The text should be spoken by various voices, in a room full of people. There is one central voice, who does the poems and the history, but many other voices from the audience speak when it comes to the dialogue.
I long to live up to the sun
I long to reach up and touch it,
But I am gone
But I am but dust
The cinders
Of my heart have burnt away but
My mind and my soul still live on.
I will pass through life again
I would do anything just to have warmth
Upon my face.
It is cold down here, I smell no smell,
I taste no taste.
My time came, my time was there.
One day it will come again,
My time went and death took me.
That was written by an eleven-year-old boy. I would like to read some more of his poems as we journey through the night. The boy’s father was bi-polar and would swing from bouts of depression and suicidal thoughts to moments of uplift and genius.
‘I am a genius. I am the best thing you have ever seen. Look at you. You fish. You lowly evolved species. Look at me. Look at my hair. My face. Look at my name. Barnaby Tobias Hornsey-Pennell’
In the Representative of Man, which is a hand carved, nine metre tall, wooden sculpture currently located in Switzerland, Steiner depicts two forces which lead us astray. He names one of them Lucifer. Lucifer wants to take us above humanity, above the earth, looking down, sneering at our fellow human. The part of us that thinks we’re special, the part that wants glory, that feels there is a quick answer to life, the famous side of ourselves, the one that shivers at the mundanity of life. Many artists are Luciferic.
‘Don’t talk about art, Barnaby. Talk about numbers. Objectives. Facts. Give them Steiner’s core knowledge. If you can do it correctly, maybe someone will pick it up. It might lead to money. Maybe they’ll finally give you that slot in the theatre downstairs they’ve been denying you for so long.’
The other force, Steiner calls Ahriman. The name Ahriman comes out of Persia, from the ancient Zoroastrian tradition. In the modern tabletop game Warhammer; where you collect little figurines of plastic and metal, paint them and battle against each other for hours on end, there is an army you can collect called Chaos Space Marines. Within the army, there is a sorcerer called Ahriman. They describe his backstory as thus;
‘Ahriman refuses to acknowledge his master. Across the ensuing millennia he has become a scourge of the Imperium, raiding ancient museums, libraries, scholars, places of learning, religion and contemplative thought. He seeks to acquire artefacts, data, or even persons he believes can lead him to fully master the way of the sorcerer.’
The part of us that wants a logical answer everything, end results, material. The part that views human beings as simply data. Much of the art industry is Ahrimanic.
‘God, they’ve never heard that before. You’re on fire, Barnaby.’
There was a young Sufi called Nasrudin, he went to a teacher for music lessons, he asked him about the cost, the teacher explained, 'It's fifteen pounds for the first lesson, and then ten pounds for each lesson after that.' Nasrudin replied, 'Very well, I'll start with the second lesson.'
The sky blue and clear
The sunlight so orange,
So pink,
In the sky so lovely.
It looks like the very power of the heavens
Have opened up and the angels have made
Beautiful dazzling lights.
Before the eleven-year-old boy was born, his father was going to marry an extremely wealthy woman. Her parents owned a long lineage of sherry companies, and their wedding present to the boy’s father was a four-bedroom house in London with a swimming pool and tennis court, and a comfortable job within the family business. The father of the boy wanted to be a millionaire. He was also a talented celloist and pianist, filled with the potential of being a musician.
On the one hand we have the art, a place for truth, for imagination, a place that is in touch with spirit. Personal. Explorative. Lonely. Loving. Untouchable. Nourishing. Communal. Human. Alive. Something we are all capable of doing, something which is inexplainable. It doesn’t have tracible laws in nature or logic. It just is. And then we sell it for money.
On the other hand, we have the industry; a place which is designed to make money. A place that focuses on outcome. Where the heights of creative projects are measured by how many tickets they sell. By how much money they make. Not by how many people they reach. How many souls they bring together. How much hair they raise.
In the Lord of the Rings, Tolkien depicts Sauron as essentially the physical incarnation of Ahriman. He’s spikey and made of metal. Sauron blocks out the sun, the symbol of divinity, to move his forces over Middle Earth and conquer humanity.
The military industrial complex makes profits from the destruction of mankind. They make their weapons in large factories, away from sunlight. When the weapons are put into action, huge blooms of dark smoke are sent into the air, like thick cloud.
