In the end, it doesn’t matter if love comes to you or not, or if doesn’t come to you in the form or with the force you may have wanted.

All that matters is that love exists somewhere in the world, and that we strive to make a world where this astonishing fact — which alone gives meaning to life, and is itself immortal — can flourish in all of its manifestations.

Visionaries peer through the grid of flames that separates us from full reality. They get closer than the rest of us, and thus can discern more of the shapes and landscapes there … although of course the heat of the grid — and the chaotic energies that drive them to the quest in the first place — distort and obscure their vision.

And so, what they bring back to us is not the gospel truth, not the whole story, not without error — but it is closer to reality than we would ever reach on our own.

***

(And then, the  next week….)

The Outward Circumference

I was on the second floor of Blackwell’s,
sitting in the covered chair next to the Russian books.
I was reading Blake, in Erdman’s edition,
The Marriage of Heaven and Hell it was,
when I fell asleep and had the most vivid dream.

I dreamed I was on the second floor of Blackwell’s,
sitting in the covered chair next to the Russian books,
and you walked up to me, as natural as air,
dressed smartly, in some long dark sweater,
high boots, and, I think, a thick scarf
wound and bunched around your neck;
your brown hair, longer here,
was falling and flowing to your shoulders.
You were smiling, you leaned down, you told me something,
some slight thing, some happy gossip.

Then I woke up, without knowing that I had slept.
I looked down at the heavy book in my lap, and read:
“Energy is the only life and is from the Body, and
Reason is the broad or outward circumference of Energy,”
which were the same lines I’d seen twice that week,
quoted in a book of cosmology as a prescient illustration
of the true nature of matter as discerned by modern science,
then in a book on brain structure and its relation
to our perception of reality and meaning in the world.

Then with a jolt I looked up, looked around:
Where were you? You had been here,
I remembered, your living presence,
in this very scene, intact, no dreamish muddle,
not a single thing distorted, but now ….

It took a long, disturbing moment
To fully grasp it had not been.

More recently, in his song “Not Dark Yet,” Dylan sings, “I was born here and I’ll die here/Against my will.” That’s a direct lift from the Pirkei Avot 4:29: “Against your will you were born. Against your will you will die.”

Rogovoy’s identification of the midrash as the source for one of the most powerful lines in one of Dylan’s most powerful songs is indeed an astute work of scholarship, giving us a genuinely new insight into the song. What is equally interesting is to go back to the original text, and see how Dylan does not just appropriate it, he also “turns” it in a new direction.

For after the phrasing that Dylan uses in the song — “against your will you were born; against your will you live; against your will you die” — the passage from the Pirkei Avot goes on: “against your will you are destined to give an account before the King Who rules over kings, the Holy One, Blessed is He.” While the dread of judgment hangs over the passage, it also carries a counterpoint of hope: God does exist, there is life after death, and thus a purpose to life — to make oneself fit for the passage, worthy of a good verdict from the divine Judge.

Yet there is no such counterpoint in the lyrics of Dylan’s song: no assumption of a life beyond, no hope, no purpose, not even “the murmur of a prayer.” He has taken a passage which denotes an unquenchable faith in God and put it into a context of the bleakest existential despair.

But there is yet a further turning. The very beauty of the song serves as a counterpoint to the despairing lyrics. The actual experience of the recording as a whole — the haunting and majestic music, the vivid emotion and deep humanity put across in the singing (despite the singer’s insistence that his “sense of humanity has gone down the drain”) — is itself redemptive, or at least sustaining. Here — at least for the duration of the song — there is meaning, there is engagement, there is beauty, there is truth. If our flawed, conflicted, brief and brittle human existence can produce such works of depth and power, then it does have worth and purpose — no matter what happens after the coming darkness finally arrives…even if “beyond here lies nothing.”

The title comes from this:

Bright, terrible spirit of Life and Death,
Quencher and quickener of ev’ry breath,
Particle, universe, memory, fate,
Rapturous melody, discordant state,
Cloud of unknowing,
Field overflowing,
Storm ever blowing,
Dream without end….

More will follow, in various forms.