Trying to describe the indescribable is a mug’s game.
There are no stories beyond the power of words, for stories are words.
As we try to get at the magic of experience, the enchantment that can transcend facts and transmute reality, …it turns into a story born of words and limited by them. It rhymes and writhes, but artifice of language only hints at possibility of something deeper; it makes your reader work, inventing meaning, while losing your experience forever and making you redundant… What a pity!
Poor poet – forever betrayed by your tools turning experience into stories, visceral into abstract, dreams into – what?
You imbibe of your desperate loves to get over the voids, forming rickety bridges and narrow paths in the clover. He is happy and chirpy, who covers, sidesteps and avoids, but the longer you do it the heavier is the hangover.
When I look at an iris I don’t see eye to eye with it. Not even if I crouch down and level with it, and stare at it. For all its name, all it can do is reflect the light. Beautiful colours, but pointless and utterly blind. Now my irises have black holes into the space that can suck up the light and give that iris its name and face.
Inside is unfathomable – you cannot plumb the depths from inside the sea. Outside is unknowable – you cannot know what you cannot perceive.
The only place to know and see is the interface – the waves on the sea: the drops of rain, creating the rings; the sight and touch, embodying things; the warmth and breath, infusing life; the pull and press, the push and strife.
At the interface there is rough and rub which, we have to face, is the nub.
We erect fences around construction sites. We put signs on fences. Bright yellow warning signs, easy to see, attention-grabbing with screaming carmine letters: “DANGER! CONSTRUCTION SITE. KEEP OUT AND KEEP YOUR CHILDREN OUT!” Construction sites are inherently dangerous. Things change. New things appear out of the dust and confront you unexpectedly. Old things break and fall and hit you on the head if you are not careful. They are like that. Children have to be protected. As you think of danger, of all the unexpected, deadly things that can happen to them, your breath catches and your heart skips a beat. You erect fences and put signs on these fences. But it is never enough. The world changes so fast now-a-days that you can’t keep up. New things appear daily. The things you don’t understand can hurt you and your children. As the future is being constructed, you have to build more and more fences and put up more and more signs screaming: “DANGER! CONSTRUCTION SITE. KEEP OUT AND KEEP YOUR CHILDREN OUT!” Eventually, you end up in a cage, crouching in the corner, teeth bared, terrified, but ready to protect your children. It’s all for them, to keep them safe, to keep them near. The world under construction is fenced off, blocked off by the screaming signs. That’s when they leave. They climb the fence quietly, stealthily, trying not to hurt your feelings or break through the fence with all their might, screaming defiance. In the final count, it doesn’t matter. They leave. They have no choice. Their lives are there, in the changing world being constructed for and by them. With pity or hatred in their hearts they leave you in your cage. Anger turns to dejection. They will visit. They will bring your grandchildren, ignoring the signs: “DANGER! CONSTRUCTION SITE. KEEP OUT AND KEEP YOUR CHILDREN OUT!”
As you walk without a shadow of doubt, you enter the valley of the shadow of death. You will fear no evil, for you will be that evil, never seeing itself or the world, but seeing your reflection upon the face of the world.
I think it is vitally important to learn from history. George Santayana once said that those who do not learn from the past are doomed to repeat it. I can add that one of the first things we learn from the past is that those who repeat it are doomed.
As the tide goes out and the interface between the land and the sea is laid bare, the soggy mud reflects the majestic sky so clearly, so deeply, so poignantly… Tears well up in my eyes. I feel at one with the mud, but not with the sky.
