I awoke one morning last week, with the wisps of this evaporating in the last breaths of a dream. I was on a beach in the Mediterranean, aAlong which were strung low signs, calling people to come and celebrate leaving the EU. I tried to take a photograph of one of the signs when a wave crashed over me and washed me up the beach. As I came to rest, a woman was singing, gently, eyes on the middle-distance.
Did it really have no meaning?
Well, I never thought I’d hear those words from you
Who needs a meaning anyway?
I’d settle any day for a very fine view.
I think many of us have lost our belief in the power of language in the last few months. It feels epochal as if we’re about to shift (or have shifted) into a new space, a space that floats free of the old bonds.There has been a great, grand cheapening of the truth, the very grounds of meaning usurped by a new clowning mischief, irrevocably disrupted and unmoored. Maybe it’s a necessary corrective, a welcome into the epistemic uncertainty always experienced by those not in the slipstream of the seats of power. Whichever, it’s terrifying, and one finds oneself wanting to retreat into a space of monkish silence. To pick up the leaves, wander in the void of the woods among the simpler truths of those bare, ruined choirs.
I’ve travelled more than forty miles today, I must have grown some wings.
It’s strange how time just seems to fly away, I can’t remember things.
In a world of my own they say and who can blame them, they’re just not the same.
I’ve known about it all along though I thought I was all wrong, and it’s such a shame.
And beyond all of this, a friend and family member is in the reachless fathoms of dementia. He is cared for by the most extraordinary people, in the most extraordinary, selfless ways. He is an erasure, and they, in turn, suffer a kind of erasure themselves. But they continue to search for him and provide the softest, safest space for his gradual and terminal disappearing. Onward he goes, propelled by who knows what mysteries, into the trackless wild. K, as you go, they are there, they are there, and that heat you feel, that is they, brandishing the weight of love’s flaming torches.
Mountain*7 