A waltz of the word and wordless ~ Malinda Words

My friend Terry Nichols showed me a sky I had never seen before. Rather, she gave me eyes to see a sky in a way I hadn’t thought was possible or even meaningful. In short, the idea never entered my mind.

In Peru, she told me, people look at the night sky not as an exercise to gaze upon stars but the darkness between then. That’s where the stories reside, apparently.

There are starless nights and nights of stars. She sees stars like few of us ever get to see them. In the deserts of New Mexico you get the full 360 degree view of the sky. It’s a sight that immediately humbles. We are made keenly aware of our dust-particle dimensions in relation to the vastness of the universe. And if we think of the great unknown, then dust-particle is what the sum total of human knowledge is. This is also made apparent.

Knowledge is not the same thing as wisdom. Not the same thing as comprehension either. Such things intersect and it could be interesting to explore the relevant spaces — the domains, the commonalities, the points of intersection.

It’s easier to look at the sky.

I did.

So, remembering Terry, I looked for stories. I saw stars. I saw darkness. I wandered among them. I wondered.

I drew a line from my eyes to the dark blobs of sky. If that line continued, what would it encounter. ‘Stars,’ I told myself. Stars whose light is yet to reach the furthest my gaze could go. Is darkness really dark, I asked myself. Is it the product of an eye’s error, a human limitation or just mine and mine alone?

And so, the darkness told me stories, such as the above and others too. And so, gradually, I lost the eyes to see the stars. At one moment, I realized that mind had gone one way and eye another, for I no longer saw star, no longer saw darkness, no longer the sky. Thoughts disassociated themselves from the sky and from one another. Thus fragmented, it was a strange inability to comprehend that enveloped and even more strangely its companion quilt — an ‘at peace’ with myopic elements of self.

From then on, I dwelled on stars at my feet and between them dark skies. Stars around me and darkness that made them brighter. Things seen which make other things invisible. Things dark and perhaps sacred or pernicious whose continued existence depend on the brightness that stars give out.

Seen. Unseen. Separate and together. They are and they are not. There has to be a lesson here, I felt. And immediately I told myself, ‘maybe the lesson is that there’s no lesson at all; there are no answers simply because there are no questions.’

I looked up at the sky. The stars were still there. ‘How tiny!’ I thought to myself. ‘That’s a lie,’ I told myself immediately afterwards. A voice in the head said softly, ‘both’ and I’m sure I heard it suppressing a laugh.

I had floated among constellations, retired them all, journeyed with darkness, alighted on earth again. There was grass under my feet. So I stood there awhile. And from a star-configuration and the illusion of darkness, a story came to me. It came in multiple forms: a hundred toffee-wrappers, each distinct; a melody I’ve never heard before played on a bamboo flute; a single flower upon a book of verse. And before my eyes, they all turned into words.

I was being tasked to write, I felt. ‘The story, however, is not written in or with words, but in the space between letter and letter, word and word, sentence and sentence, paragraph and paragraph,’ I told myself.

I did not write it down. I will not write it down. I cannot write it down. And yet, it is a story that anyone reading this can gather. Of this I am convinced. It's a dance, a waltz in fact.

28 November 2020

A waltz of the word and wordless

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