Of Time Before Time After

A flutter of wings at my ear,
a pointed gaze of greeting
— all at once, a welling memory,
a time of knowing soul before words,
a completely other kind of knowing,
offering clarity to this experience
only from within sleep and dreams.

 

The amplitude of such interiority,
speaking as if from shadowed recesses,
is perhaps all that remains of that time,
all this time after time,
time filled with learned speech,
this a wholly different way
to perceive and filter experience.

 

The hummingbird,
having partaken of the offered nectar,
turns to me once more, as if to say,
“Yes, friend; we were there together,
remember?”

 

Such deep remembrance
renders planned trajectories irrelevant
to what is possible
when you look up,
reach out,
let loose and—
like the beautiful bird
—fly.

  

© 2020 by Elisabeth T. Eliassen and songsofasouljourney.blogspot.com

 

 

***

Memory is an astonishing attribute of mind and consciousness. 

 

This bit of writing is an attempt – in so many ways unsuccessful – to indicate an aspect of mind that I remember vaguely from my pre-verbal self in infancy. This memory is triggered every so often; last evening, what triggered it was reading this very brief passage from a lecture given in February of 1982 by Michel Foucault (published, with many other lectures delivered at Collège de France, under the title “The Hermeneutics of the Subject”): 

 

What is it to be free? asks Seneca. And he answers: To be free is effugere servitutem. 

I followed the footnote to see the more complete quote from Seneca’s Natural Questions: liber autem est qui servitutem sui (to be free is to no longer be slave to self).

And, somehow, that moment is when a recollection came of this moment I would experience before sleep, in the age of my infancy. What I remember is the sense that it seemed not so long a time before when understanding was easier because I was unencumbered, that is not enclosed, in the awkwardness of an untrained body. I can remember being put to bed, and being sleepy, and questions forming in my mind that were not tied, really, to language, as we who have words understand and experience language. My questions were about my daily experiences, about the things I did not understand. These would roll forward like an ebbing tide. Answers would flow back. The answers came in a form I cannot express; they were lengthy, precise, all at once simple and complex. Such answers would calm me and allow me to relax into sleep, but they were real answers that informed me; I recall that each night, the questions were always different, the answers were always new—like an onboard learning system, if you will.

 

Once I had attained language skills, this pre-language fell away—and I can viscerally recall feeling it recede, feeling it slip away, as it was no longer needed. Now that I had words, I could speak them to people, and get answers in that way. I can remember still reaching in my mind for that other kind of knowing, always on the way to sleep, and sometimes would still get responses. 

 

I cannot remember anything describable about this pre-verbal knowing, except that it was, and that I remember it because I experienced it, and the memory remains a part of my consciousness. In these moments when I remember it, I sometimes wonder if it remains a latent aspect within, and if perhaps I will encounter it again, in my latter days.

Called Out

Out of the silent dust

was I called to be

Blown by some sacred breath
into the spring of existence,
particles stirred by
quaking earth and fire,
drowned by storm,
invisibly formed

Some distant song
carried its precious mass
through the void

“Who will go for us?”

Ears to hear, then unexpected response,
“Send me!”

And just as I Am is,
I became further I,
germinated,
embodied,
and released
with eyes to see,
ears to hear,
breath with which
to make voice
into the matchless
universe,
legs with which
to wander the shadowed valley,
arms and hands with which
to grasp, to gain, to give

According to each day
according to every season
according to any moment,
of which all are new
births under different light,
searching, and seeking,
wandering and weeping,
struggling,
learning
being,
serving,
loving,
in vital witness,
as ever be can be,
woven as am I of paradoxical parameters,
warp and weft, contradictory

[right and wrong,
sickness and health,
real and false,
free and oppressed,
generous and miserly,
careful and careless,

studious and ignorant,
shy and outgoing,
loud and silent,
joyful and angry,
studious and perfunctory,
color, full and less,
visible and invisible,
and so on, ad infinitum]

This song,
mine and ours,
knows no end
but partial ends forthcoming

by and by
—one knows not the wherefore nor why,
only that existence presses forward,
revolving and evolving,
perhaps toward,
and even sowing,
knowing

[shall ever I do?
shall ever I know
what I is, am and ever was
or why,
and if then,
what next might be/is,
what might be beyond
or what beyonding might bond?]

And when the Song calls me back
to that valley of bones
that river of dust,

Be, as I’ll be
marked:
Return to Sender,
Am I to I Am,
Thine to Thee.

© 2019 by Elisabeth T. Eliassen

(A meditation for lent on International Women's Day)

Another Waiting

Waiting,
ever present
in this issue
of living,
encompassing,
as it cannot help but do,
the elegant enigma life,
from birth,
and expansion,
through experience
and arrival at the passage
through which death
may be an another emergence,
if not a healing.

Certainly this life,
this is an exploration,
if you will,
of the complexity
of the soul;
where we are
in each moment,
we think and feel
in a language of
fluidly visible emotion,
on a landscape
of shifting times
and trials,
and waiting,
suspended in either
joy or grief.

For what do we wait?
Will time tell the tale?

Perhaps we’ll never realize
the moment in which we
slip into that possibility
that goes against the
grey grip of fate,
into unforeseen,
unanticipated,
because unimagined,
furthering.

© Elisabeth T. Eliassen 2016

In Mortality

By its four corners, something like a large sheet was gently lowered,
and a voice was heard by one, some, or perhaps many,
“It is good, all is good;
no worries.”

