The Departed

“In the mornin’ when you rise

Do you think of me, and how you left me cryin’?

Are you thinkin’ of telephones, and managers,

And where you got to be at noon?

You are living a reality I left years ago

It quite nearly killed me.

In the long run it will make you cry.

Make you crazy and old before your time.

And the difference between me and you.

I won’t argue right or wrong,

But I have time to cry, my baby

You don’t have to cry,…” 

Stephen Stills 

“In the morning, when you rise from unconsciousness, are you aware that I am with you still? Are you aware that you are the one who left me, not the other way around?

Your mind and soul are preoccupied with the things that I have left behind. I left them because they are the mortal things that don’t last. They are the things that don’t matter to me anymore. They are the things that will trouble your soul, steal your vitality and warp your sense of reality. 

The difference between me and you, is that I constantly experience the separation you have let come between us. You can distract yourself by focusing on the mortal things that I can no longer share with you. I feel you, day in and day out. I feel you as if your feelings were my own. 

I have time to cry, my beloved. You don’t have to cry.”

When a song gets stuck in your head, someone is tying to tell you something. My experience tells me to “Pay Attention To The Words”.

This is a detail from Raphael’s Sistine Madonna that has filled my imagination innumerable times over 5 or 6 decades. I am particularly drawn to the faces that hover around the edges; Rounded, well-nourished faces that tell you everything you need to know about the state of their souls. Why wouldn’t they be nourished by the subject and subjects in the painting. They are witness to something that is happening on every level of reality. And every entity in the picture is also conscious of the wholeness of the scene. Thoroughly nourishing for everyone and every being involved. 

Just as individual trees gradually emerge as distinct species and specimens to our consciousness, from the general greenery of a forested grove, so have these faces emerged in my awakening awareness. At first, the fully-developed images of the people became clear. Then, the winged cherubs below, looking on. The faces in the atmosphere became evident quite soon, but, to my initial perception, they appeared to be just more cherubic beings, not fleshed out in any distinguishing way. At some point, decades later, it became evident that they are faces depicting a variety of characters and degrees of maturity. And lately, I see that they are present in every degree of consciousness and clarity; that they are Raphael’s experience of individual human souls living outside our customary awareness. Raphael sensed them and felt the need of including them in his great artwork. They remain in my imagination of the world, as air does; sensed but not seen. And as close as the breath we invisibly breathe.

Great art (great graphic art, great music, great performing art, etc., even great thinking) fuels a kind of imagination that borders on inspiration in the involved observer.

The other day, I spent a wet day in the first gentle rain to have graced our parched summer, pruning the low branches and old dead wood of ancient Apple- and crabapple trees laden with fruit, next to an historical cemetery. The museum wants to restore the gardens next to the cemetery, to host outdoor weddings. And I was there to raise the leafy canopy that had shrouded this place for decades. My thoughts were wrapped up in the mystery of what kind of wedding would take place here. Stephen Stills’ song arose repeatedly, and the next morning, the soul-filled details of this painting kept coming to mind. Through the pensive rain, at the border of my imagination, hovered the many souls who have entered and left my mortal life. And there were others who lingered, unknown by anyone anymore. It seemed in keeping with the moment, that my sister called for the first time in months, to say she was reading my mother’s diary that Mom had pencilled and left behind, decades ago.

This confluence of experiences went into sleep with me again that night. When I woke the next morning, they had taken on a modern guise. The sadness of the song was now mirrored in the faces that hovered beneath the leafy-green curtains of my meditation. The sodden autumnal atmosphere was now painted by Turner. Vincent Van Gogh’s melancholy was palpable. An echo of Edvard Munch’s scream occasionally issues from the void. “Has the whole world gone mad?” was the deeply disquieting question that now hung in the morning air around me.

Raphael had supplied an image in answer to my question: What kind of wedding would need to be celebrated these coming days and years in this garden by the cemetery?

How different is the daily world we live in 500 years after this imagination was conceived by Raphael!