Sunday, June 5, 2011

a certain slant of light

They are but fleeting, evanescent 'spots of time', yet can so overwhelm you when they happen, because the unbearable truth they contain is only made bearable in this way --

By clearing a lucent passage through the narrow and ill-lit corridors of the moment.

The truth to which poetry alone gives access -- those 'necessary and difficult things', as Italo Calvino once put it: realising the proportions of life, the place of love in it, its force and rhythm, the place of death, time, loss, sadness, irony.

Life-defining, difficult beauty.

And the musician-poets who consistently capture and give a shape to this experience are so very few in the anguished dying world we live in. Those who do not compromise and remain experimental, risk-taking, but also giving, generous to the others they help and welcome into their projects.

I guess that's what distinguishes a true artist from a self-absorbed fake or failure. This capacity for remaining obstinately open to themselves and to others, vulnerable yet ever-evolving, unfolding always in astonishing ways.


The most beautiful voice in the world indeed.



An older, shorter version of 'A certain slant of light', now part of
David Sylvian's  new album Died in the Wool (May 2011).
Music: Sylvian/Bamg/Honore   Words: Emily Dickinson


A CERTAIN SLANT OF LIGHT

There's a certain slant of light,
On winter afternoons,
That oppresses, like the weight
Of cathedral tunes.

Heavenly hurt it gives us;
We can find no scar,
But internal difference
Where the meanings are.

None may teach it anything,
’T is the seal, despair,—
An imperial affliction
Sent us of the air.

When it comes, the landscape listens,
Shadows hold their breath;
When it goes, ’t is like the distance
On the look of death.


--Emily Dickinson, from The Complete Poems, Part Two: Nature, LXXXII.

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