To Give Voice, To Embrace

It is a great irony that I encountered, in the Caedmon Poetry Collection, Archibald MacLeish's poem "Epistle to Be Left In the Earth" while transferring audio cassette to mp3. A line struck me for its call to remembrance which entails an active voice:

Make in your mouths the words that were our names.

Reminded me of a project that has succumbed to digital rot (the .wav files will not play): the Whispers Project which I have described previously on Berneval (See Whispers). It is also interesting to note that the conception of the project depended on the form of the Web Ring, a form now gone into history.

And again I am reminded that all records erode as poignantly pointed out by Paul Monette's preface to Love Alone: Eighteen Elegies for Rog.

Worth remembering that MacLeish ends the poem with the observation that "Voices are crying an unknown name in the sky". We listen to the wind and we hear.

And so for day 1722
31.08.2011