There, on a blooming field of goodness, a fading into night,
the beginning of an end setting forth a next start;
if darkness before dawn is an eye
to a different sort of tomorrow,
surely there is a fluttering of beating wings.

And in the melting of granulation into a murmur of revelation,
wondering about all that came before this gaping emptiness,
great thirst, and heaviness of light,
was all possible done?
Is the stove off or on?

Something echoes as through a corridor,
can it be music?
So unlike any remembered sonic partaking
or moment of music-making,
it seems unlikely.

This may be a dream that is not
(though so many have thought)
or perhaps a movement in the planetary cycle,
pitting every ounce of strength
against every pound of relaxation
to power the stars of night
and set the moon toward reflection.

“We love you, we love you!”
is heard, perhaps not by word,
or perhaps it is a bird,
chirping on the ledge,
in song or pledge.

Here, on this blooming field of goodness,
is the healing place and time;
as She said, “All will be well.”

What a thing it is,
oh, what a thing,
this on, honored one,
on, onward on,
onward on,
on.

© 2016 by Elisabeth T. Eliassen

Around the Corners of Reason

you,

you are;
you are what I cannot write,
the thought I cannot have or hold,
although I breathe your very breath,
driven, as it is, from the outermost edges of imagining
and all that precedes thought, knowledge and movement.

if I can see you, touch and taste you,
I do not know it—
so near, and also so far, are you,
apprehension is fleeting,
clouded by delusions
passing around the corners of reason.

perhaps my only truth:
compared to you,
I am an insubstantial mystery of life,
spindrift on your elegant shores of expression;
you, who are without craving or curiosity,
you are indeed the fullness of time.

surely, my feeble cries of longing
add only nominally to the perpetual white noise
that spins about your profound silence,
but I pray that my effort is somehow felt
within that great science of mind
that lies beyond knowing
and sense.

© 2012 by Elisabeth T. Eliassen

Sketching

Fast,
superficial, at first,
eye to hand to eye,
yet pointing deeper,
probing beneath the flat line
toward those dimensions
where light and shadow meet
in substance, form and life;
you have to dig a little deeper
to know what is really there.

Find,
find me;
find me in shadow,
find me in light
find me as substance, form and life;
trace the world around me,
place me firmly in it,
then take my hand,
hold me close
and tell me that I’m home.

© 2012 by Elisabeth T. Eliassen

Borrowing

Spring cleaning:
an exercise in wiping away
the dust and tears,
the petty futilities
of talk that says nothing
and acts that do nothing;
so many things
you pay someone to do
you end up doing yourself--
so why pay?

Borrowing time,
always borrowing,
to think, to dream, to write, to sing,
to watch the children grow
(they won't be small for long);
I don't want to miss
my second childhood,
to feel again the growing pains
and all the other hurts
of being in a new world.

Borrowing youth--
time away from
dishes and dusting,
cooking and cleaning,
sweeping and sifting,
folding and scolding;
the sun and breeze
feel different now
than the first time
I sneezed my way through.

All borrowed,
all of this life,
this incomparable,
incomprehensible life,
this experiential being,
hopefully not interest-free;
we can only hope
to reduce our debt
by loving each day,
at peril of dust and tears.

© 2012 by Elisabeth T. Eliassen

Transcriptions

A cacophony of voices rises,

along with the noises of Life;
the shrieks, crashes and throbs
of man, machine and beast—
a polyphony of distractions.

There is no substitute for listening,
even among the best thought partners,
and doubly true that is for the transcriptionist
who must gather a single thread,
from among the knotty ribbons of fire,
that will allow Theseus to quit the labyrinth.

Loudness and speed or lowness and length
are symptomatic of a need for supremacy.

On the one hand, those windows of silence,
that would bring necessary context,
are lost in the wall of loud, louder, loudest.

On the other hand, many words run too fluidly
to make out with any certainty whatsoever.

And so the peace and understanding
of all the world hangs on the ears
of the lone and earnest stenographer,
to accurately record life, libation, living and love
as a single strand of thought, a manifesto.

The wings and winds of distraction
whip at curtains of indecision and disillusion,
not to say disinclination,
to forge something real from delusions,
something that will last beyond a convenient now,
something that will cancel the end game.

But, there comes an end to all our talking—
we must breathe to speak, and so we stop;
all is futile, futile, utterly futile,
even while the earth glows with Life—
we are mostly deaf to Life’s music;
it plays beyond our petty cravings,
beyond our ignoble dominions and wars.

Silence comes only because we must stop,
and welling, as from within an eruption of silence,
a truer answer finds voice and flight,
one that only the transcriber can hear.

The answer is heard by one,
but goes unrecorded;
truth often lies outside
the contractual agreement.

© 2011 by Elisabeth Eliassen

When I was coming to be

When I was coming to be,
I had no tongue and
I had no eyes—
there was no need
for these extras;
mindness saw,
mindness expressed:
this a more subtle tool.

After I was coming to be,
there were lips and tongue,
eyes and ears, even hands and feet—
now these clumsy aids
were needed
in order to be vertical,
so as not to be clumsy
when bumping into others.

For a long time after,
there was a parallel-motion
of this supple mind knowledge
and had-to-be-learned tongue—
different languages,
though one is not language;
I cannot translate this mindness
into thought or spoken word.

Now, little seems to remain of that mode,
of that knowing transmission of awareness,
of that, which was so easy and so pure;
usurped by thinking and speaking,
that subtle and more precise form
has retreated to corners of dreamtime,
where I await, to catch me off guard,
to remind me of the truths beyond now.

© 2011 by Elisabeth T. Eliassen