I’m still absorbed in nesting… and nursing my abused hands… because rheumatoid arthritis does not do curtain hardware in rock maple without intense retribution.
So here is a bit of poetry… of sorts.
free from words
solitary is alone. alone is one. solitary is one. but one is not necessarily solitary.
i often wish i could break free from the strictures of language. too much programmed, programmed without any explanation or recourse to reason.
give me five minutes of thought beyond the confines of language and i could solve all the mysteries of life. there are answers out there, written for all to read in no language spoken or devised by humanity. life is not a symbolic construct. life is the humbling joy of seeing a fledgling leave the nest. the consuming pain of delivering a new child into this bounded world. the rapture of making two one even for the briefest interval. we can describe these things until they become unreal, but they will remain after all description. real. abiding. and nothing that we describe is. not even this thing called i. if only i could break free.
but i am a machine so precisely programmed as to seem intentional. these words, these analyzed sensations bind me to this earth as surely as gravity and with graver consequences. because there is so much that a machine bereft of its creator can never comprehend, can never accomplish, can never even apprehend. these words are my bond.
i want so to be free of words. just once before i cease to be. just once.
imagine what that reality must be like. . . could be. . . is. . . probably. . . when i try to imagine i’m cut loose from the forms of these words, i have the same sensation of the impossible as when i dream of flying. flying like a butterfly. gravity and language. they both keep my feet too firmly planted in this earth. and the boundaries are exactly the same. perhaps some irresistible force in this universe guides both. you must be attracted to large bodies and you must represent all you know. if i ever get my five minutes of freedom i suspect i’ll discover a common root. but inside this box i cannot even imagine what that root might be.
i cannot. i cannot. i cannot.
and then we die.
i believe there is a world of difference between representational forms and emotive forms. emotion springs from a source completely bereft of words. we try, i try to confine emotion to language but we always suspect, sometimes even know, that words do not convey emotion. words cannot capture emotion. so we never quite are able to put faith in words. faith cannot fit into verbosity, however complex, however simplistic. we cannot completely believe. and hence the tragedy of our existence.
i cannot.
and yet we know a thing we call faith to be. for moments we might even have it in our grasp. but these moments of elusive emotion are so fleeting. before we know what we are experiencing, we are trying to capture the experience in what we know. this existence in language bondage is as pathetic as mortality. as loneliness. as anything i can imagine.
imagine. i magine. image.
even our senses are fooled. and but for those dreams of flying and desires of release i’d suspect that this life is truly bounded by the constructs of the brain. that linguistic despot. symbolic tyrant. formal autocrat.
but there are those moments. fractional glimpses of reality as we can never know it. it is out there somewhere if only i could break free for five minutes just once before i cease to exist.
i cannot. i cannot. cannot.
and then you die.
the boundaries between the mundane and the profound are so infinitesimal as to be nonexistent at any scale.
two’s a perfect number. . . but one? well. . .
and all we think is couched in symbolism. artifice. all these words are empty.
well, perhaps not poetry.
art at it most refined state strives to create the reality underlying its own formal structure. the act of creating induces a state of disconnect not unlike inebriation. (don’t paint and drive.) if everyone on the planet would cultivate creation the world would be free of many forms of stress. of course, we wouldn’t get anywhere. but we’d be happy.
and the irony of life is its buttress.
so do anthills dream?
confusion is the ultimate indication of a state beyond that which we can know. nirvana must be a sort of bleary daze, permanently lacking caffeine.
©Elizabeth Anker 2021
By My Solitary Hearth 