The greatest displeasure of the largest number
Is the law of nature. – Pao Chao, “The Ruined City”
Paul J. Pastor writes about The Kalevala, an epic poem written from Karelian and Finnish folklore, focusing on “the great bard Väinämöinen” who chooses to live
on the island with no words
on the mainland with no trees.
After a long while, if I’m reading this correctly, Väinämöinen begins to sing the world into being.
Pastor applies this to our own small creative works. Silence, not just moments of quiet, but true silence that endures beyond our comfort can be “the great and difficult friend of the writer and the artist.”
We are not artistic dynamos. We cannot truly create anything of own mere will. We must rely on the Lord and his revelation, both general and specific. Noise, even a natural and healthy noise of life, can drain us—at least, it does drain me.
And yet what brings Väinämöinen, the bard of bards, into the fullness of his power is precisely that condition of emptiness that so disgusts or unsettles us. It is being in the boring-place, the empty-place, the still-place that something happens to him, something so vast that nature itself unlocks her most intimate secrets.
Photo by jean wimmerlin on Unsplash
The great bard began singing on a rock so bare we would have trouble finding a similar one today, but we may find a deafening silence among ruins, a place where
. . . grains of sand, like startled birds,
are looking for a safe place to settle.
Bushes and creepers, confused and tangled,
seem to know no boundaries.
These verses come from fifth century Chinese poet Pao Chao (or Bān Zhāo). In “The Ruined City,” he describes a vast plain with visible canals and roads cut into it, all leading to crumbled ends and weeds.
The young girls from east and south
Smooth as silk, fragrant as orchids
White as jade with their lips red,
Now lie beneath the dreary stones and barren earth.
The greatest displeasure of the largest number
Is the law of nature.
This too is silence and a little despair; we need more than human hope to endure it. Can we throw seeds into the wind that will sprout in what time the Lord will give them? Kyrie, eleison.