The Song of Nature

[De Batz 10]

Hopelessly mystical and probably totally impenetrable, but here's the Song of Nature:

 

“Quiet your mind.” says the teacher. “Listen first to my voice. Then, around it, behind it, before it, listen to the song.”

“I cannot hear-” The pupil begins, but the teacher cuts him off with a gesture.

“I can help.” The teacher holds his hands out in front of him. He begins to hum a low, constant note. The pupil's eyes narrow. He shifts himself, repositioning his weight, and focuses on the teacher. As he watches, the teacher lowers his head, but the constant low note continues.

The pupil begins to speak. “Master, I do not hear-”

Again, the master stops him, but this time there is no gesture, no movement. The teacher is still, statue-like, in a way that suggests even the beat of his heart has stopped. The hum continues, but through it the pupil hears a voice which says quietly but clearly “Find silence. That is the first step. Then listen to it.”

The pupil draws the back of his hand across his forehead. The hum continues, but the voice has fallen away. As the time passes – a minute, an hour? - the sound of the hum begins to change. At first, it was an identifiable pitch, a unified note. Now, the sources are separate, the frequencies have detached themselves, but each is detailed, the timbre of a richly characterful voice.

In amongst the swirling cacophony, the teacher's voice is audible again. “Listen to the voices.”

The pupil replies without moving his lips. “I hear them.”

“But you hear them all at once, as a chord on a piano.”

“They make their sound together.”

“To feel this harmony is the first step. We will resume when you have slept.”

 

The pupil wakes in the dimly lit cell, unaware that he has been asleep. He is seated, legs crossed, against a wall of stone that is cool, dry despite the stillness of the air. He looks about himself. The teacher is already there, watching him as he rouses himself.

“You have slept for a fortnight. This is not unusual amongst neophytes.”

The pupil's eyes widen. “I do not remember-” He stops himself. The teacher has not made a sound.

Again, the teacher's voice, calm, quiet, and yet insistently present. “You are learning. You can hear me as I sing to you. But you are not yet able to listen to the song of nature.”

The pupil breathes deeply. “Teach me.” He does not know this time if he speaks, or if he communicate without sound.

The teacher's voice seems to come from a point at the centre of the pupil's head. “Ancient cultures, in the age when gods were strong and mankind was itself youthful and virile, believed in a thing they called magic. Some referred to it as sorcery, some as witchcraft, dependent on whether they thought it was for good or for ill. But they all thought it was the control of forces outside of nature, but they were wrong.”

The pupil no longer hears the teacher's voice, but begins to experience the words directly, as one who has fallen into a book and no longer reads the story but simply lives it. His sense of himself in space begins to fade, as he sees a strange landscape of colours and shapes that have no analogue in human experience.

“You begin,” the teacher continues, “to understand. The sounds that you hear are not sounds as science tells us, the vibration of the smallest parts of nature invisible to a human's limited eyes.” The pupil does not respond other than to continue to absorb the pure experience that is presented to him.

“Each particle of the universe sings its song, and if you learn how, you can hear it. The adepts say that they can listen to many of the songs simultaneously. They have great expectations of you.”

“That is why I am here.” The pupil replies, but it is in confirmation rather than a question.

“That is why you are here, whatever 'here' is. That is why I am chosen, I who have led scores of those who have become adepts through their first steps. Already you excel. Should you progress as it seems you might, you are like to surpass all. Do not let this knowledge distract you, for pride is disruptive. The thought of ones achievements is a source of distraction, a noise that hides the delicacy that is the song.”

The shapes that eddy and whirl begin to slow, but the shapes are not familiar. It is as though the lines and the colours, the edges and the areas, the volumes, are no longer composed into objects but simply there, extant each but not together, not in space but nevertheless real. Their number is uncountably huge, but this vastness does not signify, it does not inspire awe. The pupil slowly takes each in its turn, inspecting it, hearing its song as it tells its story. Each story is the history of the universe, the beginning, middle and the ending yet to come.

He does not know how long his journey takes, but as he makes it, he sometimes comes to where he has been before, although places and times have no sense, no order. He watches as the stories coalesce into one, the unity and the separation of those stories no longer contradicting each other. The whole and the many no longer contend.

 

Some time later, he hears the teacher's voice again.

“I had not expected you to find the song so quickly. I could not follow you as far as you travelled.”

The pupil is awake, aware, but no longer of the space of the dream.

“I heard it. If that is the word.” The pupil puts his hands together. This conversation is real, the sounds echoing around the stone-walled cell. “The song. I heard it, and I understood.”

“No adept has ever claimed such understanding. Are you-”

Now the pupil silences the teacher, without sound.

“I have heard the song, and I know how to sing it. As you see, I can stop you from speaking, if I wish it.”

The teacher, as though hung from a hook, lolls in space, not quite touching the ground. After a moment, he seems to recover himself, with a perceptible fall. His teeth begin to show in a broad, satisfied smile.

“You have learned well, my pupil. You no longer require such a title. You hear, you see, you are the song. You cannot break the laws, but you can bend them, push them, find their limits. Use your gift well.”

[Ian Rivedon 10]

De Batz,

 

Exceptionally well written, and not as impenetrable as you seem to think. I enjoyed it as a standalone piece, though it seems as if it might be part of a larger work. I like the narrative form, which is reminiscent of the 'Walled City' narrative in Haruki Murakami's 'Hard Boiled Wonderland And The End Of The World'.

 

It is quality writing, but just one very small point. In the 20th line of text, the pupil says “I do not remember-”. Is the hyphen intentional, rather than an ellipsis?

 

IR

[De Batz 10]

I think the hyphen was a hangover from the earlier lines when it was intentional. It ought to be either '...' or '.', but now that my attention has been drawn I can't actually decide!

 

This is your suggestion in action, Ian. I thought of the song - as a way of characterising the stuff that makes up the universe - one night in bed, then the following evening I wrote this. I'm lucky in one sense, in that for the most part I spot errors on the first pass so don't end up reading and revising that carefully... But I did make an effort not to rewrite each line, allowing it to spill out without applying the critical eye.

 

I haven't come across Haruki Murakami, but I shall have a look. My touchstone for this is Jorge Luis Borges, who wrote a great deal of this kind of philosophical short fiction. His work is somewhat difficult for the native English speaker as it's all dependent on the translation, and he has much greater facility with the well-judged but unexpected adjective than I have, which elevates his writing. I'm not consciously copying, but the medium I suppose suits the story.

 

I hadn't thought of it as part of a larger body, except in so far as it contains a piece of philosophy that I've been trying to articulate recently. I suspect that it could be expanded, but I couldn't read a novel that was written this way. It's too whatever-it-is, impersonal? Even I find it quite cold and I wrote the thing!

 

Thanks for the feedback, as ever gratefully received. I wonder if there's any mileage in us putting together a SFWG anthology and hawking it to publishers...

 

Andy

Edited January 23, 2012 by De Batz
To add a note of thanks!