The Words

 "THE WORDS" Ann 2nd August 2008  Something I dreamt and try to express here.

 

    The words and letters piled up behind the front door, ready for use, not yet known, push the door and no sense is made of the pile, just a jumble, perhaps they are like the one-celled organisms that Arthur Koestler mentioned in one of his books, that when food runs out where they are living, gather themselves together into one conglomorate body and thereby give themselves the possibility of moving to other "pastures". 

 

These words have gathered themselves together for you, for me, to find and use, to move on into new creative ideas, then choosing some, you don them, before entering the woods where they begin to take on meaning and imagination takes hold of reality to lead you deeper and deeper, and deeper into the forest of trunks, webs tangle in the brain and create patterns of poems, ideas, creations, fantastic, banal, extraordinary and ordinary, then euphoria sets in and carries the brain to recognition of the patterns and rhymes, tone mixtures blend with the birds, the rivers, the mountains, the horizon takes a wide stride into the soul and your feet leave the ground as they need it no more, the 'craft' carries you into the air and the whole world is beneath, with all its natural creations and at the same time the dizzying number of fabulous, fantastic, impressive works of your fellow men that bombard the senses carrying them almost to insanity, and as you reach that edge you see into a calm of sea, a hope of meditation, contemplation, stillness, and as you sit on your cloud of knowledge you feel welling up in you the creation you are to make. 

    

It begins as a bright, sharp sparkle of colour and fascinates your whole being, then growing it pales slightly but gains form and as if by magic it sets the muscles of the brain, the eye and the hand moving to create your own expression of the gathered mass of knowledge, nudged by what has moved you, your mind crystallises the vision invisible and sends it out as words, as paint, as dance, as song and there it is a whole, a whole you never dreamed could come out of a mangled mass of literature, science, religions, exhibitions, dramatic journeys - there it lies a tiny expression personified, subjective and projective as it casts the brain out from the head into a fantastic shape of the joy of creating your own "masterpiece".

     

Looking at it you wonder, did I make this? How can that be? I didn't see it before it was, and now it is, its wonderfully strange and to myself so beautiful, so beautiful as love itself, it weaves the very ether of our being into itself and shouts to the hills and valleys "I am, I am, I am, because I made this, even though I don't know how !" How all this, all that, all all has become saturated into that ! Oh what a life is life if we live it !

 

Give me a leaf, a stone, whatever the object the whole of your knowledge comes flowing into the mind to study the object in front of you; in order to experience it one has to step out of the mind and peep round your head at the object, fool yourself into thinking that there is no knowledge of a before, and here, you see it for the first time in its "itness", how otherwise can one judge whether it has any sympathy with you and if then it has not - it is not for you - move on and leave it standing there as something not understandable to your collection of memories and experiences, something that doesn't fit into the pattern of the dance you created consciously and unconsciously, as you wandered through the literature and art of your forebears and the influences of your many teachers and mentors, who built up great piles of immovable stuff, much of which you would never be interested in anyway. 

 

Each his own sensitivity to the patterns that fit and fit well enough to be moulded into your personal expression which gives you the feeling and describes you as you and nobody else - you are unique and only you, are you. 

    

All these only "you's" wander about the world as a tortoise slowly wandering wondering which way to go, which influences to grab and which to let be, for what? There you step into a void of nothing as there is no answer, just keep going, reproduce yourself, your work, your ideas, your joys, your fears, your laughter, your tears and having lived, evaporate like a beautiful cloud into, into, out of, out of, out of, of,of,...............

 

Rain stops play, all the cloud is contained in the rain and falls as nourishing water on the earth, we have become a part of this magic spinning ball of matter and will never leave it - we are it - we are a part of it - how beautiful !

 "SMALL PILE OF ASH" (written at the same time)

 

Words pile high outside the door

Of the mind of me and plenty more

We push and shove at the pile outside

How will it be when we choose our creed

Will it show the limits of human greed

Or fashion a poem, a painting, a life

Or be quelled as a woman, only a wife?

 

Babies and shopping, knitting and washing

Whirling from this room and that

Life goes by like a lightening flash

And suddenly there lies a small pile of ash.

 

Why do we do it that way I wonder

When joy's in the air as dramatic as thunder

Seize it and love it and roll it around

Till the brain cells so stubborn, they lift from the ground

And with it you take friends to left and to right

And dance to the music of midsummer night

Had you dreamed, yes you had, that you could take flight

In a world of your own as the ironing you do

There outside the banal is life looking at you

Grab its wings of fancy, it devilish dare

Or you'll end up a cabbage to just stand and stare.