Karoo Moon
Arrival
You are in a train, dozing as the poles race past, the koppies
behind them moving more slowly, the mountains hardly at all.
You drift off. You wake. Deserted station platforms. Occasional
sheep. A car overtakes. You are in the car. The blur of bushes.
The sameness in your life. You slow down. You stop. Between
the bushes, red earth. Look deeper. Crystalline structures. The
divisions between mind and matter blur and then dissolve. You
are here. You have always been here. You are stone.
The warm heart sinks into the land
which rises to embrace you with your countless lives
demonstrated by the fossils in the rocks
that have led you to this present time.
History they say lies in the past, How far back shall we go? To
the ships with white sails that arrived three or four hundred
years ago from continents once joined? Or should we go to the
very first moment of cosmic expansion and what then?
Time here, if there is time, is all of time. Time space and form,
mantis hare and moon, are but different aspects of one face.
Earth and sky interpenetrate. Some people talk about a deeper
breath. There can be sadness not related to anything one knows.
Language fails.
Go to the veil. Whatever has been thought or imagined is portal
to a world beyond our comprehension. Here with eland blood
in ancient sedimentation is the greatest exploration of mind ever
undertaken.
Time
The clock on the church steeple has stopped at 11:30 am and no
one has noticed. The woman walking down the dusty street has
hardly moved. In some invisible aspect of itself the town is
hurtling away and time is stopped or slowed down.
The dusty streets and unentered houses hold a strange silence.
You wake to the sound of an owl. Dogs bark. You sleep.You
wake. The stones are still stones but no longer dead or inert.
They radiate an inner life, the unseen spinning, the hills
shimmering with an invisible light.
Time comes in waves. Sun sinks, moon rises, hare stops, be-
comes stone. Moon dies, sun rises, sinks, moon is reborn. Does
the lizard know that to which we are blind, or do we too have a
gland atrophied now, which feels time as a dimension of a rock
or a tree?
To put the matter in time we tell it thus: four and a half billion
years ago the planet forms, a billion or so later is life. Now skip
the rest till we get to recent times: two hundred and fifty million
years ago a glacier melts and a basin is revealed. Africa is as yet
undisclosed but the basin we can see from the train, or out the
window of the car on the long black road.
‘But the koppies,’ you say. ‘What are they?’ Ah, my friend,
gather closer round, for we are talking secrets of the land. To
the dispossessed the moon was male and so was the sun. This is
the body of the earth and up there – yes, turn your head - in that
star-struck sky are the daughters of the rain. Now reach down
and touch her gently. You too she feeds.
The sun and moon were not always thus
whisper the rocks. Time’s motion is a recent thing.
Far from here in the south by candlelight
the dispossessed, taken chained and bound,
tell the secrets of the land to one who writes it down
and dies. These stories are still carried by the wind
that was once a man and then a bird
in the koppies, in the caves.
The sun comes, the darkness goes, the sun sets, the moon at
night, the sun comes out, the moon decays, goes painfully away
and is reborn.
Yes, but there is death, you say. Time’s measure is the finite
life. Without death time does not exist. ‘Where is its home?’
you ask. In the pool the hamerkop whispers. In the pool
wherein fall the stars. Beneath the surface a death is falling into
life at the same time as the silver surface captures the shooting
star.
Where there is death there is life. Where the void is, there is
time.
Space
Copernicus was never here, nor Newton, nor Galileo. Never
gone the long history’s people, the space long known where the
distance of a star can be felt as easily as a mother’s waiting
embrace. (It can be ascertained with the naked eye from it’s
fixity relative to a mountain by a man who can run a buck to
exhaustion.)
Long before Einstein, the people here, later dispossessed, were
painting relativity and space-time on the rocks. The paintings
work like a holograph: the observer provides the mental light
for paradoxical journeys through fistulas in time.
The projection of the stars, themselves projections of some
other sort, in the silence of the night animate tortoise, buck and
hare. Descartes divided mind and body but here sight faster
than light penetrates the hardest stone.
Once a deep compulsion drove springbok to trot
oblivious to obstacle and attack
toward the west Atlantic shore where they drank the water
and died by the million along thirty miles of coast.
Some say it was overpopulation or too little space
that activated an ancient impulse ignoring disasters on the way.
If so, the desert might heal us of that affliction,
wake us out of the trance that sends us unswerving
toward the precipice in our own apocalyptic time.
