"Everybody got to watch the sky turn gray."*
This is a feather, fallen from a heaven where you cannot yet be, a dream-place of shadow inhabited only by deep sleep. Deep. Hollow. It is a sleep from which one does not usually awaken.
Once, as a child, Icarus Huxley thought he feared heaven. Its winter sky hung, cleaved by an unkindness of ravens, a cloud of hundreds of wings, thinking and flying as one hunting. As a child, he must learn to face fear, to embrace it, and only then learn the special skills he must develop to be what he was meant to be: a door of calm and guiding assurance for spirits of the dead. Once, then, he had a dream of a place he did not know; not his canyon home of childhood. The house was a gothic-gabled, dark gray-green mass, already ancient when he first saw it as he came out from a cornfield. The path around it martks the dangers he must face to master his fate. The corn had long since been harvested. It was November, before Thanksgiving. Walking through the stalks, some fallen over, some still upright, and some uprooted and carried away, all were hay-colored and hard. To bend the stalk was to hear the snap of broken bone...
*James Taylor, "Everybody Has the Blues"
No comments:
Post a Comment