Keening

Voice of stone, voice of the earth: to sing is to lose the capacity to sing; to listen to lose the ability to hear.

My voice? Yours? Not even that. A keening raised to the sky, like the shepherdess’ cries in The Sacrifice, indiscernible at first from bird song. I tell myself that bird song is innocent, it does not suffer. Like water in water, immanent, it is unbroken joy. Generation succeeds generation in the fields, in the forests – but what happens when a voice is torn from the natural immediacy? A new voice keens, but a voice destined to suffer – a voice fitted to grief, ready for it.

But whose grief? Whose malaise? It is not that it is impossible to sing joyfully, but that joy always bears grief at its back. It suffers itself, the song, in the singer. Suffers and is thereby detached from everything but itself. Detached – but for all that, it does not come to itself.

Suffering lost in itself, the song lost in the song: keening sounds over the plain.