The Silent and the Singing Swan

“Let music sound while he doth make his choice;
Then, if he lose, he makes a swan-like end,
Fading in music…”

—William Shakespeare, The Merchant of Venice, Act 3, Scene 2

I had attempted to write this many months ago. Like much of my writing and perhaps much of my life – it remained unfinished because I could not find the form that would tie the final bow around the creative pursuit. I have often felt that certain capacities were placed within me long before I understood how they might be used.  I have struggled to unite the grandeur of the spiritual worlds with the actual work of living in a body, carrying out ordinary responsibilities, and learning how to be among other people.

There has long been within me a desire to bring creative longing together with a concrete way of working spiritually, to draw from the majestic wisdom one finds throughout the world and allow it to become an expression of love. Each of us approaches the riddles of life in a unique way, attempting to make sense of what we have undergone and what life has asked of us. Yet we do not seem to live in a time when many people can easily gather behind a common cause. Even where much is shared, each person brings particular colors, and creative impulses, seeking to form a path that is truly one’s own. Perhaps this individualization is part of how the world must now turn, even though it also makes genuine collaboration increasingly difficult.

For nearly seven years and even  before that, in a different way  —I have tried to find a form through which I might bring something of what I have encountered as the living creative Spirit, or Logos, to those with whom I live in close contact, particularly people whose lives have been shaped by Alcoholics Anonymous and Christian thought. The larger work toward which this writing leads became my attempt to do that. It may be my swan song in this particular form and at this juncture in my life: the culmination of a period in which I hoped to build a bridge among the three spiritual streams that have profoundly shaped me—(AA, Christianity, and Anthroposophical Spiritual Science)

Yet as I approach its completion, I recognize something about my effort. Perhaps I have spent too much time trying to work these ideas into their fullest possible form on paper, hoping that if I could only express them clearly enough, others might more readily feel what they opened within me and recognize how much more may be contained within the spiritual principles we already practice. The writing and shaping of creative impulses from my entire life has been necessary, but it can also become a way of postponing – escaping in a sense what the ideas themselves require: an honest attempt at living them out.

My own name seems to contain something of this lesson. Shane comes through the Irish Seán, a form of John, while Smith is among the most common surnames in the English-speaking world. Traced backward in this way, my name leads toward “John Smith”—not a distinguished name announcing some exceptional personality, but almost the name of anyone at all. I am merely another John Smith. This is meaningful to me because one of the great spiritual influences upon my life was an anonymous movement. Alcoholics Anonymous allowed me, for the first time, to begin getting a handle on myself and to walk through life with clearer and more sober eyes. I think here of Peter’s warning: “Be sober, be vigilant; because your adversary the devil, as a roaring lion, walketh about, seeking whom he may devour” (1 Peter 5:8). Sobriety can take on an altogether different form, wider and far richer when it  It calls for wakefulness toward oneself and toward the forces that would draw one back into unconsciousness. The anonymity of AA also foreshadowed the necessity of breaking down my more egoistic tendencies. It showed me that a group could exist without a governing personality cannibalizing the freely working spirit. Each person could bring individual qualities into something greater without needing to become the center of it.

I think here of the words of the Christ in John 17: “I pray for them: I pray not for the world, but for them which thou hast given me.” I do not understand this as indifference toward the world, but as a reminder that we are given particular people with whom to work. We do not always have to search far and wide for those into whom we may build life. A time may come when human beings will learn to speak across the oceans in spirit, but for now I have been placed among certain people. I can try, as Paul wrote, to become “all things to all men,” in the hope that something of what has helped me may also help another. 

The meaning carried by a biography cannot be reduced to genetics or heredity. There is also something spiritual at work within the formation of a life and within the emergence of inner character. For people living before the modern era – before this fifth post-Atlantean epoch as anthroposophy or spiritual science asserts—the name of a thing and the qualities dwelling within it may not have appeared as divided as they do within our present thinking and feeling. Meaning, speech, image, and being remained more closely interwoven. Even the phonetic character of a name could be experienced as belonging to the nature of what was named. Modern consciousness no longer experiences language in this way. As we form an identity, which is so hard to get at in today’s chaos- we still wonder whether our  personal biographical circumstances, even what is contained behind a name, can hold something more than an accident. We wonder what our lives may leave behind and what might finally become our swan song.

