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.
