WITHIN THE CONFINES OF WHAT IS MEMORY

104. WITHIN THE CONFINES OF WHAT IS MEMORY:

I have just returned home from a walk in the sky – the dark sky at night the black sky at night the one on high the one with the stars the stars which seem still to be hanging just as they did fifty-five years ago perhaps right over the house I lived in then the relative same spot in the relative same sky and the suspended moments of dipper and lance those strange skeletal dots in the sky above they watch and wash and waver the arms of MANKIND all below now just as they did then ‘AND WITHIN THE CONFINES OF WHAT IS MEMORY we still stand forth as witness witness to the earth below and all those little concerns that go with it’ and today the chapel still stands whether here or somewhere in London fair - still stands as witness – administered no longer by ‘John of good memory’ as it was in the twelfth century yet managed just as well perhaps IF MEMORY SERVES and so I look at the sky with wonder and find myself thinking back to something something fair and so different and faraway like light before it was discovered or travel before it was defined and I imagine yet again this effusive and sorrowful dialogue with the God of the skies above me as if present and there this very moment and the great voice back speaks stilly the vague response addled as it is by some strange appropriation of every old seafarer of England’s veiny old shore and in those words of questioning I recognize amidst the great night sky’s silence the uncertainty and pluck of every man who’s ever lived and in the responsive voice of God itself I hear perhaps something more missing today than ever then ["but sir to where are we headed the men wish to know for just today it was they saw yet another series of shooting stars on the deepening nighttime sky and well sir they are right now scared but are you not ? but to where are we headed ? and just as in the fair city we left on the banks of the Thames so long ago are still waiting for us those we wish to see again for as they are fleshy and fat and grown voracious upon the appetite for food and people so by contrast a’sea like this we are grown sad and lonely thin and sorrowful and beneath these changed and starry skies so many days after days decrease our appetite for anything more and sir the men wish to know to where are we headed kind?"] and in space high above me I see nothing but the echoes and the memory of all this in passing - so distant so vague and so gone - and thereby in closing this winter night’s tale of darkness I glean only this to say from some broad and booming voice of God in skies above: "…To get to sleep in latitudes called upper is difficult at first for Englishmen. It’s like being sent to bed before your supper for playing darts with father’s fountain-pen or like returning after orgies when your breath’s like luggage and you realize you’ve been more confidential than was wise."