Mirror
On those misty ocean mornings
When the aimless summer air
Slouches through the awnings
With its rustling despair—
Looking for the random traces
With its languid thwack
Which terrors from inhuman places
Might be playing back—
On those hazy mornings dawns
As well a gracious day,
Unerring on our faces,
Drawn from far away,
As human as the rest of space is.
Credits
Paul Bowles moved to Tangiers when he was young, rooming with the composer Aaron Copland. Bowles was a pianist and a composer himself, and years later Copland introduced his music to New York City.
There was music behind Bowles’s novel The Sheltering Sky. It was based on the song “Down Among the Sheltering Palms,” featured throughout the 1940s and 50s by singers like Al Jolson, Johnny Mercer, and Bing Crosby. It was in the film Some Like it Hot.
As Bowles wrote in The Sheltering Sky:
"Because we don’t know when we will die, we get to think of life as an inexhaustible well. And yet everything happens only a certain number of times, and a very small number really. How many more times will you remember a certain afternoon of your childhood, an afternoon that is so deeply a part of your being that you can’t even conceive of your life without it? Perhaps four, or five times more? Perhaps not even that. How many more times will you watch the full moon rise? Perhaps twenty. And yet it all seems limitless..."
Interestingly, Brandon Lee quoted this passage just before he died at 28 during the making of his gorgeous dark film The Crow. The quote was meant to be on his wedding announcement. It’s now on his tombstone.
At this time, when invisible dangers swirl around us, it’s easy to feel that the blue Moroccan sky Paul Bowles distrusted might be sheltering us from not only existential dread, but from the ravages of biological mutations.
It is easy to doubt, to disbelieve in the humanism which dominated universities and nations since the Second World War.
But, as the Observation Principle shows us, we as observers distort what we observe. Our presence changes the mood, and thus the outcome, the meaning, of any event. We have the power to impose disbelief or belief on any scene. Space is in the eye of the beholder. It is a tabula rasa on which we draw our own face. We can choose to see, mirrored in the music of the spheres, way off somewhere in infinity, our own faces, our own hopes, the return of an innocent dawn. Throughout the distress of humanity, nature remains as constant as ever. The sky hides monsters, but also infinite beauty.
May 10th and 13th, 2020
Kailua