Much of What Happens to Us in Life is Nameless Because Our Vocabulary is Too Poor
edited from John Berger’s “Some Notes on Song”


I cup the air with both my hands and close my eyes.
And this gesture announces that the muzzle of the song
is nestling in the palm of my hand.
Putting its arms around me in historical time,
like I have not been held before.
When the song smiled, which it often did,
it was the smile that comes after the tragic has been assimilated.
Hopelessness leads to wordlessness.
It’s difficult today to express or sum up in prose
the experience of Being Alive and Becoming.
The living flesh is needed to interpret and
raise its contours above the precise present,
and then…

like a river the song –
following its own course,
yet always flowing to the sea, from which everything came.
The fact that in many languages the place where
a river enters the sea
is called the river’s mouth emphasizes the comparison.
The waters that flow out of a river’s mouth
have come from an immense elsewhere.
And something similar happens with
what comes out of the mouth of a song.
And something whole out of the empty…

All I know is that these arms wrap around nothing.
Only empty space interlaced by the circle my arms make.
In other words, songs are sung to an absence.
Absence is what inspired them, and it’s what they address.
In the sharing of the song the absence is also shared –
Listen and become possessed, inhabited,
by a force or compulsion coming from outside.
A ghost from an elsewhere past.
The memory of the singing.
I cling to song and make it my own.
I put my arms around linear time without being utopian
and sing