|
|
|
"InSTANT!" It rang out in two notes not with an uh sound but with an ah sound, Latin. It gave him a deliberate pause and he stopped on his way. Three hours before he had woken up, packed, and started walking. It was still dark and the tall conifers above blocked out all but a few of the stars on the blue night. He wondered if he was dreaming what he heard, and then he started walking again. Alone. To pass the time he would think of a song and whistle it. It wouldn't be long before he reached the treeline, and soon after he'd be at the summit. The hike was just one of a number of self-centered mountain climbs. He was walking and whistling when a voice started singing along. Had this ever happened before he wondered? That the woods would be singing to him, with him? Even now other voices were joining in, getting louder and softer, jumping octaves. Could this be real, this song, in little words in pauses in breaks and then in a cacophonical chorus that kept riding louder out of suddenly soft notes? For him? Right then he looked up and he could see the treeline, but there was no one around. He shouted out to ask who was singing, and what was the song, but the song just kept going. There was a moment of fear as he started to differentiate people out of the voices. It couldn't be a dream; sunlight was coming over the edge of the night horizon, spilling. And so he started singing himself. It was a song he had heard long ago but had never found the words to--only a scrap of the melody. Suddenly that didn't matter, the words were all rather much the same, the music was any of a number of mixed melodies. He could make it all up as he went along. And somehow he was no longer alone and he was no longer trying to escape from city lights or car engines or the noises of other people. Months later he would read two passages laid side by side in dactylic hexameter. It was just this scene and he would think back then on the mountain streams and the exercising chorus and how, for the first time, his life had been the simile. Haec dum Dardanio Aeneae miranda videnturInstaurat. That was the word months earlier he had found and attached himself to, not knowing where it would go. He had been searching a dictionary for forgotten words and all of the sudden that one word had appeared, anglicized of course, but still true: instauration. A beginning, a restoration. Ever since then he had entitled that year of his life "one last instauration" and he had searched for an instant to attach to that title. Now, here it was. When he got to the summit, the voices stopped. Indeed! "Why did you stop singing?" he asked. Our morning exercises are over. "What was the song?" The same one we do always. "Why did you sing along with me?" We always have. Haven't you heard us before? "Teach me the song." You know it already.
These mountains do not have to be lonely places just as these mythologies don't have to be questioned--would Vergil himself have been given a pause to hear his own chorus singing in the Cynthian ridges? Probably so. Any magic of the story is in the truth that it reveals through what else it hides in the mask. There is something in the human existence, something of tragedy, of friendship, of life, that one cannot leave behind, even in the wilderness away from the smoldering smokestacks and processions of rush-hour traffic that so often make up our lives. It is, then, as in this one part, of an instaurating song:
|
Back to Writings