The Sons of Light

There was a time, a time before oblivion, when men walked to the edge of the sacred, their souls open to the winds of legends. They passed on their origin, and advanced in their time by recalling the oral memory of the original fire. So that the Dream lasts.

They knew where they came from; it was not a world of clones, a world of slaves without memory, they knew themselves of a higher origin, more pure, like an ancient flame deposited in the flesh, a memory of light embedded in the clay of the body.

By essence

The oldest civilizations, on the shores of the sands of Egypt, the plateaus of Iran, the sacred deltas of the Indus or the shores of the Mediterranean, proclaimed with naked voices this truth: man is son of light. Not by metaphor, but by essence. This idea today makes the children of the century smile. They see only ash and deny fire.

But there dwells, under the ruins and dust, something stubborn, still vibrant, a glimmer in the shadow, the remembrance of a song. And perhaps, by plunging into silence, listening to the living and the imperceptible, we will hear again the forgotten call of the wires of light.

There are men who are not made for the din of cities, nor for the clay hourglasses of empires. These live on the edge, at the edge of the visible worlds, where things fade and start again. They do not write history, but they dream it, and it is more ancient, more true.

Deep shelter

They are found in the deep caves, sheltered from the tumult, tracing with the light of a trembling flame the animal silhouettes of the first revelations. We can guess them, centuries later, prostrate in the mists of the Himalayas, bodies dissolved in the breath, glorious bodies evaporated in the rainbow, watching between two silences the passage of a cosmic memory.

And further still, in the tundras or forests of before the borders, the shamans beat the drum as one knocks at a heavenly door, so that the ancestors -these invisible always present- deign to open up the light.

They are men of dreams, but of a dream that is more real than the stone. They do not dream to flee: they dream to remember. Because in these states of trance or meditation, something is transmitted.

A flame. A presence. A word without words. They then know themselves the heirs of those who, before them, have crossed the threshold. They see with the eyes of their predecessors. They hear in their bones worked the old songs.

Light line

And in this contact, however fugitive it may be, with the original breath they recognize their lineage-not that of blood, but that of light. The painted cave, the hanging monastery, the covered alley, the shaman’s sacred clearing are only thresholds. Places of echo.

The man who stands in silence, body open to the invisible, becomes a receptacle. He lets himself be crossed by a memory that does not belong to him in its own right, but which he nevertheless carries -as one carries a torch without being the fire.

Then he knows. He does not need to write it: knowledge is in his flesh. He is a son of light, not because it was told to him, but because he relived it there in the heartbeat of the world.

Marked

And then there were the prophets. Not those of the crowds, not those of the crowns, but those who walked in the wind, feet in the dust of the desert, eyes raised to a light that others could not see.

They spoke loudly, but it was first in silence that they had received. Somewhere between the lightning and the night, between the burning bush and the calling dream, they were visited-and marked.

These men, whom the world calls mad or chosen, knew too. They had not dreamed for themselves, but for the whole world. Their word was fire, but it is at the source that they had been drinking, where light takes the form of breath.

Watchmen too

The poets followed them. Less solemn perhaps, but just as much crossed. They also watch, they too watch. They write what others cannot say, and sometimes what others no longer dare to feel.

They have the ancient gift -that of opening in the language of the holes through which passes the light. Strangely enough, many of them live in isolation, like the hermits in their caves in the Cévennes, their huts in the north or their garage on Rue de la Pierre au Diable.

All know a simple and terrible thing: that the word is nothing if it does not spring from the place where the world touches the invisible. And that to write a single right verse, sometimes it is necessary to cross the silence of an entire life.

Dreamers too

In the mountain, in the forest, on the steep coasts of Armor, in the cold room of stone monasteries, others watch. The hermits, the monks, these men devoted to the apparent useless, hold the border.

They pray not to be saved, but that the fire may not go out. In them still burns this ancient memory, this dark consciousness that they only transmit -as one keeps a relic, not for oneself, but for those who will come.

They dream, too.

But their dreams are made of the dreams of others, those of their elders, their masters, their saints. A light transmitted from below, from heart to heart, from night to night.

Bear’s Pass

This is how, through time, this secret lineage stands: shadow painters, desert walkers, tambourineurs of the invisible, fire scribes and solitary prayerers. They have neither a common temple nor a single book, but they recognize each other. They are the sons of light, and their song, even extinguished, continues to resound in the stones, in the wind, in the silences of the world.

A people lost in the far reaches of South America, a people who have disappeared today although they carry the great migrations of yesterday, the long road from the Bering Strait which was then called “the passage of the Bear”, a people has kept for a long time a strange power.

The last of its representatives had the same kind of dream. Blond faces, speaking a language that the Land of Fire had never heard, seemed to visit them, almost every night, and the images remained, headstrong.

The futures we lose

Their old sages said to listen to the stones and the wind, and that sometimes, when the icy wind rises up the coast, it is a breath of ivory and foam, an ancient dream, looking for another heart to inhabit it. What was whispered in the words of these elders still exists, all around the planet. It is the dream energy of the dead, still seeking its way.

Strange thing that the memory of the dead. It does not live in the graves, nor in books, nor in names. It floats. It goes around the world like a discreet wind, a dust of souls waiting. And sometimes she finds a fault -a dream, an absence, a silence- where she enters.

The stones hear it, keep it in them, sometimes return it. They do not speak with words, but with the tone of memory. Not of what was, but of what could have been. Of what may be. The dead do not dream of the past. They dream of the future lost.

The thread of death

The annals are there, immaterial and yet so real, not written, not said, but alive, vibrant, ready to reincarnate in the invisible, in a gesture, a look, a coincidence.

The murmur of stones is the memory of the future. They bear the annals, they are a rhythm, a very low frequency, that only those who accept to be crossed hear. For it is necessary to be hollow in order to receive the memory of the future. One must have given up building his own story to become the support of another.

But for everyone, the whisper one day becomes silence. Then dreams. And this dream is fragmented, diluted, and seeks another heart to inhabit. That may be the meaning at heart. Not to transmit knowledge, but to maintain a tension in the world towards the forgotten. A vibrant, fragile thread between the living and the dead.

Heir to a dream

The children of light have a day, long ago, and not by their doing, forgotten or given up to be “one”. And it is their suffering that still speaks to us in the dreams of the dead. Not to return, but to reconcile.

The dreams of the dead do not call to build, but to remember. To become again porous. To be no more, each one, than an embers in the ashes, a mirror in the wind. And if sometimes, for no reason, you cry looking at the sea, know this: you are not alone.

Someone walked before you. Someone left you a dream. It belongs to you.

And it dreams of you in return.