{The Division}

Rather more than a hundred years ago, in those blackest hours of wandering possibility when there was no land for sea and no sky for clouds, only the ever-changing stillness and a groaning noise, unmusical as ever, unheard though it may have been for lack of ears—there was one day found, fast asleep among the bells, by no certain coincidence, a Nightingale whose song set forth the very hills. Pre-Chordata, such a music arose and so divided change from constancy that all present harmonic opposition appeared—sea and sky, land and cloud, meadow and forest, village and mountain, soul and fire, ear and vibration—to enchant the world, to tell us how we ought to place ourselves, and to make fiddlesticks of our impending will.

Unupholstered, strewn with dirt and disorder, society had no great talent or passion beyond embellishment of the abode. One day, the Nightingale came flying to the top of the village belfry and gave form and rich color to the places where common folk were only roughly acquainted with the curious scene of joys and sorrows but particularly gossiped of gnats and flies. The careless dust became intimate with unwonted splendor, ever traveling and transformed yet thoroughly haunted by echoes of its sacred normal state.

But amusing entertainments soon turned out to be a fatal passion: a decided success and a very large sum of money one day became the only things. Under a lime-tree, a quartette, squabbling and wrangling, made a discordant noise louder than tradition. The birth of a great disturbance, this quartette, seated orderly in the midst of sufficient troubles, by no means disposed to smile, found themselves with no reason for hoping that the future, living somewhere in concealment, would bring better times. So, floating in the minds of many men, reality, idle and extravagant for a time, obtained so unremunerative a nature that members of the village, enraged by the great danger they were often in, all ultimately contrived to escape.

The Nightingale, plain as necessity, cried out, “Stop, brothers, stop! Be so kind, my friends, as to wait a little… I have found out the secret.” They prepared to follow its advice, eager for it to solve their difficulty.

“I live up there in the grateful shade of day-dreams watching you through the openings in my hanging curtain of green leaves—you puzzling animals who toil toward your coffins, erecting monuments of peace and relaxation to memories unable to appreciate the symbolism.”

At one time, they all listened, they observed, they long wished—but the Nightingale, bending its head toward the ground, sobbed and poured its voice, a shower of tiny notes, down onto the grass as a final liberty. Straightaway, it took to its wings, uttered a shrill cry, and our poor Nightingale flew far, far away.

{The Great Silence}

At length all was scarcely breathing. Our favorite choirs died away. The wood let her voice languish. Even the breeze was hushed. Only now and then sustained notes echoed a distant murmur no longer manifest in us. A great mastery over art in countless ways passed from one truth to another.

“It’s a pity being bored,” they said one day. “It would be a great deal better to hear you sing, Nightingale, without judgment.”

All the shepherds and shepherdesses went out of their wits and wandered through the woods and forests. Singing ceased and the world was much reviled.

And so it begins again in silence, a grave shushed awe in the face of time immobile, like a dream starting somewhere before the imperceptible beginning and playing endlessly like a fairy tale burbling from the lips of Lethe. Beginning, always beginning and beginning again…

The whole continuous and invisible until immediately cracking and breaking into pieces at the sound of the Word swiftly followed by a rushing commerce of further words linking themselves together in a preposterous show of inevitability as though they were capable somehow of cutting ties so easily with that ghostly voice that is always still.

For years afterwards, old volumes full of vague ideas shaped themselves into a drama called the histories.

Many a version has been produced in the interior serving to gain its various translators a reputation even to the totally uneducated peasant. Literary men, supposing that they had an opportunity, found their way into all parts of the empire never ceasing to revise, improve or correct. Because the public has never ventured far from shore, it took no interest a little farther on in more than a few slight alterations.

One fabulist, free from the eager thirst of fame, secretly discovered a more lasting and extensive flame, destroyed a new language, and produced a sumptuous edition distinguished and celebrated from that time forward by no large mass and whose contents were scarcely ever told. (Far more commonly exchanged by the village tradesmen, shopkeepers and proprietors was the gossip surrounding the storyteller’s penchant for claiming now to be one and then to be the other of a dubious pair of twins sharing the same name.)

But all versions were equally forgotten, countrymen seeing no use in such musty volumes but to heat the stove.

Now this unappreciated maelstrom of manuscripts from one unpopular notebook alone remains of the histories.

{The Brook}

A shepherd, clearly visible to all eyes, greatly esteemed for his grief, kindled a fire by the side of a Brook.

Our poor friend thinks no more about luxury. He has become faint and feeble and becomes worse every day. Shame pours out as from a tap.

