Once There Was a Way....

"Once there was a way...."

The idea has been expressed everywhere from Heraclitus to the Beatles and Keane.  How did Heraclitus (500 BCE) put it?

τοῦ λόγου δὲ ἐόντος ξυνοῦ ζώουσιν οἱ πολλοί
ὡς ἰδίαν ἔχοντες φρόνησιν
1. p.77. Fr.2

“Although all hold the Word in common, the people
live as if they had a private understanding.”

That's Heraclitus longing for a world that had already disappeared in his day.  It is the same sense remarked in Isaiah: "All we like sheep have gone astray; we've turned each to his own way."  These sentiments express something of a society detached from a common thread, a binding ideal: the feeling of anomie -- of not belonging to or within one's own society due to the absence of common values, ideals that are shared, are agreed upon, and which exist as the people's common ground.  But there is something more: the lost personal, individual attachment to another person and lost moments of connection.  Anomie.

From the Beatles, there is not only "Golden Slumbers," linked above, but this from John Lennon:

Whatever happened to
The love that we once knew
Can we really live without each other
When did we loose the touch
That seemed to mean so much
It always made me feel so

Free, as a bird

 And from Keane:

Oh simple thing where have you gone?
I'm getting old and I need something to rely on
So tell me when you're gonna let me in
I'm getting tired and I need somewhere to begin

I came across a fallen tree
I felt the branches of it looking at me
Is this the place we used to love?
Is this the place that I've been dreaming of?

Is it mere nostalgia, as moving as nostalgia may be?  No.  It's deeper; it carries a greater import that speaks to us about our inner lives and identities.  The Romantics called such a thing Sehnsucht, an inconsolable longing, a longing for something or someone beyond ourselves.

C. S. Lewis described Sehnsucht as a longing for something from another world -- or at least a longing for something beyond what this world can satisfy: 

'Ιουλιανπαθω

and 

"O! I desire too much!"

A word similar in meaning is Suadade -- a sense of people, places, moments, deeply loved and tied to our identity, but now gone, missing.  Remembering them isn't mere nostalgia; it's deeper, having, I believe, something to do with our very being -- with our souls.  That is, someone has been so important to us that without that person we are somehow not quite complete, and we remember....  A word said in just the right way, a sound, a look, a song, a smell...and there they are.  Or, rather, there they aren't.  And we feel their absence as we remember.

One more: hiraeth (from Welsh: hir, "long" and aeth, "sorrow, grief").  It connotes a homesickness, a longing for a home or a person that is no more or, as someone put it, "which maybe never was."  It is for something "irretrievably lost"; one Welsh language official said, "It’s a kind of longing for a person, a place or a time that you can’t get back to, a kind of unattainable longing" (Brosschot).

As author, J. L. Carr put it in his remarkable novel A Month in the Country,

     We can ask and ask but we can't have again what once seemed ours forever -- the way things looked, [...] a remembered voice, the touch of a hand, a loved face.  They've gone and you can only wait for the pain to pass. (104)

Hiraeth can also denote a longing for the past.  That is most certainly what Tennyson called his "passion of the past," expressed in his poem "Tears, Idle Tears" from The Princess:

Tears, idle tears, I know not what they mean,

Tears from the depth of some divine despair

Rise in the heart, and gather to the eyes,

In looking on the happy Autumn-fields,

And thinking of the days that are no more.

Fresh as the first beam glittering on a sail,

That brings our friends up from the underworld,

Sad as the last which reddens over one

That sinks with all we love below the verge;

So sad, so fresh, the days that are no more.

Ah, sad and strange as in dark summer dawns

The earliest pipe of half-awaken'd birds

To dying ears, when unto dying eyes

The casement slowly grows a glimmering square;

So sad, so strange, the days that are no more.

Dear as remember'd kisses after death,

And sweet as those by hopeless fancy feign'd

On lips that are for others; deep as love,

Deep as first love, and wild with all regret;

O Death in Life, the days that are no more!

All the above lyrics -- song or poetry -- carry a sense of hiraeth, Suadade and Sehnsucht.  There are others.

 Vianney's song, Pas La:

 

 En Francais:

Je suis une cruche,
percée de plus,
j’ai la peau craquelée
depuis toi, desséchée
Quand vient la lune
et le vent frais,
par habitude,
j’te cherche sur le canapé

mais t’es pas là, mais t’es où?
mais t’es ou ? (pas là, pas là pas là…)

Part of his (translated) lyrics:

I am a broken jar
totally in holes
My skin is cracking
since you faded away
when the moon shows up
and I feel a cold wind
I am still searching [for] you laying on the sofa

But you're not here, where are you then?
but where are you? (not here, not here, not here)

The past is a struggle: it's loaded with all sorts of things that have carried significant import into our present condition, the way we think now about things (even as opposed to how we used to think about them).  There are things back there we idealize, things we also dismiss as irrelevant...but perhaps shouldn't.  The Germans have a funny word here: Vergangenheitsbewaeltigung: "the trouble you go through when trying to come to terms with the past."

