A few short weeks ago, business as usual lurched to a halt.
Bars sat empty and their tenders could not pour their soothing elixirs and do their unofficial therapy with the lonely ones.
Little ones approached the playgrounds encircled by yellow tape that read “CAUTION”, and they made their stand- the forest, the original playground would have to do.
What absence, or change was it that most pained or shocked you? An American in Wuhan, China wrote on the 48th day of quarantine:
“I used to think there weren’t really birds in Wuhan, because you rarely saw them and never heard them. I now know they were just muted and crowded out by the traffic and people. All day long now I hear birds singing. It stops me in my tracks to hear the sound of their wings.”
In these days the poets beckon, their words somehow emerging with eviscerating clarity in the blessed space left by the fleeting cessation of endless commerce. Rilke wrote this poem 98 years ago, as he watched the steady march of the industrial and technological growth society around him… and it is one of my favourites.
The Machine endangers all we have made.
We allow it to rule instead of obey.
To build the house, cut the stone sharp and fast:
the carver's hand takes too long to feel its way.
The Machine never hesitates, or we might escape
and its factories subside into silence.
It thinks it's alive and does everything better.
With equal resolve it creates and destroys.
But life holds mystery for us yet. In a hundred places
we can still sense the source: a play of pure powers
that—when you feel it—brings you to your knees.
There are yet words that come near to the unsayable,
and, from crumbling stones, a new music
to make a sacred dwelling in a place we cannot own.
Sonnets to Orpheus II, 10 Transl. Macy & Barrows
Now in this moment when some of our factories, businesses, and busywork has subsided into silence: what, or whose sounds and songs are you hearing again? Or for the first time? How can you sense your source? What will bring you to your knees?
I know that the reality is some machines are still working hard, maybe overtime… These devices which once separated us, and kept us fixated or distracted, safe from truer, fuller contact, are now for some the only way to seek it. May this time birth in us a deeper power to guide these technologies in our life together, toward connection, not alienation; awareness, not excuse.