Conversations With A Stone
By Wislawa Szymborska
(Nobel Prize winner 1996)
I knock at the stone's front door
"It's only me, let me come in
I want to enter your insides,
have a look around,
breathe my fill of you."
"Go away," says the stone.
"I'm shut tight.
Even if you break me to pieces,
we'll all still be closed.
You can grind us to sand,
we still won't let you in."
I knock at the stones front door.
"It's only me, let me in.
I have come out of pure curiosity.
Only life can quench it.
I mean to stroll through your palace,
then go calling on a leaf, a drop of water.
I don't have much time.
My mortality should touch you.
"I am made of stone" says the stone,
"and must therefore keep a straight face.
Go away.
I don't have the muscles to laugh."
I knock at the stones front door.
"It's only me, let me come in.
I hear you have great empty halls inside you,
unseen, their beauty in vain,
soundless, not echoing anyone's steps.
Admit you don't know them well yourself."
"Great and empty, true enough," says the stone,
"but there isn't any room.
Beautiful, perhaps, but not to the taste
of your poor senses.
You may get to know me, but you will never know me through.
My whole surface is turned toward you,
my insides turned away."
I knock at the stones front door.
"It's only me, let me come in.
I don't seek refuge for eternity.
I'm not unhappy.
I'm not homeless.
My world is worth returning to.
I'll enter and exit empty-handed.
And proof I was there
will be only words,
which no one will believe."
"You shall not enter," says the stone.
You lack the sense of taking part.
No other sense can make up for your missing sense of taking part.
Even sight heightened to become all-seeing
will do you no good with out a sense of taking part.
You shall not enter, you have only a sense of what that sense should be,
only it's seed, imagination."
I knock at stone's front door.
It's only me, let me come in.
I haven't got two thousand entries,
so let become under your roof."
"If you don't believe me," says the stone,
just ask a leaf, it will tell you the same.
Ask a drop of water, it will say what the leaf has said.
And, finally, ask a hair from your own head.
I am bursting with laughter, yes laughter, vast laughter,
although I don't know how to laugh."
I knock at the stone's door.
"It's only me, let me come in."
"I don't have a door," says the stone.
One of the reasons that I love lush forests is the desert. Contrast is a door to mindful discovery. Our minds look intently at that which is different from our own familiar. In the desert the destination of the road is obscured by distance, in the forest the road may be only a few feet ahead and behind. In either situation my heart cracks open and I see with those eyes, heart-eyes. I love it all in the moment.
On the other hand, I love to peruse maps for the opposite reason; rather than living in the moment, I live in anticipation of discovery, even if it is not accurate in any way. The maps of early explorers were like this. They were full of foreshortened coastlines and names that implied precious metals and gems. Not to mention monsters and a frightening unknown.
The Polish poet Wislawa Szymborska (1923 – 2012) writes a nice bit on maps and their perfidy. She was the 1996 Nobel Prize winner for Literature. (But let us NOT overlook her translator Clare Cavanagh who made them seem to be written in english, just for us. Otherwise I might never have seen her work and been so moved.)
MAP Wisława Szymborska
Flat as the table it’s placed on. Nothing moves beneath it and it seeks no outlet. Above—my human breath creates no stirring air and leaves its total surface undisturbed.
Its plains, valleys are always green, uplands, mountains are yellow and brown, while seas, oceans remain a kindly blue beside the tattered shores.
Everything here is small, near, accessible. I can press volcanoes with my fingertip, stroke the poles without thick mittens, I can with a single glance encompass every desert with the river lying just beside it.
A few trees stand for ancient forests, you couldn’t lose your way among them.
In the east and west, above and below the equator— quiet like pins dropping, and in every black pinprick people keep on living. Mass graves and sudden ruins are out of the picture.
Nations’ borders are barely visible as if they wavered—to be or not.
I like maps, because they lie. Because they give no access to the vicious truth. Because great-heartedly, good-naturedly they spread before me a world not of this world.
The Myth of Trees 