On the tube

It is in these in-between spaces - on the Tube, browsing supermarket aisles, idling in line - that I feel most like I'm really living. When time seems superfluous - I do nothing, accomplish nothing, yet time is being spent - lavished - on nothing at all. As if it would never run out; as if each second we were really counting down to eternity instead of an end.

***

Walking the streets of London as the sun looms ahead, in clear sky, above the brick-laid, metal-framed horizon; it shines pure, bright, unobscured - upon meeting its glare, one is dazzled -

the pavement crowds are transformed, resembling the shadow cast by a shoal of fish in murky-green seawater that betray their presence; a collective mass lying just beneath the water's surface, in wait only of oncoming danger - the other shadow.

***

I sometimes wonder that in determined, measured - conscious - effort to attain authentic expression, we may interchange authenticity and accuracy. And that fear returns: When the meaning, the moment, passes, what does else does it leave behind but empty shells, littered phrases?

The either or

Collige virgo rosas (TBC)

How do we make the most of our states? Of the experiences we do not choose, that simply happen to us; transient phases that are and then are not, as quickly as they came to be.

We grasp at life - its fragile sinews snap within our grip, crushed by the weight of our longing; we enclose it, nurture it -it withers, smothered by an airtight, irreproachable caution. We shred it with precision; we dilute it, vying for transparency, with our expressions. But in our efforts to preserve life, to store it up within us, we begin to grow stale from the inside.

***

So what then do we do with ourselves? Whatever it is that we cannot yet understand, I think -

Distill it down; use a sieve, a filter, a flame; try making concrete what is abstract, permanent what is ephemeral, still what is in passing; the feelings that slip into our unconscious before they have taken form - they slide one into the other, shuffling, stirring, continually creating something new, brushing every fiber of our being in their ascent to the surface of our minds (or is it better to say that they descend upon us?)

Because who ever knows how long anything will last? If we will ever again feel meaning prick at our fingertips, so close within reach. If we will ever see the world with such clarity, such intensity, as it is - a spectacle, a wonder, a horror (Every angel is terrifying - Rilke). It is frightening, to think of how much we lose in the process of growing up, the wages of time we mistaken as a deposit. And as time takes its toll on us we endure, awaiting a return - but does it arrive?

I ramble. The ramblings of a young girl who has no claim to knowledge and little to experience. This quote strikes me:

"'I love,' said Susan, 'and I hate."... Though my mother still knits white socks for me and hems pinafores and I am a child, I love and I hate" - Virginia Woolf, The Waves

***

... is now the time for searching -
to store up, to be still -   

the pale period of hibernation before 

the creature emerges out of its cave 

into a bright new world that blinds 

and dazzles it with complexities

painfully wound around every experience,

inspiring the intensity that presses the pen

into paper and impresses meaning onto material -

before life?

but no, there is always a need -

for who knows when wonder will dry up and

leave the soil of the heart barren with indifference

and the gentle light by which infant eyes 

see the world is torn away by time, in its great envy

of youth, and they begin to adapt to the darkness?

- "Necessity", 17 November 2012