The ancient legend holds that swans remain silent throughout their lives but sing beautifully just before they die. The expression eventually came to mean the final performance or creative act of a person’s life. Yet Socrates, according to Plato, did not believe that the swan’s final song was a lament. Because the swan was sacred to Apollo, he understood it as a song of gladness: the bird sang because it knew it was about to return to the god it served. This image has remained alive even though the legend itself was disputed in antiquity. Pliny the Elder rejected it as false. Nevertheless, it passed through later literature and appeared memorably in Shakespeare’s image of one making “a swan-like end, fading in music.” The power of the image does not finally depend upon whether every swan literally sings at death. It speaks to the possibility that an ending may also become an offering—that what has remained silent through much of a life may finally be given voice as one form of existence reaches its completion.

The title The Silent and the Singing Swan also returns me to the two initials of my name: the S and the S. I do not mean that these letters mechanically determined my destiny. I recognize a pattern in the way certain sounds, images, and experiences have slowly come together throughout my life. The two S’s were given to me before I could speak, yet I now find myself writing of silence, song, the swan, the serpent, and the strange possibility of transformation contained within them. A man told me that life would soon come to take another form in meeting me – that it would not speak to me in words of my native language, in the ways of common speech but come to me through colors, tones ,and words that do not have audible qualities at all.

Hermann Beckh, in The Source of Speech, describes the sibilant s as a sound connected with what is heavy or earthly, and drawn downward. He relates it to the serpent and to ancient roots suggesting flowing,  and winding movement. The shape and sound of the letter seem to carry something serpentine within them. It moves close to the earth, winding forward rather than rising directly into the heights. Perhaps much of my life had to begin there. For many years, it seemed as though I were living within a dream or an endless purgatory. Near the middle of life, I began to recognize that change was inevitable and eventually learned to long for it. One begins to discover that it is possible to become something other than the form into which one has hardened. The crawling and earthbound S does not have to be cast off entirely, but it must undergo a metamorphosis – a transformation. The serpent can shed its skin, and the silent swan can find its song, but only by releasing what one may hold most dear: the image of oneself, an addiction that can be far more powerful than any drug.

This returns me to the larger piece of writing, which I have nearly lost all desire to complete, except perhaps as a reminder that I must enter each day into a way of living these ideas among those nearest to me. I once imagined that its purpose was to place a collection of ideas into the minds of others to help them see the correspondences I had begun to recognize among Anthroposophy, Christianity, AA, the evolution of consciousness, and the schooling of the soul. I still believe these relationships are meaningful, and I still hope that something within the work may reach another person. What has changed is my understanding of what I can ask of it. I cannot make another person love the ideas I have come to love, nor can I determine what those ideas must become within another life. I can only give them the form I am presently capable of giving them and try to embody them in the life I share with others.

There is also a physical dimension to the swan legend that brings the image unexpectedly close to my own biography. The whooper swan, unlike the mute swan, possesses a remarkably shaped trachea that coils within its breastbone. It has been observed that, as the bird dies, the final expiration of air from its collapsing lungs may produce a slow, flute-like sound. Similar accounts have been given of other wild swans with comparably formed tracheae. What mythology brings as an image does contain a physical truth: the passage of final breath through a particular bodily form can become song.

I entered life prematurely with lungs that collapsed. Breath itself was uncertain at the beginning of my biography. I recognize the strange pattern that has gradually assembled around me: the two S’s, the anonymous name of John Smith, the serpent drawn along the earth, the silent swan, the collapsing lungs, and the breath that may finally become music. Perhaps this is my swan song, but not because my creative or spiritual work is ending. What is ending is this particular seven-year effort. I have carried these ideas as far as I presently can. I am another John Smith, one person among others, giving voice to what has passed through one particular life. I still do not know what will become of this effort to bring these spiritual streams together. More is always being revealed.