MOUNTAIN
SILENCING MUSIC OF THE SELF:
WITH
ARVO PÄRT IN THE GOAT ROCKS WILDERNESS
…I heard quite by chance for a few
seconds
in a record shop a world that I didn’t
know, without harmony,
without anything. In a music without
anything, what path
a single note takes in order to merge
into the next. That is at the core.
Arvo
Pärt in Conversation
All
things concerning what’s poor
going
through the mother. Inexhaustible
inheritance.
My mother coloring my light.
Living
long enough to know
this
is only and all, the harvest.
My
mother and what she knew.
Storied
in humility. God-head, poverty,
footprints
in rural landscapes of family.
Plain
song. Don’t get too full of yourself.
Getting.
Curse-cancelling.
Mother’s
litmus test, mine, beauty and generosity,
in
systems, in people. Residing and residual.
Running
through me, in this set and release of skis.
Silence
and cover-up. Snow beauty.
Bridge
and broken bridge that must be crossed.
I
have skied here, to this mountain lodge,
High
Camp, through windows looking—
this
mountain, the One-For-Us-All—
It’s out—Rainier, that
we call ours,
notebook
and a book of talk with the composer,
Arvo
Pärt and Enzo Restagno.
Falling
for the mountain and the music and the word.
Stabat Mater.
Mother-standing-there. Yesterday’s God voice
void
of irony, people fleeing.
Gob-smacked
and damned. Silenced in bells.
Voices
in bells. (Karen a bell-ringer too!)
My
way to Arvo Pärt. Bells of the Beloved.
Let me be wounded with his words,
inebriated by the cross because of love.
Say
it twice. Say it again.
Recall
suffering in coffee-shopped pews of hesitation.
Make me by his wounds to be wounded,
Let that cross inspire me with love for
your son.
The
mother’s words I failed to hear.
Calling
for mountain cross words.
Bells
at midnight, repeating themselves,
my
wife ringing in front of me, if I can hear,
if
in my practice, what practice allows.
Pärt
discovering old colours, past epochs, lines with soul.
If
Jesus is eternity…each word with equal weight,
Distance
from the text, psalms of human imperfection.
Thinking
like John Cage, How can one fill the stillness,
the
silence that follows, with notes worthy of silence?
Childlike innocence juxtaposed with the
cruelty
of the outside world. Tenderness wins.
When conflicts lose their power meaning
is dead.
One line was not
enough. It’s the same as flying,
you need a pair
of wings. In the way a child resembles
its parents, the
tintinnabuli voice carries the gene
of the melody
within it. Perhaps I could say that the melodic voice
represents my
sins and imperfections while the second
voice is the
forgiveness afforded me.
Listening
to music, skiing through silences of snow,
towards
transparency, a participant, all my sins
transparent
in all that I do.
In
90 minutes
of
music, every weakness of mankind. Have I done
this,
have I done that? All can be seen in me
checking
my groceries in a Safeway Store.
Questions
given in snow, on skis.
How
does one express penitence?
Weakness
of our condition, not one,
but
ours, in me? Compassion
and
sufficiency. This note. This man.
This
one to the many. In waiting
where
one discovers time.
Jim
Bodeen
21
December 2018—7 January 2019
High
Camp Lodge, Goat Rocks, White Pass—
Yakima/Yakama,
Washington State
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