I Heard the Voice of the World Speak Out

The Opening of Eyes

That day I saw beneath dark clouds
the passing light over the water
and I heard the voice of the world speak out,
I knew then, as I had before,
life is no passing memory of what has been
nor the remaining pages in a great book
waiting to be read.

It is the opening of eyes long closed.
It is the vision of far-off things
seen for the silence they hold.
It is the heart after years
of secret conversing
speaking out loud in the clear air.

It is Moses in the desert
fallen to his knees before the lit bush.
It is the man throwing away his shoes
as if to enter heaven
and finding himself astonished,
opened at last,
fallen in love with solid ground.

-David Whyte
from "Crossing the Unknown Sea"

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" What is meant by Rilke's "You must change your life" is evidently something more subtle. I don't understand it at all myself, so I can only speculate. Conrad evidently made use of the information the shadow gave him by ceasing to be a ship's captain on the Congo, and so a low-level exploiter of Africa. Rilke, when he realized what his work was telling him, interrupted his writing of poetry, and spent months watching animals in the zoo, and blind men on the streets, and years alone. He began to ask less from the world, not more. The Taoists would probably say that changing your way of life means giving up having an effect upon the world. It involves "wu-wei," not playing any role. Wu-wei is also translated as doing nothing. Wang Wei said once:

In the old days the serious man was not an important person.
He thought making decisions was too complicated for him.
He took whatever small job came along.
Essentially, he did nothing, like these walnut trees.

His friend P'ei Ti answered this way:

I soon found doing nothing was a great joy to me.
You see, here I am, keeping my ancient promise !
Let's spend today just strolling around theses walnut trees.
The two of us will nourish the ecstasies Chuang Tzu loved.

A man has an effect on "the world" mainly through institutions. So we could say that in the second half of life a man should sever his link with institutions. I think the problem is more complicated for women, but I don't understand it. Conceivably for women the change might involved accepting more responsibility for affecting the world.

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If the shadow's gifts are not acted upon, it evidently retreats and returns to the earth. It gives the writer or person ten or fifteen years to change his life, in response to the amazing visions the shadow has brought him -- that change may involve only deepening of the interior marriage of male and femanle within the man or woman -- but if that does not happen, the shadow goes back down, abandoning him, and the last state of that man is evidently worse than the first. Rilke talks of the shadow retreating in this poem:

Already the ripening barberries are red,
and the asters hardly breathe in their beds.
The man who is not rich now as summer goes
will wait and wait and never be himself.

The man who cannot quietly close his eyes
certain that there is vision after vision
inside, simply waiting until nighttime
to rise all around him in the darkness --
he is an old man, it's all over for him.

Nothing else will come; no more days will open;
and everything that does happen will cheat him --
even you, my God. And you are like a stone
that draws him daily deeper into the depths. "

-- Robert Bly
from "A Little Book on the Human Shadow"

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