Smeagol is Lucifer. He seeks the ring, power, magic, everlasting life – which is very current with billionaires - the things that will take him beyond the rest of his species. He becomes Gollum. Self-loathing, vicious and addicted.
In Steppenwolf, Herman Hesse tells the story of a man who believes he is half animal half human. The human side of him never knows the animal side, and the animal side never knows the human side. When he is human, he seeks music and divinity. When he is animal, he seeks the pub and prostitution. Both sides of Lucifer, the part that lifts us up above, and the part that pulls us down. The thing they share is their attempt to drag us away from Earth. When actors often finish a show, after reaching such heights, they hit the pub and come back down.
Life is precious, life is a winding path.
A ball of secrets, a maze, a mystery.
Life is short it’s good, it’s wonderful, it’s great
You can never get enough of it.
It’s powerful, it’s a puzzle, it’s a riddle, it’s fresh.
For some people it is beautiful, for others it’s a crime.
For old it’s unravelled they have worked out the meaning of it.
For young it’s still a mystery.
But you have a choice which path will you take, light or dark?
Or will you follow others and make mistakes.
You have to think for yourself,
I’m not going to make that decision for you.
Two days before he was due to marry this wealthy woman, the boy’s father was strolling in Kensington Palace Gardens, and another woman walked by with a dog. The boy’s father heard a voice in his head saying that she was going to be the mother of his children. So, he called off the wedding and married this woman instead. The father and the woman had five children. The father and the mother divorced soon after the fifth was born. The father and the mother never spoke to each other again. The boy was one of those children.
A friend of mine was struggling to get his heart into a Shakespeare speech, he couldn’t speak it. When he walked out on the Globe and looked up and saw the painted gods on the ceiling, he spoke it.
When the Egyptians and the Greeks performed theatre, it was an act of worship. Only the most holy could go on the stage, Egyptian theatre was more pure ritual, a summoning of spirit. The Greeks used mask, partly because they performed to thousands, but also because they didn’t want to put the singular human before the archetype, the personal before the universality of mankind.
In the plays of Shakespeare, you can find the whole cosmos. Light and dark encompasses every human. He writes about the spirit and the dirt and does not separate the two. Hamlet kills in the physical world because of something he sees and hears in the spiritual. He sits on the precipice between the two worlds. Striving to balance them both in his breast.
When I wrote this speech, I thought I was giving a lecture, my first draft was linear logical, it was littered with facts about the history of theatre. It felt accomplished. Right. Proper. I knew I had to throw it in the bin.
‘God you’re brave, and look at your talk now, full of artistic genius, just look at them, in awe.’
‘Who gives a damn! You haven’t given them anything they can go away with. Nothing to clutch. You’ve barely spoken of Steiner; this is a lecture in Steiner House! In Rudolf Steiner House!’
A zen master is walking with his three pupils in the woods, the master stops and picks up a branch, turns to his pupils and asks the first one, 'What is this?' The first pupil says, 'It's a stick.' The master hits him with it. He turns to the second pupil and says, 'What's this?' the second pupil hesitates, so the master hits him with it too, he turns to the third pupil and says, 'What is this?' the third pupil says, 'Hmm, I'm not sure, may I take a look at it?' He takes the stick from the master and hits the master with it.
Tolstoy expressed how it saddened him when people turned art making into a profession. He said that when something like money becomes an intention, something else crept into the work.
David Hockney when finding out a painting of his sold for over £90 Million, turned away embarrassed. He didn’t want to know the price his work was estimated at. When we buy a ticket to the theatre, we want our monies worth, the more we pay, the more we expect to be wowed by the production.
In a recent production of a Greek tragedy, when the actors spoke to the Gods, they didn’t know where to look. When the brother and sister were re-united in the story, there was so much dry ice, I couldn’t see them embrace. I don’t think they did embrace. But I could not see, because the human moment was smothered by the dry ice.
A couple of Christmas’s ago, there was homeless woman outside Baker Street station, she was cold and crying. I sat with her -
‘You’re so great Barnaby, not only handsome, but kind too.’
‘Get to the point!’
She told me her story. I gave her some money for a shelter. Then I teared up as I told her my story. She turned to me, disgusted, and said, ‘Don’t you start crying mate.’ I think I wore a suit and big jacket. And gave her twenty pounds. ‘Problems?’ She must’ve thought. ‘What problems?’
