“Pnin walked slowly under the solemn pines. The sky was dying. He did not believe in an autocratic God. He did believe, dimly, in a democracy of ghosts. The souls of the dead, perhaps, formed committees, and these, in continuous session, attended to the destinies of the quick.”
Vladimir Nabokov, “Pnin” (1957)
Why is it that sounds of a type become icons of memory, recalling the phantom notes of all their aural forebears? The neurological answer – that physical matter, the brain partitions responsible for long term memory and sense perceptions abut one another and thus easily form pathways of exchange – does not satisfy. Reality though it be, that scientific fact, that quirk of evolved biology, seems less than the truth suggested by the experience. I cannot hear the rain on the aluminum sheets of this rented cabin as anything other than echoes, reverberated across a lifetime from the roof on my childhood home, carried past images of my siblings, long since grown, listening beside me at the open back door, carried through all the intervening corrugations that drummed a similar tempestuous cadence (a friend’s house just a mile removed from the original, and another; the multitude of cabins across the many summers of a single summer camp; and on and on), conjuring various shades through time and an unfolding tapestry of thoughts thought out and feelings felt beneath this demiurgic song, unto the solitude by these oil-lamps lit and washed by untouched showers which abstract me in this sought anachronism.
This fire, too, is an archetype. What being has yet made history by LED? What illuminated manuscripts were inked beside this fire? What world-changing manuscripts penned or quilled in sleepless nights, what storied epic chiseled laboriously by some antediluvian mason while this same light stood witness? Dumas and Murakami, the Bible, Vedas, Analects, even Gilgamesh etched in stone in ancient Nineveh were blazed into existence or else transliterated and preserved by firelight.
And so I claim this sacred flame, this generative heat, and make of a rural desk my Zoroastrian temple. An altar to our collective human light and shrine to familial, intimate rain. That is the truth unspoken by gray matter fact.
October 11th, 2020
Hermit Thrush 