Читать книгу Hollywood to Vienna - Donald Ellis Rothenberg - Страница 17

Now what were those words doing here, rattling around my brain as I walk in this still forest, with its many shades of green? Pine trees, and the thin and plentiful, small and straight trees whose name I do not know. And the white birch-like trees, all of them shimmering in the slight breeze, with the afternoon sun shining through the flickering leaves. The shadows and the light, the opposites combined, always present like the leopard and the kid, the wolf with the lamb, all so irrelevant now as I feel the earth beneath my feet.

My shoes glide, shuffling against the ground soaked with after-rain wetness beside a flowing stream carrying runoff from the recent downpour. I hear the fresh gurgling talking water. Birds chirp, singing and rustling leaves, looking for something, hopping to and fro. Overhead, clouds play hide and seek with the sun, while underneath in this forest, the protection is comforting.

All alone, I walk for a long time lost in thought and then no thought. The movement carries me along as if my body were weightless, and someone, something else, is moving it as if gliding unseen, a guest and yet at home here in this nature that seems so gentle now. Where is home, after all?

There are many hues of brown and green, yellows and orange, with a sky that is mostly clear blue with a few billowy white clouds moving by. This is where we return when our time is over and we must leave our body, and the decay starts and continues, just like that tree over there that must have fallen last winter. Already there are insects and new green leaves sprouting around its roots. This compost, all this humus and new fertilizer: after the death begins new life, and the life cycle continues on and on and on . . . despite what man does. We think we are so holy and important, and yet we are just small little ants in this universe.

What was that? Oh look, it’s a little squirrel! Light brown, and caught in a glance with me. We are feeling each other. We stop for an eternal moment, a lifetime. My breath is carried away. The squirrel stands on its back legs, looking, not scared. It seems to recognize me.

Are we communicating through thought, energy transference, something connecting us all, the plants and animals, the symbiotic relationship, the mix? The moment passes as we continue on, squirrel first. He or she has work to do — must comb about the forest, hide things, look for things, scurry about. Oh, that must be the mate coming over, wondering what happened. We know this grokking of each other. It’s been going on for millennia, forever. We humans think so much, we forget to live and feel and breathe, and just be at ease.

All of a sudden I hear the piano again, da da da da da . . . as the green evaporates into a recital hall. Is it Strauss, or — who was it that used to write and walk in the Vienna Woods inspired by the beauty, the sheer innocence, the intensity, the cool, crisp, luft/air so rare and dear? Caught up in a dream, a recital with the Kaiser at the palace perhaps, pomp and circumstance from another era. The monarchy lived with the music, supporting composers at the center of a whirlwind that lives on. The music in the hearts of space, across the continents, transforming into late night radio sounds its namesake . . .