Had I the heavens’ embroidered cloths,
Enwrought with golden and silver light,
The blue and the dim and the dark cloths
Of night and light and the half light,
I would spread the cloths under your feet:
But I, being poor, have only my dreams;
I have spread my dreams under your feet;
Tread softly because you tread on my dreams.
William Butler Yeats
Anais Nin turns to those gathered around a cauldron which is brimming over into endless meadows and mounds that seem to flow forever … over and beyond this edge of cosmos.
Nin:
When I was in my youth, and I was beautiful and strong, knowing I could handle anything. I held on to hope for as long as I could.
In time, though, I gave greater significance to my silent reprieve from trust.
My sensual ecstatic encounters became work. My heart wasn’t up to it.
They were looking through me. I would have to figure out who they were seeing so that I could fight for myself. My heart began to hold a rising reservoir of blood from bruising cuts and convulsing shame …
I would come to use these experiences to understand women, and the woman in me … I also hoped that men would understand them, too. I knew that men who cared to understand women, would also care to understand themselves. In my life, they were too busy figuring out how to grab the most tender and vulnerable of moments to get what they wanted.
I refused to diminish myself … my feelings … my soul. My intuition became my most intimate lover … and my imagination fell in love with the muse.
My dreams, I carried between my breath and would swallow to place them deep within emerald pools of the fractal infinity of whom I am.
There were those very rare occasions, when I shared them with my loves, and they did not tread them. Men of my time were more insensitive than I had hoped.
And then I met Rupurt.
All that I am. All that I ever was, is in his perfect eyes.
He was my heart. I was his soul. Together we found our own. We shared a universe of starlight in the womb that was our life together.
In my pain as I lay dying, I could not remember the intimacy of our joy, our ecstatic moments of tenderness, when time would form dew drops of liquid caress.
As I was dying, I withdrew … into those emerald pools … until the rest of me would become ready. Rupurt understood. I understood him. We had room. We came to peace with losing one another. And we are eternally in love.
He is in my soul. I am in his heart.
But my human hated pain. It made her forget.
Virginia Woolf:
If I had emerald pools, they were hiding … waiting … until I could get beyond the haunting of my life. I can feel them in you.
Could the fields of daffodils, before us now … could they be my pools? Am I going to let them change me?
Anais Nin:
Let them change you.
Death wrapped me in its cloth and tightened its grip until I could see the beauty of its fabric and surrender to its embrace … And this beauty will never let me go.
I was in agony in my resistance. I forgot who I am. In the end, all I could do is surrender.
Death lay with me and helped me to forget the world. In this forgetting, I could remember … and here I am.
Woolf:
Maybe I had more hope for emerald pools than I knew. I imagine that they brought me here, to be with all of you. I am not alone. The scent of you, as one, lifts me into a beautiful sadness.
The cauldron at the edge, surrounded by rounded mounds and meadows, shoots a small geyser of liquid crystalline tears, to rain on them. The sky moves in response to gently stroke the mounds who wait for those who would take their stands — to walk the pools, in surrender.
Einstein to Godel:
You were with me toward the end, Kurt. Our talks made it easier for me to leave. We were the odd balls … the wacky ones. Thank heaven. The others had lost their fascination with true mysteries and substituted these for finding solutions … calling that mystery. I was quietly appalled and horrified. What was the difference between that and organized religion. I think this is why they continued debating one another. Each side wanted to hold the most power over others.
But what happens when we revel in the unknown … when we let that black womb take us, dissolve us, and make us new?
Godel:
We knew that we were enough, on our own. We didn’t need anyone. Hand in hand, walking along the streets of Berkeley, just forgetting the world. I don’t know how to say how I feel. Those three words are said too much. They are not enough.
Virginia, I also took my own life. It was a much slower process. I stopped eating. I know the agony of which you speak. I was eating myself alive. In those moments, in the darkness alone, I also forgot everything that I am. I could have listened to the music. I know this now.
Mathematics, with its symphony of hope and infinity, with its never ending melody of eternity’s poetic breath … played to me again … and again.
Anais Nin:
I am at home, here with all of you.
e.e.cummings:
And I am remembering,William Wadsworth:
“I wandered lonely as a cloud
That floats on high o’er vales and hills.
When all at once I saw a crowd,
A host of golden daffodils.
<…>
They flash upon that inward eye.
Which is the bliss of solitude;
And then my heart with pleasure fills,
And dances with the daffodils.
Virginia Woolf leaps with abandon, into the field of daffodils.
McClintock:
Each grain of corn had more intimacy with me, than any of the human race. I felt the connection, the oneness of genes … of DNA … of every stalk of corn and every kernel. I knew oneness and communion with nature.
I was so tender, so completely vulnerable. I was innocent with each of my genes as they allowed me to know them. I knew their light and felt their substance. I sensed their movement and their warmth. I knew I was alive through them. And I wonder if they felt a little more alive through me.
Schrodinger:
I feel more alive with you, Barbara. I feel more real. I have hope that I have never known.
Carl Jung comes forward in melodious chant:
Let’s waste time chasing stars around our heads.
I need your grace to remind me, to find my own.
All that I am. All that I ever was – is in your perfect eyes
They’re all I can see.
Einstein, Anais Nin, Woolf, McClintock,Schrodinger,Godel, e.e.cummings … sing along with Jung, into the cosmos … to the humans on earth … to all of life in the universe.
If I lay here.
If I just lay here.
Would you lie with me and just forget the world?
Forget what we’re told before we get too old
Show me a garden that’s bursting into life.
All that I am. All that I ever was
is here in your perfect eyes
They’re all I can see.
I don’t know where.
Confused about how as well …
just know that these things will never change for us at all …
If I lay here.
If I just lay here.
Would you lie with me and just forget the world?
Maya Angelou comes through the bonfire, in this moment, on this edge … as she had appeared once before, in her dream state, while she was human.
Angelou:
His day is done.
Is done.
<…>
Although born into the brutal embrace of Apartheid, scarred by the savage atmosphere of racism, unjustly imprisoned in the bloody maws of South African dungeons.<>
His stupendous heart intact, his gargantuan will hale and hearty.
He had not been crippled by brutes, nor was his passion for the rights of human beings diminished by twenty-seven years of imprisonment.<>
No sun outlasts its sunset, but it will rise again and bring the dawn.<…>
He has offered us understanding.
We will not withhold forgiveness even from those who do not ask.
Nelson Mandela’s day is done, we confess it in tearful voices, yet we lift our own to say thank you.<…>
We will not forget you, we will not dishonor you, we will remember and be glad that you lived among us, that you taught us, and that you loved us all.
Thank you Maya. “No sun outlasts its sunset, but it will rise again and bring the dawn.” This is you, Maya Angelou.
copyright © 2013-2014, Lyn Marsh,PhD, all rights reserved. You may not reproduce materials without permission from Lyn Marsh,PhD.
Information on photos: http://www.pinterest.com/lmarshphd/on-the-edge-of-the-cosmos/
Lyrics for Chasing Cars, Snow Patrol are laced throughout the story.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chasing_Cars
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virginia_Woolf
I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud, poem by William Wordsworth
Cloths from Heaven, poem by W. B. Yeats
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