“Kindly Brook, how would it be if I hide all my victims in thy depths? Wouldst thou greedily swallow up every one of them? How does it all end in thy most secret recesses?”

His Katherine had lately been drowned in its dark abysses so smoothly, so peacefully, so sweetly to the heart.

But what happened?

The Brook began to murmur indignantly: “Methinks that this sad and irreparable loss seethes; it roars, it overthrows ancestral oaks! My waters should bring fresh life to Nature nowhere causing misfortune or sorrow. Only tell me in what manner you propose to make your people happy.”

A heavy raincloud, as silver as the sea, suddenly burst upon that very shepherd—its crashing waters sending him home but still heard from meadows afar.

But, alas, what became of the Brook? Its banks overflowed upon a neighboring hill becoming, in a word, nowhere. At last, in a flow of eloquence, it perished within its own affluence. A week had not gone by before not even a trace was left behind—only the turbid waves of an incautious river! And without robbing the earth of its copious ornaments, the soiled foam rolls past every bush, every cottage.

{The Oracle}

A Beggar who had been driven out of all patience was creeping along from house to house grumbling at his lot. At the extremity of town, he reached a wretched old house. Because it was old and damp and rotten, they said there was nothing in it but filth. Suddenly, Fortune appeared gliding to his side.

“You wish to be rich; I have heard you say why: on all sides you are met with hindrance and loss. I have long wished to help you, so listen! In this singular hovel, there is a forgotten wooden idol in a very rich attire covered as it is from top to toe with gold and silver. This idol is, in fact, an Oracle uttering prophetic answers. Take the idol and consult it about anything. Only bear this in mind: until you shall have flung the idol into the river, you will remain a poor, hopeless Beggar.”

Scarcely could he believe it was not a dream!

But what happens? A day goes by, and then a week, a month, a year. Our feckless Beggar eats scantily and drinks scantily. Scarcely has the day begun to break before he is believing blindly in the Oracle’s wise counsels, and when the day comes to an end, he is plunged up to his ears in enigmatic speculations yet something or other is still to be wanting.

Sometimes he makes up his mind to throw away the idol. But then his heart grows faint within him. He reaches the bank of the river and turns back again.

“How can I possibly part with the idol? Who isn’t glad to get hold of a good thing? Yes, I will keep the wonderful Oracle one day more.”

By now our poor Beggar has become grey, thin, faint and feeble. Still with trembling hand he goes on taking advice from the Oracle. He takes and takes but how does it all end?

Suddenly there is a cry in the village.

“The house is on fire!”

But at that moment, Fortune returns: the walls of the house split, and the Beggar escapes with his precious idol before the house falls and turns to dust. Our Beggar is almost too overjoyed to breathe. He scarcely feels the ground beneath his feet. But the deafening idol becomes tremendously heavy.

He hurries to the river that flows so gently, chooses the spot where the depths seem blackest, and plunges into the abyss with his treasured companion. The deep swallows them down, Fortune disappears, and now they lie at the bottom of the sea melting away like dreams into the realm where Pluto sways, never returning to the light of day.

Life is a kind of torment—and to what end? To do nothing but eat and drink delicately? We soon die and leave all behind. One man tries with all his might to seize the goddess and only loses his time and his trouble. Another seems, to all appearance, to be running out of her sight; but, no: she herself takes a pleasure in pursuing him.

{Two Thieves and the Tempest}

A thief of some unnoted town, pursuing his profession, had of some words got possession—a poet’s words of great renown. The thief labored in those words he plundered, mingled—with axe rerhymed, with acts relined each speech. He spared no tool, wholly roughed each rule. At last: “That’s mine,” he said, in joyful mood, “Poem’s Being changed for good!” But god divine, with evil trap, asked, “Is it?”

The question now: “to sell or not to sell?” while musing deeply Being’s poem’s spell. By interpretation, his poet was, this and that, another thief heroed by chance and living off lyric’s spoils prone to fat. The thief-turned-prince oft forgets the source: happenstance. Might all be pleading law? Mere fuss of work, affairs, labor judged by richest shares? But what of art, magic gold, zephyr’s breath? Unseen accents of bleeding awe? Let’s wreak upon ourselves laws of long sighed who knows. Dark and jagged, pitiless and wild. So tempest’s power at the word unflows.

And oh, resistless powers—all engaged in war. See how the gods demand it. Your charming book, what’s it for? A price no nearer—the ancients say it—than barren praises from face to faceless gazes.

So what could our dear thief do? From haunts of men, he soon withdrew. Now none have truly heard the poem Being freed from word.

