Two nights ago you were in my dream and then yesterday I thought I saw you in the crowd. It's fast approaching the time last year when we began to speak ~ it seems like an eternity ago, sometimes I think it never happened at all; that our knowing of each other (if you can call it that) was purely in my imagination. But it did happen ~ the evidence of our messages secreted away in a computer file, the photo I took of you out of sight, the books you gave me in alphabetical order in the bookcase. All material aspects of our knowing beautifully arranged ~ no clutter left, except in my mind. Why we no longer speak is as much a mystery to me as our speaking. So, I talk to you here, though don't imagine that you will be hearing this.
Last night I watched with interest a documentary about the American poet Walt Whitman. He wrote about the ordinary person, watched their weary faces, put himself inside their skin and tried to imagine how they might feel. I am you, he said as he observed a slave being auctionioned ~ could feel the rope tied around the woman's breasts as she was eyed off by a potential owner. He wrote about the human body, lust and love and passion, but also grief. Although he spoke through the 'I' he was attempting to speak for the masses ~ “it is you talking just as much as myself…I act as the tongue of you”.
For the past two days I've been trying to make a painting of a child who is about six months old. It's crawling behind a water-wall. From my angle it is obscured by the water, a beautiful metaphor of the way life washes over us and sometimes distorts both our bodies and our view. Funny, because it's been about six months since you and I have had a really close conversation, perhaps we will never speak again. I feel like Walt Whitman who speaks from the past to those in the future he may never meet, but can imagine just the same.
Closer yet I approach you;What thought you have of me, I had as much of you—I laid in my stores in advance;
I consider’d long and seriously of you before you were born.
Who was to know what should come home to me?
Who knows but I am enjoying this?
Who knows but I am as good as looking at you now, for all you cannot see me?
(from 'Crossing Brooklyn Ferry' in Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass, 1900)
As I think I have heard you say, (my para phrasing) - people come in and out of our lives to teach us lessons about life.
ReplyDeleteToday I made contact ( good 'ol facebook) with a man whom I loved five years ago, but was never able to be my lover. We had a lot of desire but not the opportunity. Now I am in another happy relationship and wonder should I have made contact with the past? There will be a lesson!
I've yet to work out what lesson I learnt. Perhaps, afterall, the lesson of the knowing was not for me but for the others involved.
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