Rilke and Bayo - Take 1

Something at the Edges

LET THIS DARKNESS BE A BELL TOWER

Quiet friend who has come so far,

feel how your breathing makes more space around you.
Let this darkness be a bell tower
and you the bell. As you ring,

what batters you becomes your strength.
Move back and forth into the change.
What is it like, such intensity of pain?
If the drink is bitter, turn yourself to wine.

In this uncontainable night,
be the mystery at the crossroads of your senses,
the meaning discovered there.

And if the world has ceased to hear you,
say to the silent earth: I flow.
To the rushing water, speak: I am.

from Sonnets to Orpheus II, 29
by Rainer Maria Rilke
Translated by Joanna Macy and Anita Barrows, In Praise of Mortality, 2016
(With gratitude to Joanna and Anita, and begging forgiveness for the reproduction here.)

This poem has come into our lives at a moment of ‘collective national darkness’ and personal change (mine). There is depth and beauty here - words somehow as relevant and meaningful now as they must have been a century ago when Rilke wrote them (in his mid twenties). And as Deb and I read and recite aloud (Deb has it down, I’m working on it), the ‘meaning discovered there’ aligns with many other stories, places, and people that have come into our lives of late. I hope Rilke, wherever he is, won’t mind too much if I explode his poem and write a bit (in this post and others to follow) about things his words make me feel/sense, and about small stories of connection and magic that seem to pervade my life at this ‘crossroads’.

My profound gratitute to Deb, for introducing me to Joanna Macy + Anita Barrows’ Rilke translations and asking me to listen with her to Joanna’s beautiful reading of the poem above, and for pointing me towards the writings and speaking of Bayo Akomolafe. All of these have come into my life at a moment of transition following the ending of my most recent ‘traditional’ work engagment, an ending which Deb has helped me to see as a gift, a deepening, and a new beginning.

Post 1 - Something at the Edges

There is something going on here. Coincidences, movement and flows just beyond the edge of sight, ley lines of connection, strange synchronicities outside the rectilinear architectures of expectation and conformity, reveal themselves - almost inevitably it seems - as I step tentatively out of preconceived frames and begin (slowly) to ‘see’ without the focusing lense of orthodoxy and logic.

Strange thoughts, coming from me. I have lived much of my life ‘squeezed into my head’, seeking to make sense of things within the cartesian, orthogonal confines of rational explanation and ordering, desiring to name things in order to contain or control them. I have been uncomfortable with uncertainty, ill at ease with questions without resolutions. Truth be told, I often rage at and fear what I can’t predict or control. And I have mostly sought to fit myself into the confines of a self-made Procrustean Box.

And yet.

There is something going on here.

Perhaps more than a few of us are sensing something at the edges.

It’s there in Rilke’s poem:

Quiet friend who has come so far,
feel how your breathing makes more space around you.

What may we find in the space around ourselves when we calm our breath, on our long journey, and stop demanding answers when the questions themselves are what matter and need to be lived? Deb and I talk often about this concept. I think she may say (perhaps in a different post) that the best way forward is just saying ‘yes’ to more things and people, to life (without guarantees, or definable ‘return on investment’).

This ‘something’ at the edges is there, too, in much of what Bayo Akomolafe writes. I sense in his words a lovely, bewildering, hard-to-articulate idea - a revelation (of sorts), or some sort of ‘carrying away’, as he calls it - something important but hard to get a fix on - that just feels true and deep and beautiful. It is - as Bayo aknowledges - not yet languagable. (Yet, he approaches it, communicates its essence, with his own unique voice, and you can hear in the audience response that people feel it.)

In his conversation with Ned Buskirk in the You’re Going to Die podcast, Bayo says:

“Life is a constant embarkation. So it’s this constancy of embarkation, this being carried away, that tells me that the world is filled with the energy of the yet-to-come, that there’s so much generosity there. I don’t need to look through the prism of my degrees to see that I’m connected with knowledge and wisdom that precedes and succeeds and exceeds the privacy of what I think I know. In my not knowing I’m introduced to this generosity.”¹

And:

“It’s such a time of loss. We’re so habituated into being rectilinear citizen subjects, this is the posture of excellence, your back is straight, your head is high, this is how we’re taught to walk on the streets, and there’s something obscured in that rectilinearity.…We’re so enamored of our postures. We need other forms to take root.”²

And:

“What the clean geometric lines of modernity obscure is how bodies travel, and the ancestrality that leaks into the spaces between us. The world travels in lower case, not in capital letters. That tells me that we are not as isolated as we think. We practice embodiment. Bodies are practices. And we also practice isolation, because we live in the architecture that presumes we need to do that. You step into a room and you need to put on your best face, put out your degrees, you know, show that you are successful. The neurotypicality of the every day.