{An English Tree}

I do not know what time of day it is. Nor what day of the week. I could not say for certain what month it is right now, and I know I don’t know what year it is. I have no idea how I got here, and I do not seem to have plans to go anywhere else. I am standing near a tree, but I do not know types of trees very well so I won’t say what kind it might be. I am happy that the tree is here since otherwise I would be nowhere. If someone were to come along and ask me how I am, I could at least say, “I am near a tree!”

Truth be told, I am afraid to get too close to the tree. I imagine approaching it, reaching out to touch it only for it to fall over and reveal its fraud. Then when someone asks me a question, I would feel compelled to say, “I am near a façade of a tree!” which sounds unnecessary. And yet, it seems a lie to leave out the fact that it is a fake, a stand-in for a real tree.

I do not have anything else to do so I stand here and think about this some more.

Now there is a man approaching from some direction. When he is close enough, he gives me a quick nod and says, “Good day.”

“Yes,” I respond, “it is a good day isn’t it, sir? Unseasonably warm for this time of year though. I daresay it won’t do this English tree here any good, but I don’t need to tell you that! Well, I best be going! Today is my birthday and I am late for lunch with a friend. Good day!”

And off I walk in no particular direction with no particular place to go.

{?}

A certain, familiar thief—some say a wizard, others say the Evil One—crept into Krilof’s house one autumn night, and, betaking himself to the storeroom, rummaged the walls, the shelves, and the ceiling, and stole without remorse all, as far as words went, he could lay his hands on. Krilof, poor fellow, had lain down a rich man but woke up so bereft of everything…

“Police! Robbery! Stop thief! I’m ruined! I’ve been robbed of everything I possessed!”

{The Faraway Bell}

On certain evenings at sunset, the sweetly melodic chiming of a mysterious bell could be heard in the village coming from the direction of the deep and otherwise silent woods.

“There is the evening bell,” people would say, always feeling quite solemn.

Some insisted that there must be some obscure church unknown to them in the thick of the forest or else on the other side of it and that a trick of the terrain caused the tones to sound so near and so beautiful.

Others came to believe that there was no bell at all—that it was their very own hearts resounding sweetly like the mother’s voice as against the rumble of vehicles and cries in the street.

Indeed, a great many people from the village had ventured into the woods over the years hoping to discover where the sound came from. But not one of them brought home any kind of explanation although many said that they heard the curious bell throughout their search and that it sounded as if it came from the village. This was, time and again, taken as proof that the bell did not exist and that the chiming was either imagined or else conjured by the villagers themselves.

Then one day a certain original, famed only for his ability to remain in a constant state of drunkenness, claimed that his very own Shadow had decided to separate from him. First, it took only a step or two away—then, it took to running. Our eccentric friend, astounded, gave chase, but the Shadow was manifestly quicker easily escaping capture and penetrating into the solitude of the wood.

The days trudged by and the Shadow remained missing—strangely, the deep-toned evening bell was likewise absent. The loner, meanwhile, took to even more drink than usual perturbing all in earshot with his tall tale, leading them to loudly question one another, “That kind of fellow is useless and cannot be trusted. How long are we to allow him his space and our food and drink? Shall we pelt him? Shall we thrash him? Shall we send him after his ‘Shadow’ and hope he also never returns?”

But, as the Drunk stood—and wavered for a moment so that the villagers present could not tell if he was attempting to leave, trying to make his way over for another drink, feebly trying to find a place he might relieve himself, attempting to interject his side of things or simply standing as an alternative to lying face-down on the floor as he had been—the Priest pointed out that the Drunk truly did not have a shadow as he very well should in this room and just as everyone else there in fact did. They even confirmed his lack of a shadow the next day by taking him to various locations to see if the light from the Sun would produce the expected result. When the findings vindicated the Drunk’s story, the villagers wondered how they had missed this glaring fact and felt more than a little guilty for merely assuming the Drunk was talking nonsense. Some of them secretly wondered if they too might take to drinking if their shadow should leave them.

Noting the Drunk’s absence over the course of several days, some of the villagers looked for him and found him upon a roof which was covered with roses. It seems the Drunk had quite suddenly stopped drinking and instead began writing a poem which he was hard at work on. When they asked what this was all about, he replied that his Shadow had been to the end of the world and that he had seen where the sound of the bell came from. Horrified and curious, they saw to their astonishment the Poet’s Shadow on the roof just as it should have been.

Days of painful anticipation followed. The villagers’ impatience to see the completed poem was unbearable. Finally, they dragged the Poet down from the roof, Shadow and all, and questioned him about what had happened. He maintained that he must complete his poem and that everything they wanted would be in it. But the villagers would not relent.