Down deep, deep, far, far down
There lies a horror, utter darkness
A place of lies, deceit of complete and utter torture, death, hell.
Some would say the devil himself lives there.
You don’t want to know what awaits you down in the darkness.
The father and mother sent their five children to a magic school. The boy played Thor in a production of Norse Myths at the age of 8. His father saw him in the production, said he was good. When the boy wrote these poems at age 11, his mother typed them up.
That boy who stabbed those three young girls in Southport. It makes me wonder if he was ever a boy. Did he want to hear stories. Did he climb trees. Did his mum tuck him in at night. If so, when did he change. When did the moment come. What possessed him. What snuck in.
Psychology and science explains these moments as phenomena in the brain; mental breakdown. They just ‘snapped’ or ‘flipped’. We might say they were ‘completely out of character.’
These two forces can also work through institutes and policy.
In his book Sedated, James Davies explains how in the 80’s the conservative government made a shift in the public sector; in attempt to make things more efficient, they made schools and hospitals more like private companies, This meant if they wanted funding, they had to compete for it. This brought in a whole new pressure on teachers, students, doctors. Suddenly school was no longer about trying to help students learn, it was about getting the best grades. Many disabled and less able students were turned away from the most competitive schools. As well as patients deemed to tricky to treat from hospitals.
Talks with primary school teachers tell me how less and less emphasis is placed on art, on stories, painting, as they don’t get you jobs. Poetry, painting, music, these things are only reserved for private schools. They’re luxuries. Not necessities.
MALCOLM So nice of you to join us.
STEPHEN Nice? Nice? London is burning! It's completely lost!
MALCOLM It's been lost for years, Stephen, ever since they got those self-service checkouts.
STEPHEN We should never have left, I told Jack the countryside was no good. All you clotted cream, yoghurt weaving pixies don't know how to hold a barn dance, let alone a protest. The only thing that's going to put a stop to this devastation is Londoners, cold, gritty Londoners.
MALCOLM No, no, we need more warmth Stephen, more artists, not accountants.
STEPHEN What can an artist offer this world?
LILLY Boys -
MALCOLM Far more than any number crunching cocaine sniffing suit wearing mongrel.
LILLY Boys -
STEPHEN Mongrel? The world is made of numbers, not pictures -
MALCOLM The world is made of symbols -
LILLY Boys!
They stop.
That's enough. It's Sophie's birthday.
MALCOLM We were only catching up.
STEPHEN (incredibly light and friendly) Yes, I had missed my usual dosage of insults from my dear friend here.
Verse is the eternal language, the language of the heart, de-dum-de-dum-de-dum. Prose is the everyday. Vowels express feeling, they open, consonants form and shape, they contract.
When Ibsen transitioned from verse to prose, he was attempting to interrogate more closely and humanely mankind’s new position within society, religion and nature. Factories had been born, the modern working day came about, Darwinism. Plays moved from palaces to kitchens, from archetypes to everyday people. Nietzsche said God is dead. Freud said we fancy our parents, Jung said we need to go into our souls.
At the same time, they introduced the star system as a way of grading art. Theatre shows are given five stars if they are deemed a roaring success, one star if a complete failure. We scream for them today. Swarm them. We call them superstars. Or stars. You get a star on the Hollywood Walk of fame. Cemented into the pavement.
The days grow shorter the days grow darker
The brilliant white snowflakes so vulnerable to the heat
Make excellent snowballs for children to play.
The darkness creeps in, he wants to play too with the snowflakes.
He does not know what to do.
The boy left the school at age 12 and went to a different school. He wore a tie and had eggs thrown at him. After three months, he went back to the magic school.
After World War 2, Pinter used silence as a way of interrogating the human condition. He got rid of words. Pauses. Beats. Long silences became his language. Words failed to convey the thing they were trying to convey. Or audiences failed to interpret. What was of more use, what said more, was silence.
Along with Beckett, Pinter did not bow down to structure or character arc. They disrupted what came before. Putting what they felt was needed into the world. Waiting for Godot depicts two men, homeless men, of no place or job, no loyalty to idea or concept, country, in some ways free, but hungry, waiting for a man who never arrives, the man is called Godot. They wait in the wasteland for a job. The man never comes, instead a child sends a message that they are to try again the next day. So, they do. They’re probably still there, waiting for their task.