I like the idea that I don’t need to complete my own sentences - that the spaces between us are not as empty as we think they are.”³

So what does this stuff mean?

I realize there is a slightly cryptic tilt - a simultaneous knowing and un-knowing - to these words. I’m (as mentioned) used to expending a lot of (wasted) energy to arrive at clear explanations and straightforward answers, and I’m attempting here to articulate something new for me - more a feeling and exploration than explanation, something nascent, a growing awareness, something just beyond reach but tangible.

For me personally, I believe I need to ‘let go of what I thought I knew’. (Easier said than done.)

And there is so much darkness in this moment of ‘the American wound’, as Josh Schrei puts it (Emerald Podcast), that many of us (actually most of those Deb and I interact with) are asking ourselves how to act differently, how to engage in new ways, how to resist, and how to simply go on living in a country of such vast contradictions, in a time of such existential angst and simmering rage.

Rilke:

Let this darkness be a bell tower
and you the bell. As you ring,
what batters you becomes your strength.

This is not, in my view, just making lemonade. Rather than contract inward and disengage in difficult times, Rilke seems to be saying: Witness with open eyes and heart. Speak truth. As you speak (or sing, or write, or create) you may find the source of your voice, your depth, your power.

So (this may sound strange) I find myself leaning into what - somehow - my body knows but my mind has obscured. My body knows: when I walk at sunset with Deb, when I sink my hands into the soil of our backyard garden and plant spring seedlings, when I beat life-polyrhythms on my djembe with other drummers co-creating the pulse, when I watch our daughter painting in her al fresco studio (our front porch)…

In the end, I think what this all comes down to is simple humanity, kindness between strangers, an honoring of the other (in community and in ourselves), a growing understanding that, as Bayo states, the individual is already a crossroads, manifold.⁴

In this uncontainable night,
be the mystery at the crossroads of your senses,
the meaning discovered there.

I can’t say what Rilke means by the mystery or the meaning discovered at the crossroads, but for me these beautiful words feel like inclusion, connection between humans, connection with everything.

This is the opposite of othering and exclusion.

“The individual is a territory. It’s not you, brother. We are a web of relations. We are in a post-individual world.”⁵

Bayo again.

Two glimpses of that ‘something’ at the edges:

Bayo Akomolafe, when asked to introduce himself to the audience of the You’re Going to Die event, says: “I want to start by saying that at this moment I’m missing my son.” And in his website bio, before any mention of achievements or degrees, he states he is the grateful life-partner to EJ, father to Alethea and Kyah, son of Olufunmilayo and Ignatius.

The other day, Deb and I were walking together on a grass covered path in a field at the edge of PRS, near an old white barn, along the edge of a small wetland pond. A man, an elder, coming the other way, stopped to greet us - strangers - as if he’d known us for years and handed us his binoculars to better see the male and female Mallard ducks on the pond, and their trailing duckling offspring (joyfully flapping, paddling and quacking). Such a small but profound moment of human connection within the relational web of a life-filled planet. Five minutes of quiet conversation, as if with someone known for years, a simple gift of time and attention (as Deb would say), no thought for anything but that radiant moment, at sunset, shared with a ‘friend’.

In this uncontainable night…

1. Transcribed from Bayo Akomolafe - LIVE at The Lost Church in San Francisco, You’re Going to Die: The Podcast, Ned Buskirk

2. Transcribed from Bayo Akomolafe - LIVE at The Lost Church in San Francisco, You’re Going to Die: The Podcast, Ned Buskirk

3. Transcribed from Bayo Akomolafe - LIVE at The Lost Church in San Francisco, You’re Going to Die: The Podcast, Ned Buskirk

4. Transcribed from Bayo Akomolafe - LIVE at The Lost Church in San Francisco, You’re Going to Die: The Podcast, Ned Buskirk

5. Transcribed from Bayo Akomolafe - LIVE at The Lost Church in San Francisco, You’re Going to Die: The Podcast, Ned Buskirk