begun · winter 1947 · last worked · advent 1958 · h. cordova

a treatise on bells, pages 1–89

— 89 —

on the silence after the bell

the silence which follows the ringing of a great bell is not the absence of the bell but its long, lessening afterlife in the body of the listener.

where the church bell ends in the air, it begins again, for some time, in the bones of those who stood beneath it; and where it ends there it begins, more faintly, in the memory; and where it ends there it

ends — or does not end — and one must say at last that

conclusion to follow.

eleven years · no conclusion · the lower right drawer

he meant the conclusion to draw together all twelve chapters: the casting, the hanging, the ringing, the silence after; the curfew and the passing; the bell as instrument and as marker of time; the question — saved for the last paragraph — of whether a bell heard only by oneself counts as a bell.

he could not answer the last question. he could not conclude without answering it. for eleven advents he meant to sit down to the conclusion in the new year. for eleven new years the cathedral bell rang at midnight and he heard it and decided he would write the conclusion that week. that week passed.

he died in spring without the page. the manuscript, eighty- nine pages bound in grey board with a single ribbon, lives in the lower right drawer of the desk by the south window. the ribbon is still tied. the conclusion is, in the strict sense, what one hears after closing the drawer.

note · loose, on the last page i have written about the silence after the bell so many times that it has, perhaps, become the subject itself. the bell was only the way in.

bell a great bell passing bell silence a concerto