later read a beautiful review of the concert; there are those who understood what was happening at such events and will therefore be alive to all we are in grave danger of losing. 

When I look back on that night I am overwhelmed with a sense of sorrowful amazement. It seemed so normal then. I have seen this particular artist many times in concert and, as I thought, would certainly see him again. Such is the hubris of a complacent attitude to existence. I think of all the other elements of life that seemed normal; they were anything but. Many times, through the years, I have sat with lifelong friends, receiving Buddhist teachings from our masters. These are teachings which spring from a pure and unadulterated living tradition. Over 2,500 years old it is still the same wonderful medicine now as it was when it was first taught. Somehow, we were fortunate enough to be the recipients of such priceless treasure. The extraordinary hiding in plain sight within the normal. There were so many aspects of life which I took for granted.

The more I reflect, the clearer it becomes that this latest episode of human catastrophe is an illustration of how each and every aspect of our life is held in the jaws of change. Not one corner of this suffering world of ours escapes the pervasion of impermanence. We lived our lives a certain way and foolishly we expected them to remain the same; but things have changed. In the midst of a time when upheaval and despair seem so widely spread across the world, I think of all the previous occasions when humans were caught up on such a large scale and I shudder. 

It was the poet Virgil’s awareness of this suffering, the sadness of this world that drew me so strongly to him when I first encountered the Aeneid. It is after all, his phrase ‘lacrimae rerum’, ’the tears of things’ that has fascinated readers throughout the ages. It speaks of the fact that every facet of our existence down to the external world which we believe we experience is infused with the water of sorrow.  As an aside, it is amusing that it was precisely this sensitivity that led Victorian critics to judge Virgil as not ‘adequate’* to the task of expounding the glory of Rome. This ushered in an attitude towards the poet which endured until select German critics and T.S. Eliot himself brought Virgil back to the position of eminence in which he belongs. It is our great good fortune that Virgil’s awareness of the human condition; imperfect, striving beings in a broken world which can never be made whole, was too sharp to be suborned to the totalitarian nature of Augustus’ vision of Rome.

Since I was very young I have felt a deep affinity with the lone poet, the troubadour, carrying his ‘basket of flowers and bag full of sorrow’. As I grow older and time flexes her inexorable fingers this feeling grows ever stronger. We could do worse right about now than to sit and consider what we have lost and what we are willing to learn to live without. For a world without Orpheus would be a grim realm indeed. A refusal to listen when his song comes calling is just one more way in which we are left blind and dumb to the tragedy of life and the limits and possibilities of our being. 

* Matthew Arnold, The Modern Element in Literature