Mosaic of Molecules

Aldous Huxley, Island

“The truth is not always beautiful, nor beautiful words the truth.”- Lao Tzu I thought it would be good to write. I don’t sit like I used to, don’t feel the need to as much as I used to. The writer’s block that came up around 2012/13, never really seemed to let go of me and so I didn’t feel the sense of hammering ot words that meant little to me.  This can be about impressions. I caught myself thinking about how riverbeds form and how innumerable impressions need to be made in the earth to carry a river forward. These are mostly invisible lines, indentations that matter but appear outwith our experience. One would have to be the river, step inside its flow to understand that every fissure, every cavity and silted bottom is part of the flow. I keep reading texts which undermine the things I had took for granted, things that were never  my own in any case. The purported European “enlightenment”; enlightenment for whom? Theories about past civilisations that project contemporary experiences on historic time. Another case of seeing the shimmering surface, glistening, glistering, without appreciating the myriad flows beneath.  To think we have a language speckled with Latin, rough, vulgar possessive terms. There is romance but there is also violence. A knotted and pulsing left over from a cruel Empire, aching to start its striations, its indentations once more. I am reminded of the bombed out German cities after the European wars, factories all still intact, still ready to go. Our machines clamber to get on top of us, and even our language is a little machine, driving our impulses against our deeper will. Heraclitus famously wrote that you can’t step in the same river twice. And plenty of other not so famous people probably said otherwise. A word is powerful, a name perhaps more so. Back to the river. To properly embody the river, to truly step inside the river is not just to place your feet in it but to experience it as flows, depth, indentation, silt and sand, flora, fauna, deep pulverizing eddies. I’m not done yet. To be made aware that the only constant is change. The sort of non linear experiences that derive from a deep feeling or empathic connection derive very different answers. To see that our own two feet are limitations upon ourselves, that when we sense only peripherally we see only the appearance of flow, bit when we get a little deeper, even allowing ourselves to step inside the flow, we experience a continuity, a deep sense of stability that we cannot feel without dropping our initial impressions. It is rather us who need to be worries about ourselves, about our discontinuity of experience, how language shifts us, tells us we are machines, even tells us that the world is a machine. When we dredge rivers we  lose the ephemeral, but quite nuanced language of flow, of a river’s soul. And we also lean more and more into that notion that nothing persists, when the truth couldn’t be more different. 

Who owns my writing now? It is good that it is tidal and that it’s contours never remain the same. I am occasionally a writer as in an occasional tide that comes up and covers the land. I once lived nearby such a place which look drastically different when the tide was way out. I couldn’t help but get caught up in this idea of tides, of being softened and hard edges become pebbles through sheer force of time and tide. But then we humans are not attuned to these flows and even out ships are designed to sit atop them rather than immerse within them. To catch yourself in oceanic time you are certainly losing yourself. Our old animosity toward the sea, seen most glaringly in how we dredge it, hunt over it, all counter to these dramatic flows which we know can destroy us so easily. But we are not born to be tidal. We are strange, alien creatures that have flung ourselves high over all, and even those inhospitable salty depths become a new frontier. Where are we going? What will be the very thing I write that takes me right out of these abysmal depths and fluttering into sky. What wildernesses, what new things are beyond the nature that we have fought so unrelentingly, and is there a space for something utterly out with our frame of reference now. What invisible things, what loneliness will dissipate as we begin to see ourselves in the microcosmos, in the very origins of ourselves which grow from minerals, shells, and the speaking of matter.