And so the Poet told them the story—that his Shadow had gone deep into the woods to the end of the world where the clouds were fiery red and where you could somehow hear the waves of the ocean rolling to some faraway shore but where there was at the same time a great stillness full of white starlike lilies and blue tulips and moss growing upon enormous stones jutting out from the green meadows and where in the middle of it all there was a hollow tree—and his Shadow climbed up this tree and could see an extraordinary view of endless yonder meadows punctuated by oaks and birches and interrupted by grand lakes quietly glittering in the sun—but still more important and more grand was that inside the hollow tree there was hanging the most beautiful bell that one could imagine such that there could be no question that this was but the very one they had been seeking for so long, the bell whose tones had so moved all of their hearts—and there was even an engraving upon the bell: Palermo. But the Poet could see—even now, clear as day—that the bell had such a terrible crack in it that it could not possibly chime any longer—and what is more, what should he see but their departed Nightingale sitting listlessly upon a nearby branch, forlorn at being all but forgotten.

Here at this last point, the Poet’s tale came to an end as he succumbed to the eventuality of his vice—his story was often told but neither his Shadow nor the faraway bell was ever seen or heard by the villagers again.

{The Architect and the Unpleasantness}

An Architect was being taken through the streets, probably as a remedy. It is well known that architects are a wonder among us so buildings crowded with cunning thieves disappeared of their own accord. From some space or other, an Unpleasantness comes to meet this Architect just as if it wanted to fight, and all things unfolded.

An unpleasantness is looked at and examined in detail—an architect gains its living by the same business.

“I can break trees,” says the Architect, “but what is the reason of this? Tell me, in what does the real secret consist?”

“Everything is here which any one can possibly desire,” came the unpleasant reply. “Some of them are stolen, but they live utterly free from all restrictions. Truly, the affair cannot be too much admired. A great hand at building provides refuge from cold and heat, but plenty of space bestows loss of time. Everywhere conceivable, an order is given. I may not be reckoned or disposed of; I perch close at hand, successfully inserted everywhere to each new abode.”

The Architect, without fighting at all, answered, “Haven’t you, my friend, a bit of—patience?”

“Neighbor, cease to bring shame on yourself,” advised the Unpleasantness, “you run and bark and squeal and just see now, you are already hoarse! But I keep straight on and do not pay you the slightest attention—and that’s just what gives me courage.”

{The Hunter in the Forest}

The scene: the boundless universe.
—a comedy immense—

In acts unnumbered, a house was built by human nature, fresh from the hand of poetry.
In few words, it was nowhere. But from time to time, it found its way back to the primeval history preserved for us in the remotest antiquity.

Some mental machinery shuts the door, pulls in the latch-string and is wholly at home in that immortality of the universal storehouse of the everlastingly forgotten, the great unutterable drama.

Now suppose—wishing to bring back the sound of that deaf unknown elsewhere under a somewhat different form of that well-known magic—we take a man of whose poetry the world knows nothing and toss him into the focus of civilization. Those two very ancient collections of fables—collections without any principle or connection—writings of the best species of literature, scattered under the embalmed truth, flourishing among that whole being we have already mentioned which seems to have written nothing itself—nothing but was remembered—contained in speeches which fall from the lips—a few scattered fragments that may have come down to us but was long forgotten.

Speech and reason—the intercourse of these beings in all their parts and forms had no employment but, mingling with itself, the first rude passage from mouth to mouth blossomed and ripened—created and endowed the elements themselves—air, earth and water—invented, by the force of its own genius power and compactness, noble narratives introduced as profane history—a chronicle of the realities, as well as moral truth, of man developed by time.

This disputed subject must be left to those who have a taste for inquiries into such creatures as extended romances or dramas. Certain it is, however, that this system wrought at the same instant a not improbable sentence of condemnation upon itself and, bearing the almost unrivalled exquisite elegance of the rules of arithmetic, such a distinctly deformed exterior of playful fictions of the life of man as to successfully conceal itself within that very current of mere amusement that soon became the most important occasion and revealed the difficult problems of human conduct.

All the graces of style are sufficient to show that their author possessed the constantly remembered need and desire to remain forgotten—though burdened unremittingly, desperately with the insufferable seat of the empire. Be it no surprise, then, this poet should one day unexpectedly but entirely become a mighty hunter taken up into the forest, horribly roaring like a beast of tremendous size, so saying:

Let me taste the twisted pains of men. I will devour death in the agonies of these books so their pleasures come to be translated in the same manner—into the ancient language of this country and expressly for that purpose. I am the fountain of word unheard, I am the ornament and machinery of the hand of God, I am the innumerable birth—a thousand and one imitations, mutations, modifications, translations. I am fain to gravity’s reign, and I sustain and supply virtue’s vice. I cheat sleep where fable slept, and there, I became other things. I return not finding any. The result is before you, my imperfect knowledge—the heartfelt and hungry-looking stranger who knocked at your doors, the hatchet-tongued stranger not given name but expressed in the so-long-neglected task. I am unadorned and disconnected.

