Poem: Paul Valery

[Lisa Walford]

I am currently in Los Angeles, and am so incredibly saddened by the edginess and trauma all around. For those who lost everything, the shadow of this will last a very very long time. For everyone else, whenever the wind stirs, we all shudder. 

Pranayama has been gentle. We first do what we can to quiet the heart and allow ourselves to be held by the earth. Breath, slow, almost timid, almost like being loved by the breath.. healing begins. For me, it is simple to say these things. My thoughts, hugs and prayers are for those who lost.. 

this is the poem I read last Wednesday

Paul Valery was a French poet who was first acknowledged during the First World War. He was nominated for a Nobel prize twelve times and toured Europe giving lectures on art and philosophy for the League of Nations. He corresponded with Albert Einstein, Andre Gide, and considered many other elite figures of the era his friends. 

This poem is timeless, it could have been written yesterday. When you read it, think of yourself sitting beside the ocean, contemplating the horizon. Are we each a droplet in a vast universe, arising to our moment of uniqueness and to then exhale into eternity? at one with dawn and dusk..     

As on the shore of the ocean

On the front of separation,

On the pendulous frontier of motion

Time gives, tacks back,

Strikes, deploys, gulps back,

Gives and regrets,

Fingers, falls, kisses and moans,

Returns to the mass,

Returns to the ocean…

 

I plunge into the interval between two waves –

Time regretfully

Finite, infinite…

What does this time enclose?

What shrinks, what bridles?

What measures, refuses and snatches time away from me again?

Imposing impotence to go beyond, O wave!

The very sequence of your act is to take back,

To flow back so as not to break

The integrity of the water’s body!

 

To remain sea and not to cede

The power of motion!

Fated to flow back

Rasping, regretfully,

To be reduced, to be restored,

Having dared and lifted,

It cannot but return

To the pure and simple presence,

To all things less itself,

Even though not itself,

Itself never for long,

Never long enough

Either to be done with all things,

Or to begin other times…

 

Listen endlessly, hear

The song of waiting and the shock of time,

The constant rocking of the reckoning,

Identity and quantity,

And the voice of the ocean

Reiterating, I win and lose

I lose and win..

Oh! Fling a little time outside of time!

 

More than alone on the shore of the ocean,

I give myself like a wave

To the monotonous transmutation

Of water into water,

Myself into myself…