These forces are not unique to Steiner’s cosmology. You can find them all over the world, in many sacred texts, in many examples of artwork, in everyday life. In ourselves. They express themselves in many ways, anger, hate, jealousy, envy, pride, ambition. Constantly talking to us and pulling us in different directions.
If we go further into the artistic process, we have both Sauron and Gollum present. The moments of creation in the head, is a moment of raising above common thought, my precious ideas, we could give to Gollum. The moment of getting the idea down, materialising it, editing, especially editing, which has the feeling of contraction and destruction, we can attribute to Sauron.
Both work together in this process. And we need both these forces. In the middle of these two forces, between the art and the industry, between the idea and the physical formation of the idea, we have the artist. The individual.
Do you see how they love me? How they adore me? How they praise me? (to heaven) And yet, Father, you and Michael cascade insult upon insult down on me. Like some mossy rock underneath a gigantic waterfall. Me being the rock and your insults being the - (conceited) yes, well I'm glad you got it, it was the perfect metaphor. (as if being corrected) Simile. I meant simile. (brattish) Put Michael on. I want to talk to Michael about his little comment. Because I want to talk to him. Put him on.
Hello, brother. Father told me what you said. Yes, he did. And I want to ask...is that all you can muster? After all I've done? 'Flat?' Really, is that the best you've got? 'Flat?' What does that mean, Michael? What does flat actually mean. (light musing) Lacking depth? Colourless? Two dimensional? Unrealistic? Boring? Obvious? Low on energy? Which one? Because it's a pretty vague response isn't it. Pretty shallow. Yes. Shallow. As in surface level, unspecific, uninspiring, unhelpful, empty, null, void, irritating. I mean, what does flat actually mean? (violent outburst) HOW CAN A PAINTING BE ANYTHING BUT FLAT!?
No, no it's not true, Michael, no it's not - no, it's not, Michael, I reject that notion entirely. As do the humans. Oh, they do, Michael, yes, they do. They mob me, mob me to get at me. They gave me five stars for it. FIVE. How many stars are you worth? When was the last time they gave you a star? When was the last time they even thought of you! (as if receiving an answer) No - I don't want an actual date, it was rhetorical. Put father back on. (stroppy) Because I want to speak with father!
Father? I pour my heart and soul into these paintings, I really do, I make exact replicas down to the last whisker of you, father, and of home and of all my wonderful memories, and I just think I deserve a tiny, little bit more credit than you and Michael - yes you - what you two have so graciously afforded me. No. No, I don't want to talk to him. You tell him this though, tell him this. Are you ready? Good; people don't just see beauty when they observe my work, Michael, no, that would be the art of a lesser soul. No, no, no, no, no, they don't just see beauty, they feel beauty, they experience beauty, my beauty infects them. It is given to them. It transforms them. They become Beauty. They become it. You tell him that. Oh, he's there is he? Did he hear? Well, does he look impressed? What d'you mean he looks confused? No, I don't want to speak to him - look, it's very simple, if you and Michael don't acknowledge me soon, I will do such things as sins are named for. Beat. Of course it makes sense, 'Do such things as -' I mean what the hell do I have to do to get back in your good-books? Really? No, I'm serious now, how do I get home? I've done everything I can! (a desperate howl) Why won't you let me back HOOOME?!
Current playwrights and artists have so much to compete with, so many different voices, different things pulling them in different directions, fame, money, power, AI, social media, streaming services, sports, gaming, pornography, gambling, it goes on.
Arthur Miller wrote plays because he believed they made us feel less alone in the world. Rilke says we must all come to terms with the fact that we are unutterably alone. It’s hard to see why we are still drawn to the theatre.
The figure in the middle of this sculpture depicts the Christ or Buddha nature, consciousness, love, truth. It’s the part of us that stands up to these forces, that keeps them at bay, but also has compassion for them. It works with them, understands that we need these parts of ourselves. Alan Watts speaks about the great game of life as thus, ‘A great drama is when the hero is always losing but never loses, and the villain is always winning but never wins. At the end of the play, we applaud both actors, the one who played the hero and the one who played the villain.’ It’s this force, the one that can applaud and appreciate, that works through us and makes us most human.
