My throat began hurting last night, and I didn’t get much sleep, but the dark hours gave me the perfect opportunity to practice meditation: referential and open; and to play around with the effects of positive affirmations. I was able to lessen the intensity of the pain for a minute or so after each experiment.
The morning’s first cup of coffee with milk and salt left my throat feeling worse than when I got out of bed, so I traded the second cup for one filled with turkey broth (simmered into being last night) amended with cayenne and garlic tinctures. I also prefaced the broth with a few drops of echinacea tincture. The results were not perfect, but better than before.
I am taking Robert Bly’s first essay in Looking for Dragon Smoke at a leisurely pace. It’s titled “Six Disciplines that Intensify Poetry,” and I am having a go at each discipline one reading session at a time. This morning, I read about the second: “The Ancient Friendship Between Sounds,” which leaves me thinking that I might have gotten more out of my college literature studies had any professor anthropomorphized an element or two of poetry, like Bly does here. I’ll record a paragraph or two:
The tiny particles of spoken sound which are announced on paper as in, and ar, and or and an and un are lovely things! The language experts who have very little sense of language call them phonemes. Please forget that right away. Calling them sound particles is OK for now. Grasping these little sounds with the pincers of our ears is the most exciting process we can learn to do—it is like the study of the Egyptian artifacts. They are really little creatures—in and am and el and il and en. A sound friendship, or a sound-urn contains the delicate, easily destroyed artifacts of music. A sound particle or being is the union of a heavily veiled vowel and a consonant, the one leaning on the other, so to speak, two friends who are never parted, who always sing the same little tune, no matter how it’s spelled.
While I have no desire to drill down into the details of poetry, I do like to be presented with new ways of considering things that are presented/thought about in essentially only one way.
Here’s a bit more from Bly:
W. B. Yeats always emphasizes that, for the heart to take in a poem, the soul in us has to go into a slight trance; and that can’t be done by assertion, nor image, nor fact, nor meter. The music of the sound particles induces the trance.
I’ve spent a lot of time here with Bly, but I think he’s worth it, and I know that this lovely, little, translated-from-German verse by Goethe is:
Over all the hilltops
Silence,
Among all the treetops
You feel hardly
A breath moving.
The birds fall silent in the woods.
Simply wait! Soon
You too will be silent.
We got the first snowfall of the season last night, and I’m looking forward to snow-snuggled silence in the woods across the road.