The healing is not imagined. The chest expands, fills with
breath. Breath is thought, wind formerly a bird. One soars, finds
unity with the stars. We can see it in the shimmering rock and
eagle wing – they interpenetrate. Go to the images. Stand close.
Watch them separate.
Form
The long straight road, the railway line, koppies, a cloudless
sky, pumpkins on the iron, emptiness. That's one version of it.
Or, where there are sudden storms: a gentle cow with wisps of
breath, or if it is male, then hail, sometimes on a sunny day. In
the distance lightning fetching those, now stars, who pick the
flowers of the rain.
The movements of stones gripped by ice are recorded on the
pavement slate, each scratch a single act in time too large to
comprehend with senses geared to a single life. Sandstone tells
of periodic floods, giant reptiles dying into mud. Layers of slate
suggest rivers of clay. Magma bursts like a woman’s flood. All
of history leads to where we are now, early mammal-like
reptiles they were, we say to avoid the embarrassment of us
being they in one and the same moment of unified time,
immigrants from the north in the middle Permian.
We talk rather of what the farmer saw: a frozen buck wakes,
shakes off cracking ice, a lizard’s eye tells it when its warm
enough, thick mud walls and shutters keep out the heat, snakes,
lions, strangers, the dispossessed.
There is another story told in wind
of wind that was once a man then bird
dropping bloodstained feather into a pool
among the daughters of the rain
ostrich becoming ostrich again
while sun thrown up into the sky
reshapes the moon that does not die
for ever, but reborn gathers souls,
and clouts the hare and splits its lip
for doubting resurrection of the dead.
Form and time, time and space, when we leave the car beside
the road, interpenetrate. Preserved in sediments of rock, and
rock itself from bacteria deep within, when we lose ourselves in
the larger time, we are the fleeting moment in its trancelike
state. The dispossessed, more than those who brought the sheep,
know that wind was once man, and birds living matter in flight.
A world at odds with what we learned at school, their images
take us into a world denied, and sadden us who have been made
blind or who blind our children to the realm. The
interpenetration of our separated things is the clue to what’s
represented here. Behind the fixity of form, an Eden, monstrous
often, evokes longing for the exiled home.
But if rock and rain and plant and sheep are one and the same,
where is the structure that guides them to their form? Not DNA
– in the larger time it too is born and dies – but memory perhaps,
the thoughts and histories invisible to our senses that draws us
to our destinies.
The present moment, marooned, scars the stone, but thoughts
leave no apparent residue. Is that why the car goes past and
doesn't stop? ‘It’s the Karoo my dear. There’s nothing here.’
Born as bacteria in the rocks we unable to grasp the picture
except with tears. The paintings tell it all. As long as you don't
interpret them.
Spirit
The church spire pinwheels the cosmos which spins around the
unmoving town built on shale of dinosaur bone and ancient
plants. The silence of the night is punctuated by the windmill’s
cry. Water from deep down is directed onto dust and great
landscapes rise and fall echoing an history embedded in the soil.
In the surrounding hills the owl and the jackal are about, and
the wind of the stars and the sleeping town speak to each other
in the enfolded night.
The wind pump turns, refracting light onto the stone wall of the
dam. Emptiness is not empty here but what fills it has no name.
Dry, the river but water speaks through mint, as does the owl
through perforated shell, the jackal through feathered carcass
and the farmer’s gun through the stuffed eagle in the town’s
museum.
It is speculated that the images on the stone
when the dispossessed were in their ecstasy
separated and took form in space
through which they passed into the death.
Not the death we say is at the end of life
but the ocean of light in which rocks now rest.
The same melt of space from the dying ice
is around the farmer’s house and the eagle in flight.
The eland are gone and we marooned among cars but here
where form becomes time, mind penetrates the hardest stone.
For the road and the railway are our lives, but for the veil the
two worlds would meet.
Here is a world of spirit in stone. The penetration of it in mind -
the dissipation not the passing through - is what I mean. Here is
the time of the early race played out in landscape unbounded by
form. Here, carved on pavements of stone, are the secrets
longest known.
According to modern physicists, we are constituted of
dimensions infinitely small for which we have no senses, or at
least none of which we are aware. Perhaps one day our parietal
eye stimulated by a reborn sun will allow space-time to bathe us
more apparently.
We are born in silence and reborn in silence. To become the
veil means to abandon road and railway, to empty time of time.
For the destination is the departure and not beyond. The rocks
are our teachers. The rocks, the windmills, the tracks of small
animals in dry river beds, the scent of mint.
Ruben Mowszowski