As a general rule, all the very oldest people of this planet are not getting on Facebook or TikTok to let everybody know what age milestone they have accomplished and what they have learnt along the way. As a general rule, the long-lived and hyper long-lived, live very private lives, around a few close and loyal individuals only. Public display, or attention seeking, is rarely of interest to a long-enduring individual. Only a small smattering of their knowledge and accumulated wisdom is shared outwards.
Indeed, the vast majority of human wisdom is concealed, portioned and partitioned away, within the recesses of a being's mind and imagination (and sometimes up one octave, in a close-knit community). A thoroughly private affair, in any instance.
Profoundly, knowledge/information/order is inherently embedded in the deep enclosures of nature herself, also. From photons to electromagnetic waves, DNA to cell systems, most information is thoroughly hidden, locked away from the elements (and any scrambling elements) so that the integrity of the message, the state of in-form-ation, is maximally preserved. Hidden to nearly all, excepting a few of the very most perspicacious, caring and devoted of individuals.
In another respect, however, wisdom and knowledge is deeply exposed, deeply and profoundly laid-bare; hidden in plain sight. It waits, as all music does, for us to open up and come alive to meet it, to witness it, to attune to it, or merge with it. Like the elder deep in the forest with his keen senses, like the mother who has lived for her son and discovered true love, like the aspirant who has tasted the cosmos in a homegrown grapefruit under a Tuscan sky at dusk, like the writer, who wrote one hundred years ago: "I am not Lost at Sea, I am alive at Sea. I am awake at Sea. I am lost in the land of men, but out here I am free". Like the fern trembling in the breeze, in all starkness and fragility, yet with the hope and resilience of the ages.
Kyle Vialli (2023)
Artwork: “Night and Sleep", by Evelyn de Morgan (1878).