I met another homeless woman in Baker Street station, she was a seventy-ish Nigerian lady. She told me how she had been evicted from her house during Covid. She had a big smile on her face. I asked her why she was so happy; she was smiling because she had a plan. She would go to the library every day, spend all day in there and study local law. She was going to take the council to court, and was planning to get her house back. I asked her what her name was, she said everyone called her Sunshine.
‘Go on, tell them how much money you gave her.’
What would the world be like without the four seasons?
It wouldn’t be beautiful.
The summer so warm, so powerful,
The spring so young, so fresh,
The autumn so lazy, so dead,
The winter so old, so dark.
That’s what the world wouldn’t be;
It wouldn’t be warm, powerful,
Young, fresh, lazy, dead, old and dark.
Not all of these separately
Make the world beautiful,
But all as one.
A year later, he left again and went to a different school. His father said that was a good choice. At the state school he learned to swear, take drugs, sleep with women, get drunk, steal and bully.
Ten years ago, when I was motorbiking in Vietnam -
‘You sound so cool.’
‘What does this have to do with Steiner?’
About four weeks into the trip, I was going about 90km and enjoying some mountains, and I crashed into another motorbike that was parked in the middle of the road. I flipped off my bike, flipped in the air several times, and landed on my back. I was wearing a t-shirt and shorts. And a twenty-dollar helmet. I came out unscratched because the day before, or even earlier the same day, the metal bag rack on my bike snapped off. Meaning I had to put my bag on my back instead of having it on the bike. The bag was stuffed with clothes.
J.K Rowling came up with the Harry Potter series on a train journey, because she didn’t have any way of writing it down, she worked it all out in her head on the train. She’s expressed how it was ‘given’ to her.
The other day, I couldn’t write this talk. I was struggling with how to approach it, I went for a walk down Clapham high street, a young man in a tie called Ramone stopped me and asked about my understanding off the bible. He told me the story of his faith as we walked all the way to the common. At the end he shook my hand and left. I felt better about the talk.
The big tall trees which seem to go on and on
The roots go down and down
The top most branches reach up to the heavens
And it seems that the angels make wonderful fruits and blossoms
which they put on the trees.
The trees are wonderful they are gifts from the heavens
They are here to make the world beautiful, they are royal trees.
The boy decided to be an actor. He moved to London and met a stranger. The stranger told him that behind the world we see, there is another world, a world that is untouchable. This world is within us. He called it our baseline. The thing beneath all the melody and the horns, the drum solos. He asked the boy why he wanted to act, the boy said because he wanted to be famous.
This part of us that calls to us, that directs us to certain places, the Greeks called the Daimon, The Romans called Genius, the Christians called it our Guardian Angel, Jung calls it the Self. Oscar Wilde famously said I have nothing to declare but my genius.
Plato’s Myth of Er tells the story of a soldier called Er who dies, and his soul has to return to earth. In his pre-birth state he encounters other souls before they are born, these souls choose which family they go into and the life they are to have. Poets, politicians, doctors, philosophers, etc. When these souls are born on earth, they forget their previous memories, but are still drawn to the professions they chose in their pre-birth state.
James Hillman uses this for his psychological concept acorn theory. We are not products of our childhood trauma, but rather we do the things in childhood to prepare ourselves for what we will be as adults. He gives the example of Edmund Hillary, who when he was a boy spend most of his time in isolation, alone in his bedroom, he didn’t have many friends and was very shy. When he was older, he became the first man to climb Everest alone. Hillman suggests he was preparing for this moment in his childhood. The acorn and the oak tree.
The Dalia Lama walks into a pizza place, the young server behind the counter says what can I get you? He says, can you make me one with everything.
The earth, strong beneath your feet,
Soft beneath others.
The worms churn the soil
Making it rich and good,
The soft rain on the soil,
Pitter patter, pitter patter,
The smell of the earth as the
Rain hits the fresh soil.
It’s as if there’s a part of God
In it, and his scent has come out.
The boy got an agent and booked an acting job. On the job, he smoked and drank and got fat. After the job, he moved back in with his father to the countryside and prayed and meditated. And got a bow and arrow.
When the Greeks took the mask off, when Shakespeare wrote Hamlet, when Ibsen moved from Verse to prose, when Becket and Pinter moved from words to silence, the transition from the stars in heaven to the page and the pavement, it felt like the recognition of a loss of something. Or perhaps it was an attempt to be closer to something that we no longer recognise so clearly.
