To My Dear Maurice,
The world is loud and I will speak softly for you, I know you will hear me as I speak from a place that I feel is close to your ear.
We live in a many faceted world, largely one where each face of the diamond requires a large amount of attention. This modern life requires a mind that can assess these points of focus and choose the correct stance by which to respond, verbally and indeed thoughtfully. So you see there is indeed a possibility that this letter was meant for you to read but equally, and maybe more importantly, it was meant for me to write.
The act of putting in ink my thoughts from this vista has been a long and curious road for me to walk, but rest assured there have been many previous incarnations of these verses, and the fact that this is the version you are now reading is worthy of note and of significant importance to me. It also seems important for me to say that the frame of mind you are in for witnessing what I write may require some patience, a virtue I to have been placing many hours in realising its importance. Whilst you may not agree with all I say it is important to be less strict with the text than your own thoughts as I do not presume to know your poetic religion.
If we are to learn we must begin with the past. History is a knowledge acquired by investigation and so it is logical to begin with where we have been. Many now teach to be present, or to forget knowledge of a past that isn’t valuable, which in turn is to be without prejudice, completely.
This I feel to be an individual task and one that yields unique rewards which is dependent wholly on environment. Yesterday I was over there, today I am here; should I leave yesterday to yesterday and forget the trip I have taken? Presence is but one element of what has passed, what will pass and what is now.
All these are in constant and unpredictable flux.
All require a certain awareness of ones body and the space we sit in. what has passed and what is to come are imaginary, what is now is only ever the most fleeting of feelings. You see dear friend, as each moment of now moves into what was, it becomes a trace, and defines us in only so much as a walk taken on a line. How much this line is important is an individual quest and not one for mass.
Oh how I love who I am in this precious second. The bird plans his nest as the tree grows to seed and plans the future of future trees, both are important pursuits, and are for mass.
You are an artist, I know this much, although the environment of an artist is a place to feel free, we use this to understand inspiration to make something for this world. We know the world will be a more interesting place because of the making of it and we learn how to annunciate and speak more clearly about who we are and why we are here.
Secondly you are a sculptor. A sculptor is a unique being. A maker of objects; objects who stand by our side and shoulder to shoulder with our character. Through this we hold up a mirror to our country and our physical world. We do not challenge our families, instead we add to them, and in every act of making puts us alongside the stature of what it is to be mother and father.
Thirdly, and possibly most importantly, we are dreamers. To dream is to create in a world not of our physical own and not where our feet are grounded, but where our inspiration lays and sleeps. When we dream we create worlds, worlds that don’t need to be built to be physical. I live in my dreams, I can fly above mountains and dive into seas. I can send messages and know they are delivered before I’ve finished thinking them. They are the places beyond places, a third place of creation and in dreams all belongs to us.
For it is with love we shall meet, with dreams in our eyes, with the elegant pressures of the sun and moon.
What wonders are before us? It is the dreamers who will win, the dreamers are god and know truth in their dreams. Let us speak with the birds and our opponents; let us ask of them their dreams, for it is the softness of dreamers who greet us here. This life, you see, is but a moment of love and love endures so hear me when I say to you, listen between words and struggle not to hear the silence of pauses, in those moments are where you’ll find me, in times between times and on the edge of the moon and for that I love you.
I know my dreams and in that I know all things ever dreamt, let us meet here for a while for without our bodies we know lightness, without our feet we know flying and without hands we know to taste. The leaf will always reach for the sun, yet the sun will move to find its setting place and make way for the moon. Does not the leaf then search for the moon? When moons and suns and leafs collide, there my friend, is the end of this world and the beginning of the next. Without independence we would find their personalities muddied by the impression they leave in our vision.
For all you know to be true, let us feel our way through and around this subject of mass.
Firstly let us take a walk together through how we learn about mass and its place. As children the world is new. We are given a licence to expand as much as our guardians and teachers let us. We are pointed at experience, we gauge perspective on quantity, time and emotion.
Later we learn about velocity, and begin to build an opinion on what we can trust. This, in turn, leads to mistrust and disloyalty. We test ourselves and are tested. Some important lessons are presented to us and we either decide to remember this or dispel them from memory.
Later still, we travel the Roman road of stability accompanied by anxiety refining our opinion, procuring others and inventing further ones. Towards the end we get ready to say goodbye to all we know of the physical parameters of mass, weight and motion. We resign to the idea that we will soon give way to new spatial elements such as memory and solemn emotions, which solidify before turning gaseous and evaporate into the axis between plane and plan.
To know… ah yes, to really know, was the only goal. It wasn’t a particularly ill grasp of a tongue or a unique place in the heart of the earth that drove me to this feeling. It was perhaps through the realisation that the organisation of movements between the sea, the earth and the stars, really and quite wonderfully revolve around a man standing tall on the deck of his boat.
