Our despair: a drop in an ocean. Death--the final bill in which the challenge turns into a phantom. Ambitions, hopes, enchantment. All this finds its peace there in the world beyond. Words irritate. Gestures mislead. Emotions dissolve. Only sounds speak a language that might be understood. If one opens the heart, would there be someone receptive enough? But who is listening? Who is able to feel it? Often I do ask myself, where does a heartbeat identical to mine exist? And the attempt of an answer is: out there, on the other end of my own sound --Gidon Kremer
I know this. I have made the sounds and found the other heartbeat.
And it was of mine own. “Mine” not in the sense that “I” made it,
but because it chose to flow through me and I was compelled to give it
voice. Now my sound has been silenced. It has sung out enough
for the time being.
Instead, I am learning how to write words in the quiet churning of the
mind. They flow out as well. And again there is another at
the other end pacing at the same pace and nodding “yes, yes yes.”
Murmuring.
A writer starts out, I think, wanting to be a transfiguring agent, and ends up usually just making contact, contact with other human beings. This, unsurprisingly, is not enough. (Making contact with the self--healing the wound--is even less satisfactory.) Writers end up writing stories--or rather, stories’ shadows--and they're grateful if they can, but it is not enough. Nothing the writer can do is ever enough.Why does the writer write? The writer writes to serve--hopelessly he writes in the hope that he might serve--not himself and not others, but that great cold elemental grace that knows us.
--Joy Williams, “Why I Write”
To serve the voice that demands to be given voice. There are
some who are creators and have no choice but to create, and some who are
receptors who haven't the slightest desire: it all seems like too
much effort but they recognize the creation, connect and willingly take
it in. It mystifies me but somehow purpose is manifested. I
create, you receive. (Somewhere in the middle there are the interpreters
as well: classical musicians, actors...) I have no choice
but to be doing this writing. It arises as a need despite the many
petty human obligations and I enter the transcendental state within which
the words emerge. An odd place that I know I've been to only as I
come up for air. The state of otherness. Where you wait at
the other end. And we are somehow tangled up in the whole.
Churning. Tremendously nebulous isn't it? But you do know what
I'm talking about don't you? Terribly intimate.
I was surprised to find a Tarot card stuck to the skin of my back when I woke this morning. The Ace of Wands: A time of beginnings--a marriage, birth, enterprise, creation or, in a sense, the creative or emotional momentum behind them.
Beginning. Creation. Momentum. A surging forward like cresting storm clouds, like sheets of rain that traverse the continent: one great sweep of water that travels from California to Texas to Maine. From the highest cloud to the lowest valley. One drop. Down through the rills, creeks, streams, rivers, roaring to the ocean and rising back up into the clouds. One side to the other. Never ending. But given shape and meaning by the act of creation. An eternal act of beginning what has already been.
“What the hell are you blathering on about?”
I am learning to create that which already exists.
There you are. At the other end of my own heartbeat.
Hi.
5/5/2001
Ingrid Karklins