Pinter, notorious for his violent and absurdist plays, is even more famous for his silence, his attempt to get beyond the words.
Jon Fosse, the 2023 Nobel prize winning novelist and playwright, said: JAN.
‘A silent language speaks from the work as a whole. What matters aren’t the parts in isolation, but the whole. I might go as far as to say that there is a spirit of the whole, a spirit that speaks, both from very nearby and from a very great distance. And what do you hear if you listen well enough? You hear the silence. And as others have said before; it is only in the silence that we can hear the voice of –‘
Silence.
You cannot look up into the light
No mortal can stand it.
For light is the home of god his great realm,
It’s so peaceful yet it’s so powerful,
It tells no lies so yet only the purest
Of human beings can go there,
For it is the home of the creator
For you, well let’s just see what awaits you in the light.
When the boy’s father married his mother, he stopped playing the cello. Eventually, he stopped talking to his children. But when he drunk wine, he confessed to the boy all he wanted was a family. When the the boy told him he loved him, the father asked why.
These two forces that we have, pushing and pulling, the industry and the art, the fame and the artist, the money and the integrity, the part that wants to destroy and create, they are there. And very real.
The boy wants to live in an oak tree, have a large family who wear knitted jumpers, who run in and bundled him when he gets home. He wants to have a community; he wants to grow his own food and live out his life in peace. He wants his wife to bake and paint and sing. I want to be famous. I want to have a flat in soho, a range rover, a large social media following, lots of money in the bank, and lots of fans. I want recognition. A blue plaque that says my name.
But so is that other force, and those other moments, the little miracles that happen every day, the parts of us that seek the sacred, that calls to us, the guiding hands we have in life.
The fact we lose our minds over stars, that we’re drawn to them, the fact the desired affect a modern playwright wants on its audience is movement, they want to move them from here to somewhere else, some other place. The fact we still go the theatre. We sit in the dark with strangers and watch false events unfold to people we do not know but like to imagine ourselves to be. This is ritual. The fact Shakespeare is the most reproduce playwright. Ibsen the second. The fact that four Greek tragedies have been staged in London this year. The fact we still have a section in the audience called the gods, where the actors look and say their lines. And the section below the gods is called the circle, the grand circle, or the royal circle, the circle is the symbol for the infinite, the sun symbol, divinity. This tells me we are still seeking something, collectively, there is a wish to ‘get at it’. What ‘it’ is, is hard to say.
In a book I read it said, ‘We must put our best, our purely human qualities at the service of humanity as a whole. We must live fully within our own being.’
Arthur Miller asked where are the secret parts of ourselves? Why don’t we see them on the stage?
The main thing I take from everyone mentioned in this talk, is not so much their achievements, but the willingness to follow that part of them that called. To put themselves forward as individuals.
‘One day in Spring, one day, just before we did Red Leaf, I had my epiphany. It had been so long since anyone had said anything about me, complimented me, or put opinions on me, I was feeling a kind of ... free from myself. And this idea crept in, that my interior, what I feel inside, is in fact entirely separate from my exterior. And that people's interpretation of my exterior doesn't belong to me, because they aren't quite me, in fact, they aren't me at all. And I can't change what they see or feel, because I am completely separate from it - the real me is- is safe from - from all their nasty perceptions. And after this epiphany I felt free. Relieved. And I started to think that maybe it was okay other people could enjoy my beauty without me. That I didn't need to... hoard it all. That I didn't have to feel it myself for it to be true, for it to exist for others. That maybe it doesn't exist at all. That maybe I can have my inside and they can have my outside. They can have the part that rots. And I can have the everlasting bit. The bit that matters.’
If the father had not been troubled about his upcoming engagement. He wouldn’t have gone for a walk two days before the wedding. He wouldn’t have seen the mother. He wouldn’t have heard that voice. The boy would not exist.
That sweet sound like angels singing
Like flowers dancing,
Like life growing.
A new born baby is here, his face like an angel.
Flowers dance around the flame of life.
The heavens are bright, the heavens are sweet, the heavens are life.
Over time the baby gets older, older and older
Till it’s time for him to join the angels.
I will not forget this man for the dead
Are as powerful and as noble as the living.
I see now what I did not see before
That sweet, sweet music is the music of the heavens
It is the music of life.
Maybe the boy wrote those poems because he knew twenty years later, he was going to have to speak here tonight.