The condition crept up on me; slowly, slyly like a slug sliming across the garden path.
It began, I think, on a beach when walking.
All the words out of reach when trying to capture the thin line where sky and earth meet. If I was far enough out, could I simply straddle that meeting point, that melting of two worlds, extend my fingers and grasp heaven.
For a painter it is easy, well I think it is easy.
The rainbow palette of paints laid out like a hand of cards, fanned for easy picking, perhaps limited to what would be used that day. Today will be sea and sky – blues and greens, and maybe yellows and reds, and the hand of paints dealt out.
And then… and then… sit and stare. Muse upon the shades, mix this with that, dab a little here, scrape back a little there, working quickly to freeze a moment in time and space. And from the white canvas a form would slowly appear, brushstroke by brushstroke, until as if by magic the artist had captured the very same thin line. Then the artist would sit back content. A fine sea and sky caught that day, pinned for posterity in the way a butterfly collector pins out his specimens. With careful inspection the horizon would be seen – that thin blue green grey that the artist laboured long and hard over.
But it would not be the line, the actual line, the place where angels can dance on waves, or sea horses ascend to ride the sunrise and sunset.
I wanted more than that thin line, I was trying to collect mist with my hands and store it away in a jar, on a page, to take it out from time to time, to connect that mist with the mist from my future, from my past. With the collections of mists and vapours made by others. How does one collect the mist of an horizon – the longing for home of sailors lost at sea, the crack of dawn, the dying of a day, the vastness of the sea stretching far away, forever ebbing and flowing, the gaze of lovers in raptures or the despair of a suicide for whom all hope has gone.
The condition worsened when I turned to the intangible, where the emotions and the heart reign supreme, where the power of thought is cast aside. I could have been like the painter using lists of words as my palette, lists upon lists each further refining the last, adding degrees of nuance which in effect add nothing.
What list would I use to describe when meeting my new born baby for the first time?
Wonderful, amazing, bonny, fair, chubby or even wow?
All much of a muchness – just like the painter pulling predefined colours from his palette.
And If I descended through my lists as far as peach, apple blossom, drunk and my first goldfish would they suffice to convey what that meeting was like. The wonder of life and living, the mystery of linking the past through to the future, or the fear that was engendered when I held my baby, fear for myself and for the baby cast together on a path leading who knows where.
Then I found the word ‘ineffable’ – meaning that which cannot be expressed in words. And it is true, living in the world is ineffable.
Such a moment of enlightenment is liberating and frightening at the same time. It suggests that I cannot capture my sea horizon with its mists of meaning and allusion, or the ramrods of feeling coursing through my body when holding my baby for the first time, that I cannot share with my lover, my friends how I am moved by living. That the task is beyond all of my lists and prattle making.
So I am bound by words that cannot express directly.
But I can invoke.
I can invoke a spellbinding to break the condition I suffer from and so I begin:
In the deep deep dark, in the depths of a bird's lament
You can discover where this led me to in my recent collection of poetry
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