Rumours of Beauty from However Far Away (From The Book of Wonder, by Lord Dunsany, 1912)

 

The story always begins in the middle. Where it matters most.

No one sees the fallen branches next to a river till they fall in. Till they become driftwood.

Just like the middle of a story when we realize that it is time to become driftwood. To let time find us accepting what we have become. Because we always become what we once were. Driftwood is still a fallen branch.

… In my student dormitory I had a few posters on the walls. One was from Lord Dunsany, the prolific Anglo-Irish writer and poet whose lines had resonance in my days as a young man. The poster I had the opening lines from his poem “Where the Tides ebb and flow” (circa 1910)

The ebb came
And I saw the dead eyes of the houses
And the jealousy of other forgotten things
That storm had not carried thence.

The poster faced my bed and every night those words helped me dream. Of all that my life’s storms had not carried away.

Instead, these memories remained untouched, like the fallen branches next to a river that no one notices.

Till the branches become driftwood. And the river celebrates their journey.

… More than 40 years after these graduate student days, I thought about Lord Dunsany. This time when I came across new lines from him that I had not read before. But this time, his words did not made me rejoice about what life’s storms had not carried away. Rather, they made me think about the story that starts in the middle, when a river carries fallen branches. And makes them driftwood.

Here is the passage I read from his “The Book of Wonder”

“Yet in the blood of man there is a tide, an old sea-current rather, that is somehow akin to the twilight, which brings him rumours of beauty from however far away, as driftwood is found at sea from islands not yet discovered: and this spring-tide or current that visits the blood of man comes from the fabulous quarter of his lineage, from the legendary, the old; it takes him out to the woodlands, out to the hills; he listens to ancient song.”

The ancient song. From lineage. The jealousy of forgotten things that were thought to be forgotten. But they never are.

 PS/ Photo of a humble stream in downtown Prescott following autumnal rain.

September 16, 2022

©Vahé A. Kazandjian, 2022