Autumn Hymn

    Illustration by E. Schoenberger

"There was a bit of autumn yesterday that made me think of you. I was walking in the morning through layers of mist. The grass was radiant with rain and sun and there were ravens."

K. Harvey

I feel the season gently infusing the air with the perfumed sorrow of vegetal decay, and the sun has shifted its position just slightly in order to make its annual retreat into deeper space. Very similar to this my mind turns away from what I see, and focuses inward. My body knows the rhythms of nature, and I reread certain novels or poems to make my own withdrawal more comfortable. It's like pulling an old, familiar blanket around myself before sleeping, comforted by the array of scents, each threaded to a memory, in turn woven into others, making them indistinguishable from each other. A blanket of having been.

***

In their mythology, the Greeks believed that Nux, the mother of dark night, and her children, Thanatos and Hupnos (Death and Sleep) were the issue of Chaos, the abyss that preceded any form. They believed that the difference between their own bodies and those of the gods was that their human bodies were incomplete. The facts of death and sleep testified to this incompleteness. The gods forever retained form due to their complete bodies while human bodies returned to Chaos. Decomposition, the destruction of form was that process.

***

The sunlight shines like a ghost, never quite warm or bright. It's the time of departure. To die in fall is to leave in a state of grace, in harmony and equilibrium between soil and sky, light and dark, and sorrow becomes strangely tinted with joy. Memories as fresh as the crushed leaves beneath a child's feet, even years ago.

***

Yesterday was Day of the Corpse. I walked along the shore, coming across several mangled gulls before arriving at what first seemed to be a large rock formation. At closer inspection this dark object proved to be an enormous sea lion that had been beached after suffering a fatal attack by a shark. This fact was written with tears and punctures in its thick hide, and punctuated with missing fins and a partially severed head. The presence of this body with its halo of flies, and the sheer enormity of its dead weight at first seemed a contradiction to a day when the sunlight danced so playfully on the crests of waves and warmed my feet in the sand, when it occurred to me that it was the season of passing. Now all of nature begins its descent back into the soil in a ritual that is at once silent, profound and solemn. The fine day revealed to me its nature; it was indeed a requiem more perfect in composition than any symphony could aspire to. I gazed at this mutilated creature on the sand, the corpse a standing temple of memory to this once mobile life. The sun warmed my skin, a skin still able to feel warmth, and I bade this death a pleasant return to Chaos.

***

"The fire. I love the fire so much. To build them and watch them burn and feel warm and light and safe. The shadows it casts are spirits. But it is not death, it does not kill. Out of the ash things grow. The ash is left. So much can be done with fire remains, charcoal for the drawing, soil for the flowers. I know this because so often a blaze of emotions has burnt me up and ash is all that remains. Amazing. Afraid of fire, but would feel a loss if I never gazed at it again, like a drug or a pair of eyes. There must be many more like us, and so many others who know no magic tricks. So many worlds to them wasted. This is a smile to you. I am happy to spite the world." C. Lahti

Putrid eclipse, the sun was a rotten brown, the sky darkened with smoke. The appetite of the fire had so far consumed over nine hundred homes, and at this writing had not been sated. Lately I've watched flames, I am now. I see this devouring dance they perform on objects, consuming their stage entirely. Fire seems to have no regret, all of its activity is passionate, yet the result of this passion is the transformation of the object from which it is born. The child of fire is death, the end of the object. Another way of looking at fire would be scientific; fire results from the release of energy caused by the breaking down of matter. Here, fire becomes the twin of sacrifice, and the death of the object is not separable from the freeing of the nature of a given object.

***

Tonight fire brings me warmth. Single flames keep vigil around the room, holding on to the tips of candles as if they fear rising into the air should they let go. A log under the hearth is devoured by fire, becoming nothing. October, I am moved by your bleak and stripped love. You serve life and death equally. Your infinite body is cloaked only within the black cape of the night, embroidered in the memory of light that is the stars. One thousand fires release in your name what is bound, every love I feel is burned to you. I count them and feed them to you with my breath as they are consumed.

***

First rain of the season. A heavy dampness and a crystalline, cold air fill my lungs. I sit on the back porch and watch the fog swirl around a lamp, the mists obscuring sight is so different from last night when the clarity of things under the moon made me want to become the night, to become infinite. Soaked from rain, a fire somewhere goes out.

***

What I would paint if I could would be the sacred nature of departure, the scent of dead leaves fermenting in the ground, the emotion of the sun as it feels it's strength ebb to nothing.

***

Autumn, the heavens descend, death rises from the ground. Together they consecrate present time; the Moment. My life is blessed at being witness to this strange marriage of Illumination and Destruction. A ritual of color and light play somber games, the Sun recedes further into the depths of the Sky, Darkness wraps a star embroidered tunic oover the world, as leaves fall in silence, fermenting in the damp earth. Past, Present and Future are ruined, now indistinguishable from one another, real time curiously matches dream time, standing still or approaching and withdrawing like waves. The ghosts of the ancients return in children's Halloween masks, dim reflections of an embryonic and pagan world. Fire consumes, thereby destroying objects and releasing them of Form. I feel my hatreds melt, also losing form. I feel everything in sight giving in to gravity as this immense home spins incoherently in space, convinced that in the end there will be no reason to ask why, rationality and justice as absent as those who would enslave by them. All that I love is in the form of burning coals, increasing in both heat and intensity as the cold and invisible autumn winds fan them.

Photo by  Ralph Eugene Meatyard