Icarus flying home # 19

Banjo Blues

I am out on my feet, too tired to think. Writing this Bogeyman is doing my heid in. It's relentless. But after my last blog when I mentioned Wallace Stevens talking about Erfahrung and the idea of ‘lived through’ and ‘narratable’ experience and then I read Rainer Maria Rilke who wrote this on the manuscript of his Duino Elegies (1924),

Happy are those who know:

Behind all words, the unsayable stands;

And from that source alone, the infinite

Crosses over to gladness, and to us –

Free of our bridges,

Built with the stone of distinctions;

So that always, within each delight,

We gaze at what is purely single and joined.

And I love that idea of the 'unsayable behind the words' so I will say nothing else tonight, for I am too tired, except, perhaps, to play banjo. Or maybe I will just listen to this - such a delight, The Chieftains with Sinaed O'Connor.