Resonance: Reverberations: The Nature of Quotation

 

“Awake O sleeper!…”

(Ephesians 5)

“…life is but a dream”

(children’s rhyme)

“The Tao that can be spoken…”

(Tao te Ching)

“From the way I say your name I always know…”

(???)

“In the beginning was the Word…”

(John 1)

“To be or not to be”

(Hamlet)

“Try again.  Fail again.  Try again.  Fail better.”

(Sam Beckett)

“I went to the word to make it my gesture.  I went, and I am going”

(Edmond Jabes)

            Color stained into fabric woven into rug.  Of a piece, as they say, indistinguishable from the object itself.  So the words flow into us, saturate and stain us, are absorbed and resurface as we ourselves.  Like echoes in the cranium, or instinctual responses of the body.  Resonant reverberations.

“And so it was…” (A.A. Milne?)

“Once upon a time..”  “In the beginning…”

Countless appearances, an abyss of sources, the word lives on.

Who first used “love” or “light”?  “To be” or “not”?  “Hello,” “yes,” “a”?

Our life is quotation, interpretation, paraphrase.

We shelter in a common blanket.

We’re covered with a shared snow.

We drink of one great water.

Languages one to another, stained and woven rug.

N Filbert 2012