All Souls

[Image: “Gratte Ciel’s ‘La Place des Anges,’ a French aerial spectacular,” by Peter Tea. (Found it on Flickr; using it here under a Creative Commons license — thank you!) Says one preview of the show (2018): “This weekend Botanic Park will be transformed nightly into a white wonderland as angels appear above the crowd for WOMADelaide. French company, Gratte Ciel (which means skyscraper in English) will perform its show ‘La Place des Anges’ between the trees of Botanic Park.” The park in question was this one.]

From whiskey river:

(a) Are the skies you sleep under likely to open up for weeks on end? 
(b) Is the ground you walk on likely to tremble and split? 
(c) Is there a chance (and please check the box, no matter how small that chance seems) that the ominous mountain casting a midday shadow over your home might one day erupt with no rhyme or reason?

Because if the answer is yes to one or all of these questions, then the life you lead is a midnight thing, always a hair’s breadth from the witching hour; it is volatile, it is threadbare; it is carefree in the true sense of that term; it is light, losable like a key or a hair clip. And it is lethargy: why not sit all morning, all day, all year, under the same cypress tree drawing the figure eight in the dust? More than that, it is disaster, it is chaos: why not overthrow a government on a whim, why not blind the man you hate, why not go mad, go gibbering through the town like a loon, waving your hands, tearing your hair? There’s nothing to stop you—or rather anything could stop you, any hour, any minute. That feeling. That’s the real difference in a life.

(Zadie Smith [source])

…and:

Then as regards the actual connection between spirit and body I consider that the body by reason of being a living body can “attract” and hold on to a “spirit” whilst the body is alive and awake and the two are firmly connected. When the body is asleep I cannot guess what happens but when the body dies the “mechanism” of the body, holding the spirit, is gone and the spirit finds a new body sooner or later perhaps immediately.

As regards the question of why we have bodies at all; why we do not or cannot live free as spirits and communicate as such, we probably could do so but there would be nothing whatever to do. The body provides something for the spirit to look after and use.

(Alan Turing [source])

…and:

Humans are indeed frightful beings.
A single moon
Bright and clear
In an unclouded sky:
Yet still we stumble
In the world’s darkness
Have a good look
stop the breath,
peel off the skin,
and everybody ends up looking the same.
No matter how long you live,
the result is not altered.
Who will not end up as a skeleton? Cast off the notion that “I exist.”
Entrust yourself to the windblown clouds,
and do not wish to live forever.

(Ikkyu (translated by John Stevens) [source])

Not from whiskey river:

Lost in the Milky Way

Some of us are like trees that grow with a spiral grain
as if prepared for the path of? the spirit’s journey
to the world of all souls.

It is not an easy path.
A dog stands at the opening constellation
past the great helping hand.

The dog wants to know,
did you ever harm an animal, hurt any creature,
did you take a life you didn’t eat?

This is the first on your map. There is another
my people made of? the great beyond
that lies farther away than this galaxy.

It is a world that can’t be imagined by ordinary means.
After this first one,
the next could be a map of ?forever.

It could be a cartography
shining only at some times of? the year
like a great web of finery

some spider pulled from herself
to help you recall your true following
your first white breath in the cold.

The next door opens and Old Woman
counts your scars. She is interested in how you have been
hurt and not in anything akin to sin.

From between stars are the words we now refuse;
loneliness, longing, whatever suffering
might follow your life into the sky.

Once those are gone, the life you had
against your own will, the hope, even the prayers
take you one more bend around the river of sky.

(Linda Hogan [source])

…and:

On my office wall is a beautiful photograph of a slow loris with round, enormous eyes set in the spectral face of a night-haunter. From a great bundle of fur a small hand protrudes to clasp a branch. Only a specialist would see in that body the far-off simulacrum of our own. Sometimes when I am very tired I can think myself into the picture until I am wrapped securely in a warm coat with a fine black stripe down my spine. And my hands would still grasp a stick as they do today.

At such times a great peace settles on me, and with the office door closed, I can sleep as lemurs sleep tonight, huddled high in the great trees of two continents. Let the storms blow through the streets of cities; the root is safe, the many-faced animal of which we are one flashing and evanescent facet will not pass with us. When the last seared hand has flung the last grenade, an older version of that hand will be stroking a clinging youngster hidden in its fur, high up under some autumn moon. I will think of beginning again, I say to myself then, sleepily. I will think of beginning again, in a different way.

(Loren Eiseley [source])

…and:

All Hallows

Even now this landscape is assembling.
The hills darken. The oxen
sleep in their blue yoke,
the fields having been
picked clean, the sheaves
bound evenly and piled at the roadside
among cinquefoil, as the toothed moon rises:

his is the barrenness
of harvest or pestilence.
And the wife leaning out the window
with her hand extended, as in payment,
and the seeds
distinct, gold, calling
Come here
Come here, little one

And the soul creeps out of the tree.

(Louise Glück [source])