I am a man of war.

Two jackals (you might say, thieves) that figure in the histories came to be mistaken, either directly or indirectly, for their author. This remarkable book passed down the stream of time, version after version, till it slept in the dark ages—the mistaken loss to which it gave birth and over which it undoubtedly had great influence. A translation was made in succeeding ages—though it may not fully sustain the existence of the world, speak it anyway with reverence:

I wounded him—the poet—so that he fell.
I cite the verse—for a whole day, one month.
I devour his hunger—this flesh not yet tender.
I am a man of war—the remainder is thine own wealth.

The hunter, the word and the forest—all three dead.

{The Writer and the Robber}

In the corner of an antechamber sat a Writer who had at last come to the gallows. Under him, at first, a little sentence scarcely glowed; but the longer it burned, the larger it became. Like the sweet-voiced Siren, it pronounced, promoted, and preached his torments such that the very stone in the roof of the infernal halls began to crack.

Centuries have now gone by.

In the gloomy realm of shadows, an unread book long lay neglected on the ground filled full of subtle poison and unfamiliar with glory. The fire has long ago been extinguished, but the flame has not sufficiently gone out. No fly dares to light upon it. Not a breath of wind sits down by its side.

But, suddenly, a dangerous Robber gives it his entire attention, caresses it with his own hand, takes such care of it that it begins to chatter and to give utterance to nonsense. The Robber, listening with open mouth, begins to say pleasant things about the book, and the whole town becomes well acquainted with the book although it talks nonsense enough to make their ears tingle. The book begins to be puffed up, to make much of itself, to air its cleverness.

Beneath it, the Writer—long ago have thy bones turned to dust!—grows worse and worse. There is no justice among the gods. Whenever the book is opened, everyone smiles sweetly upon it. Its new master, the Robber, filled the world with its renown and his pockets full of ducats. He assumed airs of importance and, having made himself enormously rich by this commerce, transformed his cloth into that of a Merchant. But there’s nothing wonderful in that. People go on in the selfsame manner—this Robber-Merchant still looks around in the world occupied by the same calculation: “How can one man best succeed in cheating another?”

The poison, spreading abroad, does not weaken—look there: behold the crimes, the misery, murder and robbery, strife and rebellion, cruelty and lawlessness, all human misfortune—it becomes more malignant as years roll by.

Who strove to rend asunder the bonds of society?

But for a moment, she enables you to look upon the world, to hear it, to feel it, to be it. Where do you get such a voice from?—a regular nightingale, a myth invented by the writers of the books, a song that brings tears to the eyes, little silver bells that tinkle perpetually.

The Writer’s sentence appeared, suspended the very air, creating no useless delays. At the very same time, with snakes hissing amid her hair, she set herself on fire, kindling such a terrible flame, bringing to light fresh evils of which thou art the cause.

Then the book was flung out of doors, and nothing more was ever heard of it.

{Gegen Abend}

Twilight drew near, quiet and pensive. The sun sank behind the edge of the balcony of the banqueting hall as though allowing itself to be called and directed.

a spell…

a tingling of the blood in the ear…

autumn – sad and quiet – green twigs strewn about the floor

in the dark hours of the night – a transformation took place –

{Departing Song}

Above the clouds, on an ancient cedar, the Nightingale, adorned with the full garb of Jupiter, addressed the angry Caspian Sea, black as a raven:

Insomuch that I now look upon the world from a point overhead, beyond the borders of the world, not far from the haunts of men, God forbid I should hurt any one but there is nothing—nothing but dirt and offal; and yet you may suppose it doesn’t much matter. No great harm was done. But how could the day anyway begin to dawn, ample and golden, by pure accident, people stirring, voices to be heard: “do save me! I am all but lost!” Still it cannot free itself. Still it waits as the night comes on, it goes on waiting for when a greater than nocturnal darkness visits the whole world like a lord and we shall tumble into that strange, secret pool of days forever gone.

“We are they,” was the reply from down below.

The Nightingale descended a steep hill and sat on a bough on a beautiful summer day while the leaves whispered softly to the zephyrs.

“Who are you who are talking there?”

Rhythmless bells slowly vanish into the endlessness.

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