Let’s imagine that we have already heard everyone we will ever hear.
Before we were born, umbilicus of liminal place in between black and white holes, black and white stones, we were everyone we’ve ever heard, fine filligrees of invisible impressions, dormant and resonated.
Fanny Howe speaks about an old Hasidic saying where, in womb, babies carry all information from all time.
Floating in our motherly amniotic home, we remember, we are part of everyone, crystalline water molecules in our bodies, stars of milky way.
In process of being born energy departs elsewhere, but as some children enter world, an angel flicks their nose, and they hold memories of cosmos, matter held by light, Dionyson world soul, Platonic eros as demiurge, recalling labyrinths of their fractal homes.
Waters inside as out retain their shape, open mouths, gasps, aisthesis, heartlands where words spoken look like memories.
In this light Howe says that listening is existing in future of all utterance.
Future is full of listening, descending, wanting, understanding. Who we hear, who is taken, and who goes elsewhere.
Our brains are babies, all ancients reside there still.
Howe says that our souls are just the length of a baby, part of who she refers to as heartland, everyone is there, while everyone is Orpheus (a retelling who is a fresh hearing, where Orphic magic is not obsessed with control, but celebrates entering into and participating).
Heartland is also a book by Wilson Harris (true anamensis, bewildered poet of recollection and shaman flowers writing from womb of time, resounding in primordial Orphic chant) and it was Howe who introduced me to his understanding of conventional realism as an absence of cosmic love.
Vibration can help sustain intimacy, but they are not intimacy, or not intimate? If we think of impression as node, an area of least vibration (relatively speaking), thus surrounded by greater and greater energies, invisible, always switching… to make an impression is to be impressed. Vibration can lend themselves to both liberation and perpetuation of convention, so we need treat them with care, not use them as a catch all term.
But, who doesn’t vibrate?
Who are we talking about when we say, and write, vibration?
Does this mean we need to be more careful with how we engage with vibration?
To embrace with familiarity and yet somehow also separate ourselves from who we know?
Where do we separate?
In terms of vibration vibrating, nature naturing… spirals walking, to perceive outside conventional natures of realia, we remember an open hole in our hearts.
Geologian Thomas Berry writes that universe is a communion of subjects, not a collection of objects, and that to be in universe is to participate with someone common to all.
A quick glance through Francesca Speranza’s (otherwise known as Lady Wilde) Legends of Ancient Ireland (another book introduced to me by Fanny Howe), published in 1902, alludes to some of the more personal (and personified) relationships with whom we now call so often call vibration.
Within their leaves, voices of sidhe are heard in open mouths of mountain echoes, their forms seen in purple and golden mountain mist, whispering amidst perfumed hawthorn branches, rushes of autumn leaves, scampering little elves, red, yellow and brown, bending and waving barley caused by elf king and his court as they fly across fields, dancing with soundless feet, their step so light that drops of dew they dance upon tremble, but do not break.
I’ve no wish (or ability) to reduce such pantheistic and pagan means of ensouling and co-partnering world to vibration, but I ask, can we even reduce vibration, or are they always emanating no matter how far ‘down’ we try and go?
It’s difficult to trace back some of the earliest uses of vibration, as far as I can tell, vibrating was what we did, observed, we were among vibration, they weren’t so much who we said, but how we said them.
Vibration wasn’t so much a recognisable name or term, as far as I can tell at least, until the 1600s, becoming clear from within mechanistic classical science’s one-sided Saturnian churn.
It’s here that we feel the terms vibration and magic (or perhaps I should say theurgy) intertwining. There are of course innumerable ways to define magic (if one wishes), and so here we’ll cautiously think with magic as a practise of attempting to make who is not understood, understood, in a way who remains not understandable.
In this light, I can’t help but wonder how much vibration as a word has paradoxically helped to create a prevailing inaudibility of cosmic soul.
I’ve no wish to locate this at any single moment in history, but if we so wished, however playfully, we could turn to Plutarch’s On the Failure of Oracles and a resultant cry, great Pan is dead!
