Signal Clear

Moss growing in the words carved on a grave flagstone, Dunbar. Contrast turned way up to help with reading

I have been trying to read what the stone above says on it – Here lyes haste Patrick…who…this life…take(?)… – if anyone is good at decoding the worn and the moss grown, please chime in (like the bells of a cathedral). I am interested in those spaces mutated by time and nature, the worn, the seeded, the words interrupted by lichens and the washing away of stone by the weather.

 

This in contrast to the living spaces some of you have so kindly shared. It makes for an interesting and incomplete dichotomy, between the living line (word brush pencil) and the dead.  In both, the continuity is change: Lyra’s train seat which she leaves and returns to, a seat which is hers and different each time.  Anna Fonte’s chair, which is still in the picture as it once was, now moved (that makes it sound terribly serious). Think of your papers, ephemera,  work in motion, creativity manifest. The changeability and constant of human needs and wants: for a light-soaked view; for home comforts; for the sweet consolations of pets at our feet; for a good drink of water; for our words and images to mean, endure, be transferred on.

 

I think of how I am constructing characters who must always place and replace themselves within this frame, of the living and the remaining and the sometimes terrible inevitable pace of change. I think of how they must make their peace, and how hard that is sometimes.

 

For myself, I think of how much information I am taking in on a daily basis – how many words, how many sights that fire, overfire my brain.  Which is my way of coming to – how I need a short break, after all these encounters. Insightful as they have been, I need now to sit and think, instead of search and see. Not for long, just to give myself time to read the words and the images with due diligence, instead of at break-neck. I’ll be light as a ghost till then, back to full solidity at some point next week.