This lead me to think that all nature is perfectly so, and was to be a guide for my pen as spring is to winter.
The dragonfly has a momentary mind. He wishes as he does and is joyful in his knowledge that the downness of things is as pure and as relevant as the upness and the sideness. His drunk loops imitate the wind and hold the secret to his elegant existence.
An ocean wave is a jovial fellow, a man of great knowledge of his family, of space and of progress. He is cyclical and squarely loyal to the shore in his welcoming dance. Only his brothers know his unique soul, yet it is only us who pretend to now his surface.
I look to the faint heart of the butterfly and wonder, how his leafy exterior is as fragile as autumn and spring. I see him as wind without knowledge of tide or moon, but answer me this. I ask him, ‘how does the reflection of your wing command your flight so? Your mass is a negative one, lighter indeed than the sky you fall through. If you are to exist at all then surely your colour comes from some unknown prism and your progress from the sound of light breaking on it.’
The butterfly talks about a line, only it is one that fades.
I have been learning to listen to the moments of quiet in-between the spoken words of a conversation. These moments coupled with the words result in every conversation really being two conversations; what is said and what is left out. It would be as though every novel written was two books; every song had twice the music, and for every intake of breath there was twice the expulsion. The emphasis for me is that this is a means to listen and to listen to. It is what I have tried to do here, that is, as much emitting a verse from my hand and in the moment that ensues, a stillness.
It all comes from intention, when I intend a permanent thing it remains with me from that moment, and as clear as when it was first conceived. The line itself is strong and it joins, like time, two points in my memory from intention to physical act. What remains all become as permanent signs of creation.
You hold permanence too closely and in too high a regard. In that exquisiteness we can miss the progression one would discover in letting the motion be itself permanent only for a time.
Watch as the clouds become clouds. Watch as they have no care for a permanent form and relax into the viscous rain which so enjoys falling. The clouds and the men who build them know the purpose of their song and enjoy the sky if only for the time they occupy it. Treat the canvas like the sky and you will find that what is permanent is your hand daubing the field with intention, not the resulting colour array. Your memory of that moment is the only moment that can hold these thoughts.
The more I sit here the more time I have to look, I taught of essence yet I missed colour.
‘Was it enough?’ I asked you once, you said ‘it is never enough, until the last moment … then it is enough’.
The world is loud and I will speak softly for you, I know you will hear me as I speak from a place that I feel is close to your ear.
We live in a many faceted world, largely one where each face of the diamond requires a large amount of attention. This modern life requires a mind that can assess these points of focus and choose the correct stance by which to respond, verbally and indeed thoughtfully. So you see there is indeed a possibility that this letter was meant for you to read but equally, and maybe more importantly, it was meant for me to write.
The act of putting in ink my thoughts from this vista has been a long and curious road for me to walk, but rest assured there have been many previous incarnations of these verses, and the fact that this is the version you are now reading is worthy of note and of significant importance to me. It also seems important for me to say that the frame of mind you are in for witnessing what I write may require some patience, a virtue I to have been placing many hours in realising its importance. Whilst you may not agree with all I say it is important to be less strict with the text than your own thoughts as I do not presume to know your poetic religion.
If we are to learn we must begin with the past. History is a knowledge acquired by investigation and so it is logical to begin with where we have been. Many now teach to be present, or to forget knowledge of a past that isn’t valuable, which in turn is to be without prejudice, completely.
This I feel to be an individual task and one that yields unique rewards which is dependent wholly on environment. Yesterday I was over there, today I am here; should I leave yesterday to yesterday and forget the trip I have taken? Presence is but one element of what has passed, what will pass and what is now.
All these are in constant and unpredictable flux.
All require a certain awareness of ones body and the space we sit in. what has passed and what is to come are imaginary, what is now is only ever the most fleeting of feelings. You see dear friend, as each moment of now moves into what was, it becomes a trace, and defines us in only so much as a walk taken on a line. How much this line is important is an individual quest and not one for mass.
Oh how I love who I am in this precious second. The bird plans his nest as the tree grows to seed and plans the future of future trees, both are important pursuits, and are for mass.
You are an artist, I know this much, although the environment of an artist is a place to feel free, we use this to understand inspiration to make something for this world. We know the world will be a more interesting place because of the making of it and we learn how to annunciate and speak more clearly about who we are and why we are here.
Secondly you are a sculptor. A sculptor is a unique being. A maker of objects; objects who stand by our side and shoulder to shoulder with our character. Through this we hold up a mirror to our country and our physical world. We do not challenge our families, instead we add to them, and in every act of making puts us alongside the stature of what it is to be mother and father.
