I sit on a beach in France writing and wondering what next to say. There is so much that is not sayable. The mind is full of a range of thoughts, images, sensations, feelings, moods and impressions. Many are so fleeting and ephemeral that to try to stop them and pin them down is to distort them. It is these which make up any particular experience, give it flavour, make it that particular reality and no other.
One can capture the gross details, the major parameters and these are true but only partly so. I am not sure that words can ever capture, certainly not the totality of an experience, but just those essential ingredients which give it its particularity. I can remember once by the sea when I was young and had aspirations to be a writer, trying to encapsulate a sunset in words. I never succeeded. And even if I had, to my own satisfaction, succeeded it is doubtful whether my particular words would have created in another’s mind what they meant for me. It is in this that the artistry of writing lies, poetry especially, in being able to communicate something of a particular experience to another.
After all, many percepts coming from ‘outside’ are not percepts of enduring things at all. They are shadows and reflections, they are smears of milk and dust that may be wiped away, vanishing effectively for ever . They are things that burn or dissolve before our eyes.
(Donaldson M., Human Minds, Allen Lane, London 1992 p. 37)
And so I sit here at a loss. I no longer have the burning desire to capture in words the ephemera of this moment. Then, when I was young, I think it was partly insecurity – not knowing what life was, or even myself. Hence the urge to capture the fleeting moment in order to give it solidity and, somehow, prolong a reality and a dynamic over which I had no control. I was powerless. The only power I had, if I could obtain and master it, was to capture the fleeting moment, enclose it in words, which could then at will be opened any time in the future to realise the experience again. Now I know that is not possible and that it is based on a distorted view of reality. Reality is not fixed, not concrete, not based on something solid and substantial. Reality is constant flux, a dynamic process and it is the process which is ultimately real and not the things which are forever emerging from it and being absorbed back into it.
Hence the emptiness. Things are empty and insubstantial. They are moments. They are the individual notes which emerge in the playing of the music of the dance. The knack is not to fixate on any particular note, or series of notes, but to listen to the music. Only if one can hear the music can one join the dance. Most people not only do not hear the music, they are not even aware that reality is the music, the dance. Hence they can make only noise, a dreadful cacophony, though there are some who play beautifully even though they may not be aware of it. Next to me is a French couple with two daughters – one very severely brain damaged. The love and care they give her, their patience and gentleness, is a very pure note in our discordant world. Sometimes very old people, or those who are severely handicapped, are ugly and painful to look at and many, children especially, turn away in horror and revulsion. But it is important not to look just at the individual but at the whole process which surrounds them. This is often a beautiful one filled with love, care, compassion and a shining commitment.
But how does one begin to hear the music? And how does one identify the melody among all the disharmonies and counter medleys? And if one can succeed in identifying the music how does one teach others to hear? And so I am not trying to capture this now. I am listening and all I hear, under the surge of the sea, is silence. It is in the silence that the music is heard, but so often we are afraid of silence. It is in the emptiness that one touches the Real, but we are so afraid of vertigo that we cling to things.