3
Aesthetic reflection is the reflection of nowhere;
the innerness that collapses in beauty. A thing
is beloved, but we are terrified of the hunger
that our longing creates. So the plasm of life and
death intertwines in each being. How it will be determined
is a matter of faith:
And it is like a fire that has passed through my flesh,
this moral awakening to the blood. To the absence
of death in all inner action: the turning over
of mind into soul and soul into mind; it is a being with
a body. So I ask, how
can we be responsive to the life that is given? To the
life that evolves in us and is mysterious to even us?
We must look to the soul that is drawn down
out of nothingness into shape so the soul is the
shape of desire. We are opened out from the womb of
silence and ask, how does the body die except through fear?
How does the soul die except through pain?
The body may die but the soul must always live-
not in space, but in the time before the birth of the body,
outside of itself, completely relative to the opening of the
life within it. The origin of life is the absence that
strips from the core of longing an emptiness. So life
has an image: lyrical and nameless and free.
With an almost incredible eloquence we speak of death,
aware of how acutely time has compounded itself out of
stillness and must run through us, without god, with no
divinity but the blood and the music of the blood.
We are starkly beautiful in our desire for a new strangeness,
for a new being brought forth out of the old.
4
The body must face its appearance,
it must be renewed despite its dying, the soul
bright with love, the mind given over to the
enchantment of the life beyond the body, the
life in nature, the life that is like water... And sings
like the water that is entrenched in the spirit of death,
so unknown and subtle within us.
How does death undo us except through
an awareness of death? The materials of the universe
are fashioned up out of a darkness, they surge through
us and we convert them into particles of light.
The imaginative faculty may still behold the sun
in winter, and I may ask –
how may I die within this sun? How may I kill this
deathlessness in me? This is the rejoinder of the soul
to time – without fear for what is to come, with a knowledge
that all is becoming and cannot be a simple sundering
or joining together.
The Greek woman does not cower in her nakedness.
She does not cower at the edge of the light blue
Mediterranean. Her prayers are to the Eros within her, they
are said upright and with unconscious pride. The tendrils
of life have hooked deep within her, and have grasped her being.
They are ever-hidden, these purposeful tendrils of life... Ever-moving
beneath our spiritual skin, ever moving towards our inmost soul.
And how can we kill these shoots of life so that we may capture
their vitality within us? We must not be fearful and say, I
have more and more life ahead of me, for life is always gathering
upon itself. I am not afraid of the milk of spiritual infancy to run dry –
I am nourished by the overcoming of death, and am brought
now closer to life.
I wonder at my own inner beauty, my own inner necessity, and my
own brutality. These are our virtues, these are our causes for hope.
The mind may make itself immaculate, may cleanse itself of
death within life and life within death.
And so everything good is hidden, and everything good may be uncovered
as it is. The image of spring, contained within that of winter. The
snow which covers the grass and flowers and the deepest roots of trees.
Everything good has life and is saved by life.
Everything good cleanses itself of death as
death without life and life without death. The good is
without a god, it has no need of god, it is a part of itself and
a partaker only of its love for what it is a part. My anguish
is only that I am poised at the point of this renewal. I
must collapse and fold back into this new existence, this
new and greater existence of love.
All things must have a limit, and God must be limited through
being God. Each perfection demands a requisite imperfection. To
come into being means we must eventually pass out of being.
A child is active and strong, a child hovers above the
earth and says that every single beauty has a purpose. A
child does not yearn for death because a child finds
death everywhere already. The child feels the miraculous fact
of being suddenly alive...
All is bitterness, pain, and acceptance.
But all is free –