Thirdly, and possibly most importantly, we are dreamers. To dream is to create in a world not of our physical own and not where our feet are grounded, but where our inspiration lays and sleeps. When we dream we create worlds, worlds that don’t need to be built to be physical. I live in my dreams, I can fly above mountains and dive into seas. I can send messages and know they are delivered before I’ve finished thinking them. They are the places beyond places, a third place of creation and in dreams all belongs to us.
For it is with love we shall meet, with dreams in our eyes, with the elegant pressures of the sun and moon.
What wonders are before us? It is the dreamers who will win, the dreamers are god and know truth in their dreams. Let us speak with the birds and our opponents; let us ask of them their dreams, for it is the softness of dreamers who greet us here. This life, you see, is but a moment of love and love endures so hear me when I say to you, listen between words and struggle not to hear the silence of pauses, in those moments are where you’ll find me, in times between times and on the edge of the moon and for that I love you.
I know my dreams and in that I know all things ever dreamt, let us meet here for a while for without our bodies we know lightness, without our feet we know flying and without hands we know to taste. The leaf will always reach for the sun, yet the sun will move to find its setting place and make way for the moon. Does not the leaf then search for the moon? When moons and suns and leafs collide, there my friend, is the end of this world and the beginning of the next. Without independence we would find their personalities muddied by the impression they leave in our vision.
For all you know to be true, let us feel our way through and around this subject of mass.
Firstly let us take a walk together through how we learn about mass and its place. As children the world is new. We are given a licence to expand as much as our guardians and teachers let us. We are pointed at experience, we gauge perspective on quantity, time and emotion.
Later we learn about velocity, and begin to build an opinion on what we can trust. This, in turn, leads to mistrust and disloyalty. We test ourselves and are tested. Some important lessons are presented to us and we either decide to remember this or dispel them from memory.
Later still, we travel the Roman road of stability accompanied by anxiety refining our opinion, procuring others and inventing further ones. Towards the end we get ready to say goodbye to all we know of the physical parameters of mass, weight and motion. We resign to the idea that we will soon give way to new spatial elements such as memory and solemn emotions, which solidify before turning gaseous and evaporate into the axis between plane and plan.
To know… ah yes, to really know, was the only goal. It wasn’t a particularly ill grasp of a tongue or a unique place in the heart of the earth that drove me to this feeling. It was perhaps through the realisation that the organisation of movements between the sea, the earth and the stars, really and quite wonderfully revolve around a man standing tall on the deck of his boat.
This lead me to think that all nature is perfectly so, and was to be a guide for my pen as spring is to winter.
The dragonfly has a momentary mind. He wishes as he does and is joyful in his knowledge that the downness of things is as pure and as relevant as the upness and the sideness. His drunk loops imitate the wind and hold the secret to his elegant existence.
An ocean wave is a jovial fellow, a man of great knowledge of his family, of space and of progress. He is cyclical and squarely loyal to the shore in his welcoming dance. Only his brothers know his unique soul, yet it is only us who pretend to now his surface.
I look to the faint heart of the butterfly and wonder, how his leafy exterior is as fragile as autumn and spring. I see him as wind without knowledge of tide or moon, but answer me this. I ask him, ‘how does the reflection of your wing command your flight so? Your mass is a negative one, lighter indeed than the sky you fall through. If you are to exist at all then surely your colour comes from some unknown prism and your progress from the sound of light breaking on it.’
The butterfly talks about a line, only it is one that fades.
I have been learning to listen to the moments of quiet in-between the spoken words of a conversation. These moments coupled with the words result in every conversation really being two conversations; what is said and what is left out. It would be as though every novel written was two books; every song had twice the music, and for every intake of breath there was twice the expulsion. The emphasis for me is that this is a means to listen and to listen to. It is what I have tried to do here, that is, as much emitting a verse from my hand and in the moment that ensues, a stillness.
It all comes from intention, when I intend a permanent thing it remains with me from that moment, and as clear as when it was first conceived. The line itself is strong and it joins, like time, two points in my memory from intention to physical act. What remains all become as permanent signs of creation.
You hold permanence too closely and in too high a regard. In that exquisiteness we can miss the progression one would discover in letting the motion be itself permanent only for a time.
Watch as the clouds become clouds. Watch as they have no care for a permanent form and relax into the viscous rain which so enjoys falling. The clouds and the men who build them know the purpose of their song and enjoy the sky if only for the time they occupy it. Treat the canvas like the sky and you will find that what is permanent is your hand daubing the field with intention, not the resulting colour array. Your memory of that moment is the only moment that can hold these thoughts.
The more I sit here the more time I have to look, I taught of essence yet I missed colour.
‘Was it enough?’ I asked you once, you said ‘it is never enough, until the last moment … then it is enough’.