Musings from the Heart: "A Short Story in Breaths" — 2

— She —

And there was — (she)

On such long, drunken evenings she would keep still there, like a tame cat

of soft and drowsy silk

Not a movement escaped her

Nor did her childishness whisper to her of any amusement

She kept still in a kind of somber abstraction

from which breathed the fragrance of a chaste, tormenting love

Now folded upon the slender figure

Now suffused through the long dark lifted neck — at other times in something warm of childhood's innocence, and of importunate humility

While her companion pressed on with his chanting, as one carried away, possessed by what he gives

And if some errand were asked of her, or some pressing need to be met

She would hold her hurrying breaths

And look up at him in supplication

That he might cease reciting those sweet passages until she returned

And she was never long in returning....

But... did she, one wonders, understand anything of what she heard...?

And did her cousin ever perceive that she was there, that he might make plain to her what was closed to her understanding?!

She was, beyond doubt, too small for him to favor her with a sign or a gesture

And she never troubled herself over the one or the other!!

Her whole care was to see in him a world teeming with meanings, unlike the monotonous world she had known

Until you would think that life itself moved and stretched, blew and leapt

in that measured whisper, which seemed to come from far away

And on its dazzling plane she would meet things she had never known,

things bewitching, alluring,

Yet for her this was merely a ravishing beauty — as in her mother's beauty, for instance —

pouring itself into the finest fibers of her aesthetic being

so that she felt the necessity of responding to it

and the necessity of its reflection upon her dun-colored life — a fleeting reflection

which there was no hope of overlooking, or of driving from her keen imagination

★

— Unbridled —

How! How?!

How can I be like him, Mother — a poet, of soaring imagination!

I, the unlettered one, who cannot manage a single one of the letters?

But did she truly want to be, like him, a creative poet?

Certainly not........

Rather she felt the necessity of giving expression to this overflowing soul

and found in herself no material to spare her that mute travail

that travail which gnawed away her soul without mercy or respite..

The insistent obsession wrung consent from her parents

And the pampered girl accepted parting from her idol, to journey alone to the city, in quest of learning and knowledge..

those two companions who would lead her — in her own phrase — straight on to where she wished

to where she could give expression to teeming, seething feelings...

to a great, wide world, which she loved as much as she hated it

And with the appetite of a fierce and hungry creature, she set about making up what had escaped her through her first years...

She fell to devouring, between lesson and lesson, dozens of the lessons of books,

and digesting, between one lecture and the next, hundreds of the lectures of books

And thus the little unlettered girl schooled herself in many of the arts and the sciences

and the branches of knowledge, until she fulfilled the meanings of her tyrannous inwardness as no girl had fulfilled them before. And thus four years of her young, rich life slipped away
as serpents slip away to their dens, without noise and without hiss
And life grew calm again upon her thick, weary lashes

that she might rest and gather herself for another such leap — but no: that she might wake, little by little, from a long, long dream...
upon a dun reality, holding bitterness at its bitterest, and, of the story, the tears and the sobbing..
Was it, then, a thing decreed for her, that such truths should overwhelm her as did overwhelm her, until she disbelieved after having believed?!!!

★

— Conclusion —
Knowledge leads beyond its own meaning — and philosophy... that merry sprite, gray-haired and chattering...
Did she gain at its hands what could satisfy her burning questioning and her overmastering longing?!
Did it grant her to comprehend the universe with insight and guidance?

There is, there — beyond existence — something that cannot be known, and cannot be divined
something that overwhelms the whole of her thought, until life has for her neither taste nor color..
Ah, would that she had remained unlettered, unskilled in inquiry, and probing, and comparison — would that she had stayed ignorant, not stirring for an obscure answer, nor kindling for a question that has no answer — nay, would that that surging vitality had remained within bounds, half-veiled
Then its owner would have had warrant to turn her life in another direction, one that might have been more profitable to her, and a straighter path

And then this soul would not have been worn out as it was worn out by thinking and sleeplessness
And then her life would not have been futility, nor a futility against her, nor vanity or obsession — but something simple, artless, easeful, as on those long tranquil evenings sighing forever with poetry leaping and spacious, in musings and flashes — miracles dancing light and pulsing to melodies from a string
a string whose sighing spreads through the soul a world of abundant hopes stamped with goodness

(To be continued in the next issue)