Читать книгу Of Silence and Song - Dan Beachy-Quick - Страница 18

8.

A stain or strain of music. Stain: tinge with color other than the natural one. Strain: to draw tight.

When I had my first child I felt inside myself what I never had to feel before: my solitude. I felt it strain under the new shape. Those first days when eternity is the caul, the child’s timelessness leaks into time, staining it with some tone so pure it creates a rift in what hardly exists—the place within myself, more mine than saying I can mean, not where I am by myself, but where solitude lives its own involuted, involuntary life.

I didn’t know it existed until it was broken.

Singularity not of the self, but in it. Gravity from which not even sound escapes. Fear of the infant crying, also known as the event horizon.

The letter aleph, which makes no noise, draws silence tight and then a sound can follow.

Heraclitus might say, As of the bow, the arrow.

Sometimes I think we carry within ourselves an aleph somewhere behind our heart, or is it within the liver, purging noise as blood is purged of its stain. I guess I don’t know. A transplanted spiritual organ given to us on loan. But I don’t know the terms of the agreement.

Keep quiet. But I fear I can’t.

The letter bet is the first sound. Just silence precedes it. It is shaped like a house missing a wall, and mystics say it should be thought of as a house or a tent. When I studied the mystical importance of Hebraic letters I read that we house ourselves within the fear of God and the letter bet informs us of our position. It is a letter that acts as a portrait of the human condition. Or is it that we live within the love of God? I can’t remember exactly our condition. Bet says we begin to exist by dwelling. Buh-buh-buh, the first sounds a baby makes. Maybe the letter is a kind of shelter from whose safety sometimes we must grope our way back out into the unlettered universe through which aleph blows her silence. Housed in fear or housed in love and silence at the door. Learning to speak.

The words for beginning, head, and blessing also begin with bet.

Where I learned this I forget. Midrash Rabbah, or the Sefer Yetzirah, I can’t remember. I forget how the blessing began in my head.

The source goes astray or it goes missing.