With his infamous split of mind and matter, of soul from animals, rending soul from everything but human mind, and in turn, rending human from universe, René Descartes is so often the spectre to whom blame is attributed. But as an aside, we could do worse than return to his work, to remember, to study and listen out for those beings who have been subjected to various agendas and cultural milieus, to shake off some accompanying, inherited products of thought.
There are indeed a few beings within Descartes, notably theories of resonance and auditory nerve, who deserve another look, and in so doing, perhaps this will help to cast a little light, opening the windows we might say, on those theories who have become so embedded, revealing who has been left out, who has been manipulated, set aside, forgotten in miasms emerging from science’s ground at night.
Underneath science’s language someone feels missing, the same someone, as Robin Wall Kimmerer says, who swells around you, and within you.
Energy within and without our bodies flow through numerous channels called meridians, channels so often likened to rivers. We are both river bank and river, 99% water on a molecular level, full of soil and ancestral nitrogen whose true name is lost within lethe.
Mother of rivers is called central meridian channel (zhong mai, penetrating vessel), flowing through midline of our bodies from crown through pelvic floor to earth. Crystallising from pure womb energy, at conception, anamnesis (recollection, a flick) speaks in red green streaks.
Water is not ‘only’ h2o, but a living organism with their own soul in
need of tender observing, respecting, and learning. Bioengineers like Gerald Pollack and scientists like Mae Wan Ho ask if water even is ‘only’ h2o... there are myriad participations with hexagonal water, or h3o2.
Intimacy stems in part from ‘intimaire’, or impress, cosmic love as cosmological spectral density. An impression is a groove, we are water bodies waiting to be heard.
Who is more intimate than water?
We are constantly imprinting water with thought, emotion, memory, trying to keep open plasma universes who William James feared would otherwise prematurely close.
In Annie Dillard’s book, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, whom I first read over water, travelling by ferry to Dublin, there’s a chapter titled Intricacy, where Dillard (whose work for me exemplifies propinquity of detached balance and participation) visits a store called Wet Pets to purchase a goldfish, an animal, as Dillard reminds us, who has a heart, leading her to experience, as an example of equilibrium that cost twenty-five cents, an eyeful of fish-scale and star, an eyeful mirroring Carl Jung’s view of self as stars or sparks or luminous fish eyes.
A creature called elodea accompanies Dillard’s goldfish purchase. Elodea is plant who introduces Dillard to streaming chloroplasts, Venusian, red-green world of photosynthesis where a surrounding river of cytoplasm acts as a kind of space-time in which chloroplasts have their tiny being.
Elodea, perhaps a plant dreaming of being a tree, echoing fast arboreal intimacy, pours through and returns to vegetative walls of world like star river where wet lunar sap burns upward amongst rows of trees in much the same way as blood flows around quincuncial bodies.
As Dillard contemplates red blood cells whipping through capillaries in goldfish’s transparent tail, she considers nature as churning out intricate textures of ‘least works’ with an extravagance of care. There is, to paraphrase Dillard, a small world there in goldfish’s bowl, and a very large one.
When you move in, you try to learn both neighbourhood and ghost moon, cultivating intimate immensity who may or may not, at some point, help to see who else resides on edges of our being, which other edges we are, on periphery of that dubious and extracted term, human, so removed from cosmic humus.
We live in impressions of water observing themselves, light held in matter, ice held in interstellar dust. Soul making is so much easier to hold if we can let go of our conception of consciousness as being separate from cosmos, as being ‘only’ ours.
Great grandmother comes from earth, stars, asteroids.
We appear to stars as much as they appear to us, waters formulating shapes of field as subtle topology of vaporous merging, tethers of saline charge.
Impression is like a confluence, words as organs suspended in a matrix of mythopoetic imaginations, river beds filled with light encrusted fractals.
Projective depths of our projections and partial perspectives unfold in transitory subsistence, where every cell we are is also world cell, held together with water, imprinted by our last thought, protean, waiting to be remembered and read through galvanic plasmas of cell salts.