Lost in thought, I stare off into space where time seemingly
lay hidden and indistinct. But then my eyes are averted to a wall, and
immediately I begin to contemplate the different circumstances that have
altered photos taken years ago, hanging in silence – a silence broken only by a
smile lit up on your face. As the golden-yellow glow of the sun quietly slips
into the room, its placid light flares against the black and white of each
photograph’s skin. My mind assumes the posture of an affected observer as your
words begin to speak the first part of your book I’ve pulled from the
shelf in your room. Even in rest, in the sweet dream of sleep, your voice, in its honest plain-spoken style, gathers strength.
Long before you began to write your life – a life more
remarkable than the story’s translation suggests, you knew how its pages would
unfold. And now, fingerprint by fingerprint I press into each thought, feeling
the heave and release of your breath at each turn of phrase. Flooding my waking
mind are the incidental details of your journey represented by the weight of
the words carefully arranged on the page. Clearly your heart and soul ached to
explain everything you witnessed traversing life’s omnipotent terrain.
Painfully shy in the beginning, you meditated on the various
experiences that resonated deep inside, and little by little you began to
confide how you felt you were nothing more than a speechless traveler passing
through time, bereft of voice and breath. After a while, anchored to life’s multidimensional
moments, vivid flashes of memory weighted with diverse forms of expression, gave birth to wider
angles of thought. I listened intently to your speech sweeten as you took
delight in articulating the revelry of your youth. As your confidence flourished, you took pride in reflecting on those colourful hours, capturing each exhilarating moment
held in that frame of time.
As the years continued to pass, you expressed how rainbows
of joy and clouds of sorrow hung above your every thought. Storms of the heart
created by ominous winds that tore loose, wreaking havoc within the elemental
niches of your soul severely changed your world. Fatigued, surges of longing and its aching scent of absence
became a new part of the measure of your life. I felt the dread pinned to your
face as your pen and its inky inundations overflowed with words that surfaced
midst those turbulent moments where you felt caught, circling life’s deepest
end. Yet even as you spoke of the frightening parts, of years bathed in a
stone grey anguish that pressed up through the crevices of your psyche like some impending projection of mountainous terrain, you boldly fought to snatch the
light as the days arduously shifted from one season to another.
Conscientiously you worked through the conflicts and
configurations of the seconds that ticked at the forefront of your thought while
drawing out the intangibles that lay hidden in the secret corners of the mind’s
domain. There was an arc of curiosity as I discovered something of your past
that you had previously neglected to tell. Something of your character was revealed as you
delved into and exposed that hidden aspect of yourself. Naming it there on the
page, your words fulfilled the highest expression of your art by beautifully
portraying your spirit’s limitless dimensions.
At its end, I caught a glimpse of an older person's face, who’s
lines of text, lumped against this word and that, inhabited a world of grace.
Negations and affirmations of life’s mystery carried a tremendous presence as I
concentrated on the message of your story. I enjoyed the strangeness of motion
as your memory reverted back and forth, caught up in the milieu of time. In its
unveiling, your words gently refined themselves in the juxtaposition of each
paragraph. Subsequently, your history became a rare pleasure as I felt your pulse
lit by the soul of your mind through self-revelation as you laboured to
translate your memories to printed text.
As light slowly vanishes from the open window, my mind
lingers a little while longer, invested with depth and insight, promoting a new
turn of mind. Faithfully reproduced with intensity and soul, together tonight,
you and I have silently passed through the elemental teachings of your life – a life rooted deep in the product of thought. With a cry of love and appreciation, a
kind of mourning paints the night still. As this pain of separation
surges, the world tilts evermore towards the light of a new dawn.
. . . . .
I think people are often quite unaware of their inner
selves, their other selves, their imaginative selves, the selves that aren’t on
show in the world. It’s something you grow out of from childhood onwards,
losing possession of yourself, really. I think literature is one of the best
ways back into that. You are hypnotized as soon as you get into a book that
particularly works for you, whether it’s fiction or a poem. You find that your
defenses drop, and as soon as that happens, an imaginative reality can take
over because you are no longer censoring your own perceptions, your own
awareness of the world.
– Jeanette Winterson
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