What does it all mean? What doesn't it mean?  Here are meanings beyond mere "feelings" -- here are signficances to our being past and present.  We cannot explain them: "There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, Than are dreamt of in your philosophy," says Hamlet.   And yet we come against them (as I wrote elsewhere about time [LINK]).  "Here, there, and everywhere" -- we are reminded....

~~~~~~~~~~~

 Carr, J. L. A Month in the Country. Penguin, 2000.

And Time Stood Still

 "And time stood still...." [Link]

Life revolves around peculiar moments that stand in perfect stillness, and yet in that stillness, they influence the rest of life.  Such moments remain with us, and remain with the full import and potency of their striking epiphane and truth.  It's T. S. Eliot's "still point of the turning world."

Yes.  I remember intensely significant moments where time stood still -- but stood neither in stasis nor in movement.  The center scarcely moves -- the center of a turning wheel, and while the outer edge spins at a furiously ignorant pace, the center remains a tranquil point of potency and significance, even if we can't articulate the significance of the moment.

It's the center of the dance, a moment revolving within time, a moment between lovers' eyes, a moment not captured by the lovers but a moment in which they are captured.  They shall forever not live outside it.

It is a place only arrived at by all your past conspiring to bring you into it, and it is a place from which the future shall forever grow.  It's the "eternal moment" that the Romantic poets wrote of.  It's that moment which Peter Ibbeston enters when he understands the Duchess of Towers is his childhood love, Mimsy [Link].  Cupid finds his lost Psyche and wakes her with a kiss.  Pygmalion kisses Galatea as she transforms from cold, immovable stone into warm, living flesh.  And life is never the same.  From that still moment of waking, both Mimsy and Peter, Cupid and Psyche, Pygmalion and Galatea will move through their lives -- and exist both within that moment and within the future that the moment will continually unfold before them.

Yet -- and because -- it is life, we move on from that moment, for good or ill.  The moment stands still through it all, but its stillness moves in us.  Its potency is seen in how it drives our hearts to places we would otherwise never comprehend.  Yet even as it is moving us, we never quite lose sight of the moment.

The quiet moment stands with a truth, with a force that may not be denied -- or if denied, only dishonestly.  This has not been put more succinctly than by Eliot in Burnt Norton:

Neither from nor towards; at the still point, 
   there the dance is,
But neither arrest nor movement. And do not 
   call it fixity,
Where past and future are gathered. Neither 
   movement from nor towards,
Neither ascent nor decline. Except for the 
   point, the still point,
There would be no dance, and there is only 
   the dance.

And what if you should miss the vital moment? What if you should make some other choice just then? What if Galatea should not love in return -- what is there?  Eliot again:

What might have been is an abstraction 
Remaining a perpetual possibility
Only in a world of speculation.
What might have been and what has been
Point to one end, which is always present.
Footfalls echo in the memory
Down the passage which we did not take
Towards the door we never opened
Into the rose-garden.

Footfalls echo in the rose garden we never entered.  The ghosts of a life we did not choose move over the dead leaves.  The words we never spoke perpetually whisper in us.  The ghosts of two lovers who never embraced in complete understanding haunt our mind.

The danger is that such moments are pregnant with the lasting realities of life and love, loaded with all of their tragedy and their comedy.  That is why, as Sheldon Vanauken put it, "Honesty is better than any easy comfort." The still moment dwells only in honesty, in truth, no matter the outcome, no matter whether love is fulfilled or unrequited. Galatea may love Pygmalion -- or she may leave him.  And -- there are the masks of Comedy and Tragedy in Gerome's painting.

Pygmalion and Galatea. Gerome, c. 1890

 

In the midst of our best moments, we'll recall a truth left unspoken for fear of an outcome, and a lost moment parades before our mind.  And yet...in the midst of our worst moments, the ever-present still moment in which we chose a truth and received a gift of love presses us toward the center and relieves the spinning of peripheral and distracted life.

As the song says, you can try to repair the past.  You can try to become someone you're not.  Those attempts can't last. Gatsby tried: you can't get the past back.  Nevertheless -- here, there, always -- a certain eternal moment in the past stands, still and tranquil, within every present and future moment.

The life we chose.  The life we did not choose.  Both remain within the still moment -- a moment that remains forever "the still point of the turning world."  And eternity is merely that: a moment in time, standing still, shaping all the rest of time.

18pdr's Blog

18pdr's Travel Blog

This 'ere blog'll tell ya bowt me travels fah n' woid, if ya reaally wanna know.

This blog talks about travels external and internal: the places we go in this world as well as our inner journeys.  The past is always present: we travel back daily in our memories, and sometimes that past drives straight into our present and influences our futures.

Time isn't the only thing that goes on internally.  We travel to other people's paradigms -- visiting them, learning through them, and sometimes taking souvenirs from them.  We also watch others travel into and out of our lives.  And we travel into others' lives -- often leaving lasting impressions: love, joy, hurt, aspiration, reparation....  And there are, most importantly, travels of faith -- so you'll also find journeys of faith here.

The visual below is a progressive image of the vehicle I've been traveling around in during my years.  (Ironic thanks to Keith for making the flash file, below, and its little "ending.")