Sunday, November 4, 2012

Pulling oars

Have you ever really loved a book or a film yet when someone asks you what it's about you can't even answer them? You might have forgotten because it was a while ago when you last saw or read it, or perhaps it expressed an intangible essence in a subtle way and so its details are hard to describe but the zeitgeist is strong. Such an instance occurred today when someone told me they owned a book that they hadn't read, which I have read and found profound, yet I couldn't explain the narrative.

My life isn't a book or film, but people turn lives into books and films and in a way this blog reduces my experiences into silent written words. The benefit is that they are clear and precise, less velutinous than the instances they speak of.
I come into trouble when something subtle and ubiquitous slips into my life... The weather report reduces climatology to a symbol, it doesn't account for the colour of the sky or the merging of the clouds or the smell of body odour which are the ways that we experience weather. In a similar way I doubt the capacity for this space to hold the girth of something that is native to a world without an alphabet.

I'm shifting a silence into language. It's a dance, it's a game. It's guilty without guilt. It's a colonial invasion complete with disease and foreign architecture. I'm building a house for a love that wants to live in a place with walls made from trees and carpets of grass, chandeliers of stars and the gulf of Carpentaria for a bath. This is just a holiday house, just a place built from phonemes... not luxurious but elastic enough, perhaps.

I am in love, it's hard to describe but I'll keep trying because it feels to be the deepest and widest ocean that I've sailed through. I've no desire to chart the waters, only to occasionally catch a fish, to look at the sea so black that it merges with the night sky and feel how heavy the water is and enjoy that it can be difficult to row around. 

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