2 of a short series of 3
This frail vessel thou emptiest again and again, and fillest it ever with fresh life … This little flute of a reed thou hast carried over hills and dales, and hast breathed through it melodies eternally new
Rabindranath Tagore
Gitanjali – ‘Song Offerings’
Yesterday I wrote about a walk, some birds, and Carl Linnaeus, the great Swedish botanist who spent his lifetime naming creation — only to have his own names taken from him in the end. Adamah to adamah. Dust to dust. Many a different name is given to us in the course of a lifetime. And many are taken from us, too – you might like to pause for a moment to think of yours. Anyway, something in yesterday’s piece seems to want to continue.
Reflecting afterward on Rabindranath Tagore, led on to thinking of W B Yeats — who wept reading Tagore’s Gitanjali on a London train in 1912, and confessed, in the manner of his era, to being ashamed of his tears. I understand the weeping. I am not, though, ‘ashamed’ of tears. Tear-washed eyes, I’ve learned, so often come to see more clearly.
Gitanjali — the title means ‘Song Offerings’ in Bengali — opens with an image that has stayed with me, the grandson of an accomplished clarinetist, for years: the image of the flute. A reed, hollowed out, carried over hills and dales, (and in my grandfather’s case, up the Khyber Pass on his twenty-first birthday), breathed through until it yields melodies eternally new. The emptied vessel as the condition of music.
Yesterday I wrote of Troglodytes troglodytes, the Wren named twice over as ‘cave-dweller’ — that tiny, tuneful creature whose song pours out of darkness and hollow places. Perhaps the cave and the flute are the same image. Perhaps they always were.
Tagore’s theology is essentially panentheist — shaped by the Upanishads and by the ecstatic Baul tradition of Bengal, which insists that the divine is not above or beyond creation but woven into its very tissue. He would have recognised our Wren immediately.
But here I want to introduce a voice perhaps less familiar — one that Tagore himself so revered that he undertook to translate him into English.
Kabir was a 15th-century weaver-mystic, born in Varanasi, perched on the crescent-shaped western bank of the Ganges River in north-central India (modern-day Uttar Pradesh), around 1440, who wove cloth by trade and verses by vocation, and saw no essential difference between the two. He belonged to no single tradition; Hindu, Muslim and Sikh teachers all claim him, because he stubbornly refused to let the divine be housed in any one building or adequately named by any one name. He wrote: I have been thinking of the difference between water and the waves on it.
That is panentheism distilled to eleven words. The waves are real — the Blackbird is real, Turdus merula singing its Latin heart out in a Lake District morning is entirely and gloriously real — and yet never for a moment separate from the water that bears them. The Universe doesn’t dwarf the wave. It is the wave.
The medieval Christian tradition spoke of the donum lacrimarum — the gift of tears — as a mark not of weakness but of spiritual sensitivity: the heart permeable enough to be moved. Yeats had it. Tagore had it. Kabir, I suspect, wept at his loom.
Something is taking shape in these morning walks and the writing they give rise to — a small series arising not from plan but from encounter. The Swedish botanist. The Bengali poet. The Varanasi weaver. All of them, in their different ways, saying the same thing: pay attention, name carefully, hold lightly. The vessel is frail. The music is not.
The cantus firmus endures. The song continues …
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go to the first in a series of three
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